This is the Bama podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we examine the fourth and fifth centuries in the period of the ecumenical councils of early Christendom.

Oh yes, keep the story moving. That's kind of a weird word that I recently learned about Christendom.

It's like the idea that the church and the world are like one unit, like a worldwide religion sort of idea.

Yeah. What do you mean when you say that?

You could word it that way and that might be generous and our listeners might appreciate that more. I often use the term, maybe with a little bit of unintentional disdain and cynicism.

I kind of use it as like imperial Christianity. Yes, it would be my shorthand would be like when Christianity became an empire.

And that empire did it spread all over the globe. We lived in a Christian world from, I mean we're going to talk about today here in the fourth century, third, fourth century.

And we were a Christian world really, dominantly, at least in the Western world. It was a Christian world until we're going to run into the French revolution, because when that kind of starts to change.

But you know, 1400 years of Christendom, that's kind of how I use the term.

Yeah, that's basically what I understand.

Okay, good. Your term was maybe more positive in nature.

Yeah, well, depending on how you want to look at it, yeah. But yeah, it's not a commonly used word. I think it's kind of a little bit of an archaic term.

Sure, but that's what we mean by that. Yeah, absolutely.

It's going to come up. It is. Well, we'll be talking about that quite a bit for the rest of session five.

All right, so this tension that we've been talking about between this growing movement and the empire of Rome continued until just after AD 300.

Persecutions would intensify and subside at different points along this curve, usually in response to political necessity and upheaval.

The early Christian movement happened to be the second fastest growing religion in the Roman Empire for two centuries.

The fastest growing religion, I think we've talked about at different points, was Mithra, a Roman offshoot of what is typically known as Zoroastrianism.

That was the fastest growing religion. Emperors were sometimes known to claim to be Mithra incarnate. There was more than a few that did that Roman emperors, especially in the third century, by the way.

And the last emperor who made such a claim was Chlorus. Chlorus. He was the father of a pretty famous guy named Constantine.

Constantine's father was Chlorus. His birthday happened to be December 25th. That date ringing any bells there for you, Brent.

Hmm. Maybe. Yeah, this Constantine dynasty started by Chlorus, enacted an imperial advent celebrating his birth.

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