So was the spread of Christianity really a significant contributor to the fall of Rome or not?
>>18060896Christianity didn't really impede on the ability of the state to do anything. Really the most they did was act as sanctioned unofficial courts by Bishops for those who couldn't go to court for whatever reason, these were of course, not legally binding and were only based on the agreement of the parties involved. Emperors really just didn't like having Bishops have anything to do with the administration, as long as they weren't starting riots or shittalking him, the Emperor was happy to let them stay in their local community which chose them.The fall of Rome was more due to the inability for the Romans in the West to defeat or destroy the invading peoples which dismembered their empire.
>>18060896No. Rome fell because of giving rights to non white people, somthing Christianity didn't do or endorse until within the last couple centuries. You'd think people would look at how Rome fell and be dissuaded from repeating its mistakes today, but that's obviously not happening.
>>18060908>Christianity didn't really impede on the ability of the state to do anything.Besides continuing the customs of the state and empire, sure.Rome fell after christianity destroyed the Altar of Victory, to which the Roman state had piously devoted itself for centuries. You do the math.>>18060923Jews aren't white people, and christianity absolutely endorses giving rights to a literal abo if he converts to worship the jewish messiah. Ethiopia had been christian for a millennium by the time the Nordic kings accepted defeat and submitted to christianity.
>>18060896No. The real culprit was lead poisoning from Roman pipes and wine sweeteners, which caused severe paranoia and erratic governance. This collective insanity, not Christianity, dismantled the Empire from within, making rulers like Caligula seem sane by comparison. The faith simply filled the power vacuum.
>>18060953>christianity destroyed the Altar of VictoryThey didn't do that. The controversy with the Altar was with it being in the Senate and used for customary sacrificed of incense at the start of Senate meetings. Even the Pagan Senators lead by Symmachus weren't really that concerned with it, most of their petitions were actually just about state funding for the state cults.>You do the math.So, no correlation? >>18060975>The real culprit was lead poisoning from Roman pipes and wine sweetenersLead poisoning isn't an issue in actively used pipes. It's only a problem if the pipes aren't continuously running, which in that case it flakes and that does cause lead poisoning. But the Romans didn't cut water outside of rare situations.
>>18061002>they didn't destroy it, they just took it apart and removed it from its sacred place and banned the customary use of it and in fact the goyim liked itkek absolute pilpul
>>18060896More of a symptom of collapse and not the cause. The Empire chose the universalist cult of Christ that was already becoming popular across the empire to help unify the people and regain more central control of the empire.
>>18061010>Look mom! I said goyim!Yes dear.
>>18060896No it was the plague that killed off a third of the empire plus bad governance. Stop reading Gibbons, he is very biased and outdated
>>18060896No. It was the symptom that the times were getting bad for different reasons./threadEvery other answer is bullshit
>>18061080>plus bad governanceif the Later Roman Empire was good at anything, it was governance. The Late Roman Administration was one of the most competent administration's in the world until the Early Modern Period
>>18061112Right Honorious was a good emperor.
>>18061191The administration is more than the emperor. If anything that just proves my point, even in absence of any guiding emperor the administration continued as per usual. Only being stopped by violent force.
>>18061206Are you trying to claim the empire was in a good place in the 400s ad? When rome was constantly losing land
>>18061224>good placeYou're a childish moralfag
>>18061233You are dishonest. Was the empire a good place to live in the 400s ad? Was the administration running how it should when they were constantly broke and losing land?
>>18061224>Are you trying to claim the empire was in a good place in the 400s ad?In most of it, yea. But that's not what I am trying to argue. I'm arguing that the administration was competent and capable, which violent invasions from the outside does not change.>>18061239>Was the administration running how it should when they were constantly broke and losing land?In area of Roman control it was. Nor was the state ever bankrupt until the final years of Valentinian III's reign, despite this there is no real evidence that the administration atrophied due to it.You're trying to make an argument about the ability for the Roman state to defend themselves, not how they governed their empire.
>>18061246The Roman state wasn't able to operate properly because they kept losing land and money meaning it couldn't function with large parts of it ravaged by barbarian attacks.
>>18061337See>You're trying to make an argument about the ability for the Roman state to defend themselves, not how they governed their empire.
>>18060953>>18061002>>18061010>>18061020What makes Christianity so incredibly harmful and corrosive is that it is such a turd of deceit that defending it turns anyone into a pathological liar who will soon no longer be able to tell truth apart from lies.
>>18061354How can they govern themselves if they keep losing land and money. If the western roman empire had a functioning government they would not have collapsed in the late 400s
>>18061361>adopt the jew god>become jewsimple as
>>18061396I don't think you know what a government is. Having a functioning government does not somehow mean that they will be able to defeat their enemies on the field or crush the invading peoples. A functioning government was practically a pre-requisite for what Odoacer did when he launched his coup. The civil war of Constantine III would not have been possible had there been no functioning government for him to consolidate power around, nor the civil war of 472. These are not failures of government, they are political and military failures.
>>18061433You're doing this on purpose arent you? The whole reason why the western roman empire collapsed was because they couldn't govern themselves properly. Bearucrats exist even in failed/corrupt states, no is arguing against that, but they were not able to do the job properly.
>>18060923>Rome fell because of giving rights to non white people, something Christianity didn't do or endorse until within the last couple centuries./threadJew tards like to pretend like their modern-day jew worship race agnostic noahidism is "christianity" but that will never be true no matter how often they lie about it.
>>18061561Christianity isn't race agnostic at all. There are very clearly two races:>goyim(you), unnatural, uncultivated, owes a debt to jews, not allowed to be arrogant towards jews, may or may not even be allowed to eat at the same table as a jew>jews(((them))), natural, cultivated, brought you salvation from their tribal deity, blessed on account of the prophets, better than (you), give them your stuff
>>18061611No matter how often they lie about it.
>>18061112A large and organized bureaucracy does not a good — or even efficient, for that matter — administration make.The Western Romans were terribly inefficient advisors. You compare it to the administration of their Eastern homologues or even Shappur's in Iran, and it was like night and day.
>>18060896Christianity did so much historical damage that everyone thinks the first great Christian emperor went around seeing Jesus in the clouds instead of being a Sol Invictus worshiper.
>>18061611Those early emperors were trying to cultivate a non-existent cult started by a pagan priest. The actual classical jews were all wiped out before then. Modern rabbinicalism has its roots in the 9th century.
>>18061982>groyper fanfic
>>18061982Julian's doomed antics at being a christian hater will never cease to amuse me>bring your legion in Syria to simulate a pagan triumph>instead your men burn, loot, pillage and rape the province, leading you to have to concede further resources and autonomy to Syria and Aegyptus to make sure two provinces don't just rise up in revolt outrightkek
>>18061998Not only are those pagan-jews a state construct of late Rome, but all of mishnah, halakah, and kaballah come after this period. There are various seferim references to this period of pagan-led "judaism".
The Roman Empire was already collapsing before the adoption of Christianity because centuries of internal instability, economic decay, and military overextension had eroded its foundations. By the third century, the empire was suffering from civil wars, rapid turnovers of emperors, invasions by foreign tribes, and a devastated economy weakened by inflation and heavy taxation. These crises undermined central authority and forced emperors like Diocletian to impose harsh reforms just to maintain control. When Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 CE, he was attempting to unify a fractured empire, not cause its decline. By the time Christianity became the official religion under Theodosius I in 380 CE, the empire had already split into eastern and western halves, with the western half in irreversible decay. In essence, Christianity arose within a dying empire—it did not cause the collapse but rather became intertwined with its final efforts to survive.
>>18062022>because centuries of internal instability, economic decay, and military overextensionIt's really just the first of those three. The precedent of emperors being usurped into responsibility by the army comes from the 3rd century AD and it's explicitly due to foreigners in service lifting up 'their guy'. The first man to do it was probably Thrax, whose parents came from eastern Europe.
tl;dr its as crazy as saying Roman polytheism caused the decline. the decline was already there, already baked into the empire. from the birth of the empire it began its countdown to death. the slave economic system of the romans was already being out done by the newly feudal societies like armenia bordering it.
>>18062036>Thrax> Born of Thracian originSpartacus is smiling from beyond the grave when that happened.
>>18062037>the slave economic system of the romans was already being out done by the newly feudal societies like armenia bordering itPlutarch claims this. He says it's because the slaves brought in from the east were a drag on the agrarian middle class. The rich brought them in to build these mega-corporation style farms.
>>18062046His mother and father of Germanic and Alanic extraction
if anything it gave them a little more timethe moral decay of Rome in the time of Caesar and during the Empire was monumental, they were a shadow of their former selves even if their borders were longChristianity slowed the pace of infection, but by that point it was too late to save the body politicmap autism people tend to not realize the depth of the rot which had set in, they just see vast tracts of land and assume that must have been peak Romein reality, rampant corruption, cronyism, the total degradation of national virtues, etc were checked only by the monumental inertia afforded to it by historic control over the Mediterranean in short, the car was still rolling forward even though the engine had failedmore than that, it ensured the survival of Latin in western Europe since it was used by the literate of the church to communicate between different groups that didn't have the same languagebasically Christianity and Latin gave the nations of western Europe something in common during the middle ages that they would not have had otherwise, had the Roman empire continued in it's state paganism and god emperor cultthey were the were the premiere force for unity in Europe; were it not for them Europe would have become nothing more than a rabble of competing tribal kingdoms with little to no way of communicating or hashing out disputes by appealing to a higher authority (the church)
Arianism consumed imperial energy.
>>18062055I mean it was an issue in the time of late republic too
>>18062443You could be right! I don't know enough about the period. Are you thinking of the Gracchi brothers on this?
>>18062445From them to Ceaser. People not having jobs because of slaves was a big deal
bumpthe rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire was due to in large part to the total degradation of pagan virtues within their borders
>>18062022>forced emperors like Diocletian to impose harsh reforms just to maintain control.And it worked so well that for nearly the next 100 years the Roman Empire would be consistently victorious on all fronts, prosperous and successful. The reigns of Constantine to Valentinian/Valens were some of the most prosperous decades for the empire since the 2nd century. The adoption of Christianity didn't happen under some backdrop of a weakening state, it happened when it was at one of its highest points
