ABSTRACT
The social, political, and cultural values promoted by Christian empresses, emperors, clergymen, and male and female lay leaders, artists, and writers played a powerful role in the transformation of the late antique Roman world into the mediaeval West and the Byzantine Empire. It should be clear by now, however, that Christianity and its ecclesiastical institutions were not alien imports to that world, but organically grew out of it. Although Christianity is deeply rooted in Judaism, the popular Judaism of Christ and his apostles had been permeated by the culture of the Hellenistic Greek world that Rome inherited. The Jewish people had lived in that world for 300 years before the Roman annexation of Judea. The early Christian missionary St. Paul was a highly Hellenized, Greek-speaking Jew who claimed Roman citizenship. He did much to spread Christianity beyond the Jewish community in the first century a.d. and shape Christian theology. The new religion that he spread grew by converting the pagan population of the Roman world. For 300 years, many of the great leaders and thinkers among Christians were converts who had been steeped in Classical literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. The Christian desire not to be of the world while in it was impossible for any human being, even the most rigorous ascetic, to attain fully. Christianity, then, must be seen
as part of the systemic evolution of the Roman world. It was as much an effect of that world’s gradual transformation as it was a cause.
