The Dawn of Christianity
By Robert Knapp, Profile Books, £25
The extraordinary success of the Christian religion, growing from a small group of baffled Galileans cowering in an upper room in Jerusalem to the state religion of the Roman Empire, is hard for historians to explain. Nietzsche ascribed it to the appeal of its egalitarian ethos to hitherto subject classes of society such as women and slaves. The devout Christian sees the hand of God and so too, it would seem, does Robert Knapp.
On October 28 in AD 312, the Roman Emperor Constantine, as he prepared to fight his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, saw the sign of the Cross appear in the sky. The Christian religion, Knapp concludes, “might well have died but for Constantine’s cross in the sky. A second miracle resurrected Jesus a second time. This time the faith he inspired, carried on the shoulders of empire, spread throughout the Mediterranean lands for good.”
