Prior to Constantine,” says the book Europe—A History, “Christians had not sought to assume [political] power as a means of furthering their cause. After Constantine, Christianity and high politics went hand in hand.”
Historian John L. von Mosheim called first-century Christians “a set of men of the most harmless inoffensive character, who never harboured in their minds a wish or thought inimical to the welfare of the state.”
the book After Jesus—The Triumph of Christianity: “While Christians may not have engaged in emperor worship, they were not rabble-rousers, and their religion, while odd and at times offensive from the pagan point of view, posed no real threat to the empire.”
Noting an interesting parallel, lecturer in church history Geoffrey F. Nuttall commented: “The early Christian attitude to war was more like that of the people who call themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses than it is comfortable for us to suppose.”
The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity states: “The early church saw itself as one new humanity in which previously hostile groups, Jews and Gentiles, could live together in one body of peace.”
List item 3
List item 3
List item 3
"Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books." www.aloha.net/~mikesch/banned.htm
"For all the things that were written beforehand were written for our instruction, so that through our endurance and through the comfort from the Scriptures we might have hope." -Romans 15:4
"It must be universally true, that three things to which the same definition applies can never make only one thing to which the same definition applies . . . If, therefore, the three persons agree in this same circumstance, that they are each of them perfect God, though they may differ in other respects, and have peculiar relations to each other and to us, they must still be three Gods; and to say that they are only one God is as much a contradiction, as to say that three men, though they differ from one another as much as three men do, are not three men, but only one man"
