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Millennium itself – the year 1000 A.D. – and the word Millennium became a synonym for the Day of Judgement. Christianity achieved its greatest triumph so far on 313 A.D. when the Emperor Constantine – as blodthirsty and vicious a maniac as many of the Roman emperors – declared it the official religion of the empire...
How did these “messiahs” become so powerful? To begin with, all of them had the gift of preaching. But it was more than that. As we have seen, the Christian Church, which began as as poor and persecuted organization whose leaders were thrown to the lions, suddenly became the official religion of Rome in 313 A.D., under the Emperor Constantine.
As soon as they gained power, the Christians began to behave far worse than their enemies, destroying pagan temples, burning heretics, and squabbling among themselves. In effect, the Church became the supreme dictator. And the poor, ordered to go to church every Sunday, groaning under heavy taxes, and forced to pay to have their sins forgiven, became increasingly disenchanted with their spiritual masters. But there was nothing they could do; the Church exerted the same iron grip as the Nazis in Germany or the Communists in Stalin’s Russia.
5. Funk, Robert W., Honest to Jesus, p. 299: From nowon we must always ask whether the Christian tradition has something to teach us and, if it does, what that something is. We can no longer give Christianity prior consent without determining what we are embracing as part of the bargain.
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