Emperor Constantine Quotes

In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course, of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions, to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

The Emperor Constantine the Great (272 - 337) and his Pauline bishops decided that all the Gospels that went against the politics of the emperor and the Hellenistic Christianity that was created by St Paul, were to be excluded from the New Testament. Proof of this can be found in the fact that the 27 books of The New Testament are but a very small fraction of the Christian literature that was produced in the first three centuries after Jesus lived. These documents are known as the Apocryphal Gospels (Greek, Apocrypha: ' hidden' or 'secret writings') and some of them retained quite a following and were highly respected in the communities of the earliest times...

Constantine saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing this inscription: conquer by this. At the sight, he himself was struck with amazement and his whole army also.

Christendom is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. (...) The founder of Christianity was, of course, Christ. The founder of Christendom I suppose could be named as the Emperor Constantine.

In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

As we’ve already seen, the Church first became entangled with Empire and enamored with politics and all that goes with it— nationalism, patriotism, militarism, and violence—during the reign of the Emperor Constantine.

Legend says that Emperor Constantine, converted on his deathbed, willed the Roman Empire to the Christian Church, and in one act both ensured that Church’s immortality and doomed Europe to nineteen centuries of wars for God;

There is no New Testament basis for a linking of church and state until Christ, the King returns. The whole "Constantine mentality" from the fourth century up to our day was a mistake. Constantine, as the Roman Emperor, in 313 ended the persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, the support he gave to the church led by 381 to the enforcing of Christianity, by Theodosius I, as the official state religion. Making Christianity the official state religion opened the way for confusion up till our own day. There have been times of very good government when this interrelationship of church and state has been present. But through the centuries it has caused great confusion between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Christ, between patriotism and being a Christian. We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: "We should not wrap our Christianity in our national flag.

The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to protect or to tear down

the city of Rome, the best indication of the changed world is the arch erected in 315 CE in honour of the emperor Constantine’s victory over one of his internal rivals. It still stands, preserved because it was once built into a Renaissance fortress, between the old Roman

It is ironic, therefore, that while Constantine is famous for being the Emperor who laid the basis for the Christianisation of Europe, it is never noted that there was a price to pay for his embrace of a new faith: it spectacularly compromised Christianity’s future in the east. The

... the radical pacifist message of the Gospels [was] largely abandoned when the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, adopted Christianity as the official doctrine of the Roman empire — turning the church of the persecuted into the church of the persecutors, as historian of Christianity Hans Küng described the transformation.

What do you learn at school, then?" "We learn about the Prophet and his three hundred authenticated miracles,and about Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and Omar and Ali and Hind and Fatima and the saints, and sometimes the big battles of Saladin against the barbarians. And we recite the Holy Koran because we have to learn al-Fatihah by heart." "What's that?" "It's the beginning." "What's it like?" Karatavuk closed his eyes and recited:'Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim...' When he's finished he opened his eyes, and mopped his forehead. "It's difficult" he observed. "I didn't understand any of it" complained Mehmetcik. " It sounds nice though. was it language?" "Of course it was language, stupid. It's Arabic." "What's that then?" "It's what Arabs speak. And it's what God speaks, and that's why we have to learn to recite it. It's something about being merciful and the Day of Judgement and showing us the right path, and if anything is going wrong, or you're worried, or someone's sick, you just have to say al-Fatihah and everything will probably be all right." "I didn't know that God spoke language." observed Mehmetcik. Father Kristoforos speaks to him in Greek, but we don't understand that either." "What do you learn, then." "We learn more than you," answered Mehmetcik self-importantly. "We learn about Jesus Son of Mary and his miracles and St Nicholas and St Dmitri and St Menas and the saints and Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and Emperor Constantine and Alexander the Great and the Marble Emperor, and the great battles against barbarians, and the War of Independence, and we learn reading and writing and adding up and taking away and multiplication and division." "Don't you learn al-Fatihah,then?" "When things go wrong we say 'Kyrie elesion'. and we've got a proper prayer as well." "What's that like?" Mehmetcik screwed up his eyes in unconcious imitation of his friend, and recited: 'Pater imon, o en tois ouranis, agiasthito to onoma sou, eltheto i vasileia sou..' When Mehmetcik has finished, Karatavuk asked, "What's that about, then? is that some kind of language?" "It's Greek. It's what we speak to God.I don't know exactly what it means, it's something about our father who is in heaven and forgive us our daily bread, and led us not into temptation, but it doesn't matter if we don't understand it, because God does" "Maybe," pondered Karatavuk, " Greek and Arabic are actually the same language, and that's how God understands us, like sometimes I'm Abdul and sometimes I'm Karatavuk, and sometimes you're Nico and sometimes you're Mehmetcik, but it's two names and there's only one me and there's only one you, so it might be all one language that's called Greek sometimes and Arabic sometimes.

Octavian’s patron, Apollo, the god of reason, had defeated Antony’s patron, Hercules, the symbol of might.

[W]hen the emperor Constantine abruptly changed Roman policy from one of persecuting Christians to protecting and favoring them with massive gifts of money, tax exemptions, and enormous prestige, the bishops, now in political favor, sometimes used these new resources to promote unanimity; thus in 381, the Christian emperor Theodosius made "heresy" a crime against the state.

I find it incredible that the message of a carpenter, who taught us to love others as we do ourselves, could have become so distorted. The two people who did most to make these ideas acceptable were both murderers. The first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine killed his own family, and Calvin murdered Servetus because he disagreed with him. Mercy was not a word high on the agenda of these forefathers of the Church. They laid down the law for their own personal

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn't anything happening in the senate? Why do the senators sit there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What laws can the senators make now? Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting at the city's main gate on his throne, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader. He has even prepared a scroll to give him, replete with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution

of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the 'mystery' of the Trinity, and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria, in the fourth century AD, denied that Jesus was consubstantial (i.e. of the same substance or essence) with God. What on earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What 'substance'? What exactly do you mean by 'essence'? 'Very little' seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius's book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs - such has ever been the way of theology.

on that last Monday of the empire’s history, the mood changed. There was no rest for the weary, of course, and work continued, but for the first time in weeks, the inhabitants of the city began to make their way to the Hagia Sophia. There, for the first and last time in Byzantine history, the divisions that had split the church for centuries were forgotten, Greek priests stood shoulder to shoulder with Latin ones, and a truly ecumenical service began. While the population gathered in the great church, Constantine gave a final speech—a funeral oration, as Edward Gibbon put it—for the Roman Empire. Reminding his assembled troops of their glorious history, he proudly charged them to acquit themselves with dignity and honor: “Animals may run from animals, but you are men, and worthy heirs of the great heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome.”* Turning to the Italians who were fighting in defense of Constantinople, the emperor thanked them for their service, assuring them that they were now brothers, united by a common bond. After shaking hands with each of the commanders, he dismissed them to their posts and joined the rest of the population in the Hagia Sophia.

In Christianity this evolution lasted centuries; in Bolshevism — only decades. If Lenin was the St. Paul of Marxism, who set out to transplant the movement from its original environment into new lands, Stalin was already its Constantine the Great. He was, to be sure, not the first Emperor to embrace Marxism, but the first Marxist revolutionary to become the autocratic ruler of a vast empire.

After 1,123 years and 18 days, the Byzantine Empire had drawn to a close. The Divine Liturgy that had echoed from the great dome of the Hagia Sophia for nearly a millennium fell silent, and the clouds of incense slowly cleared from the desecrated churches of the city. The shocked and shattered Byzantines were now in permanent exile, but they could at least reflect that their empire had come to a glorious and heroic end. Their last emperor had chosen death over surrender or a diminishment of his ideals, and in doing so he had found a common grave among the men he led. Proud and brave, the iconic eighty-eighth emperor of Byzantium had brought the empire full circle. Like the first to rule in the city by the Bosporus, he had been a son of Helena named Constantine, and it was fitting that in his hour of need he had a Justinian by his side.

Rodney Stark confirms the point, saying, For far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (ca. 285–337) caused the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into an arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be both brutal and lax.… Constantine’s “favor” was his decision to divert to the Christians the massive state funding on which the pagan temples had always depended. Overnight, Christianity became “the most-favoured recipient of the near limitless resources of imperial favors.” A faith that had been meeting in humble structures was suddenly housed in magnificent public buildings—the new church of Saint Peter in Rome was modeled on the basilican form used for imperial throne halls.

Until the interventions of the Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius in the 4th century, there wasn’t one right, orthodox, or catholic (i.e., universal) expression of the faith. But eventually, one version of Christianity—Paul’s version focusing on the resurrected “Christ” as opposed to the historical Jesus—was endorsed by the power of the Roman Empire. After that, multiple Christianities disappeared. Suddenly, there was only one correct version sanctioned by the Roman state.

Even if three centuries of outsider status and intermittent persecution had tested the endurance of individuals and communities, coping with the patronage of a newly Christian emperor posed a challenge. The challenge was all the more threatening for its moral complexity. Was it right for the churches to accept the Emperor's favour, knowing full well that if they did so, they also tacitly accepted his right, so evident in all other aspects of life in the Roman Empire, to call the shots?

Although we can understand how people who were part of a widely disliked minority group might think that they were assailed by the devil, the idea is still dangerous. We should be worried by a powerful church that sees its dissenters as inspired by Satan. The Christians who lived during the reign of the emperor Constantine and later did not extend to pagans the toleration they had asked for generations before. They destroyed pagan shrines and temples, and stories of Christian mobs attacking Roman prefects and swarming around pagan religious centers are surprisingly common. With the legalization of Christianity, Christians turned—in the words of historian Hal Drake—from lambs into lions.53 Their violence was legitimized by the fact that they were Christian and in a martyr-led war against Satan. There was, for some, no difference between dying as a martyr under Decius and dying while trying to destroy a pagan temple. In the words of the fifth-century monk Shenoute, “There is no crime for those who have Christ.”54

If Marcus Aurelius had encouraged Stoicism as the official religion of Rome, the cultural history of the following 1500 years might have turned out very differently. But the Roman emperors from Constantine on chose to favour and later enforce Christianity as the state religion, and Pantheism was forced underground. For some 1200 years, from the fourth century until the end of the sixteenth, Pantheism in the West appeared only as occasional sparks amid the great theistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Vatika has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus, vatika represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.” Much later, the slope became the circus, or stadium, of the mad emperor Nero. It was here, according to Church tradition, that Saint Peter was executed, crucified upside down, and then buried nearby. This became the destination of so many pilgrims that the emperor Constantine, upon becoming half-Christian, founded a shrine on the spot, which the Romans continued to call the Vatican Slope. A century after Constantine, the popes started building the papal palace there.

When Constantine converted to Christianity, there basically was no Christian architecture. Local Christian communities met in converted houses, and especially in the face of periodic imperial persecution, the religion had developed no specific architectural forms of its own. In the fourth century, therefore, as imperial patronage and ongoing processes of conversion caused large numbers of specialist churches to be built for the first time, the religion took over an old form of public building from the Graeco-Roman world: the basilica. This was a rectangular, shallow-vaulted building, usually equipped with aisles around an elevated central nave and an apse at one end. It had long been used for town council buildings and audience chambers across the Mediterranean world, with the apse being occupied by the presiding figure of power (or indeed the emperor in the case of a palace audience chamber). For Christianity, the apse worked nicely for the sacred space of the altar, and the basilica was a building form essentially designed for meetings, which worked, too, as a space for church services

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur’an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the conquistadors and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary accompaniment.

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur’an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the conquistadores and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary accompaniment.

But for the coming of Christianity, who knows how the history of Europe would have developed ? Rome would have conquered all Europe, and the onrush of the Huns would have been broken on the legions. It was Christianity that brought about the fall of Rome—not the Germans or the Huns. What Bolshevism is achieving to-day on the materialist and technical level, Christianity had achieved on the metaphysical level. When the Crown sees the throne totter, it needs the support of the masses. It would be better to speak of Constantine the traitor and Julian the Loyal than of Gonstantine the Great and Julian the Apostate. What the Christians wrote against the Emperor Julian is approximately of the same calibre as what the Jews have written against us. The writings of the Emperor Julian, on the other hand, are products of the highest wisdom. If humanity took the trouble to study and understand history, the resulting consequences would have incalculable implications. One day ceremonies of thanksgiving will be sung to Fascism and National Socialism for having preserved Europe from a repetition of the triumph of the Underworld.

The early Church is no mystery, but I must say that, for me personally, it was a terrible challenge. I studied the writings of the four witnesses. I studied everything else I could find from the early Church. I looked and looked for something resembling my own faith, for something at least similar to the distinctives and practices of my own local church . . . and found only Catholicism. It was like something out of a dream, a nightmare. I had always believed, on the best authority I knew, that Roman Catholicism as it exists today is a rigid, clotted relic of the Middle Ages, the faded and fading memory of a Christianity distorted beyond all recognition by centuries of syncretism and superstition. Its organization and its officers were nothing but the christianized fossils of Emperor Constantine and his lieutenants; its transubstantiating Mass and its regenerating baptism, the ghosts of pagan mystery religion lingering over Vatican Hill. Catholicism represented to me the very opposite of primitive Christianity. The idea that anything remotely like it should be found in the first and second centuries was laughable, preposterous. I knew, like everyone else, that the early Church was a loose fraternity of simple, autonomous, spontaneous believers, with no rituals, no organization, who got their beliefs from the Bible only and who always, therefore, got it right . . . like me. I also knew that the object of the Christian game, here in the modern world, is to “put things back to the way they were in the early Church”. That, after all, was what our glorious Reformation had been all about. That, for crying out loud, was the whole meaning of Protestantism. So, as you might guess, finding apostolic succession in A.D. 96, or the Sacrifice of the Altar in 150, did my settled Evangelical way of life no good at all. Since that time I have learned that many other Evangelical Christians have experienced this same painful discovery.

This is well set out in Rodney Stark’s famous book The Rise of Christianity (1996, Ch. 4). Stark makes a compelling case that the way the Christians behaved in the great plagues of the early centuries was a significant factor in contributing to the spread of the faith. Stark, and others who have followed him, have collected the evidence from the plagues of the 170s AD, which killed the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the 250s. (Nobody is quite sure what diseases they were. One might have been smallpox, the other measles, both killers when attacking unprepared populations.) The emperor Julian, who tried to deconvert the Roman empire in the late fourth century after it had become officially Christian under Constantine, complained that the Christians were much better at looking after the sick, and for that matter the poor, than the ordinary non-Christian population. He was trying to lock the stable door after the horse had bolted. The Christians were being for the world what Jesus had been for Israel. People took notice. Something new was happening.

If there was substance to Singularitarianism, then the ascension of Kurzweil at Google would one day be seen as a decisive moment in history, analagous to the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.

Christianity, the humblest of all faiths, degenerated into the most power-hungry and hierarchical religion on the face of the earth. After the emperor Constantine elevated Christianity to the status of a state religion in A.D. 312, the once-persecuted faith became a fierce persecutor of all its opposition.

We simply do not know how many Christians suffered imprisonment or died at the hands of the authorities: possibly hundreds of people, although almost certainly not many thousands. We do know that, in the end, the Christians came out on top. Constantine converted, and with one brief exception all the emperors to follow were Christian. There would never again be an official Roman persecution of the Christians. Throughout these early centuries of on-again, off-again opposition, Christians were not always bullied, beaten, tortured, and executed. Most of the time, in most places, they were simply left in peace. Many Christians went from cradle to grave without facing any public ridicule, opposition, or persecution. We do not hear much about these Christians for an obvious reason: peace and quiet rarely make it into the history books.

In 303 CE, the Roman emperor Diocletian declared war on the Christian church and instigated the most massive persecution it ever endured. In 312 CE, the emperor Constantine himself converted to become a Christian. In 391 to 392 CE, the vehemently orthodox Christian Theodosius declared all pagan practices illegal and in effect made Christianity the state religion of Rome. With the growth of Christianity came moments of heightened intolerance. Sometimes this intolerance erupted in ugly acts of violence, suppression, and coercion. Christians were not, of course, the only intolerant people on the planet. They themselves had been the victims of violent coercion early in the century.

Eusebius was employed by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion of the Empire and gave Literalist Christianity the power it needed to begin the final eradication of Paganism and Gnosticism. Constantine wanted 'one God, one religion' to consolidate his claim of 'one Empire, one Emperor'. He oversaw the creation of the Nicene creed — the article of faith repeated in churches to this day — and Christians who refused to assent to this creed were banished from the Empire or otherwise silenced.

For two and a half centuries a long war was waged between the Church and the Roman Empire which began in the age of Nero and never entirely ceased, in spite of occasional periods of truce and relaxation, until the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. The causes of persecution were not immediately obvious, since the Roman Empire was not usually intolerant in religious matters and the Christians were not merely politically inoffensive, but inculcated obedience to the Roman government as a religious duty.

He was forty years old, and for six years he had been struggling to claim the crown of the imperator. Less than twenty-four hours before, he had finally beaten the sitting emperor of Rome, twenty-nine-year-old Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine’s men had fought their way forward across the bridge, toward the city of Rome, until the defenders broke and ran. Maxentius drowned, pulled down into the mud of the riverbed by the weight of his armor. The Christian historian Lactantius tells us that Constantine’s men marched into Rome with the sign of Christ marked on each shield; the Roman* writer Zosimus adds that they also carried Maxentius’s waterlogged head on the tip of a spear. Constantine had dredged the body up and decapitated it.1

In 251 the church in Rome alone had more than fifteen hundred dependents on its rolls, and even small local churches kept storerooms of provisions for the poor, such as oil, wine, and clothing (especially, tellingly enough, women’s clothing).16 In this way the church, long before Constantine, had created a system of social assistance that no civic or religious office of the pagan state provided; once Constantine became emperor and shifted state patronage to his new religion, storerooms became storehouses, and the church became the first large, organized institution of public welfare in Western history.

In order to arm himself against this trap, Emperor Constantine said that even if he saw the Head of Christianity commit an atrocious act, not only would he not reveal it, but he would cover it with his cloak.

and into the western parts of Asia Minor, where his successful activities attracted the attention of the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Pogonatus. This Emperor issued a decree (684) against the congregations of believers and against Constantine in particular, sending one of his officers, named Simeon, to put it into effect. In order to give special significance to the execution of Constantine, Simeon supplied a number of his personal friends with stones and ordered them to stone the teacher whom they had so long revered and loved. Risking their own lives by their refusal, they dropped the stones, but there was a young man present named Justus, who had been brought up by Constantine as his adopted son and treated with especial kindness; he flung a stone at his benefactor and killed him, thus earning high praise and reward from the authorities, who compared him to David slaying Goliath. Simeon was profoundly moved by all that he saw and heard at Kibossa, and, conversing with the Christians there, was convinced of the truth of their doctrines and the Tightness of their practice.

As Eusebius recounted the story, Constantine seemed to believe there was a basic incompatibility between being an emperor and being a Christian, between court and church, warfare and prayer, the purple and the white. It would be an ironic conclusion: Constantine, the first anti-Constantinian. Constantine the Yoderian

The widespread idea, promoted by The Da Vinci Code, that the Emperor Constantine determined the New Testament canon, casting aside the earlier and supposedly more authentic Gnostic gospels, simply is not true.

The reason for the First Council Of Nicaea (325 AD) has been misunderstood by many. The Emperor Constantine set up the meeting with intention to clarify issues concerning the deity of Jesus. Some speculate that the deity of Jesus was established at that time, however, that is certainly not the case. Saying that the deity of Jesus was established at that time would be like saying that circumcision was established when Paul and Simon Peter met to discuss the issue of whether or not Gentiles should be circumcised. Jesus was certainly deity at His birth, and circumcision was certainly established in GENESES Chapter 17 when God made a covenant with a 99 year old Abraham.

What Constantine ordered, however, was not a cross-shaped object but rather a long, gilded spear, bisected by a horizontal bar, topped with a golden and gemmed wreath that surrounded two letters, chi and rho: the first two letters of Christos. Like Lactantius, Eusebius explains that this looked like the intersection of the Latin letters X and P. In addition, a banner hung from the bar, embroidered with portraits of the emperor with his two sons.

The cross began to turn up regularly on Christian monuments as well as small personal items fairly soon after Constantine’s prophetic heavenly vision and the momentous discovery of the relic of wood of the True Cross in Jerusalem. Because both of these events were associated with the imperial house, the emergence of the cross often has been seen at least initially as a symbol, employed by the emperor or his agents to be a sign of divine protection and patronage. Yet, almost immediately following its discovery, the cross began to distinguish itself from those imperial associations to become a devotional object in itself, without bearing any necessary or direct political or military meaning.

Some early Christian epitaphs with crosses have been dated to the third century, but it was the middle of the fourth century before the cross emerged as a regular feature in Christian iconography. Two precipitating events may be most responsible for this development: the Emperor Constantine I’s vision of the cross (or christogram) before his decisive battle against his enemy Maxentius, and the discovery and subsequent distribution of the relics of the actual cross in Jerusalem.

After the cave was authenticated as the place of Christ’s birth, Helena’s son, Emperor Constantine, issued a decree for the first church building to be constructed on that site in the year 326 AD.9 That earliest church in Bethlehem was built directly on the land above the cave where Christ was born, and in 339 AD, the Church of the Nativity of Christ was dedicated.10

Maxentius, son of the former Emperor Maximian, suddenly caught everyone by surprise

Now there were two supposed emperors of the West—Severus and Maxentius

Constantine, like any Roman emperor before him, was harsh when it came to insubordination.

Galerius was made senior emperor with his nephew Maximinus Daia serving as his caesar.

Constantine automatically becoming emperor of the west

and Constantius Chlorus in the west—promoted to senior emperors.

the two emperors ended up facing off against each other in 316 at the Battle of Cibalae.

Rome was without an emperor and without a general. Three days after Maximus’s death, on April 22 of 455, the Vandals arrived at the city and broke through the gates.3 For fourteen days, the North African barbarians roved through the city, plundering and wrecking so thoroughly that their name became a new verb: to “vandalize,” to ruin without purpose.

Not all the temple statues were melted down. The “tyrant” Constantine also had an eye for art and many objects were shipped back as prize baubles for the emperor’s new city, Constantinople

families

In both Luke and John . . . Jesus himself identifies his Jewish opponents with Satan.”2 As James Carroll points out in Constantine’s Sword, the Emperor Constantine’s decision to have the church adopt the cross as its principal symbol meant that Christ’s death would always be the central focus of the faith.3 The church’s view that the Jews were guilty of the death of Christ would guarantee that Jews be considered enemies of Christendom in the popular imagination.

Contrary to traditional belief, Emperor Constantine the Great (AD 274–337) did not embrace Christianity as the religion of Rome; but adapted Christianity into a new form which was implemented as the religion of Rome.[962]

Without artists, would this heritage have descended to us? Would the words and deeds—the revelation—have survived the arduous journey into the present without the painters, the mosaic workers, the storytellers, the stone carvers, the poets, the singers, the workers in stained glass? Wasn’t it art, I thought—as I watched Bernard open a handsome black wallet and remove a handful of lire—that had been the carrier of the divine? Popes had understood that. The Emperor Constantine. Monks in damp Irish monasteries illuminating the Word.

286AD and is carried by a black Roman commander called Maurice during the reign of the emperor Maximian. Maurice’s entire legion, known as the Theban because they were conscripts from Egypt, of six thousand six hundred men were all Christians. This was extremely rare in ancient Roman history. The army was strongly pagan and remained so until the Emperor Constantine.

Saint Helena,” Dennis said, “also known as the empress Helena was the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine the great. Birthdate not known but thought to be either 246 or 250AD. Died 330AD. Famous for finding the relics from Christ’s crucifixion. She found the nails and rope used to fix him to his cross. She also found the cross on which he was crucified. She found a total of three crosses and had a woman from Jerusalem, who was near death, touch each one. When the woman touched the third cross she was cured.

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In the early days of the Church, heroic virtue was clearly seen in the sacrifice of the martyrs during the Roman persecutions. But after the Emperor Constantine not only legalized Christianity in 313 but later even granted Christians a privileged place under the law, this led to a new laxity within the Church. More believers came to the Church with insincere motives and lack of fervor. As a response, some of those that desired the full vitality of Christian life as witnessed in the martyrs set out for a separate life of prayer and fasting in the desert—a white martyrdom of death to self each day.   Finding

Can we say as much for what is termed "the religion of Christ?" No! this religion has had the aid of the sword and firebrand, the rack and the thumb-screw. "Persecution," is to be seen written on the pages of ecclesiastical history, from the time of Constantine even to the present day. [444:1] This Christian emperor and saint was the first to check free-thought.

The Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea at his summer palace and invited the bishops to attend, all expenses paid. As an added lure, he even mentioned “the excellent temperature of the air.” Constantine had his own agenda. He wanted to get this unsettled problem of Jesus’ identity straightened out so that Christianity could better serve as cement for his sprawling empire. He

history of the monastery and the long list of artifacts it housed and learned that St. Catherine’s was the oldest working Christian monastery in the world. The mother of Constantine the Great, Empress Helen, began the building project, but the Emperor Justinian later finished it somewhere between 527 and 565 A.D. for the purpose of housing the bones of St. Charles of Alexandria. According to oral tradition, Moses’ Burning Bush lay beneath the chapel. Priceless works of art, Arab mosaics, Greek and Russian icons, Western oil paintings, and other valuable articles, had been collected by curators as time passed and placed in the monastery.

I agreed I wouldn’t put any instruments on the burial slab but we can use the floor.” “You think this is a good candidate for the actual tomb?” Arthur asked. “Well, probably better than the Garden Tomb,” Neti answered, “and certainly Catholics and Orthodox Christians think this is the right place. The history goes back to the fourth century when Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to accept Christianity, came to Jerusalem looking for the tomb. So, this is a smart woman by all accounts and maybe she could be described as the first anthropologist because what does she do? She asks the people in the area where they think Jesus was buried.

Though Christianity’s early history was troubled, fortune eventually favored the new religion when, in the fourth century AD, the Emperor Constantine himself converted to it, banned the persecution of Christians and returned confiscated Church properties. Gradually, the remains of the Popes and important martyrs were removed from catacombs and buried in consecrated ground within the grounds of churches. The sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 put an end to the use of the catacombs for fresh burials, though for centuries pilgrims continued to visit them and Popes did their best to preserve and even embellish the important vaults.

In the short-term perspective of the second century AD, the Jews appeared to have been a powerful national and religious group which had courted ruin, and achieved it. During most of the first century, the Jews not only constituted a tenth of the empire, and a much higher proportion in certain big cities, but were expanding. They had the transcendent new idea of the age: ethical monotheism. They were almost all literate. They had the only welfare system that existed. They made converts in all social groups, including the highest. One or more of the Flavian emperors might easily have become a Jew, just as Constantine was to become a Christian 250 years later.

Hitler flaunted his evil intentions and deeds to the world. The Vatican had no excuse for its Nazi partnership or for its continued commendation of Hitler on the one hand and its thunderous silence regarding the Jewish question on the other hand. As the evil mounted, the Roman Catholic Church continued to work with the Fuehrer and even to praise him. Even after Hitler's troops, in spite of promises to the contrary, marched in and took over the demilitarized Rhineland, Catholic leaders all over Germany lauded him, among them Cardinal Schulte in Cologne's cathedral.18 The concordat with Hitler was nothing new. The popes had been partners with evil rulers for centuries. Would Jesus make a deal with Pilate or the apostle Peter with Nero? Yet those who claimed to be Peter's successors had been in unholy alliances with pagan emperors from Constantine onward, and continued in the alliance with Hitler until the end of the war, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from the Nazi government to the Vatican.

The change of worship from Saturday to Sunday had its roots in Rome and the heathen emperor, Constantine, converting to Christianity and declaring Sunday a day of worship in honor of the sun god.  Later, the Roman church exercised authority to make the change from Sabbath to Sunday. The practice came down through time, and many unsuspecting Christians accepted it as the norm and the truth. While

But Louis XV, in arguably the biggest single blunder of his reign, capitulated to clerical pressure and to specious arguments such as the ‘donation of Constantine’, whereby the first Christian emperor had given land to the church unencumbered and in perpetuity. The problem did not go away: clerical resistance to taxation was to defeat Louis XVI’s major reforming initiative too.

From these many theological interchanges a concensus arose; and the historical Jesus became permanently associated with the Logos, and was thereafter regarded by Christians as an incarnation of God; or, in popular circles, ‘the Son of God’. Then, to the duality of the Father and Son was added the “Spirit” or “Holy Ghost”—thus constituting a holy Trinity, comparable to Plotinus’ trinity of The One, the Divine Mind, and Soul. This doctrine of the ‘Holy Trinity’ became firmly established as a metaphysical tenet of the Church with the formulation of the Nicene Creed following the first ecumenical council assembled by emperor Constantine in 325 C.E., and the Athenasian Creed, penned around the same time—though in later years Christendom would become bitterly divided in its acceptance of this tenet.

Vatican palace has been the official residence of the Popes since 1377. The original building was built in AD 319 by the Roman emperor Constantine who built a basilica over the tomb of St Peter himself, the first bishop of Rome. In the fifteenth century the building looked as if it would collapse and in 1452 the reconstruction was begun. The whole project soon ran out of money though and it was abandoned for over 50 years until 1506 when Pope Julius II gave instructions for the entire area of buildings to be demolished and the new St Peter’s to be built.

Next the spear passed to the Roman Emperor Constantine who carried the spear into battle against the rival Emperor Maxentius on the Milvian bridge over the Tiber in Rome. Losing the battle Maxentius fled with his army and the bridge collapsed and Maxentius drowned. His body was recovered and decapitated Constantine became the sole ruler of the West. Founding the city of Constantinople on the older city of Byzantium Constantine kept the ‘holy lance’ or as it is now known the ‘spear of destiny’ there.

church was built surrounding part of the imperial palace of St Helena which she converted to a place of worship around the year 320AD. She was the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine who became the great. In 325AD the church was converted to a basilica and the floor was covered with soil from Jeruslaem. This is why the church has the name Holy cross in Jerusalem even though we are standing in Rome.

The capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople, still carried the name given to it in the year 330, when it became the imperial capital for the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. In World War I literature it is sometimes referred to as Istanbul or Stambul, but Constantinople did not officially become Istanbul until the Turkish parliament passed legislation to this effect in 1930.

The ancient Slavs called water spirits vily, meaning “fairies,” and a document of the Bulgarian emperor Constantine Asen (1258–1277) speaks of a “well of the fairies.” Pierre Gallais has just recently shown us in a new book that the fountain (or spring) is almost inseparable from the figure of the fairy.

As Marcus discovered, forces beyond Rome’s control offered constant danger: pressure from migrations by barbarian peoples hundreds of miles beyond the frontier and from epidemics with distant origins, as well as from the challenge of recurrent Parthian dynastic ambitions.

Now, in Constantinople, there is a square called the Square of Brotherly Love, with a fine group of statuary on a tall pedestal commemorating the fraternal devotion of the sons of the Emperor Constantine, who subsequently destroyed one another without mercy.

Bayard and his brothers were demon princes, and the emperor was the arch demon, an incarnation of depravity: gilded and beautiful and terrible.

The women spoke together quietly, content in their position as companions of the empress: a robust and handsome woman with thick dark gold hair. It seemed inconceivable that her firm, powerful body had born fourteen children for the emperor. Twelve of them had lived and Varencienne, at eighteen, was the only girl.

In Pagan Rome, the same practice was observed. Thus we find Licinius, the Pagan Emperor, before joining battle with Constantine, his rival, calling a council of his friends in a thick wood, and there offering sacrifices to his gods, "lighting up wax-tapers" before them, and at the same time, in his speech, giving his gods a hint, that if they did not give him the victory against Constantine, his enemy and theirs, he would be under the necessity of abandoning their worship, and lighting up no more "wax-tapers to their honour.

Seventeen hundred years ago, key elements of our ancient heritage were lost, relegated to the elite priesthoods and esoteric traditions of the day. In an effort to simplify the loosely organized religious and historic traditions of his time, early in the fourth century A.D. the Roman emperor Constantine formed a council of historians and scholars. What would later be known as the Council of Nice fulfilled the directive of its charter and recommended that at least twenty-five documents be modified or removed from the collection of texts.1 The committee found many of the works under consideration to be redundant, with overlapping stories and repeated parables. Other manuscripts were so abstract and in some cases so mystical that they were believed to be beyond any practical value. Additionally, another twenty supporting documents were removed, held in reserve for privileged researchers and select scholars. The remaining books were condensed and rearranged, to give them greater meaning and make them more accessible to the common reader. Each of these decisions contributed to further confusing the mystery of our purpose, possibilities, and relationship to one another. Following the accomplishment of their task, the council produced a single document in A.D. 325. The result of their labor remains with us as perhaps one of the most controversial texts of sacred history. It is known today as the Holy Bible.

When the emperor Diocletian retired in 305, however, Constantine son of Constantius Chlorus rushed his legions down from Britain to join in the struggle for power. He also displayed a ruthless cunning in working to secure his title. He married the daughter of Diocletian’s co-emperor, Maximian, then in 310 had his father-in-law arrested and strangled. The next year he allied himself with one rival, Licinius, in order to declare war on the other, Maximian’s son, Maxientius.

The concept of Christendom as a universal (in Greek, katholikos) community of shared values and ideals, living together in peace and harmony, had arrived.19 It comes about not through men obeying nature (as Aristotle would have framed it), but through obeying God. Or rather it will come about someday in the not-too-distant future, when all men everywhere follow His community. Until then arrives, Lactantius admits, men still need laws and a lawmaker, the emperor. But this political power in its new Christian form must be directed toward a higher end than simply maintaining public order and the Pax Romana. Constantine and his successors serve a higher constituency, namely all of humanity. Their task is to create a world fit for Christians to live in, and one that eventually they will take over.

Since the earliest days of Christianity our order has born witness to a female tradition of spirituality that men of the church have suppressed and replaced with doctrines that refashioned God and religion in their own image. Centuries ago, the Emperor Constantine called disputing bishops to the Council of Nicea to agree on church doctrine. By consensus, and one curious result, Mary the mother of Jesus was declared the ever-virgin mother of God—despite the fact that Jesus never claimed divinity for himself, and our Foundress was living proof to the contrary regarding Mary’s perpetual virginity.

The Council of Nicea was first and foremost an attempt by the Roman emperor Constantine the Great to keep his empire from splitting.

the first emperor of the east who did not peacefully inherit the throne since Constantine.

Constantine, allying himself with one of the eastern emperors, marched against Maxentius in 312 CE.

I learned that reincarnation had been part of the original teachings of Jesus but was removed from The Bible as part of the “reorganization” of the church. In defiance of Emperor Constantine, reincarnation was actively taught as part of Christian doctrine by many priests until 553 AD when Rome declared ex-communication for anyone continuing that practice.

The phrases “I am the light and the way” and “the only begotten Son” were created and added to The Bible and to church doctrine at that time…more than 300 years after the life of Jesus. Bishops and priests protesting the changes wrote many letters to the emperor. They asked, what gave Constantine the right to change church doctrine? Jesus called himself a teacher, not the only begotten Son. He sought to empower others, not to make them servants to the church.

The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople — the infant city of Emperor Constantine — was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions.

At the beginning of the fourth century AD, the Roman Empire faced a wide horizon of religious possibilities. It could have stuck to its traditional and variegated polytheism. But its emperor, Constantine, looking back on a fractious century of civil war, seems to have thought that a single religion with a clear doctrine could help unify his ethnically diverse realm. He could have chosen any of a number of contemporary cults to be his national faith – Manichaeism, Mithraism, the cults of Isis or Cybele, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and even Buddhism were all available options. Why did he opt for Jesus? Was there something in Christian theology that attracted him personally, or perhaps an aspect of the faith that made him think it would be easier to use for his purposes? Did he have a religious experience, or did some of his advisers suggest that the Christians were quickly gaining adherents and that it would be best to jump on that wagon? Historians can speculate, but not provide any definitive answer. They can describe how Christianity took over the Roman Empire, but they cannot explain why this particular possibility was realised.

Constantine said, ‘I am an emperor and a warrior, not a bishop or a martyr. A ruler by necessity must continue to sin until the very last day of his life.’ Eusebius tried to object, but Constantine silenced him. He said, ‘I have much to do in this life before I am ready to put sinning behind me.