I'm going to show you how great I am.

This is a fighty power.

I just want to say from the bottom of me heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.

Hello and welcome to How to Take Over the World.

This is Ben Wilson.

Today, we are going to be analyzing the rise of Christianity.

The reason that I wanted to study Jesus and Constantine on the episodes before this

is that I find the rise of Christianity to be so remarkable,

a man who never traveled more than 100 miles from his home in his adult life, and who had no formal education and the movement that he spawned now claims over two billion followers. That's just so remarkable to me. It is, in my mind, the blueprint for how to start a movement that takes over the world. Only Islam is even close in terms of a movement that has achieved the types of

things that Christianity has. And by the way, some of you have asked, and yes, I will be doing

an episode eventually, at least on Mohammed, perhaps on one or two other early Muslim leaders as well.

I would also love to do an episode on Buddha and Buddhism, because all of these were incredible

movements that have taken over the world in various ways.

But I want to start with Christianity because in some ways I think it is the most impressive in terms of what it has accomplished.

So through the Jesus episode, we saw how the original teachings of Jesus, the founder of Christianity, informed the way the movement grew.

Then in the Constantine episode,

we saw how Christianity got institutionalized and married to the Roman state. And this episode will be

more of a look at the structure of the church itself and what it was that separated it from similar

movements of that time. There were movements like the worship of Sol Invictus and Manichaeism that were kind of monotheistic in nature

that started to grow and develop, but they never took hold the same way that Christianity did.

So why did Christianity take off and gain a following of over two billion adherents while

the others faded away and no longer exist? So that's one of the things I want to take a look at.

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