What if Christianity was legal in the Roman Empire, like Judaism?

Anaxagoras

Banned
Not ASB at all, really.

If Christians had been tolerated, the irony is that Christianity would probably be much less popular in the long run. The courage of Christians who refused to recant their faith under threat of torture or even death inspired large numbers of people and drew a particular attention to Christianity that set it apart from the large number of other new religious systems coming out of the East.

I'm speaking generally, not being an expert on the subject.
 
Not ASB at all, really.

If Christians had been tolerated, the irony is that Christianity would probably be much less popular in the long run. The courage of Christians who refused to recant their faith under threat of torture or even death inspired large numbers of people and drew a particular attention to Christianity that set it apart from the large number of other new religious systems coming out of the East.

I'm speaking generally, not being an expert on the subject.

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And there were periods when the Romans tolerated Christianity. It wasn't a continuous persecution from the Great Fire of Rome to Constantine's conversion.
 
And there were periods when the Romans tolerated Christianity. It wasn't a continuous persecution from the Great Fire of Rome to Constantine's conversion.

Yes. There were some periods of relative peace as far as Christians are concerned, such as the reigns of Hadrian and Commodus. Others such as Trajan , only bothered persecuting Christians who were formally accused of being Christians, instead of rounding them up.

Source: The Story Of Christianity Volume 1 by Justo González.
 
From what I've read, Christianity appealed mainly to people that were already poor or disadvantaged, at least early on. Its interesting to think about, but perhaps that also made it easier to persecute early Christians, as many might have already been marginalized to begin with.

If you go from what Wikipedia says, very early persecution arose more from Christian refusal to worship the local pantheons than from any central Roman authority. At least early on, I don't think that we would see a large change in the spread of Christianity.

However, a continued lack of Roman persecution could effect a change on the later spread of Christianity. Perhaps allowing it to filter towards the upper classes faster, or lessening its visibility and quelling its spread. I view either as possible, but from what I know a lot of Christianity's early supporters already came from lower social status, so it might bear to keep that in mind when talking about early Christianity and its spread.
 
Note that just because there isn't formal, legalized persecution doesn't mean there won't be localized lynchings/pogroms (to use a couple anachronistic terms) of Christians. They will still be a strange, blasphemous religion, easily scapegoatable when things go wrong.

So you'll still end up with martyrs.
 
Maybe if the Emperor were able to settle for the Christians praying *for* him rather than *to* him

This is kind of what happens in the Harry Turtledove book Gunpowder Empire. There is a distinction between the more syncretistic Imperial Christianity, and "Strong Christianity", which more closely resembles our world's Christianity. It's not a very good book, but there is an AH example of it at least.

As for Judaism, they were supposedly allowed to practice because Judaism was considered an ancient religion, rather than a new, scary cult like Christianity.

(Jews made up a large enough population that this reason was probably meant to save face and prevent revolts).

This didn't stop frequent Jewish revolts from happening, of course. The Bar Kochba Revolt led Hadrian to try to convert Jerusalem into a pagan Roman city called Aelia Capitolina. There was also a tax for Jews similar to the jizya in the Roman Empire beginning in the late 1st century. Cassius Dio and rabbinic sources contain this information (the Wikipedia article uses them at least).
 
As for Judaism, they were supposedly allowed to practice because Judaism was considered an ancient religion, rather than a new, scary cult like Christianity.

True. Rome was generally tolerant of alien religious sects that could demonstrate some time depth as an accepted faith and did not directly challenge Imperial authority. Which is probably the overriding reason that the founders of orthodox Christianity persecuted and expunged gnostics and others who completely rejected the God of the Old Testament and instead presented their religion as the culmination of Jewish prophesy, not as something completely new.
 
The Roman Empire was not a "secular" polity in the modern sense (which is a fairly complicated notion anyway). Its political power rested on what we would define either "religion" or "ideology" and should be better understood, in modern terms, as being sort of both, like a lot of pre-modern systems of thought.
In this sense, the problem was not, strictly speaking, that being Christian was in itself illegal, which it wasn't, technically. The problem was that being Christian was inconsistent with what the Roman Empire perceived as an acceptable civic behavior and belief.
In other words, the Christian message, in its early form, was utterly unacceptable to the Roman ideology and, conversely, the Roman ideology was utterly unacceptable to early Christians.
Christianity and the Roman Empire can be seen as two systems to give meaning to one's life. At first, they were mutually exclusive. A bridge would be eventually found of course, and worked pretty nicely afterwards, but it required a hell of a lot of an effort (in time and ink and blood) to build it.
It is not just that Christians refused to pray to the Emperor, a refusal that was far from exclusively theirs anyway. It is more that Christians were not supposed to give a damn about the Emperor altogether, as the entire worldly existence was supposedly meaningless to them if not as preparation for the Hereafter. While to the traditional Roman worldview, worldly life was the only one that really made sense, though other concepts of the Hereafter existed (quite plenty of them in fact).
The Empire might have been more lenient in persecution (especially under, say, Decius) but the reasons why Christianity was considered superstitio prava immodica ("a malicious, indecent superstition") went pretty deep. Christians challenged the very basis of the traditional Roman moral and social, let alone religious, world.
 
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