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Christianity Dbq 2 Analysis

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It’s hard to imagine that Christianity, a religion today with such a stronghold on the population with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, could have ever once possibly ceased to exist so easily. Somehow, it continued to grow despite 150 years of such uncertainty and persecution in Rome for followers of Christ. From the 33 A.D. when it is estimated that Jesus was crucified to 261 A.D. when the hunt for Christians begins to deescalate slightly, Christians were sought after for crimes against the Roman government. So how did the Roman emperor Constantine I decide to adopt Christianity as his own religion in 312 A.D. not long after mass criticism? First hand accounts and testimonies from Roman administrators are available to us today as records of the persecution of Christian believers. Records such as that of Pliny the Younger’s, a respected Roman administrator who, in 103 CE was sent to Bithynia to help to govern a troubled area with unrest caused in part by a new group that called themselves Christians. He would ask suspected Christians questions in order to get them to confess and then be executed. They were tried on the basis of disrespecting Roman beliefs. (Doc. G) A lot of the conflicting beliefs dealt with …show more content…

A question that religious historian Helmut Koester asks herself in the 2009 PBS documentary From Jesus to Christ. There were a number of things that the common people, the people at the bottom of Rome’s hierarchical system, believed that they could benefit from. Christianity taught a care for each other that these people often did not feel from those above them. (Doc. D) They were also taught that there would be a future for themselves beyond the world that they knew now. It gave them something to look forward to in a time when many of the population suffered from sickness and disease or worked as slaves. (Doc. B) From the general populations point of view, what else could you

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