1. Christianity now became Romanized, because the Roman Empire, which had previously persecuted Christians, became Christian in this century. As a result, Christianity went through a great mixture with the infiltration of Roman culture into the young Christian movement. Christians went from being oppressed to being oppressors, from simplicity to opulence, from a very simple form of worship to a highly sophisticated and sumptuous one, a worship that brought much of Greco Roman culture into Christianity.

2. This century, as mentioned in the first part of this study, is extremely rich in information. We will highlight only the most important points, those that, in our understanding, need to be emphasized.

3. Remember that Emperor Constantine, responsible for the Edict of Milan in the year 313, had not yet made Christianity the official religion of the Empire. Although he converted to Christianity, what he proclaimed with the Edict of Tolerance was an opening for Christian worship, an official permission that allowed Christians to practice their faith without persecution. The Empire became officially Christian only in the year 380 under Theodosius.

4. At the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325, the Canon of the Church was established. Many doctrines were defined and incorporated into Christian thought, and at that moment great figures of the Patristic era, the Fathers of the Church, emerged.

5. The Council of Laodicea, held in 364, was not exactly a Council but more of a Synod. The difference is that a Council has a universal character, with bishops and presbyters from all over the world meeting to discuss the Canon, the creed, and the apostolic legitimacy of what would become Church doctrine. A Synod is a local gathering.

6. At this Synod in 364, they met in one of the early Churches mentioned in the text of Revelation to discuss several articles of faith. The most important outcome was that the holy day ceased to be Saturday, the day of rest prescribed in Exodus, and became Sunday.

7. Laodicea established Sunday as the Lord’s Day. The word for Sunday in Latin comes from Dominus, meaning Lord. Sunday became the Lord’s Day also because it was on a Sunday that the women went to the tomb where Jesus had been placed and found it empty. They encountered Him on a Sunday, and because this was considered a great joy, the day became known as the Lord’s Day. This is why mass takes place on Sunday, to celebrate the resurrection. In this same Synod the previous understanding of the Holy Trinity was questioned and rejected as untrue.

8. Christianity had become closely tied to the Roman Empire. After Constantine came Emperor Julian, who entered history known as the apostate, meaning he broke with the faith and disagreed with the Canon. At the Synod of Laodicea he rejected the Holy Trinity.

9. There was a regression in ideas, as the notion that the Holy Trinity did not exist returned. This emperor caused a rupture and revived the ideas of Arius, that God and Jesus were not the same. Some even went back to pagan ideas. However, the doctrine of the Trinity was restored in 381 at the Council of Constantinople under Emperor Theodosius, who by then was a Christian.

10. Therefore, it cannot truly be said that Constantine was the one who made the Roman Empire Christian. He began the process, but it did not continue because Emperor Julian reversed it. Emperor Theodosius, in 381, reestablished Christianity and rebuilt what Julian had undone. He was the one who definitively made the Roman Empire Christian.

11. The veneration of images was approved at this Synod because the Romans traditionally worshipped images of their gods. So they built altars for the saints of the Church. This led to changes in the order of the Ten Commandments. The second commandment, which appears on the Tablets of the Law forbidding carved images, was removed, and the last commandment was divided into two to maintain ten commandments.

12. Among Christians who were deeply rooted in early Christianity, debates arose about the veneration of images, because image worship did not exist in early Christianity, but for Romans it was normal. This created great confusion until the next century, when the Council of Chalcedon in 451 finally resolved the issue of image worship. The Church gradually altered parts of early Christianity.

13. Emperor Theodosius, who was Christian, declared in 380 that the Edict of Tolerance was no longer valid and that from then on the Roman Empire would be Christian. In 381 he convened another Council, the second Universal Ecumenical Council of Constantinople. There he reaffirmed the Nicene Creed, that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the same being.

14. He also decreed that since the Empire was Christian, everyone would be obliged to convert to Christianity. This Council took place in the capital of the Eastern Empire rather than the Western Empire because the Western Roman Empire had fallen.

15. In 374 the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Alaric invaded Rome and deposed the emperor, who at the time was a boy of thirteen. Alaric besieged Rome, and Odoacer took control of the Western Empire. Some Roman citizens said the Empire had fallen because it had become Christian. Others, who were Christians, said the opposite: that if the Empire had not become Christian, even the Eastern part would not have survived.

16. All the countries around the Mediterranean Sea were part of the Roman Empire. The Romans even considered the entire Mediterranean Sea as their property because it was fully contained within their territory. They even changed the name of the sea.

17. Jerome, in this century, was extremely important because he produced a version of the Bible that had first been translated from Hebrew into Greek, the second language of the time, and then from Greek into Latin, which was the spoken language of the Romans. He went to Bethlehem, and near what became known as the Church of the Nativity he began producing a Latin version of the Bible known as the Latin Vulgate. He wanted to make it common and accessible to the language of the people.

18. However, several problems arose. The first translation made from Hebrew for the Old Testament was into Greek in a version known as the Septuagint, produced by seventy scholars who gathered in Alexandria, Egypt. But some Hebrew words lose their meaning in translation, and others cannot be translated at all. Hebrew originally had no vowels or even numbers, only consonants used also as numerals. Even so, they translated it.

19. Jerome took the Septuagint, translated into Greek, and then translated it into Latin. Since the first translation was not exactly faithful to the Hebrew, later translations were also not exact.

20. When the seventy scholars of Alexandria translated the Bible, they included some books known as the deuterocanonical books that were not in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. These included Baruch, Judith, Wisdom, Tobit, First and Second Maccabees, and Sirach. They also inserted additions into the books of Esther and Daniel. Thus the Bible we have today was translated from Hebrew into Greek with added books, then from Greek into Latin, and so on.

21. Jerome was strongly questioned at the time. Even Augustine of Hippo advised him not to make the translation. Nevertheless, he wanted to remain aligned with the customs of the time. Since the Empire was Roman and the spoken language was Latin, he decided to produce the Vulgate.

22. All reading of the Bible must be done carefully, with the awareness that there may be interpolations and words whose best meaning is not exactly what appears in the text. We can follow the suggestion of Paul in the second letter to the Corinthians, chapter three, verse six: the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.

23. Greek had been the most important language of the period because it was the language of Alexander the Great. When the Macedonian Empire spread across the world, Alexander carried Greek with him and made it the official language of the world. When the Roman Empire arose, Latin replaced Greek.

24. Jerome was important not only for creating the Latin Vulgate but also for deciding which writings would form the Canon of the New Testament, determining which Gospels would belong to it.

25. Augustine of Hippo was born in Tagaste, in North Africa, in the year 354. North Africa was very productive in creating great Christian apologists. He was also a man who eventually converted. His mother was a saintly woman who prayed for him every day and who was later canonized as Saint Monica.

26. Augustine lived according to the values and customs of his time. He was very studious but also someone who enjoyed the pleasures of the world. He involved himself with women and with drinking. His mother constantly urged him to rethink his life and change his behavior.

27. Augustine left Tagaste and went to Carthage, where he devoted himself to study. He loved reading the classics, wanted to teach, and enjoyed being admired for his learning. He was very vain. He wrote two remarkable works, Confessions and The City of God. His conversion came later.

28. At first he studied the doctrine of Mani, also known as Manichaeism, created by a third century Persian teacher who taught that the universe is structured around two opposing forces with no middle ground, and that the struggle between them produces the maturation of good. Augustine became a Manichaean.

29. Later he became a Neoplatonist, interpreting life through the lens of Platonism, reading the works of Plato and Plotinus. He came to understand reality as divided between a sensible world and a world of ideas, a world of essences and a material world. Plato called these the sensible world and the intelligible world, the world of forms and the world of ideas, and said that reason allows us to travel from one to the other.

30. His mother continued encouraging him to rethink his life and evolve in his way of thinking. He became so vain that he went to Europe to teach. In the city of Milan he began the process of conversion. There was a bishop in Milan named Ambrose. Hearing his sermons about Jesus and the beauty of the Gospel, Augustine began to convert.

31. At first he blended Platonism with Christianity. For him, Christianity was a perfection of Platonic ideas. But instead of reason allowing us to reach the intelligible world, it was the grace of God.

32. On the day of his conversion, a Sunday in the year 387, he was thirty three. While walking in a garden near the Church he heard a child’s voice saying take and read. He picked up the Bible and opened it at random to the letter to the Romans, chapter thirteen, which said to live decently as in the daytime, avoiding drunkenness, debauchery, quarrels, and jealousy, and to clothe oneself with the Lord Jesus Christ rather than seek to satisfy the desires of the flesh. He then became Christian.

33. Augustine of Hippo was responsible for the conversion of Alaric the Visigoth. When Alaric invaded Rome, Augustine went to him and explained that the Roman Empire was already in decline. He asked him to spare the women and children by allowing them to remain in the temples, untouched. Alaric respected Augustine’s request because of his moral authority.

34. In 391 Augustine became a priest in Hippo, and in 395 he became its bishop. He eventually became a major authority in the Church. He began combating two common heresies of the time. Heresy means to be in disagreement with the Church’s teachings, and therefore heretics had to be opposed.

35. The first heresy he fought was Donatism, from an earlier bishop of Carthage named Donatus. This bishop taught that someone who became a priest or bishop after the Roman Empire became Christian had no moral authority. If during the time of Emperor Diocletian a person had enlisted in the Roman army or worshipped the sun god or cooperated with imperial abuses, they could not have moral authority. Donatism taught that to administer the sacraments one needed to have been persecuted and to have maintained the purity of early Christian purpose.

36. Augustine argued that this was wrong and declared that once we become Christians it is because the grace of God has made us new creatures. The past is left behind, and from then on we remain united by faith in Jesus Christ. Augustine defended the unity of the Church.

37. The second heresy he opposed was Pelagianism, from a British monk named Pelagius. This monk taught that humans have free will and can even choose not to be religious and still be saved. What matters, he said, are a person’s actions, not doctrine. If someone chooses to be good without being Christian, they will be saved. Augustine contradicted him, saying that salvation requires the grace of God, which is irresistible, and that one must be within religion. To be saved, at some point one must accept Jesus in order to receive His grace.

38. God does not choose the qualified, but qualifies the chosen.