could paganism or judaism have overtaken christianity?

Because of rome christianity was well entrenched in european culture. But before 1000 could it have been replaced by slavic, norse, germanic, roman, baltic, etc paganism or judaism. If so how would this europe turn out.

Edit: after 500 AD
 
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Butterfly away the alleged miracle prior to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and have another religion ultimately dominate the Roman Empire, e.g. Manichaeism or Mithraism. Having Christianity remain a Jewish sect could also do it, but that may be cheating.
 

Marc

Donor
Well, first you have to answer the question was the rise of Christianity coincidental, or was it part of a larger changing cultural dynamic. (Pace, not arguing for the superiority of Christianity over other faiths, but rather bringing out the "best fit" proposition that Levi-Strauss et al might make).
If you want to imagine the former, than any system is viable; if the latter, then I would suggest that a Manichean faith might eventually prevail - imagining Saint Augustine as the Paul of the movement.
 
After the fall of Rome, it's unlikely. If you butterfly Islam and keep the Christian states focused on the Mediterranean and their own squabbles, you might allow North European paganisms to survive long enough to codify in a manner similar to Hinduism, after which you'd get two separate cultural areas, 'Christendom', and 'Pagandom', likely with a similar level of interaction as the Christian and Muslim worlds.
Judaism would not, and could not overtake Christianity after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. By this point it was already very firmly a non-proselytising ethnic religion, in large part because any attempt at proselytisation would end very poorly for them.
 
In the early eight century, a terrible plague sweeps the Mediterranean, devastating urban populations but much less so the pagan Germanic groups and the Arabs, who at this stage are (afaik) largely non-urbanized. The ensuing losses cause the fall of the Franks and Byzantines to waves of Slavs, Arabs, Saxons, etc. who migrate en masse and slaughter some of the inhabitants and assimilate most of the rest over the next couple of centuries. Christianity thus suffers a massive blow to its prestige and is henceforth seen as a "defeated" religion, declining over time to e.g. modern Zoroastrian levels.
 
Aside from catastrophic events, I cannot see this happening. I will not repeat the argument about Judaism, but honestly, I do not any kind of ethnic paganism had neither the prestige nor the missionary spirit to spread that much. Of course, a powerful tribe could coalesce around a Muhammad-like figure and go berserk spreading the cult of Chernobog, but to become an enduring system, it would require at the very least also to copy-cat some features of the Christian clergy IMHO. After all, even Julian modeled his reformed paganism on the Christian Church, from a bureaucratic point of view. At the core, I think that the question is a matter of politics and its interplay with religion rather than the other way round. To quote Franck Herbert, "When religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows."
 
"Traditional" pagan religions lacked the structure and organization to spread outside their home culture. Most even lacked the concept of conversion. But a reformed pagan systems borrowing influences and philosophies from a defeated Christianism and/or Zoroastrianism may succeed: Mithraism, Sol Invictus, Cult of Isis, Cult of Cybele...

Early Christianism itself was for a long time a heavily fractured faith, with dozens of lines of interpretations. If it wasn't for Imperial-backed initiatives like the Council of Nicea to define an official version of the dogma for all to refer to, it may have stayed so. Smaller and smaller competing, dissident sects migrating over Europe and Africa, dissolving into local folks beliefs and giving birth to entirely new religions: churches of Wotan or Isis, infused with Christian-derived concepts such as 'soul-saving' conversion/baptism, non-henotheism/exclusive worship, proselytism, ordained clergy, written scriptures, etc.
 
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