SoldierOfChrist
Banned
Hello!
Between the suppression of the Apostles by the Romans and the conversion of Constantine, the early Church spent its decades in the wilderness, with its disciples persecuted, murdered, and generally pushed to the fringes of society to practice their faith in secret. During this period, myriad schools of Christian thought flourished underground, influenced by regional and cultural matrices, oftentimes borrowing heavily from pagan philosophy and worship. The dominant strain eventually coalesced as the Nicene Creed at the Council of Nicaea, forming the central doctrine of what would become the Roman Catholic Church, which held a monopoly on Christian spiritual and temporal authority for a millennium before Martin Luther and his ilk upended the world again.
My question is, what if events had progressed differently? Say, if Arianism triumphed, or the Church fractured permanently along regional lines from the very beginning (Donatism flourished in Northern Africa, but was eventually subsumed by Catholicism during the Byzantine era)... Would Christianity remain the dominant religion of the Mediterranean? How would alternate theologies and liturgies develop compared to our timeline? How would you go about making this happen?
Between the suppression of the Apostles by the Romans and the conversion of Constantine, the early Church spent its decades in the wilderness, with its disciples persecuted, murdered, and generally pushed to the fringes of society to practice their faith in secret. During this period, myriad schools of Christian thought flourished underground, influenced by regional and cultural matrices, oftentimes borrowing heavily from pagan philosophy and worship. The dominant strain eventually coalesced as the Nicene Creed at the Council of Nicaea, forming the central doctrine of what would become the Roman Catholic Church, which held a monopoly on Christian spiritual and temporal authority for a millennium before Martin Luther and his ilk upended the world again.
My question is, what if events had progressed differently? Say, if Arianism triumphed, or the Church fractured permanently along regional lines from the very beginning (Donatism flourished in Northern Africa, but was eventually subsumed by Catholicism during the Byzantine era)... Would Christianity remain the dominant religion of the Mediterranean? How would alternate theologies and liturgies develop compared to our timeline? How would you go about making this happen?
