Hello Jimmy,

Firstly, thank you for highlighting my statement that all sources from this period are from within Churches within Rome. What my statement should have said, was that all sources for Christianity come from within Rome.

To answer your points -

‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ do not have solely Christian origins. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 even states that “Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. Irenaeus and Tertullian omit it from their lists of feasts”.

Many traditional elements of Christmas pre-date Christianity and most Christmas customs are, in fact, based on old pagan festivals, the Roman Saturnalia and the Scandinavian and Teutonic Yule.

It was the general custom in pagan Europe to decorate spaces with greenery and flowers for festivals. For information on this please read “The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain” by Ronald Hutton. Sir James Frazer says, “The largest pagan religious cult which fostered the celebration of December 25 as a holiday was the pagan sun- worship of ‘Mithraism’, and this winter festival was called ‘the Nativity of the SUN’ Mithraists also observed Sun-day and kept sacred the 25th of December as the birthday of the Sun. Many scholars have pointed out how the Sun- worshipping Mithraists, the Sun-worshipping Manicheans and the Christians were all syncretized and reconciled when Constantine led the take-over by Christianity”.

Mithra has the following in common with the Jesus character:

Mithra was born on December 25th of the virgin Anahita.

The babe was wrapped in swaddling clothes, placed in a manger and attended by shepherds.

He was considered a great traveling teacher and master.

He had 12 companions or “disciples”.

He performed miracles.

As the “great bull of the Sun”, Mithra sacrificed himself for world peace.

He ascended to heaven.

Mithra was viewed as the Good Shepherd, the “Way, the Truth and the Light”, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah.

Mithra is omniscient, as he “hears all, sees all, knows all: none can deceive him”.

He was identified with both the Lion and the Lamb.

His sacred day was Sunday, “the Lord’s Day”, hundreds of years before the appearance of Christ.

His religion had a eucharist or “Lord’s Supper”.

Mithra “sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers”.

Mithraism emphasized baptism.

As for ‘Easter’, most Christians agree that much of today’s Easter iconography does not have its roots in the religion. Philippe Walter, professor of medieval French literature at the University of Grenoble III, says in his book — Christian Mythology, that in the process of the Christianization of pagan religions, it was easy to associate the pagan festival that celebrated “the passage from the death of winter to the life of springtime”, which is what Jesus’s resurrection is based on in the story. Many of the traditions and symbols we now associate with ‘Easter’, such as eggs and rabbits, do have their origins in pre-Christian pagan rituals.

The question regarding why no historian writes that Constantine converted for political reasons is explained in my book Creating Christianity — A Weapon of Ancient Rome, which of course you are welcome to buy and read when it comes out on the 10th of October.

My conclusion that Constantine’s conversion was political is based on the evidence available. But you do ask a very good question, why would Constantine convert to Christianity, if not because of a divine sighting? (a sighting of which there is obviously no proof).

Less than 10% of the Empire’s total population was Christian, even well into Constantine’s reign. Christianity had very little representation in the political and military infrastructure of the Empire, so why support this new belief system?

The important thing to remember is that there was an ongoing crisis in the Roman world, which led to the collapse of traditional Greco-Roman polytheism (the belief in or worship of more than one god) and the whole structure of Classical civilization. So, the introduction of Christianity and its integration with the Roman state brought a new element to the dying Classical civilization and helped it transform and survive.

If we take into account the great effort Constantine had personally invested in holding the new Christian religion together, even when various theological disputes arose and threatened to rip the early Church apart, it is clear that his main goal was to unite the Roman world, which was something that it desperately needed.
The coming together of the Church was vitally important for the uniting of the Roman state, and history would prove this true in the later centuries, especially in the Eastern Empire.

Although Constantine appeared to adopt Christianity, he kept the mentality of Roman Emperors and their relationship with religion. The trend in the empire was that the Emperor was not only an earthly ruler over his subjects but also a ‘semi-divine’ ruler who had personal contact with the Gods. This reached it’s highest point in Diocletian’s use of the word ‘Dominate’ (dominus- meaning “Lord”, “Master, “Owner”) when the Emperor had become a divine figure, which rapidly replaced ‘princeps’ as the favored word for referring to the Emperor. ‘Dominus’ meant that the Emperor was seen as a sacral (a symbol) to whom all subjects owned absolute obedience.

Of course, this slow transformation of the Roman world from a Semi-Absolutist Monarchy under the Principate, to a full Absolute one, where the Emperor had supreme authority and was not restricted by any written laws, legislature, or customs, had started much before the time of Diocletian. Constantine basically took Diocletian’s system and introduced the Christian God into a typically Roman understanding of state-religion relations.
This meant that Constantine was not only Emperor, he was also the Head of the Church, meaning he ruled over the Church in the same way he ruled over the state and he never renounced the title of Pontifex Maximus, the official title for Caesar’s position as head of the pagan college of Roman priests.

The Pontiffs of the Roman Catholic Church oversaw the feudal system, wherein Christianized serfs gave their work product to the authorities without complaint. Ref — https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Titus-Chapter-2/

Serfs were indeed slaves — the word “serf” can be traced back to the Latin word servus, meaning “slave”. But the people that became serfs did not start out as slaves and originally they were called coloni (sing. colonus), a Latin word meaning a farmer who farmed his own land.

When Rome was a Republic, the coloni had numerous rights, including the ability to sell their land, but these freedoms steadily fell away during the imperial era. Around 300 A.D./C.E. the Caesar Diocletian implemented a tax which unified a plot of land with its inhabitants, which meant it became more difficult for coloni to sell their plots.

But later, Constantine defeated Maxentius at the battle of Milvian Bridge, in 312 A.D./C.E. Armed with the power of “Jesus”, he defeated his rival and became a dictator. His reign is best remembered for the Edict of Milan in 313 A.D./C.E., which fully legalized Christianity, and the Council of Nicea, which he chaired in 325 A.D./C.E, that began the era where the religion could enjoy the power of the Roman state. What has been overlooked by historians is that his efforts on behalf of Christianity were just one-half of his legal “reforms” and when one half is placed side by side to the other, an entirely different picture emerges. Constantine used Christianity to make the enslavement of most of the European population acceptable to the victims because it was an act of ‘God’.

Constantine’s other edicts were the true beginning of medieval serfdom. They officially ended the coloni’s ability to sell their land and instead bound them to it forever, another set of edicts commanded that the lower classes could not change profession. Constantine thereby put an unfair society in place and to prevent any intellectual resistance from the newly created slaves, Constantine also began the process that made Christianity the state religion. So when viewed in their true historical context, it is self-evident that the sole purpose for the specific combination of Constantine’s edicts was to enslave serfs and make rebellion a sin.

Below is the order of rank that Constantine’s edicts created –

The Feudal System:

The Pope/Church

The King

Bishops

Nobles

Knights/Vassals

Priests

Freemen

Yeomen

Servants

Serfs

Constantine knew that Christianity could serve as a new belief system that could unite the Roman world, and to me, it appears, at that time, that nobody was more aware of that than him. It was because of this reason that he aimed to keep the early Church together, that’s when he called for the Council of Nicaea, which would lay theological foundations for the Christian set of principles, principles which were laid down by an authority and they were to be considered as incontrovertibly true within the Roman state.

Was Constantine truly a Christian? We can’t know, but what is extremely important for us to realize, is that in the time in which Constantine lived, it was a time of great religious upheaval and there was no religious exclusivity, and, based on what we know about him, Constantine continued to practice many of the pagan rituals and remained loyal to the cult of Unconquerable Sun (Sol Invictus).

Many people make the mistake of separating politics and religion when it comes to discussing Constantine, but it is obvious, even today, that the two work together. His Conversion was a clever and necessary political move, because of the circumstances.

From what I can tell, you appear to be approaching this subject matter from the belief that ‘Christians’ existed before the New Testament emerged, but there is no reliable evidence for that, only statements that come from inside Rome.

But thank you for your comment.