INTRODUCTION
This chapter aims to sharpen some of the notions I advanced in chapter 1
in the light of the intervening discussion. Again, my interest here has pri-
marily to do with earliest Christianity. The latter’s apparent aptitude for suc-
cess as a religion of empire is the issue that most concerns me now. The fact
that Christianity came to triumph as it did is not something I personally find
appealing—neither historically nor otherwise. Indeed, if there is a larger pur-
pose to this chapter, it is to remind those who yet remain identified with
this legacy (as many of our social institutions still do) of Christianity’s
latent and lymphoid lust for social dominance. Unlike Ethelbert Stauffer
(1955, esp. p. 275) I do not consider the establishment of Constantine’s
imperium gratiaeversus Rome’s imperium naturaeto represent a significant
change in kind. In fact, while describing the supposed difference between
the two, Stauffer himself speaks of the former as “the renewed empire,”
although he also claims, incredibly, that the Christian version was “an
empire which practised forgiveness.”
I do not think that Christianity was destined, in any way, to succeed
(in) the Roman Empire. Neither, however, do I think that Christianity’s
eventual success in this realm was merely a function of fortune: the result
of a happy mix of accident or opportunity and propitious habits. Without
denying the role that such factors undoubtedly played in constructing the
historical script of emerging Christian hegemony, these factors were able
to contribute to this outcome, I suggest, only because such a script was