Religion

In the time of the Gospels the Roman Empire was (and had been for well over a thousand years) ruled cooperatively by a combination of secular power, centered on the Emperor and Senate and concerned mostly with military and foreign affairs, taxes, and public works, and religious power centered on the temples of the various Roman gods and concerned mostly with domestic affairs. Neither side was completely dominant and each had what was regarded as absolute control over certain spheres of Roman life.

Constantine saw the emergence of this weird Judaic cult as an opportunity to break the political power of the temples. His conversion to Christianity was deliberately staged to split popular support away from the temples and toward an inward-directed death and afterlife obsessed philosophy which he thought could be easily manipulated and less demanding of expensive temple constructions and ceremonial sacrifices. But surprise! As soon as they tasted political power, these Christian leaders turned out to be as fractious and ill-tempered as their pagan predecessors, with the curious result (not often recalled by Christians) that most of those Christians thrown to the lions in the Coliseum were put there by other Christians.

The Council of Nicea was Constantine's gambit to draw these factions together into a unified and easily manipulated movement. The version of Christianity which emerged from Nicea was ruthlessly structured as an hierarchy with the Pope replacing the Emperor as the most powerful expression of divine intent in the material world, with individual humans pegged in a relationship that required them to report in order individual to priest, priest to bishop, bishop to Pope, Pope to God. No line skipping tolerated, and anything which suggested such a thing was ruthlessly suppressed as heresy. Thus all forms of Gnosticism got chucked overboard, as well as a lot of borderline fusion movements which aren't even remembered. The four books of the apocrypha somehow survived Nicea, but always a bit on the margin, and did not make it into the protestant KJV.

Ironically it was the Protestants who inadvertently reinvented one of the two most important tenets of Gnosticism, the idea that an individual's relationship with God was ultimately personal and that God listens directly to everyone's prayers. (The other big Gnostic idea, that God the Father is evil or insane and that history is a struggle by the Holy Spirit and to right all the wrong things he's done to his creation, has been touched on now and then too. Oh, and the Holy Spirit's big play, the sacrifice of God's Son at Calvary, failed. That last one doesn't get much air time at all.) Gnosticism actually felt so correct and answered so many questions (Evil? Not a problem) that it was was a continually recurrent heresy requiring multiple massacres to keep it down until Protestantism and the Enlightenment came along to really mess things up for the Vatican.

(For a good porthole looking over how that whole keeping down the heretics thing went, look up anything written by this guy named Samuel Clemens about the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.)

Really, when you take even the most cursory look at how the Bible was assembled and handed down to us, it is hard to see any form of belief in biblical inerrancy as anything other than simple-minded or insane. There is good stuff in the Bible (I'm particularly fond of that bit about treating others as you'd like to be treated yourself), and there is some truly terrible stuff. The same is true for most belief systems which have the historical depth and vastness of reach of a major religion. (And no, science is not immune to this. J. Marion Sims would like to have a word about that.)

As for the Romans, it's probably just as well that I don't have to sacrifice goats to Apollo, but I wouldn't be disappointed if someone decided to bring back Lupercalia.