Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
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Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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No one seems to know exactly why, but Diocletian, two years before the end of his highly effective reign, abruptly ordered the most vicious of all persecutions of the Christians. For eighteen years Diocletian, although himself a convinced and practicing pagan, paid no attention to the growing Christian power. His court was full of Christian officials, and his wife, Prisca, and his daughter, Valeria, were considered Christians.
Reklam
Diocletian has not enjoyed what is called good press in Christian circles, because he was the most savage of the persecutors of the church. Given the anarchy he inherited, however, and the revived empire he passed on to his successors, “Diocletian deserves to be ranked among the truly great emperors.”
Ethiopian Christianity still has a distinctly Semitic character, holding to several Jewish observances: Saturday Sabbath, abstinence from unclean foods, and the circumcision of male infants. According to the thirteenth-century epic Kebra Negast (“The Glory of Kings”), the first Ethiopian emperor, Menelik I—said to be the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—secretly moved the ark of the covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church still claims to possess the ark.
When Europeans eventually made their way to east Africa, they were astonished at what they found. A Portuguese travel log from the sixteenth century puts it vividly: “No country in the world is so full of churches, monasteries, and ecclesiastics as Abyssinia [Ethiopia]; it is not possible to sing in one church without being heard by another, and perhaps by several.”
Eventually, the openness that characterized Taizong’s reign gave way to intense religious persecution under the Taoist emperor Wuzong (reigned 840–46). Wuzong proved hostile toward foreign ideas, and he targeted both Buddhists and Christians. As a result, we have little record of Christian activity in China between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, but the faith never disappeared.
Reklam