It is difficult to assess the impact of Christianization on the empire as a whole, but the effect on the Christian movement itself was unquestionably substantial. Before Constantine, being a Christian involved personal risk. Suddenly, not being a Christian became a liability. Masses of people flocked into the movement, and the Christian population surged during the century following Constantine’s conversion, catapulting from 10 or 15 percent of the Roman population to 75 percent or more. Accumulating more Christians is not equivalent, however, to developing better Christians, and there is some evidence that levels of religious piety and devotion decreased because people joined the movement out of convenience rather than out of conviction. The age of martyrdom also came to an end, and monasticism developed as a new way for individuals to express their complete devotion to God. Known as “white martyrs” (because no blood was involved), monks and nuns figuratively died to the world. Leaving their old lives behind, they fled to the desert where they could fully devote themselves to God with no earthly distractions.
Back in the world, as opposed to the desert, faith and politics were becoming ever more intertwined, and the institutional Great Church reaped the benefits. In 325, the Emperor Constantine himself called the bishops into council at Nicaea and charged them with developing a statement summarizing the core beliefs of true Christianity, so that every other alternative version of Christianity could be condemned and hopefully eliminated. Bishops from the Great Church readily agreed, and in doing so effectively turned the Great Church into the Imperial Church of the Roman Empire. The outcome of the council’s work became known as the Nicene Creed, and it was used as a guide both in Christian worship and in identifying and persecuting other Christians who were deemed heretical. The Nicene Creed is still used as a statement of faith in many churches today.
Now able to operate freely in public with official support, the bishops of the Imperial Church increased their efforts to impose order and clarity on the Christian movement. One crucial task was to finalize the official canon (table of contents) of the New Testament. A number of different canons had been suggested over the years, but by the early 300s a consensus was beginning to emerge. The Didache (mentioned above) was one of the last documents to be eliminated from the New Testament list, and the book of Revelation (also known as the Apocalypse) was accepted only reluctantly because it was so susceptible to anti-imperial interpretation. The matter was firmly settled in the year 405 when the Palestinian monk and scholar Jerome (347–420) finished his Latin translation of the New Testament, and this text, known as the Vulgate, almost immediately became the definitive biblical text for most Christians. The New Testament used by the Persian Church had five fewer books (eliminating 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation) and the Ethiopian New Testament had eight additional books, but most Christians of the time affirmed Jerome’s twenty-seven-book canon.
With the approval and generous financial support of Roman authorities, Christians began building large and spectacular church buildings. Before the year 300, Christians had generally worshiped in relatively small quarters, often meeting in a house or similarly sized building. Once Christianity became the official religion of the empire, modest and provisional structures no longer seemed adequate or appropriate. New buildings were needed that could compete with or even outshine the grandeur of the older temples of Roman paganism, and enormous amounts of money were devoted to building massive, architecturally impressive church buildings called basilicas. As the architecture of the Christian movement changed, the visual art inside those buildings also changed. Most noticeably, Jesus got older and sterner. In the early centuries of Christianity, Jesus was typically pictured as a young, beardless shepherd carrying a lamb over his shoulders. The new portrayals typically depicted Jesus as a bearded, middle-aged judge or ruler on a throne (see Figure 1.1). Simultaneously, Christian worship became more elaborately choreographed, tailored to fit the magnificence of the new church buildings. Worship began to feel much more like an imperial court ritual than like a gathering of friends. Together, these changes signaled a major shift in Christian identity. Christianity was no longer the faith of social outcasts; it had become the faith of the prominent and powerful.
Figure 1.1 Figure of Jesus as a young shepherd (from the catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, third century) and Jesus as a middle-aged judge (from the Chora Church in Istanbul, originally constructed in the later fourth century). Source: Image on left: Joseph Wilpert, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Good_Shepherd_Catacomb_of_Priscilla.
The Council of Chalcedon, held in the year 451, was intended to complete the Imperial Church’s reorganization and its codification of correct beliefs. New guidelines regarding the behavior of monks/nuns and the clergy were announced, and the empire’s churches were incorporated into a hierarchy headed by a handful of super-bishops called “patriarchs.” The council also sought to end speculation about Christ’s ontological identity. The Council of Nicaea in 325 had declared that Christ was both fully divine and fully human but had not explained how the two were related. Chalcedon declared that these human and divine natures were joined, but not merged, in the single person of Christ. This abstraction would have meant almost nothing to ordinary Christians, but it meant a great deal to the bishops and theologians of the Imperial Church because it gave them a firm standard for differentiating truth from error. It was also supposed to unify the Christian movement for all time. But it did not. Instead, the Chalcedonian Creed become a new flash point for division.
Christian Diversity and Unity in the Year 500
The Great Church in the Roman Empire was the largest group of Christians in the world when the Chalcedonian Creed was being written, but it was certainly not the only group. Many Christian sects (marginalized Christian communities that were not legally recognized by either the Imperial Church or the government of Rome) continued to survive out of public sight within the borders of the empire, and groups of Christians outside the Roman Empire were even more diverse. As early as the first century, Christianity had been introduced to southern India via maritime trade routes, and it subsequently became a permanent minority religion within India’s complex social and spiritual environment. Christianity also put down roots in the Persian Empire (now Iraq and Iran) as early as the second century, and Christianity was brought to Armenia and Georgia in the Caucuses (the land between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) about the same time. Christianity made its way into Ethiopia during the fourth century, and later a group of nine theologically anti-Chalcedonian monks (known as the Nine Saints) fled south from Syria to Ethiopia where they helped to complete the evangelization of the region. Contemporaneously, Patrick was preaching the gospel in Ireland, where Christianity was organized along the lines of the Irish clan system rather than clustering around major urban centers as it did in the Roman Empire.
Christians adopted slightly different Christian identities in each separate region. Armenia, for example, was the first nation to officially embrace Christianity as its state religion, which remains a source of pride for Armenian Christians even today. Christians in Persia were severely persecuted – far beyond the horrors endured by Christians in the Roman Empire – but they remained faithful nonetheless, and joyful perseverance in suffering became a mainstay of their identity. In Ethiopia, where Judaism was historically respected, Jewish ideas and customs remained prominent in the movement. The fact that Christian communities adopted locally unique practices does not mean that they stopped thinking of themselves as belonging to a larger Christian movement that transcends cultural and national boundaries. Then, as now, Christians understood that being associated with a specific local Christian community was fully compatible with viewing other different Christians as siblings in faith. Christian unity was understood to be a matter of mutual recognition and respect much more than it was a matter of strict uniformity of practices