Kim Bowes: belief

Transcript context

…When it comes to Roman Empire Christianity, say after Constantine, what would surprise us most about their practices? I think what would surprise me most, and many of my scholarly colleagues, is how few Christians there are. We somehow think that Constantine declares his support for this religion, and then boom, everyone’s Christian. In fact, of course, most people aren’t Christian for a really long time. Since you were asking about rich people, it takes a good 50 years, if not longer, for rich people to really say, “Okay, we’re going to go along with this new religion. ” I think that’s one of the biggest things that would have surprised us in a post-Constantinian world, is how few Christians there really are, especially when you went to the countryside. You went to the countryside, you find very few Christians at all for at least 200 years. It takes a long time for people to be convinced of what’s still a new religion. Do we have a sense of what they actually believed? Is it something they went along with, or say they had an active belief in the Trinity, or what did it mean to them to be Christian?…

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