All of Roman history

All of Roman history. The growth of Christianity from its unnormal origin 40 AD, with fewer than 1,000 followers, to being the majority religion of the entire Roman Empire by AD 400, has been examined through a wide variety of historiographical approaches. Until the last decades of the 20th century, the primary theory was provided by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776. For over 200 years, Gibbon’s model and its expanded explanatory versions—the conflict model and the legislative model—have provided the major narrative. The conflict model asserts that Christianity rose in conflict with paganism, defeating it only after emperors became Christian and were willing to use their power to require conversion through coercion. The legislative model is based on the Theodosian Code published in AD 438. Two devastating epidemics, the Antonine Plague in 154 and the Plague of Cyprian in 251, killed a large number of the empire’s population, though there is some debate over how many. Early Christianity never openly called for slavery, and while theologian G. François Wessels writes that it “must be conceded” that abolition was not a possibility in Paul’s day, it must also be affirmed that many of the early Christians were slave owners who voiced no objection to the long–standing institution. Theodosius I In the centuries following his death, Theodosius I (347 – 395) gained a reputation as the emperor who targeted and eliminated paganism in order to establish Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the empire.