Constantine Divine Emperor Of The Christian Golden Age

"Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. The book explores the emperor's image as conveyed through literature, art, and architecture, and shows how Constantine reconciled the tradition of imperial divinity with his monotheistic faith. It demonstrates how the traditional themes and imagery of kingship were exploited to portray the emperor as the saviour of his people and to assimilate him to Christ. This is the first book to study simultaneously both archaeological and historical information to build a picture of the emperor's image and propaganda. It is extensively illustrated" --Provided by publisher.

In this book Bruce Winter explores the varied responses of the first Christians to requirements to render divine honors to the Caesars as the conventional public expression of loyalty to Rome and its rulers. How did they cope with the culture of emperor worship when they were required to give their undivided loyalty to Jesus? First examining the significant primary evidence of emperor worship and the enormous societal pressure the first Christians would have faced to participate in it, Winter then looks at specific New Testament evidence in light of his findings. He examines individual cities and provinces and the different ways in which Christians responded to the pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and participate in the conventional expressions of loyalty to the Roman Empire.

The story of the growth of the early Christian community. A rapid, detailed and accurate narrative, full of picturesque scenes drawn directly from contemporary witnesses to the rise of Christianity in the Roman world.

Constantine's conversion to Christianity marks one of the most significant turning points in the epic of Western civilization. It is also one of history's most controversial and hotly-debated episodes. Why did Constantine join a persecuted sect? When did he convert? And what kind of Christian did he ultimately become? Such questions have perennially challenged historians, but modern scholarship has opened a new door towards understanding the fourth century's most famous and mysterious convert. In Constantine and the Divine Mind, Chandler offers a new portrait of Constantine as a deeply religious man on a quest to restore what he believed was once the original religion of mankind: monotheism. By tracing this theological quest and important historical trends in Roman paganism, Chandler illuminates the process by which Constantine embraced Christianity, and how the reasons for that embrace continued to manifest in his religious policies. In this we discover not only Constantine's personal religious journey, but the reason why Christianity was first developed into a world power.

A comparative examination and interpretation of religious violence in the Graeco-Roman world and Late Antiquity.

In this ground-breaking examination of responses to Joseph the Carpenter, Dr. Jacobs offers fresh insight into the historic understanding and perception of this often forgotten figure. Challenging assumptions about the ways Joseph was understood and perceived in the first several centuries of Christianity, Jacobs begins his study with a thorough review of the earliest narrative portrayals of Joseph in the New Testament. Subsequently, he carefully traces the diverse responses to Joseph through the analysis of numerous works of art and narratives. In the process, he documents the presence of two trajectories: one, the most dominant, which affirms the roles of Joseph presented in the nativity accounts and highlights his significance and, another, which diminishes these roles and, consequently, Joseph's significance. While Jacobs's study documents the presence of tensions with respect to understanding and perception of Joseph within this period of Christianity, it also reveals that Joseph had much more importance than has previously been acknowledged.

The Roman Empire of the fourth century AD, ruled by the Emperor Constantine the Great, was a society marked by social, religious, and political transformation as the empire came under the influence of the Christian Church. To understand how this period's emperors and bishops, among other political and social actors, thought about and enacted political theory, Nathan Israel Smolin turns to theological sources, revealing an age of profound political, social, and religious ferment, in which ideas and structures fundamental to the history of the following millennia were developed and contested--ideas that continue to shape our world today.

This book sheds new light on the religious and consequently social changes taking place in late antique Rome. The essays in this volume argue that the once-dominant notion of pagan-Christian religious conflict cannot fully explain the texts and artifacts, as well as the social, religious, and political realities of late antique Rome. Together, the essays demonstrate that the fourth-century city was a more fluid, vibrant, and complex place than was previously thought. Competition between diverse groups in Roman society - be it pagans with Christians, Christians with Christians, or pagans with pagans - did create tensions and hostility, but it also allowed for coexistence and reduced the likelihood of overt violent, physical conflict. Competition and coexistence, along with conflict, emerge as still central paradigms for those who seek to understand the transformations of Rome from the age of Constantine through the early fifth century.