Jerusalem-based Christianity ignored

YOUR series on religion in modern Ireland (March 20/21) covered the many influences shaping religion, the standing of religion in today’s society and the opportunities of the Celtic Tiger bridging the wide gap with darker economic climes when one alternative to the emigrant boat had the consoling name of “vocation”.

However, I take issue with Conor Ryan’s history of Christianity.

Besides straying over the dividing line between religious belief and history, he also ignored the centuries of Jerusalem-based Christianity in which that religion poured out to the Roman Empire. The sees of Jerusalem, Byzantium, Rome and Alexandria were all equal in authority. The diversity of that period of “host Christianities” reflects much freedom of belief, but that was to change. And change it did when that religion became Roman-based.

Constantine hijacked it and made Christianity the state religion of a military superpower, with the cross as a war emblem.

But what about Constantine’s successors whose status was reduced to that of Byzantium emperors? There now was a rival power in the west, the papal monarchy. The Bishop of Rome was in control.

Muslims, in time, would be given a bloody lesson in the art of jihad by papal crusaders and just one crusade against heresy would wipe out more Christians than were killed by Nero and Diocletian combined.

It is important, then, to remember that this institution is not a legacy of a “nomadic Jew crucified at the age of 33”, as Mr Ryan would have us believe, but in fact the legacy of the man who bore the self-proclaimed title of “God’s vicar on earth” — Constantine, who murdered kith and kin to ascend the imperial throne.

Eric McCarthy

Charles Daly Road

Togher

Cork