CHANGES IN CHRISTIANITY

Changes in Christianity ~ 16 ~ the people who entered the Church during his reign did not do so because of any deep-rooted intellectual conviction. They became Christians without changing their thoughts and attitudes. For most of them, faith was a matter of expediency, not conviction. They started moulding Christian beliefs according to their previous, non-Christian beliefs. Eventually a religion with little relation to the teachings of Jesus came into being. The historian, Adolf Harnack, has quite rightly pointed out that ‘by the 4th century the living Gospel had been masked in Greek philosophy,’ (Adolf Harnack, Outline of the History of Dogma) Anything that is associated with a religion for a long time becomes sacrosanct. So after a few hundred years, this altered version of Christianity came to be revered as sacred. That which had initially been adopted on the grounds of expediency came to be considered as a genuine part of the religion taught by Jesus. The Greek sciences, which had no evidence to support them, came to be known as Christian science. Subjects such as ‘Christian topography’ came into