From Jesus to Constantine the Great: Christianity and the Roman Empire
Taught by Nick Fokas
Nick misspent his youth studying and teaching ancient history and classics. When not yelling at kids to get off his lawn, he raises a ruckus playing guitar in the band Reserved For Rondee.
This class will examine how a marginalized and persecuted Jewish sect won over the hearts and minds of the Roman Empire. In the early 1st century AD a charismatic religious leader in a backwoods Roman province founded a movement that would not only challenge established religious customs in the ancient Mediterranean world but would wind up supplanting them. Despite encountering stiff resistance from Jewish and Roman authorities and being outlawed, Christianity found more and more converts as its message spread throughout the borders of the Roman Empire and beyond, until even a Roman Emperor publicly proclaimed his devotion to this new faith and set the Empire on a trajectory to becoming Christian.
In this class, some of the questions we will explore include: What do we know about Jesus and his initial teachings? What were early Christian religious practices like? What were Roman and Jewish attitudes towards Christians, and how did these change? Why did the Romans persecute Christians? Who were the martyrs? How and why did Constantine the Great become a Christian? Why did Christianity succeed when other novel religious movements failed?
