Leaving Jesus out of the list wouldn’t be precisely Christian, but at the same time I think we can reasonably agree that He asked mortal men to be his standard bearers, and a look of those men would not be improper. I’m not sure that ranking them is of any significance, however. Let the last be first and so on.
My first comment is that even putting Paul at the top is making some assumptions. Specifically, I believe board members too often confuse Paul’s importance in later theological discussions with his importance at the time. His letters are extremely important in that they show what contemporary Christian leaders were thinking and doing. But there’s no evidence that his followers were separate from those taught by other Apostles (he specifically rebukes some who tried this) either physically or theologically. We simply have more sources on Paul, but not nearly enough for a complete picture. This has unfortunately tempted too many people to fill in the gaps with whatever they earnestly, honestly, wanted to be true or feared to be true.
The Apostles spread throughout the Roman world, and perhaps beyond it, and we simply don’t know who reached more lives. That said, I would tentatively suggest taking a look at Peter. Strictly speaking, all the Apostles should be ranked equally. The notable thing about Peter is that he spread the word to what would become the Western Roman Empire and specifically Rome itself.
Constantine’s significance is more that he was forced to acknowledge that Christianity couldn’t be confined any more, but it was almost certainly going to happen anyway. Christianity was already very widespread by his time, to the point where society flipped to be majority Christian rapidly once the formal restrictions were eased.
On the contrary, we actually have a mountain of evidence conclusively proving there were all sorts of different points-of-view. Paul’s letters are not evidence of what others were thinking. First off, half of Paul’s letters are probably frauds. Actual scholars (as opposed to apologists) do not believe a single person wrote all of them. By the end of the first century, we start seeing mentions of some but, by no means, all of the writings which would later go on to be included in the New Testament. However, we don’t know that the writings we have today are identical to the writings those people mention. As far as extant records are concerned, we have some manuscripts which differ as well as a whole host of other manuscripts which were being passed around at the same time but were rejected and deemed heretical some time later. The fact of the matter is that early Christianity was composed of all sorts of conflicting & competing beliefs. By the time canonization occurred, no one actually knew what the truth was. What we had here was a case where the victors in an ecclesiastical power struggle over the “correct” dogma won the privilege to condemn their enemies as heretics and adopt the “facts” (along with their preferred texts) the way they saw fit.
Thanks for that. Funnily enough I’m reading Gibbon again (haven’t read him since I was a youngster). When I posted I was on Book XVI; if I’d posted just one book on I wouldn’t have made such a goof!
Actually, I’d say that while Constantine (and Clovis) helped kickstart Christianity by getting the upperclass on board, it’s really Charlemagne who’s the most important, because he did one crucial thing : made baptism mandatory shortly after birth.
Prior to that, baptism was an opt-in thing that could only be done by adults - you had to choose Christ on your own. Then trek to the nearest cathedral, or wait for an itinerant priest to dunk you in a river. Consequently, while many in cities would do it and go to mass ; in the countryside people didn’t really go for it, nor did they really understand what it was all about, and in a great many cases actually kept to the old religions or weird synchretisms.
Charlemagne’s reform ensured that everybody would get baptized (thus forever cutting the kid from the pagan gods of old), but it had another, much more important effect : like I said, going to the cathedral to get baptised was an economic no-go for the majority of peasants and besides the full-body immersion baptism that was done in those times could not be done to infants. So the baptismal reform prompted every two-horse village to commission its own dinky little church where priests could be sent by the local bishop with portable baptismal basins. In time, these churches had their own full-time priest, the locals could go to Mass every Sunday and the priest could tell them what to do every second of every day.
And* that’s* the point where Christianity became a real, popular, omnipresent religion instead of something reserved to the elite and the monks.
Then Charlemagne went on to christianize Saxony and Denmark by the sword, so there’s that too
This is a very important point. We’re aware of Paul’s missionary travels and church-planting because we have so much of his writing (or writing ascribed to him). But there were other apostles and missionaries doing the same thing and their impact is more difficult to assess. Paul specifically mentions communities of Christians planted by Cephas (Peter) and Apollos, and we also know about Banabas, Silas, and others.
Paul, and later church fathers such as Clement and Augustine were important in the development of Christian doctrine, but as far as spreading the religion across the Empire we have to credit all the nameless evangelists who went from town to town without leaving anything in writing for us to remember them buy.
