  CHRISTIANITY AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE The Religion of the Jews. Among the cities captured by the Romans was Jerusalem, about which cluster so many stories from the Old Testament. There, hundreds of years before, lived David, the shepherd boy who, after wonderful adventures, became king of his people. There his son Solomon built a temple of dazzling splendor. Among this people had arisen great preachers,--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah,--who declared that religion did not consist in the sacrifice of bulls and goats, but in justice, in mercy, and in humility. They had a genius for religion, just as the Greeks had a genius for art, and the Romans a genius for government. The Jews conquered by the Romans. When the Jews first heard of the Romans they admired these citizens of a republic who made and unmade kings. In later years they learned that the Romans were hard masters and they feared and hated them. The Jewish kingdom was one of the last countries along the shores of the Mediterranean which the Romans conquered, but like all the others it finally became a Roman province. Jesus of Nazareth. A few years before the Jewish kingdom became a Roman province there was born in a village near Jerusalem a child named Jesus. After he had grown to manhood in Nazareth he gathered about him followers or disciples whom he taught to live and act as is told in the books of the New Testament.
This was the beginning of the Christian religion. It was first held by a little band of Jews, but Paul, a Jew born in Tarsus, a city of Asia whose inhabitants had received the rights of Roman citizenship, believed that the message of the new religion was meant for all nations. He taught it in many cities of Asia Minor and Greece, and even went as far west as Rome. Several of the epistles or letters in the New Testament were written by Paul to churches which he had founded or where he had taught. So it happens that from Palestine came religious teachings which multitudes consider even more important than the art and literature of the Greeks or the laws and political methods of the Romans. Why the Christians were persecuted. The Romans at first refused to permit any one in their empire to call himself a Christian. They disliked the Jews because the Jews denied that the Roman gods were real gods, asserting that these gods were mere images in wood and stone. The Christians did this also, but in the eyes of the Roman rulers the worst offense of the Christians was that they appeared to form a sort of secret society and held meetings to which other persons were not admitted. The emperor had forbidden such societies. The Romans also disliked the Christians because of their refusal to join in the public ceremonies which honored the emperor as if he were a god who had given peace and order to the world and who was able to reward the good and punish the evil. The Christians believed it to be wrong to join in the worship of an emperor, whether he were alive or dead. Christians put to Death. The Romans were cruel in their manner of punishing disobedience, and many Christians suffered death in its most horrible forms. Some were burned, others were tortured, others were torn to pieces by wild animals in the great amphitheaters to satisfy the fierce Roman crowd. Nero, the worst of the Roman emperors, who, many thought, set Rome on fire in order that he might enjoy the sight of the burning city, tried to turn suspicion from himself by accusing the Christians of the crime. He punished them by tying them to poles, smearing their bodies with pitch, and burning them at night as torches. The Christians allowed to Worship. The new religion spread rapidly from province to province in spite of these persecutions. At first the Christians worshiped secretly, but later they ventured to build churches. Finally, three centuries after the birth of Christ, the emperors promised that the persecutions should cease and that the Christians might worship undisturbed.
The Roman Empire becomes Christian about 325 A.D. Constantine was the first emperor to become Christian. He was the one who made the Greek city Byzantium the capital of the empire and for whom it was renamed Constantinople. For a time both the old Roman religion and the Christian religion were favored by the emperors, but before the fourth century closed the old religion was forbidden. In later days worshipers of the Roman gods were mostly country people, called in Latin pagani, and therefore their religion was called "paganism." How the Church was ruled. One of the reasons why the Christians had been successful in their struggle with the Roman emperors was that they were united under wise and brave leaders. The Christians in each large city were ruled by a bishop, and the bishops of several cities were directed by an archbishop. In the western part of the empire the bishop of Rome, who was called the pope, was honored as the chief of the bishops and archbishops, and the successor of the Apostle Peter. In the eastern part the archbishops or patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria and Jerusalem honored the pope, but claimed to be equal in authority with him. There were also two kinds of clergy, parish priests and monks. The priests were pastors of ordinary parishes, but the monks lived in groups in buildings called monasteries. Sometimes their purpose was to dwell far from the bustle and wrongs of ordinary life and give themselves to prayer and fasting; sometimes they acted as a brotherhood of teachers in barbarous communities, teaching the people better methods of farming, and carrying the arts of civilized life beyond the borders of the empire.
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