What accounts for the triumph of Christianity over its pagan rivals?

Around about AD 30, Jesus of Nazareth was put to death by a second-tier Roman administrator in the backwater province of Judea. But some two hundred years later, in 312, Constantine was going into battle at the Milvian bridge with the Chi-Rho symbol on the shields of his soldiers because he allegedly had a vision telling him, “In this sign, conquer!”

Then later, in 380, the emperor Theodosius II issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

How did this happen?

One could appeal to divine providence and purpose, but even then the question is “how,” by what material means did Christianity become so resilient and then hegemonic in the Roman empire?

One conspiracy theory is that Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire to use Christianity as a tool to control the empire. The problem of course is that Constantine did no such thing. He legalized Christianity, gave it certain privileges, interfered in a few ecclesiastical debates, but otherwise tolerated Jews and pagans. Constantine was unable to unify the church and keep all the bishops on a leash amidst the torrent of debates in the Donatist and Arian controversies.

There were external factors as well that facilitated Christianity’s rise.

The Roman Empire had created a political edifice, a social system, means of travel for establishing trans-provincial associations, that made it possible for religious ideas to spread and networks to be created across Europe, Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia.

Also, monotheism was an idea on the rise in different forms in the Greco-Roman world. Devotion to the “Most High God” was known in parts of Asia Minor in the firsts century, Middle Platonists flirted with monotheistic notions in the second century, and there were attempts to import the Syrian god Elagabal into Rome in the early third century. By the late third century, emperors like Diocletian would champion the cult of Sol Invictus, the triumphant Sun, as a supreme deity over others.

Perhaps Christianity was a more inclusive form of Judaism. We know from Philo and Josephus about many pagans who were attracted to Judaism, many adhered to or converted to the Jewish way of life. Maybe Christianity, with its Jewish origins, was a type of Judaism-lite which was even more palatable to pagans, given that Christianity maintained some of the things that made Judaism interesting (its antiquity, monotheism, sacred texts, ethics, sense of solidarity and identity) but divested itself of some elements of Judaism that some found hard to swallow like the requirement of circumcision for men and other things like abstaining from pork.

The famous historian Edward Gibbon attributed the rise of Christianity to the “inflexible and intolerant zeal of the early Christians.” In other words, the early Christians were religious nutjobs who wouldn’t shut up or give up.

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