Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
1183 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
Once the Romans discovered what the Christians were up to, they were confronted by the problem of toleration in a more exasperating form than even the Jews had presented. The Jews, after all, were “a sort of closed corporation, a people set apart from others by the mark of circumcision, who lived and worshiped largely by themselves, and did little active proselyting.” The Christians, on the other hand, were always talking about their Jesus. They were out to make Christians of the entire population of the empire, and the rapidity of their spread showed that this was no idle dream.
Reklam
In his day Julian was finding it more difficult than he had expected to put new life into the traditional Roman religion. He wanted to set aside Christianity and bring back the ancient pagan faith, but he saw clearly the drawing power of Christian love in practice: “Atheism [i.e., Christian faith] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”
To answer critics like Celsus, a number of Christian writers arose to defend the Christian faith against the rumors and railings of the pagans. We call these writers apologists. Not because they were sorry for anything: the word comes from the Greek word apologia and means “defense”—such as a lawyer gives at a trial.
The picture suggests that areas inhabited by people who preferred to keep their barbarian speech were usually more resistant to the introduction of the gospel. We know that as late as the sixth century, Emperor Justinian was still rallying Christian forces to overcome paganism in the interior of Asia Minor.
After the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, the center of the Christian movement moved north and eventually west. The second home of the church was Antioch of Syria. Under a succession of notable bishops, the church in this third largest city of the empire took root and exerted widespread influence throughout Syria. By the end of the fourth century, Antioch was a city of half a million people, and half of these were Christians.
Reklam