ABSTRACT
The Christian Church in the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages Late Antiquity was a time of great religious ferment. Many people turned away from the fossilised worship of the innumerable gods of the classical Greco-Roman and eastern pantheons. They sought contact with the philosophical currents which inclined towards the belief in one divine power, such as Neoplatonism, or with mystical sects which guaranteed personal contact with a humane deity. Those religions that brought a message of individual salvation and rebirth after death were especially popular. That message was – and is – central to the Christian religion, which originated as a Jewish sect. For Christians, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in Palestine under the rule of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, was not only the Messiah (literally meaning ‘anointed’, christos in Greek), the saviour of the people of Israel promised to the Jews, but even the son made
flesh of the only God. His resurrection from death on the cross opened, for the faithful, the way to their own victory over death and to eternal salvation.
