The Chronicles of the Christians is a series that takes you on a journey through the spiritual, political, and ideological history of Christianity. From the crusades, to the Crusades, and the fights to defend Christendom, we ll look at how faith influenced battles, not just in the physical realm, but in the ideological wars that shaped kingdoms and shaped empires.
00:03:22.860Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to the Chronicles of the Christians.
00:03:28.660This is a journey unlike any you've embarked upon before, and I'll be your guide through the spiritual narrative, where history isn't just about a sequence of events, but living, breathing, testament to faith, power, and the divine.
00:03:44.600This isn't your typical Sunday school lesson.
00:03:46.600This is history with its armor off, revealing the scars and miracles that have shaped the very fabric of the Western world.
00:03:56.380I'm talking about Christianity, not as a footnote in history books, but as the main character in a saga of human endeavor, conflict, and transformation.
00:04:06.840Imagine a story where miracles aren't just tales for children, but pivotal moments that change the course of nations.
00:04:15.300We'll explore the miracles of healing, of resurrection, of divine intervention in times of Tarkist despair.
00:04:25.940They're the lifeblood of a faith that has endured against all odds.
00:04:30.600But this series isn't just about the spiritual.
00:04:33.060We'll delve into the gritty, the political, the warfare that's often been fought under the banner of the cross.
00:04:39.620From the crusades, from the crusades, to the fights to defend Christendom, we'll look at how faith influenced battles, not just in the physical realm, but in the ideological wars that shaped kingdoms and shaped empires.
00:04:56.180We'll see how the power of Christ was not just in the peace of the church, but in the chaos of battlefields and politics.
00:05:03.260Oh, they've always been intertwined with faith.
00:05:05.420The rise and fall of popes, the schisms that split the church, the alliances and betrayals, all part of the divine political chess game where every move could alter the course of history.
00:05:17.060And we'll explore how Christianity didn't just react to the politics of time, but actively shaped it from its humble beginnings to Rome, to the Vatican's influence in global affairs.
00:05:28.780But at its heart, the chronicles of the Christians is about the power of Christ in a way you've never seen before.
00:05:37.920It's about a simple message from a man in Galilee and how it echoed throughout the centuries, influencing art, law, culture, and the very soul of Western civilization.
00:05:50.960This series will challenge you to see Christianity, not just as some religion, but as a force that has built, broken, and rebuilt the Western world time and time again.
00:06:05.900So whether you're a believer, a skeptic, or just a lover of history, join us.
00:06:11.720Let's uncover the untold, the controversial, and the miraculous.
00:06:15.660Let's see how the teachings of Christ have not only survived, but thrived, shaping our world in ways we are only just now beginning to understand.
00:06:25.900Prepare for a journey through time where faith meets reality, where the divine meets the human, and where every episode promises to reveal the unseen layers of history.
00:06:35.880This is the Chronicles of the Christians.
00:08:25.820He appears to some crowds, but it's not like the whole world is immediately Christian right after that.
00:08:32.500And usually we kind of get this story that, oh, well, Constantine became Christian around 300 AD, and then the whole Roman Empire just became Christian, and that's that.
00:08:42.080But it's probably a little bit more complicated than all that, isn't it?
00:08:48.120It's really, it's one of the most fascinating stories in world history because we basically have no good analog for it in history.
00:08:57.280I mean, we have the spread of Islam, but the spread of Islam is there's a small group that follows Islam, and they conquer a bunch of territory, and it's instantly this big religion.
00:09:05.880With Christianity, what we have is we have something that is just an obscure faith in a very marginal province, a very marginal part of this vast empire, and it grows to become this absolutely immense.
00:09:22.080And it grows and it grows and grows and grows, and it's only 300 years later that they convert their first, you know, leader of an entire country.
00:09:29.780And then from there, they just keep going because that empire, the Roman Empire, it collapses, and yet it still keeps growing.
00:09:36.780It expands into new kingdoms, and it just grows and grows and grows and becomes the most influential ideology of any kind in world history that we all, even if you're not Christian, even if you follow a religion other than Christianity, you live in the Christian world, the world that Christianity built.
00:09:57.180Like, we all have its imprint on our brains, on how we see the world, on how we think about moral questions, and it's one of the most interesting stories in world history.
00:10:08.340Obviously, the saga of Christ himself is fascinating, but what his followers in the centuries that followed were able to do.
00:10:16.000And so the story of Constantine that people do know, and that is also associated with a miracle.
00:10:24.900And Constantine, he was fighting in a war against, of course, another emperor of Rome, or would-be emperor of Rome in northern Italy.
00:10:31.400And he's about to cross this, or there's this battle of the bridge, the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, and he purportedly sees a cross in the sky and adopted the phrase, in this sign, you will conquer.
00:10:46.980And this, you know, it's a year later, he wins the battle, obviously, and then a year later, he issues the Edict of Milan, and this, of course, legalizes Christianity, because prior to then, you know, I think most people know this part of the story, that Christianity wasn't exactly encouraged in the Roman Empire prior to this.
00:11:07.060And at that point, he makes it legal, but he doesn't necessarily just force everyone to become Christian, does he?
00:11:15.260No, not at all. It starts off with just, as you say, an Edict of Toleration.
00:11:20.080And it was quite the swerve, because just a few decades before you have, or just a few years before, you have the persecution of Diocletian, the Great Persecution, they called it, where Diocletian is a Roman emperor, and he orders very intense targeting of Christians.
00:11:36.280This is probably when the most people would have ever been martyred for Christianity.
00:11:42.620It actually causes a split in the Christian community, because you have some people who abandon the faith under pressure, and then there's a whole debate, like, do we welcome these people back?
00:11:51.700And ultimately, the ruling was, yes, we do.
00:11:55.180And then you have more persecutions under Diocletian's successor, I think it was, is it Galerian?
00:12:01.640I can't, I don't want to, I don't want to get the emperor wrong, there's a lot of emperors.
00:12:04.160And then it swerves back to toleration, but it's a very generous toleration.
00:12:10.080Constantine gives a lot of patronage to Christians, he puts a lot of Christians in senior positions of his imperial administration, and of course, Constantine himself becomes a Christian, and he makes his sons into Christians.
00:12:22.980And so, from there, it's just like a rocket ship.
00:12:26.160It gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more popular, especially with the urban classes of the Roman Empire.
00:12:32.860And then from there, it spreads into the masses.
00:12:35.760But I think one of the most amazing things is, well, so is there, is there kind of an idea, is there, is there kind of an idea that, oh, well, if the emperor and the royal family are Christian, then we should be Christian too, because that'll kind of, you know, that'll kind of help us get in with the emperor.
00:12:51.600Is it, is it purely a political thing?
00:12:53.740Or was it something where it was catching on and people were saying, hey, there's something to this?
00:12:59.540I mean, it's definitely a mixture of both.
00:13:02.240You see people, you see Christians at the time complain, who say, oh, you know, our faith, like, it was so pure when we were a persecuted faith, because everyone was very much a true believer.
00:13:12.000And then once the emperors are, oh, yeah, the OGs, so the OGs were like complaining about it, like, oh, I was a Christian when it was hard to be Christian.
00:13:21.540If it makes you feel better, if it makes everyone feel better, what I can say is that I'm drawing a lot on this book that's a favorite of mine, The Barbarian Conversion from Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher.
00:13:32.280Very nerdy book, but if you like nerdy books, it's a fun one.
00:13:34.880And one of the things in it is, for all of Christian history, the Christians of our present moment say, oh, the past generations of Christians were just so much better than us.
00:15:53.060People obviously know St. Patrick's Day.
00:15:55.000There's a lot of cultural iconography around that.
00:15:59.240But so what you're saying is actually the core of it is true, that St. Patrick really was not just the person who – the priest who converted Ireland, but he really was the first Christian missionary of anywhere.
00:16:13.120I mean, beyond the apostles themselves, obviously.
00:16:19.760So we have – and we have the stories of the apostles themselves.
00:16:22.460But it's also – it's not well super documented what they did.
00:16:25.980Whereas with St. Patrick, we have a little more primary source evidence about how it happened.
00:16:30.480And I think the line from the book itself that I have saved here, he says,
00:16:35.720As far as our evidence goes, St. Patrick was the first person in Christian history to truly take the scriptural injunctions literally, to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire.
00:17:18.740It had more than 200 or so kingdoms in this tiny island.
00:17:22.180Ireland, no place could be harder to establish the Christian faith in.
00:17:26.160And he manages to do it and turns it into this huge source of scholarship, a source of Christian learning, a source of Christian missionaries.
00:17:34.800It was a very remarkable accomplishment that we really, it's easy to underplay it with the simple stories we hear about St. Patrick.
00:17:43.700That's right, and this is actually a monumental shift, not just for the spread of the faith, but also this idea that Christianity could be hardy and that could go into a place as austere, as you're describing, and actually work there as well.
00:18:02.280And so it's showing an adaptability, and it's showing a perhaps central truth or central veracity that so many people have been able to glom onto.
00:18:13.300And the spread of it throughout Europe as an end of this really is something that we should all understand and perhaps understand better as we are even here in our Christian season.
00:20:02.340And coming from a mother who is also a very devout and enthusiastic Christian, Catholic Christian, I could certainly relate to Constantine when it comes to that.
00:20:15.040So one of the big things that St. Helena is known for, though, is she's the one who embarks in – so this is a couple of decades later, and she's still around after the Edict of Milan, about – I guess about 10 years after that.
00:20:29.460She conducts this first pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and she kind of becomes the first pilgrim to the Holy Land.
00:20:36.900So she goes to Jerusalem, and she's looking for the holy sites and saying, look, I'm a Christian now.
00:20:43.240I really believe this stuff, and travel was expensive back then, but when your son's the emperor, it's not so bad.
00:20:51.860And so she goes in and says, look, I want to find these relics.
00:20:54.880Like, where was the site of the crucifixion?
00:20:58.220And, of course, one of the big ones that she's associated with is the finding of the true cross.
00:21:03.800And, of course, this one is hotly debated.
00:21:06.800And I'll just tell the quick story, though, is that one of the traditions that we have regarding the true cross that was supposedly found by St. Helena was that a terminally ill woman was brought before the site of the true cross,
00:21:23.480and each cross was touched to her, but only when the third cross was applied that it led to an immediate healing.
00:21:32.560And that was how she was able to identify it as the cross, and that, of course, it also had the title above it, the INRI, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
00:21:44.060And she then has them sent to Constantinople.
00:21:48.240She has this sent around and then thus begins the building of the Church of Holy Sepulcher and many of the other pilgrimage sites.
00:21:57.640And to be fair, there had been pilgrimages before.
00:22:03.660But the fact that the emperor's mother was going to these places certainly brought with it an amount of prestige and an amount of wealth that just sort of your average peasant pilgrim wouldn't necessarily bring,
00:22:16.640and a lot of renown, and it really kind of started this overall process of Europeans conducting pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
00:22:27.700And this was a huge part of the Christian experience, especially in this period.
00:22:32.640I mean, we obviously still have pilgrimage today, but it was enormously popular in a time where it was very difficult to be a pilgrim.
00:22:39.160We have evidence that, you know, even in the Middle Ages, you'd have bishops, and they would organize these giant, multiple thousands of people would go on a big pilgrimage journey to the Holy Land.
00:22:52.180And then you had more local pilgrimages, famously the Canterbury Tales, one of the foundational works of English literature.
00:22:59.440It's about pilgrims going to Canterbury, so the chief church in the English church at the time.
00:23:05.300And you have – there's famously a pilgrimage site at – what's the name?
00:23:50.780According to tradition, upon arriving in Jerusalem, St. Helena aimed to find the site of Jesus' crucifixion,
00:23:56.660which was then buried under a temple of Venus, which had been erected by Emperor Hadrian to suppress Christian veneration at the site.
00:24:06.300And so this – you know, Christians had been going here and pilgrims for a long time since the crucifixion because they knew this was the site.
00:24:14.220And yet a pagan temple had been built on top of the site.
00:24:18.280St. Helena, of course, orders that to be destroyed, and then the site converted into a church.
00:24:23.580But this really speaks to how there was a huge process of the conversion from – and, of course, as the title of your book is –
00:24:31.560this process of conversion of the pagans into Christianity.
00:24:35.160This was not – and the pagan pantheon of people, I think, know the Roman gods and the Greek gods and the Norse gods.
00:24:42.460But there were so many others and even lesser gods.
00:24:45.680And there were just – there were religions all over the place, and everyone was competing for it to be, like, the top religion at the time, which was a huge thing.
00:24:53.520And not really in a sense that we have today in society where, sure, you know, you can go on Google and look up a bunch of different churches in your area,
00:25:02.920but you don't really have this competition like we did back then in these claims of primacy and claims that we are the one true religion.
00:25:10.060So how is it that Christianity in that context is able to really come out on top?
00:25:15.740I mean, certainly if the emperor converts, that's not just going to be enough to get people who are true believers to say,
00:25:21.620all right, never mind, forget – you know, forget about, you know, Venus and Jupiter and Zeus and all that nonsense and Thor.
00:25:28.520And, no, we're going to go with this guy from where?
00:25:31.820Oh, yeah, yeah, Israel and Jerusalem and these places that no one's ever heard of.
00:25:37.840Yeah, it's another – I think I'd say it's a myth of early Christianity is the claim that –
00:25:43.680you'll have critics who will say, you know, Christianity is just another religion.
00:25:49.060You'll run into this – you'd see this in the online hot takes about why Christianity is bad.
00:25:53.720They'll say, for example, Mithraism is basically the same religion, they'll say, and that could have been picked instead, or there's other faiths.
00:26:04.780If you read into the details, you definitely find – we have a handful of critics of Christianity whose writings have survived and what they'll say.
00:26:13.880For example, the Emperor Julian, Julian the Apostate, he was the last Roman emperor to be a pagan, and he wrote these attacks on Christianity.
00:26:22.740And one of the things he says in these attacks is, you know, it's a big problem how those Christians are actually so much better at following through on their moral claims, and they're really good.
00:26:33.620One of the things he says is the Christians are great at universally loving people.
00:26:38.280So we have accounts from people who aren't Christians where they say when a plague hits a city, the pagans will treat the pagans, and the Christians will treat everybody.
00:26:47.340They will treat everyone basically equally in that regard.
00:26:50.800And we have accounts where in the ancient pagan world, the pagans would – it was common to expose infants, for example, if they weren't wanted or if they were disabled, and they say the Christians don't do this.
00:27:04.920The Christians, like, they care for every life, they would say.
00:27:08.040Like, you're not talking about child sacrifice, are you, and child killing?
00:27:12.100Because certainly there were no pagans that would ever participate in that.
00:27:16.520Yeah, child sacrifice, but just also just treating lives as not holding value, and that was a big innovation of Christianity.
00:27:25.080And I think that's one of the most important things.
00:27:27.280It's not just that Christianity is monotheistic.
00:27:29.860There had been other monotheistic religions, and there was a trend towards a more monotheistic attitude in the pagan times.
00:27:37.520Judaism obviously was a monotheistic religion, and there were tons of Jews that lived in Rome, the city, and also obviously throughout the empire.
00:27:46.960But you don't really see a – you don't see that level of – some, obviously, who are even citizens – but you don't necessarily see that level of spiritual or theological acceptance of Judaism anywhere in the Roman elite.
00:28:05.520And you do even see a trend, like I say, towards a monotheistic attitude.
00:28:09.580So, for example, there's a cult of this syncretic Egyptian Greek god named Serapis, and this is a big god in the east, and it is – people do go towards that faith, and you start seeing people say things like, yeah, there are other gods, but like Serapis is definitely the number one god, and he's cooler than the other ones, and he answers prayers that other gods won't necessarily answer.
00:28:32.120There's a trend there, but Christianity really is a level up over this, where they're very strong – it's a very strong belief in, you know, this monotheistic god, but also just the level of moral seriousness they bring to it is such an advance over paganism.
00:28:49.640In paganism, the gods are just – are much more capricious.
00:28:53.200They might – the gods might have moral expectations of you, but they don't necessarily listen to prayers, and they don't – the gods themselves are often not very moral beings.
00:29:03.920You know, you have the famous stories where Zeus has slept with every single woman, which is probably some holdover from, you know, every town had its own chief god, and they all got merged into Zeus.
00:29:14.200And Christianity was just such an advance on that, of a god who individually cares about you, who, like, your fate is – he cares deeply about your spiritual fate, and he has very sincere expectations for you, that our faith – our faith carries with it moral commandments that we expect people to follow.
00:29:38.420And this seems to have just really worked and resonated with people.
00:29:41.260I think one of the most incredible things about Christian history – and we can talk more about this if you want – is one of the reasons Christianity wins is it really embeds itself into people's mindsets.
00:29:52.400They think this is the faith that the world needs, and you have elites, you have very wealthy, very powerful people spreading it for centuries on end.
00:30:02.920And so, I want to get into that in the next segment here, but let me just ask you that question right there, is, did they actually believe it, or was it all just cynical?
00:30:14.280They 100% believed it. What they did makes no sense unless millions of people really believed this.
00:30:21.280Millions of people really and truly cared about Christianity and the Christian project to bring it forward through the ages, starting in the Roman Empire, all the way up to today.
00:30:37.200That's something that we need to talk about, because that is absolutely fascinating, and you're not going to hear this anywhere else.
00:30:44.260Stay tuned, Jack Posobiec, Blake, now for more, The Rise of Christianity, and the Chronicles of the Christians.
00:31:19.480Okay, folks, we're back here. Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, The Chronicles of the Christians, The Rise of Christianity.
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00:32:29.540All right, Blake, so we're talking about this idea that the early Christians and the Christians as Europe became Christian and we're talking kings and elites and lords and all of these other royals that this wasn't just some cynical, you know, one-off, oh, you know, we're doing this because the emperor said to.
00:32:50.360That they actually devoutly believed in Christianity and you and I were talking prior to the episode that one of the ways that we see this is through the founding of the great monasteries, which really become the blueprint for universities.
00:33:06.480But the fact that tons of money, the equivalent of like billions of dollars today were spent on this project.
00:33:17.300We have pretty good source records on this that, you know, we'll have people's wills where they'll leave money for this.
00:33:24.760And, you know, of course, we have the sites, the monasteries themselves.
00:33:27.580We have people are spending, yeah, as you say, millions, billions of modern-day dollars to establish churches, to establish monasteries, to support priests, to support mission work in other places.
00:33:41.620And the author of that book I mentioned, he says, the word he uses is like staggering.
00:33:47.920Like, he says the numbers are practically unbelievable, except that it's so well attested that they actually did this.
00:33:54.260And, you know, obviously it's monasteries where there's an element where you'd build a church and the monks there would pray for your soul and all of that stuff.
00:34:01.140But even like the Christianization of the public, a big reason this happens, it used to be the vast majority of churches in early Europe were built by lay people.
00:34:11.660They were basically a private endeavor.
00:34:13.800You would endow a church for the people within the lands that you ruled.
00:34:18.520And the vast majority of churches are built this way.
00:34:21.260And a notable thing that he hits upon is once they scale this back, and they had reasons for scaling it back because you had a lot of simony where, you know, you'd endow a church and then you'd get to name who the priest was.
00:34:39.500But once that went away, the number of new churches went down and it was much more difficult to get those churches founded.
00:34:44.980So for hundreds and hundreds of years, you have the case where Christianity is mostly spreading as a private endeavor that it's not, you know, as in it's not the pope or, you know, a central organization that's doing all the missionary activity.
00:35:00.820It's thousands and thousands, really millions and millions of lay Christians are doing it.
00:35:06.160You'll have all of these religious figures who decide, I want to go become a missionary, and they'll go into Saxony, they'll go into Poland, they'll go into Scandinavia, they'll go into Russia, preaching Christianity in dangerous places.
00:35:24.260We have no shortage of accounts of these individuals getting martyred.
00:35:28.480Some of them get martyred five minutes after they walk over the border.
00:35:32.000They were very tough people they were running into.
00:35:34.320And we just have so many accounts like this, so many that it's impossible to, it's simply impossible to argue that these are all made up or exaggerated.
00:35:46.100It just overflows the number of examples we have.
00:35:49.980And it just, it really was people believed in this and they thought it was important to encourage other people to believe in this.
00:35:57.860One of my favorites is the English of the Dark Ages, early Middle Ages, the Anglo-Saxons.
00:36:03.420They were very aware, oh yeah, we're part Saxon, we came from Saxony.
00:36:07.960And so you have a ton of English missionaries who go to Saxony in modern-day Germany because they think it's very important.
00:36:13.420We need to get the other Saxons to become Christians because they're our brethren, this is our homeland, and they should join the Christian faith.
00:36:22.280And tons of them do this, and eventually they do succeed.
00:36:27.540And that's what's so amazing because I do think that part of this that is well known to a lot of people that through the Middle Ages,
00:36:37.080it's in this monastery system where we get the ideas of higher learning, where the Bible is, of course, hand-copied, hand-copied down again.
00:36:47.780And remember, this is prior to the printing press, prior to any of that, folks.
00:36:50.780So where the Bible itself is hand-copied word for word, translated here and there into the various monasteries.
00:36:59.660You have the Book of Kells, which, again, in Ireland speaks to the ancient Irish tradition of spreading Christianity.
00:37:07.100And it's through this system that they really were able to preserve the document of the Bible as well as keep the flame of the faith throughout the entire Middle Ages,
00:37:16.500which is the time, as we know, were just brought with warfare and constant threats on all sides,
00:37:22.820that it was the fact that you had kings and knights and lords that truly believed in it
00:37:30.540and believed that having this religion would be the best way forward for their people that actually kept it together.
00:37:37.480And at one point, and we'll be going further in depth in all of this,
00:37:42.680in this period, you have the founding of Oxford as a university,
00:37:46.160and you even have the building of the Notre Dame, the founding of that almost 1,000 years ago.
00:42:46.000Again, that's slnt.com to take advantage of their end-of-year warehouse sale, giving you up to 70% off plus free shipping on qualifying orders.
00:42:58.520So, Blake, all of this is going on, and we're right about the first—we covered 1,000 years so far in the show, so just give people a place mark or we're at the 1,000-year mark.
00:43:10.800But there's something pretty big that happens in 1054, and that's called the Great Schism, where the church—and obviously there have been other schisms, and there have been different sects and things that have broken up.
00:43:24.740But this is the really big one that people point back to.
00:43:27.680The church basically splits into West and East, and personally, I've always viewed it as kind of, you know, just kind of political in nature,
00:43:40.140because this is where you also kind of see Byzantium is growing in its own regard in the East, whereas the Western Empire has totally changed its character into a different, you know, different kingdoms and different areas where, you know, the Western Empire is like just not the Roman Empire anymore.
00:44:01.080You've got different kingdoms, people who claim to the Roman Empire, etc., but Byzantium really becomes the home of Eastern Christianity. Talk to me a little about the Great Schism.
00:44:12.620Yeah, so the Great Schism, for those—a lot of our viewers are probably Protestant, they might not be familiar.
00:44:18.240There's divisions within the church that predate the Reformation in the 1500s, which broke up Western Christianity.
00:44:25.540So, initially, of course, ideally, there is only one Christian faith community, but they do like to argue about things, they disagree about things.
00:44:33.900And so, one of the big disputes, by 1050, you've got a big growing chasm between Christianity, as it's practiced in the eastern part of the Mediterranean,
00:44:44.720in the Greek Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, what you might call it,
00:44:48.580and then in the west, which is where there's the Pope in Rome, and then you have tons of different kingdoms in Spain, in France, in England, in Ireland, in Germany, all these places.
00:44:59.380And they've diverged in their practices, they've diverged in their beliefs.
00:45:04.040In the west, there was increasingly the sense that the Pope in Rome was the boss, the number one guy to look to for guidance.
00:45:11.680In the east, they tended to disagree with that.
00:45:14.100But they also had some religious disputes that would seem, that would be very confusing to a lot of people today.
00:45:20.600For example, there's a huge debate over something called the Filioque.
00:45:23.780If you are familiar with the Nicene Creed, it's where the Holy Spirit, we say, in the west, we'll say,
00:45:29.500it proceeds from the Father and from the Son.
00:45:32.860In the eastern creed, it just proceeds from the Father.