Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - The Chronicles of the Christians - Part I： The Rise of Christianity

00:00:00.000 I want to take a second to remind you to sign up for the Poso Daily Brief.

00:00:05.420 It is completely free.

00:00:06.760 It'll be one email that's sent to you every day.

00:00:08.640 You can stop the endless scrolling, trying to find out what's going on in your world.

00:00:11.720 We will have this delivered directly to you totally for free.

00:00:14.960 Go to humanevents.com slash Poso.

00:00:17.240 Sign up today.

00:00:18.460 It's called the Poso Daily Brief.

00:00:19.860 Read what I read for show prep.

00:00:21.780 You will not regret it.

00:00:23.400 humanevents.com slash Poso.

00:00:25.060 Totally free.

00:00:25.780 The Poso Daily Brief.

00:00:30.000 This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.

00:00:40.600 A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.

00:00:46.980 This is Human Events with your host, Jack Poso.

00:00:50.220 Christ is King.

00:01:00.000 Is this the man you think so dangerous?

00:01:23.400 This, the man that aspires to be a king.

00:01:34.000 Come.

00:01:35.380 Come, come, come.

00:01:36.520 The leaders of the Sanhedrin accuse you of preaching perverted doctrines.

00:01:55.820 Come.

00:01:56.580 Come.

00:01:56.620 They also say you call yourself the king of the Jews.

00:02:10.440 Well, are you king of the Jews? 0.96

00:02:12.500 If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would have fought to prevent me from being captured.

00:02:28.340 Oh, you speak of a kingdom.

00:02:32.120 Therefore, you must be a king.

00:02:35.000 Are you a king?

00:02:40.820 I am.

00:02:41.600 I was born for one purpose.

00:02:52.840 To bear witness to the truth.

00:02:57.780 All who can accept the truth, hear my voice.

00:03:00.400 And what is the truth?

00:03:22.860 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to the Chronicles of the Christians. 0.94

00:03:28.660 This 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.

00:03:44.600 This isn't your typical Sunday school lesson.

00:03:46.600 This is history with its armor off, revealing the scars and miracles that have shaped the very fabric of the Western world.

00:03:56.380 I'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.

00:04:06.840 Imagine a story where miracles aren't just tales for children, but pivotal moments that change the course of nations.

00:04:15.300 We'll explore the miracles of healing, of resurrection, of divine intervention in times of Tarkist despair. 0.98

00:04:23.320 These aren't just stories.

00:04:24.320 These aren't just stories.

00:04:25.940 They're the lifeblood of a faith that has endured against all odds.

00:04:30.600 But this series isn't just about the spiritual.

00:04:33.060 We'll delve into the gritty, the political, the warfare that's often been fought under the banner of the cross.

00:04:39.620 From 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.

00:04:56.180 We'll see how the power of Christ was not just in the peace of the church, but in the chaos of battlefields and politics.

00:05:03.260 Oh, they've always been intertwined with faith.

00:05:05.420 The 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.

00:05:17.060 And 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.

00:05:28.780 But at its heart, the chronicles of the Christians is about the power of Christ in a way you've never seen before.

00:05:37.920 It'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.

00:05:50.960 This 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. 0.91

00:06:05.900 So whether you're a believer, a skeptic, or just a lover of history, join us.

00:06:11.720 Let's uncover the untold, the controversial, and the miraculous.

00:06:15.660 Let'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.

00:06:25.900 Prepare 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.

00:06:35.880 This is the Chronicles of the Christians. 0.98

00:06:45.660 All right, we're back.

00:07:09.020 Chronicles of the Christians, Jack Posobiec, and I wanted to introduce our co-host for the first couple of installments here.

00:07:17.100 It is, ladies and gentlemen, we're bringing him back, fan favorite or fan frenemy.

00:07:22.860 I'm not sure.

00:07:23.640 It's Blake Neff, co-host of Thought Crime and also a producer on The Charlie Kirk Show,

00:07:29.160 and the co-host for Chronicles of the Revolution last year, which turned into the New York Times bestseller,

00:07:36.840 Unhumans, The Secret History of Communist Revolutions and How to Crush Them. 0.54

00:07:41.080 What's up, Blake?

00:07:43.260 Jack, it's very, very good to be here.

00:07:46.140 So, Blake, what is this Christianity thing?

00:07:49.420 You know, we hear about it.

00:07:51.000 You know, obviously, we know the religion.

00:07:52.900 We know the crosses.

00:07:53.820 They're all over the place.

00:07:54.920 You can't really go anywhere without, anywhere in the European or Western world without, you know, seeing elements of Christianity.

00:08:05.260 But how did it become this way?

00:08:07.800 I mean, certainly it wasn't always like this.

00:08:09.680 I mean, people used to believe in the pagan gods, and we kind of get this story that, you know, okay, so Jesus happens, right?

00:08:20.780 Jesus is crucified.

00:08:22.340 Jesus dies on the cross.

00:08:23.540 He comes back to life.

00:08:25.820 He appears to some crowds, but it's not like the whole world is immediately Christian right after that.

00:08:32.500 And 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.

00:08:42.080 But it's probably a little bit more complicated than all that, isn't it?

00:08:45.340 Yeah, exactly, Jack.

00:08:48.120 It's really, it's one of the most fascinating stories in world history because we basically have no good analog for it in history.

00:08:57.280 I 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. 0.74

00:09:05.880 With 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. 0.58

00:09:22.080 And 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.

00:09:29.780 And then from there, they just keep going because that empire, the Roman Empire, it collapses, and yet it still keeps growing.

00:09:36.780 It 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.

00:09:57.180 Like, 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.

00:10:08.340 Obviously, the saga of Christ himself is fascinating, but what his followers in the centuries that followed were able to do.

00:10:16.000 And so the story of Constantine that people do know, and that is also associated with a miracle.

00:10:24.900 And Constantine, he was fighting in a war against, of course, another emperor of Rome, or would-be emperor of Rome in northern Italy.

00:10:31.400 And 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.

00:10:46.980 And 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.

00:11:07.060 And at that point, he makes it legal, but he doesn't necessarily just force everyone to become Christian, does he?

00:11:15.260 No, not at all. It starts off with just, as you say, an Edict of Toleration.

00:11:20.080 And 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.

00:11:36.280 This is probably when the most people would have ever been martyred for Christianity.

00:11:42.620 It 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?

00:11:51.700 And ultimately, the ruling was, yes, we do.

00:11:55.180 And then you have more persecutions under Diocletian's successor, I think it was, is it Galerian? 0.86

00:12:01.640 I can't, I don't want to, I don't want to get the emperor wrong, there's a lot of emperors.

00:12:04.160 And then it swerves back to toleration, but it's a very generous toleration.

00:12:10.080 Constantine 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.

00:12:22.980 And so, from there, it's just like a rocket ship.

00:12:26.160 It gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more popular, especially with the urban classes of the Roman Empire.

00:12:32.860 And then from there, it spreads into the masses.

00:12:35.760 But 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.

00:12:51.600 Is it, is it purely a political thing?

00:12:53.740 Or was it something where it was catching on and people were saying, hey, there's something to this?

00:12:59.540 I mean, it's definitely a mixture of both.

00:13:02.240 You 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.

00:13:12.000 And 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.

00:13:20.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:21.540 If 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.

00:13:32.280 Very nerdy book, but if you like nerdy books, it's a fun one.

00:13:34.880 And 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. 0.56

00:13:45.380 They were so much more devout.

00:13:46.580 And now people today, they don't care. 0.96

00:13:48.920 They're all terrible.

00:13:49.520 They've been doing that 2,000 years straight.

00:13:52.260 They were doing it in the 300s.

00:13:53.960 They were doing it in 1,000.

00:13:55.560 They were doing it in 1,500.

00:13:57.360 And they're doing it today.

00:13:58.540 So maybe that makes people feel a bit better about what our own situation is with Christianity in the wider world.

00:14:05.980 Except I'm the opposite.

00:14:06.760 So it was happening then, yeah.

00:14:07.860 I think that the current trend is slightly different.

00:14:12.100 It's more of like bucking the trend.

00:14:13.720 You hear this with Zoomers who get converted. 0.98

00:14:16.400 And they say, no, we want to be more devout than the generation prior because they weren't devout enough.

00:14:25.280 Maybe we're living through a brand new trend.

00:14:27.740 And if so, it could be something really amazing.

00:14:30.340 We could see a big revival.

00:14:32.160 And that's another thing that we see in history.

00:14:34.920 There are big swings.

00:14:36.340 It was not – sometimes the reduction is just, oh, from the conversion of Constantine to the Reformation.

00:14:42.340 They'll call it the age of faith.

00:14:43.800 And it was an age of faith, but it was an age where it rose and it fell.

00:14:49.040 You had entire regions – England, for example.

00:14:51.920 England or Britain under the Romans had a lot of Christians.

00:14:55.720 And then the Roman Empire falls.

00:14:57.060 It gets conquered.

00:14:58.360 And Christianity in Britain, in northern France, it basically vanishes.

00:15:03.100 It gets wiped out.

00:15:04.420 Pagans conquer it.

00:15:05.600 And they have to bring it back.

00:15:06.940 And if you were living through that, it might have felt like it was the end of the world.

00:15:10.740 Oh, Christianity has been defeated. 0.90

00:15:12.780 Northern Gaul, overrun.

00:15:15.580 The Christians ransacked. 1.00

00:15:16.920 The bishops, the priests, they're gone.

00:15:18.860 And hundreds of years later, they bring it back.

00:15:22.020 They expand it again with this missionary zeal from new places.

00:15:25.960 You have – Ireland, for example, gets converted by St. Patrick in the late Roman Empire.

00:15:31.040 All the places around it get taken out.

00:15:33.600 Britain gets overrun, like I said.

00:15:34.980 Gaul gets overrun.

00:15:36.100 And then in the 500s, the 600s, the 700s, you have missionaries coming out of Ireland, bringing Christianity back. 0.88

00:15:43.420 And it's one of the most amazing stories.

00:15:45.280 And it's not widely known today.

00:15:48.160 Right.

00:15:48.700 And so, well, let's go back to the one that people know.

00:15:51.340 So people know about St. Patrick.

00:15:53.060 People obviously know St. Patrick's Day.

00:15:55.000 There's a lot of cultural iconography around that.

00:15:59.240 But 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.

00:16:13.120 I mean, beyond the apostles themselves, obviously.

00:16:19.300 Yeah.

00:16:19.760 So we have – and we have the stories of the apostles themselves.

00:16:22.460 But it's also – it's not well super documented what they did.

00:16:25.980 Whereas with St. Patrick, we have a little more primary source evidence about how it happened.

00:16:30.480 And I think the line from the book itself that I have saved here, he says,

00:16:35.720 As 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.

00:16:52.440 And that's what made him so amazing.

00:16:54.000 Christianity in the ancient times was an urban religion.

00:16:57.780 And, you know, it's kind of natural.

00:16:59.640 Like, it's a communal religion.

00:17:01.080 You have to go to a church to do the church services, the ritual, you know, all of that, all the stuff we associate with churchgoing.

00:17:09.040 It naturally requires settlement.

00:17:12.060 And he went to this place.

00:17:14.220 Ireland had no cities.

00:17:15.620 It had no towns.

00:17:16.880 It was, like, itinerant bands.

00:17:18.740 It had more than 200 or so kingdoms in this tiny island.

00:17:22.180 Ireland, no place could be harder to establish the Christian faith in.

00:17:26.160 And he manages to do it and turns it into this huge source of scholarship, a source of Christian learning, a source of Christian missionaries.

00:17:34.800 It was a very remarkable accomplishment that we really, it's easy to underplay it with the simple stories we hear about St. Patrick.

00:17:43.700 That'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.

00:18:02.280 And 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.

00:18:13.300 And 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.

00:18:24.680 We'll be right back.

00:18:25.620 The Chronicles of the Christians, the Rise of Christianity.

00:18:28.760 Jack Posobiec, Blake.

00:18:32.280 The Chronicles of the Christians, the Rise of Christianity.

00:19:02.280 And we're back.

00:19:06.460 The Chronicles of the Christians, the Rise of Christianity.

00:19:10.280 Now, Blake, someone that I want to talk to, you know, going back as well, is the role of St. Helena, who was the mother of Constantine.

00:19:19.300 And correct me if I'm wrong, but she was Christian before him, right?

00:19:23.120 So the mom had converted before the son.

00:19:26.620 I double-checked this.

00:19:28.180 It is debated.

00:19:28.920 So there are some narratives where she converted before and may have exposed him to Christianity, you know, prayed for him.

00:19:35.220 There are other accounts.

00:19:36.540 I know Eusebius writes in early church history, and in his version, Constantine converts first.

00:19:41.660 So it's not clear, but there is definitely – there are definitely traditions in which she was the person who came first.

00:19:48.880 And that's very common throughout Christian history.

00:19:50.080 But everyone agrees there was a sort of – yeah, but everyone agrees there was definitely a mother-son dynamic to it.

00:19:55.360 Yes, yes, for sure.

00:19:57.500 And she was definitely a very enthusiastic Christian.

00:20:01.320 Right, right, very devout.

00:20:02.340 And 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.

00:20:15.040 So 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.

00:20:29.460 She conducts this first pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and she kind of becomes the first pilgrim to the Holy Land.

00:20:36.900 So she goes to Jerusalem, and she's looking for the holy sites and saying, look, I'm a Christian now.

00:20:43.240 I really believe this stuff, and travel was expensive back then, but when your son's the emperor, it's not so bad.

00:20:51.860 And so she goes in and says, look, I want to find these relics.

00:20:54.880 Like, where was the site of the crucifixion?

00:20:57.120 Where was Jesus' tomb?

00:20:58.220 And, of course, one of the big ones that she's associated with is the finding of the true cross.

00:21:03.800 And, of course, this one is hotly debated.

00:21:06.800 And 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,

00:21:23.480 and each cross was touched to her, but only when the third cross was applied that it led to an immediate healing.

00:21:32.560 And 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.

00:21:44.060 And she then has them sent to Constantinople.

00:21:48.240 She has this sent around and then thus begins the building of the Church of Holy Sepulcher and many of the other pilgrimage sites.

00:21:57.640 And to be fair, there had been pilgrimages before.

00:22:01.780 She certainly wasn't the first one.

00:22:03.660 But 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,

00:22:16.640 and a lot of renown, and it really kind of started this overall process of Europeans conducting pilgrimages to the Holy Land.

00:22:27.020 Exactly.

00:22:27.700 And this was a huge part of the Christian experience, especially in this period.

00:22:32.640 I mean, we obviously still have pilgrimage today, but it was enormously popular in a time where it was very difficult to be a pilgrim.

00:22:39.160 We 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.

00:22:52.180 And then you had more local pilgrimages, famously the Canterbury Tales, one of the foundational works of English literature.

00:22:59.440 It's about pilgrims going to Canterbury, so the chief church in the English church at the time.

00:23:05.300 And you have – there's famously a pilgrimage site at – what's the name?

00:23:11.640 It's in northwestern Spain.

00:23:13.960 It's like the route of St. James, and they would go to a shrine there.

00:23:17.980 And, of course, Rome has always been a popular site for pilgrims.

00:23:21.280 And so there's a strong tradition of, you know, piety expressing itself through actions.

00:23:27.760 And that's been – from the earliest days of Christianity as a big public religion, that's been a part of it.

00:23:35.380 And we owe that to a Roman emperor's mother.

00:23:37.660 Well, now, one of the pieces, though, going back to this, is that it's not just Golgotha, so the spot where this had gone on.

00:23:48.760 However, listen to this.

00:23:50.780 According to tradition, upon arriving in Jerusalem, St. Helena aimed to find the site of Jesus' crucifixion,

00:23:56.660 which was then buried under a temple of Venus, which had been erected by Emperor Hadrian to suppress Christian veneration at the site.

00:24:06.300 And 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.

00:24:14.220 And yet a pagan temple had been built on top of the site.

00:24:18.280 St. Helena, of course, orders that to be destroyed, and then the site converted into a church.

00:24:23.580 But this really speaks to how there was a huge process of the conversion from – and, of course, as the title of your book is –

00:24:31.560 this process of conversion of the pagans into Christianity.

00:24:35.160 This was not – and the pagan pantheon of people, I think, know the Roman gods and the Greek gods and the Norse gods.

00:24:42.460 But there were so many others and even lesser gods.

00:24:45.680 And 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.

00:24:53.520 And 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,

00:25:02.920 but 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.

00:25:10.060 So how is it that Christianity in that context is able to really come out on top? 0.58

00:25:15.740 I mean, certainly if the emperor converts, that's not just going to be enough to get people who are true believers to say,

00:25:21.620 all right, never mind, forget – you know, forget about, you know, Venus and Jupiter and Zeus and all that nonsense and Thor.

00:25:28.520 And, no, we're going to go with this guy from where?

00:25:31.820 Oh, yeah, yeah, Israel and Jerusalem and these places that no one's ever heard of.

00:25:37.840 Yeah, it's another – I think I'd say it's a myth of early Christianity is the claim that –

00:25:43.680 you'll have critics who will say, you know, Christianity is just another religion.

00:25:47.580 It could have been anything.

00:25:49.060 You'll run into this – you'd see this in the online hot takes about why Christianity is bad.

00:25:53.720 They'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.

00:26:02.720 And that's really not the case.

00:26:04.780 If 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.

00:26:13.880 For example, the Emperor Julian, Julian the Apostate, he was the last Roman emperor to be a pagan, and he wrote these attacks on Christianity.

00:26:22.740 And 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.

00:26:33.620 One of the things he says is the Christians are great at universally loving people.

00:26:38.280 So 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. 0.79

00:26:47.340 They will treat everyone basically equally in that regard.

00:26:50.800 And 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.

00:27:04.920 The Christians, like, they care for every life, they would say.

00:27:08.040 Like, you're not talking about child sacrifice, are you, and child killing?

00:27:11.460 Ooh.

00:27:12.100 Because certainly there were no pagans that would ever participate in that.

00:27:16.520 Yeah, child sacrifice, but just also just treating lives as not holding value, and that was a big innovation of Christianity. 0.97

00:27:25.080 And I think that's one of the most important things.

00:27:27.280 It's not just that Christianity is monotheistic.

00:27:29.860 There had been other monotheistic religions, and there was a trend towards a more monotheistic attitude in the pagan times.

00:27:37.520 Judaism obviously was a monotheistic religion, and there were tons of Jews that lived in Rome, the city, and also obviously throughout the empire.

00:27:46.960 But 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.

00:28:03.520 Yeah, not nearly as much.

00:28:05.520 And you do even see a trend, like I say, towards a monotheistic attitude.

00:28:09.580 So, 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.

00:28:32.120 There'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.

00:28:49.640 In paganism, the gods are just – are much more capricious.

00:28:53.200 They 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.

00:29:03.920 You 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.

00:29:14.200 And 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.

00:29:38.420 And this seems to have just really worked and resonated with people.

00:29:41.260 I 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.

00:29:52.400 They 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.

00:30:02.920 And 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?

00:30:14.280 They 100% believed it. What they did makes no sense unless millions of people really believed this.

00:30:21.280 Millions 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.

00:30:37.200 That's something that we need to talk about, because that is absolutely fascinating, and you're not going to hear this anywhere else.

00:30:44.260 Stay tuned, Jack Posobiec, Blake, now for more, The Rise of Christianity, and the Chronicles of the Christians.

00:30:49.480 Inquenitate, inquenitate, inquenitate, inquenitate.

00:31:19.480 Okay, folks, we're back here. Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, The Chronicles of the Christians, The Rise of Christianity.

00:31:27.080 Folks, we are in crunch time right now. New administration will be sworn in soon.

00:31:32.800 But as great as that is, that also means our enemies have days left to stir up trouble.

00:31:38.480 That could mean a cyber attack, an invasion, or, God forbid, a nuclear strike.

00:31:42.940 So until the long-term bureaucrats are out of Washington, I am not taking any chances.

00:31:48.180 That's why I have an emergency food supply from MyPatriotSupply right now.

00:31:53.280 They're offering $100 off their three-month emergency food kit.

00:31:57.120 And we're talking 2,000 calories a day for three whole months.

00:32:00.720 This is plenty to get you through even a prolonged emergency.

00:32:04.720 All their food kits last for up to 25 years in storage.

00:32:08.140 Plus, they come in rugged, weatherproof buckets.

00:32:10.520 So go to MyPatriotSupply.com right now to order your three-month emergency food kit.

00:32:16.820 I've got an emergency food supply in my home and in my car because my safety and my security for my family are worth it.

00:32:24.220 Go to MyPatriotSupply.com to order your three-month emergency food kit right now.

00:32:29.540 All 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.

00:32:50.360 That 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.

00:33:06.480 But the fact that tons of money, the equivalent of like billions of dollars today were spent on this project.

00:33:15.000 Yeah, it's exactly the case, Jack.

00:33:17.300 We have pretty good source records on this that, you know, we'll have people's wills where they'll leave money for this.

00:33:24.760 And, you know, of course, we have the sites, the monasteries themselves.

00:33:27.580 We 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.

00:33:41.620 And the author of that book I mentioned, he says, the word he uses is like staggering.

00:33:47.920 Like, he says the numbers are practically unbelievable, except that it's so well attested that they actually did this.

00:33:54.260 And, 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.

00:34:01.140 But 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.

00:34:11.660 They were basically a private endeavor.

00:34:13.800 You would endow a church for the people within the lands that you ruled.

00:34:18.520 And the vast majority of churches are built this way.

00:34:21.260 And 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.

00:34:33.180 And, oh, the priest is your nephew.

00:34:35.320 And then he collects the tithes.

00:34:37.760 There was stuff like that.

00:34:39.500 But once that went away, the number of new churches went down and it was much more difficult to get those churches founded.

00:34:44.980 So 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.

00:35:00.820 It's thousands and thousands, really millions and millions of lay Christians are doing it.

00:35:06.160 You'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. 0.61

00:35:22.900 And a lot of them die.

00:35:24.260 We have no shortage of accounts of these individuals getting martyred.

00:35:28.480 Some of them get martyred five minutes after they walk over the border.

00:35:32.000 They were very tough people they were running into.

00:35:34.320 And 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.

00:35:44.560 There's just too much of it.

00:35:46.100 It just overflows the number of examples we have.

00:35:49.980 And it just, it really was people believed in this and they thought it was important to encourage other people to believe in this.

00:35:57.860 One of my favorites is the English of the Dark Ages, early Middle Ages, the Anglo-Saxons.

00:36:03.420 They were very aware, oh yeah, we're part Saxon, we came from Saxony.

00:36:07.960 And so you have a ton of English missionaries who go to Saxony in modern-day Germany because they think it's very important.

00:36:13.420 We 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.

00:36:22.280 And tons of them do this, and eventually they do succeed.

00:36:27.540 And 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,

00:36:37.080 it'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.

00:36:47.780 And remember, this is prior to the printing press, prior to any of that, folks.

00:36:50.780 So where the Bible itself is hand-copied word for word, translated here and there into the various monasteries.

00:36:59.660 You have the Book of Kells, which, again, in Ireland speaks to the ancient Irish tradition of spreading Christianity.

00:37:07.100 And 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,

00:37:16.500 which is the time, as we know, were just brought with warfare and constant threats on all sides,

00:37:22.820 that it was the fact that you had kings and knights and lords that truly believed in it

00:37:30.540 and believed that having this religion would be the best way forward for their people that actually kept it together.

00:37:37.480 And at one point, and we'll be going further in depth in all of this,

00:37:42.680 in this period, you have the founding of Oxford as a university,

00:37:46.160 and you even have the building of the Notre Dame, the founding of that almost 1,000 years ago.

00:37:54.940 Exactly, exactly.

00:37:56.280 I'm looking at my notes here, just all of the, some of the fascinating stuff that was going on in this period

00:38:03.980 that would just capture the enthusiasm for it.

00:38:06.000 But there was one, this is interesting.

00:38:08.240 So during the 800s, of course, Spain was conquered by Muslims, 1.00

00:38:11.700 and you had Christians living under Muslim lords.

00:38:14.080 And in the 800s, there was a fad where Christians in Cordoba, which was a Muslim city,

00:38:19.860 they would come out and they would publicly denounce Islam and say they're Christians,

00:38:24.320 and then they would be put to death for this because you weren't allowed to do that.

00:38:27.500 And there was actually a big debate among Christian leaders, which was,

00:38:30.580 are these people martyrs?

00:38:32.820 Because martyrdom properly, you're not supposed to intentionally seek death.

00:38:37.060 You accept death if it is inflicted on you, but you don't, it's, you can't just do it as a fancy way to commit suicide.

00:38:43.260 So they had to tell people, you should affirm your faith, but you should not go recklessly commit suicide in the city of Cordoba. 0.85

00:38:50.180 And it's just amazing to read something like that and then, you know, see some loser on the internet who just says, 1.00

00:38:56.480 they were pretending because Christianity lets you control people, like dork losers. 0.99

00:39:03.060 Yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of a joke when you actually look back. 0.98

00:39:09.780 And so this is one of those myths and just talk a little bit about how people totally get this wrong,

00:39:14.600 especially your typical like Reddit atheist type.

00:39:16.780 Yeah, it's just, you run into all of these like bizarre takes where it's so clear.

00:39:24.500 I think that they've never like, they've never been around people of faith.

00:39:28.020 They've never been in a like really avid faith community.

00:39:30.920 So they come up with these bizarre narratives where, oh, like everyone just does it to get money or to get wealth or to get status.

00:39:39.400 And it's totally alien to them.

00:39:41.560 It's alien to them that someone would sacrifice a great deal, like a huge amount of wealth, a huge amount of time,

00:39:47.860 potentially their very life, that they would sacrifice that for an idea, an idea that they really, truly believed in.

00:39:55.900 And yet throughout the Middle Ages, we have countless cases of people doing this.

00:40:00.200 And in ancient times too, during the early rise of Christianity,

00:40:03.220 we have so many cases where it's so clear that this is hugely important to people,

00:40:08.220 that they would dedicate their entire lives to this in a period where life is, life is relatively cheap.

00:40:14.360 Your life is not as long.

00:40:16.120 You don't have a, you know, a secure retirement to look forward to.

00:40:19.660 Things can be very tenuous and people growing up in that environment, they think I like, what am I going to do?

00:40:27.300 I'm going to dedicate my life to God and I'm going to try to dedicate it to bringing God to the heathens, 0.86

00:40:35.060 whether they're in my own country or in another country.

00:40:37.680 And that's one of the most remarkable things with Christianity is them taking their faith of their locality and saying,

00:40:43.720 I want my enemy to accept this faith.

00:40:46.160 I'm going to go to the place where they send raiders, they kill us, and I'm going to preach the word of God to them.

00:40:52.880 And they did so because they had devout and deep faith in Christ.

00:40:59.680 Christ, the true rise of Christianity, the chronicles of the Christians.

00:41:04.740 We'll be right back.

00:41:05.240 All right, folks.

00:41:34.940 We're back.

00:41:35.380 The chronicles of the Christians, rise of Christianity.

00:41:38.180 Folks, thieves have found a new way to steal.

00:41:40.760 Recently in Montgomery County, where I'm from, a wave of car theft has hit in Pennsylvania.

00:41:46.540 What's the new technique?

00:41:47.580 They call it cloning key fobs, like your car's key fob.

00:41:50.380 Now, it's not just happening in Pennsylvania.

00:41:51.740 It's everywhere in the United States.

00:41:53.580 But you don't have to be a victim.

00:41:55.040 You can take back control of your security with today's show sponsor, Silent.

00:42:00.800 Stop big tech and government overreach.

00:42:03.060 Start the new year off right.

00:42:05.120 Protect yourself and your loved ones with the gift of Silent.

00:42:08.980 Silent's Faraday products block all incoming and outgoing signals so no one can get their hands on your information.

00:42:14.820 From key fobs to phones and laptops, simply place your device inside, close the sleeve, and that's it.

00:42:20.800 You are off the grid and safeguarded from unauthorized access.

00:42:24.460 Go silent today at slnt.com.

00:42:26.840 Take advantage of their end-of-year warehouse sale, which is happening right now, and saving you up to 70% off.

00:42:33.160 This is the biggest event of the year and your last chance to get some of Silent's most popular products at a massive discount.

00:42:40.400 70% off and free shipping on qualifying orders.

00:42:43.560 Stay ahead of what's coming.

00:42:44.720 Secure your privacy today.

00:42:46.000 Again, 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.

00:42:55.800 slnt.com slash poso.

00:42:58.520 So, 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.

00:43:10.800 But 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.

00:43:24.740 But this is the really big one that people point back to.

00:43:27.680 The 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,

00:43:40.140 because 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.

00:44:01.080 You'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. 0.59

00:44:12.620 Yeah, so the Great Schism, for those—a lot of our viewers are probably Protestant, they might not be familiar.

00:44:18.240 There's divisions within the church that predate the Reformation in the 1500s, which broke up Western Christianity.

00:44:25.540 So, initially, of course, ideally, there is only one Christian faith community, but they do like to argue about things, they disagree about things.

00:44:33.900 And 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,

00:44:44.720 in the Greek Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, what you might call it,

00:44:48.580 and 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.

00:44:59.380 And they've diverged in their practices, they've diverged in their beliefs.

00:45:04.040 In the west, there was increasingly the sense that the Pope in Rome was the boss, the number one guy to look to for guidance.

00:45:11.680 In the east, they tended to disagree with that.

00:45:14.100 But they also had some religious disputes that would seem, that would be very confusing to a lot of people today.

00:45:20.600 For example, there's a huge debate over something called the Filioque.

00:45:23.780 If you are familiar with the Nicene Creed, it's where the Holy Spirit, we say, in the west, we'll say,

00:45:29.500 it proceeds from the Father and from the Son.

00:45:32.860 In the eastern creed, it just proceeds from the Father.

00:45:35.260 And this is a huge debate.

00:45:36.940 This is, if we didn't have this dispute, the great schism might not have happened.

00:45:40.720 But they did schism over that.

00:45:42.560 And when they did, they thought it was going to be temporary.

00:45:45.400 It was, they'd split before, and then they'd reunited, and they just had a fractious relationship.

00:45:51.060 But 1054, it turns out, is the one that basically stuck.

00:45:54.860 The churches have not reunited since then.

00:45:57.580 And that paves the way towards today, where you can say, unfortunately, we have a huge diversity

00:46:03.380 of Christian churches that are not in accord with one another, are often very hostile to

00:46:09.880 one another.

00:46:10.500 And that should trouble us.

00:46:12.140 It might be inevitable, we're humans, that this would happen.

00:46:15.040 But it should trouble us, because we want there to be one community of Christian believers.

00:46:19.780 And instead, we have many small communities of Christian believers that are often in conflict

00:46:25.480 with one another.

00:46:26.100 And we have a duty as Christians to try to heal schisms, and to try to prevent new ones

00:46:34.260 from emerging.

00:46:35.020 It is a sin to sow discord within the Christian community.

00:46:39.380 You know, I just say, no, I've been doing my part.

00:46:42.380 And as everybody knows, I am Catholic, but of course, my wife is Orthodox.

00:46:47.420 So, you know, I'm going above and beyond over here to heal this, heal the schism on in my

00:46:52.420 own personal, my own personal capacity.

00:46:56.020 And I have actually taken her to the Vatican, and we've discussed the Filioque in the Sistine

00:47:01.300 Chapel, but that is a story for another time.

00:47:04.400 But, you know, Blake, going going back on this, and before we before we end part one of

00:47:10.440 this here, what's the role of Rome?

00:47:12.640 Just very quickly, has Rome fallen out of, you know, grace?

00:47:17.200 Is it still seen as a position of leadership as the empire fell?

00:47:20.840 What's the role of Rome in the church here?

00:47:24.640 In this time, I mean, in the West, it's clear, it's clearly become the like the leading voice

00:47:29.920 in Christianity.

00:47:31.180 In the East, it's a little funny because they do regard the Pope as this, you know, the

00:47:36.840 Bishop of Rome as at least a first among equals.

00:47:40.620 But it's just a question, how much do you defer to him?

00:47:43.020 And one of the issues they had is they still had an emperor who was kind of a quasi-religious,

00:47:47.200 religious position.

00:47:48.040 And so they would have an emperor who actually could weigh in on religious questions.

00:47:51.980 And we've moved on from that in the West, but in the East, it was much stronger.

00:47:56.580 That caused a lot of issues.

00:47:58.100 And so this becomes a huge, huge point going forward because just about 40 years after

00:48:08.840 this in 1096, and we'll talk about this in part two, we get to the start of the first

00:48:15.340 crusade.

00:48:16.620 So stay tuned, folks.

00:48:17.820 Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff will be back at you with part two of the Chronicles of the Christians,

00:48:24.540 the Crusades.

00:48:26.200 Stay tuned and thank you.

00:48:27.400 Once again, I've been Jack Posobiec.

00:48:28.960 Ladies and gentlemen, as always, you have my permission.

00:48:31.220 Till next.

00:48:31.520 Then, of course.

00:48:43.340 Bye bye.

00:48:51.540 Bye bye.

00:48:52.260 Bye bye.

00:48:58.520 Bye bye.

Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - December 26, 2024

The Chronicles of the Christians - Part I： The Rise of Christianity

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript