(September 29, 2022 at 8:39 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote:(September 29, 2022 at 4:02 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: -ish. He didn't give a fuck who jesus was or what theology that entailed, he just wanted them to stop bickering - because division eradicated the whole point of the roman administrative state assuming christianity.
Pick a god, one god, any god, and end it. That was his ask.
The historic version of christianity is a dispute between two wings of a pagan roman family angling for power...both sides long dead...availed them nothing. They just stuck us with it.
You said it yourself "pick a god".
After the council, certain beliefs got uniform and formulated as dogma (nature of Jesus), and Christians who did not accept this dogma were persecuted as heretics so that only one version of Jesus prevails. They also forbade and destroyed all other gospels (at least 50) because they held heretical descriptions of Jesus - meaning, different descriptions than those that the council prescribed.
There was the "Edict of Thessalonica" of Theodosius I. Which was a state-sponsored support for legal mechanism to counter what it perceived as 'heresy'. By this edict, in some senses, the line between the Catholic Church's spiritual authority and the Roman State's jurisdiction was blurred. One of the outcomes of this blurring of Church and State was a sharing of State powers of legal enforcement between Church and State authorities, with the state enforcing what it determined to be orthodox teaching.
Remember, of course, that Rome, in the West, fell, and it was not until the High Middle Ages and on into the Early Modern Period that ecclesiastical courts began to arise and that the medieval Inquisitions began to come into place. The reason that I am saying this is because heresy was a somewhat nebulous concept in medieval Catholicism. For instance, Giordano Bruno was likely burned at the stake more due to his denial of the Divinity of Christ than his suggestion that there was an infinitude of Worlds. In addition, Bruno spent 7 years in a Roman Inquisitorial jail before his final condemnation, which was likely participated by him. And, so, heresy often depended on the heretic and his/her attitude towards the ecclesiastical authority.
