Let’s scroll forward in history a bit. We’ll move from the Binding of Isaac (<<see blog) to the 4th Century.
Kronos or Cronus– Ate his children. One of them, Zeus, escaped. Zeus came back and killed his father. The odd part of the story is then Zeus killed his children. Answer; Zeus failed and Kronos assumed his son’s identity.
Saturn – Ate his children because it had been foretold one of them would overthrow him, The story is widely believed to have been appropriated from the Greek of Kronos. But what if the myth was about a real man or “god,” just in a different society and a different lifetime?
We’ll skip Pontius Pilate for now.
And here we are, the 4th Century! Constantine the Great became emperor of Rome in 306 AD. Christianity had been illegal since it’s emergence in the 1st Century. By the 3rd Century the religion was largely tolerated.
One of the worst events for Christians was the Diocletian Persecution of 303 AD. The Tetrarchs launched the purges against Christians for failure to comply to Roman laws requiring sacrifices to their gods. Constantine’s father Constantius was one of the Tetrarchs. Constantine witnessed the purges but did not try to intervene.
Constantine was able to establish sole rule over the Roman Empire. Much of this had to do with political manipulations and making overtures to those who had power taken from them in the past. The Christians were not the only group Constantine helped to gain support for himself, the nobility of the Senate for example. In 313 AD the Edict of Milan restored legality to Christianity and returned their properties that had been confiscated during the Diocletian Purges.
In 325 AD the First Council of Nicaea defined to a great degree what would become Christianity of the future. It was born of a disagreement between Arius and Alexander of Alexandria concerning the nature of Jesus. The Trinitarian beliefs won out. Much of the what the Tanakh lost in translation (<<see blog) to the Old Testament comes from this time.
Constantine had previously called for Christianity to settle disputes. He attempted to resolve a schism over Donatism in North Africa, first appointing Miltiades, Bishop of Rome to hear the dispute with the instruction “I do not wish you to leave schism or division of any kind anywhere.” This led to the Council of Aries. That’s what I call thinking of the future!
Constantine was not a fan of Judaism however. In 329 AD he issued laws prohibiting Jews to own Christian slaves, prohibited mixed marriages and punished by death conversion of Christians to Judaism.
Constantine later moved to the humbly renamed Constantinopolis formerly Byzantium. He converted to Christianity on his death bed in 337. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy would become the religions of the Roman State in 380 AD.
Constantine I had his son Crispus executed. The reasons for this vary according to the historian one references. Constantine used his authority to expunge the records of the existence of his son. Fortunately he wasn’t completely successful.