There can be no doubt on the basis of the written and archaeological evidence that the Christianization of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe involved the destruction of works of art on a scale never before seen in human history.

Conversion was not a widely known phenomenon in antiquity. Pagan religions had almost nothing like it.They were polytheistic, and anyone who decided, as a pagan, to worship a new or different god was never required to relinquish any former gods or their previous patterns of worship. Pagan religions were additive, not restrictive.

There was a scant role for ethics in the paganism. It is not that ancient people were less ethical than people today; it is that ethics had little to do with religion. If it had a “location” in ancient life, it was in philosophy.

Some scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods’ anger. But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect. he gods—or at least one ofthem—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently.That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians.Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay.

We have very little evidence to suggest that serious intellectuals converted to the Christian faith between the time of Paul and the mid-second century.Most converts would have been lower-class and uneducated.This was certainly true in Paul’s own day. In a letter to one of his largest congregations, he explicitly reminds the Corinthians about their own constituency: “Consider your calling, brothers and sisters: Not many of you were wise...

Martyrdoms would rarely lead to conversions because they were themselves relatively rare.The vast majority of pagans—including the millions who eventually converted—never saw a martyrdom, as recent scholarship has shown.As the most prolific and one of the best-traveled authors of the first three Christian centuries, Origen of Alexandria, stated in no uncertain terms: “Only a small number of people, easily counted, have died for the Christian religion.

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew