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Dec. 26, 2024 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec

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The Chronicles of the Christians - Part I: The Rise of Christianity

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	This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
	A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
	This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
	Christ is King!
	O Santa, O Santa, O Santa, O Santa, O Santa, O Santa, O Santa, be all of thee.
	Benedictus qui, benit in nomine domini.
	Is this the man you think so dangerous?
	This?
	The man that aspires to be a king.
	Come.
	Come, come, come.
	Now, the leaders of the Sanhedrin accuse you of preaching perverted doctrines.
	Come, come, come.
	come they also say you call yourself the king of the jews Well, are you king of the Jews?
	If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would have fought to prevent me from being captured.
	Oh, you speak of a kingdom.
	Therefore, you must be a king.
	Are you a king?
	I am.
	I was born for one purpose.
	I am.
	To bear witness to the truth.
	All who can accept the truth hear my voice.
	And what is the truth?
	Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to the Chronicles of the Christians.
	This is a journey unlike any you've embarked upon before, and I'll be your guide through this spiritual narrative, where history isn't just about a sequence of events, but living, breathing, testament to faith, power, and the divine.
	This isn't your typical Sunday school lesson.
	This is history with its armor off, revealing the scars and miracles that have shaped the very fabric of the Western world.
	I'm talking about Christianity, not as a footnote in history books, but as the main character in a saga of human endeavor, conflict, and transformation.
	Imagine a story where miracles aren't just tales for children, but pivotal moments that change the course of nations.
	We'll explore the miracles of healing, of resurrection, of divine intervention in times of darkest despair.
	These aren't just stories.
	They're the lifeblood of a faith that has endured against all odds.
	But this series isn't just about the spiritual.
	We'll delve into the gritty, the political, the warfare that's often been fought under the banner of the cross.
	From the Crusades to the fights to defend Christendom, we'll look at how faith influenced battles, not just in the physical realm, but in the ideological wars that shaped kingdoms.
	And shaped empires.
	We'll see how the power of Christ was not just in the peace of the church, but in the chaos of battlefields.
	And politics, oh, they've always been intertwined with faith.
	The rise and fall of popes, the schisms that split the church, the alliances and betrayals, all part of the divine political chess game where every move could alter the course of history.
	And we'll explore how Christianity didn't just react to the politics of time, but actively shaped it.
	From its humble beginnings, to Rome, to the Vatican's influence in global affairs.
	But at its heart, the Chronicles of the Christians is about the power of Christ in a way you've never seen before.
	It's about a simple message.
	From a man in Galilee, and how it echoed throughout the centuries, influencing art, law, culture, and the very soul of Western civilization.
	This series will challenge you to see Christianity not just as some religion, but as a force that has built, broken, and rebuilt the Western world time and time again.
	So whether you're a believer, a skeptic, or just a lover of history, join us.
	Let's uncover the untold, the controversial, and the miraculous.
	Let's see how the teachings of Christ have not only survived, but thrived, shaping our world in ways we are only just now beginning to understand.
	Prepare for a journey through time where faith meets reality, where the divine meets the human, and where every episode promises to reveal the unseen layers of history.
	This is the Chronicles of the Christians.
	The Chronicles of the Christians
	All right, we're back.
	Chronicles of the Christians, Jack Posobiec, and I wanted to introduce our co-host for the first couple of installments here.
	It is, ladies and gentlemen, we're bringing him back, fan favorite or fan frenemy, I'm not sure.
	It's Blake Neff, co-host of Thought Crime and also a producer on The Charlie Kirk Show, and the co-host for Chronicles of the Revolution last year, which turned into The New York Times bestseller, Unhumans, The Secret History of Communist Revolutions and How to Crush Them.
	What's up, Blake?
	Jack, it's very, very good to be here.
	So, Blake, what is this Christianity thing?
	You know, we hear about it, you know, obviously we know the religion, we know the crosses, they're all over the place.
	You can't really go anywhere without, anywhere in the European or Western world without, you know, seeing elements of Christianity.
	But how did it I mean, certainly it wasn't always like this.
	I mean, people used to believe in the pagan gods, and we kind of get this story that, you know, okay, so Jesus happens, right?
	Jesus is crucified.
	Jesus dies on the cross.
	He comes back to life.
	He appears to some crowds.
	But it's not like the whole world is immediately Christian right after that.
	And usually we kind of get this story that, oh, well, Constantine became Christian around 300 AD, and then the whole Roman Empire just became Christian, and that's that.
	But it's probably a little bit more complicated than all that, isn't it?
	Yeah, exactly, Jack.
	It's one of the most fascinating stories in world history, because we basically have no good analog for it in history.
	I mean, we have the spread of Islam, but the spread of Islam is there's a small group that follows Islam, and they conquer a bunch of territory, and it's instantly this big religion.
	With Christianity, what we have is we have something that is just an obscure faith.
	in a very marginal province a very marginal part of this vast empire and it grows to become this absolutely immense and it grows and grows and grows and it's only 300 years later that they convert their first you know Leader of an entire country and then from there they just keep going because that empire, the Roman Empire, it collapses and yet it still keeps growing.
	It expands into new kingdoms and it just grows and grows and grows and becomes the most influential ideology of any kind in in world history that we all Even if you're not Christian, even if you follow a religion other than Christianity, you live in the Christian world, the world that Christianity built.
	We all have its imprint on our brains, on how we see the world, on how we think about moral questions.
	And it's one of the most interesting stories in world history.
	Obviously, the saga of Christ himself is fascinating, but what his followers in the centuries that followed were able to do.
	And so the story of Constantine that people do know, and that is also associated with a miracle.
	And Constantine, he was fighting in a war against, of course, another emperor of Rome or would-be emperor of Rome in northern Italy.
	And he's about to cross this, or there's this Battle of the Bridge, the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, and he purportedly sees We're good to go.
	He legalizes Christianity because prior to then, you know, I think most people know this part of the story that Christianity wasn't exactly encouraged in the Roman Empire prior to this, and at that point he makes it legal.
	He doesn't necessarily just force everyone to become Christian, does he?
	No, not at all.
	It starts off with just, as you say, an edict of toleration.
	And it was quite the swerve, because just a few decades before you have, or just a few years before, you have the persecution of Diocletian, the Great Persecution, they called it, where Diocletian is a Roman emperor, and he orders very intense targeting of Christians.
	This is Probably when the most people would have ever been martyred for Christianity.
	It actually causes a split in the Christian community because you have some people who abandon the faith under pressure.
	And then there's a whole debate, like, do we welcome these people back?
	And ultimately, the ruling was, yes, we do.
	And then you have more persecutions under Diocletian's successor.
	I think it was...
	I don't want to get the emperor wrong.
	There's a lot of emperors.
	And then it swerves back to toleration.
	But it's a very generous toleration.
	Constantine gives a lot of patronage to Christians.
	He puts a lot of Christians in senior positions of his imperial administration.
	And of course, Constantine himself becomes a Christian and he makes his sons into Christians.
	And so from there, it's just like a rocket ship.
	It gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
	It becomes more and more popular, especially with the urban classes of the Roman Empire.
	And then from there, it spreads into the masses.
	But I think one of the most amazing things is...
	Is there kind of an idea that, oh, well, if the emperor and the royal family are Christian, then we should be Christian too, because that'll kind of...
	You know, that'll kind of help us get in with the Emperor.
	Is it purely a political thing?
	Or was it something where it was catching on and people were saying, hey, there's something to this?
	I mean, it's definitely a mixture of both.
	You see Christians at the time complain who say, oh, you know, our faith, like, it was so pure when we were a persecuted faith because everyone was very much a true believer.
	And then once the emperors are...
	Oh, yeah, the OGs.
	So the OGs were, like, complaining about it.
	Like, oh, I was a Christian when it was hard to be Christian.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	If it makes you feel better, if it makes everyone feel better, what I can say is that I'm drawing a lot on this book that's a favorite of mine, The Barbarian Conversion from Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher.
	Very nerdy book, but if you like nerdy books, it's a fun one.
	And one of the things in it is, for all of Christian history, the Christians of our present moment say, ugh!
	The past generations of Christians were just so much better than us.
	They were so much more devout.
	And now people today, they don't care.
	They're all terrible.
	They've been doing that 2,000 years straight.
	They were doing it in the 300s.
	They were doing it in 1,000.
	They were doing it in 1,500.
	And they're doing it today.
	So, you know, maybe that makes people feel a bit better about, you know, what our own situation is with Christianity in the wider world.
	Except I'm the opposite.
	So it was happening then, yeah.
	I think that the current trend is slightly different.
	It's more of like bucking the trend.
	You hear this with Zoomers who, you know, get converted.
	And they say, no, we want to be more devout than the generation prior because they weren't devout enough.
	Maybe we're living through a brand new trend, and if so, it could be something really amazing.
	We could see a big revival, and that's another thing that we see in history.
	There are big swings.
	Sometimes the reduction is just, oh, from the conversion of Constantine to the Reformation, they'll call it the age of faith.
	And it was an age of faith, but it was an age where it rose and it fell.
	You had entire regions.
	England, for example.
	England or Britain under the Romans had a lot of Christians.
	And then the Roman Empire falls.
	It gets conquered.
	And Christianity in Britain, in northern France, it basically vanishes.
	It gets wiped out.
	Pagans conquer it.
	And they have to bring it back.
	And if you were living through that, it might have felt like it was the end of the world.
	Oh, Christianity has been defeated.
	You know, northern Gaul overrun.
	The Christians ransacked.
	The bishops, the priests, they're gone.
	And hundreds of years later, they bring it back.
	They expand it again with this missionary zeal from new places.
	Ireland, for example, gets converted by St. Patrick in the late Roman Empire.
	All the places around it get taken out.
	Britain gets overrun, like I said.
	Gaul gets overrun.
	And then in the 500s, the 600s, the 700s, you have missionaries coming out of Ireland, bringing Christianity back.
	And it's one of the most amazing stories, and it's not widely known today.
	Right.
	And so, well, let's go back to the one that people know.
	So people know about St. Patrick.
	People obviously know St. Patrick's Day.
	There's a lot of cultural iconography around that.
	But so what you're saying is actually the core of it is true, that St. Patrick really was not just the priest who converted Ireland, but he really was the first Christian missionary of anywhere.
	Exactly.
	I mean, beyond the apostles themselves, obviously.
	Yeah, and we have the stories of the apostles themselves, but it's also, it's not well super documented what they did, whereas with St. Patrick, we have a little more primary source evidence about how it happened, and I think the line from the book itself that I have saved here,
	he says, as far as our evidence goes, St. Patrick was the first person in Christian history to truly take the scriptural injunctions literally, to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire.
	And that's what made him so amazing.
	Christianity In the ancient times, it was an urban religion.
	It's kind of natural.
	It's a communal religion.
	You have to go to a church to do the church services, all the stuff we associate with church-going.
	It naturally requires settlement.
	And he went to this place.
	Ireland had no cities.
	It had no towns.
	It was like itinerant bands.
	It had more than 200 or so kingdoms in this tiny island.
	No place could be harder to establish the Christian faith in.
	And he manages to do it and turns it into this huge source of scholarship, a source of Christian learning, a source of Christian missionaries.
	It was a very remarkable accomplishment that we really It's easy to underplay it with the simple stories we hear about St. Patrick.
	That's right.
	And this is actually a monumental shift, not just for the spread of the faith, but also this idea that Christianity could be hardy and that could go into a place as austere as you're describing and actually work there as well.
	And so it's showing an adaptability and it's showing a perhaps central truth or central veracity that so many people have been able to glom onto and the spread of it throughout Europe.
	As an end of this really is something that we should all understand and perhaps understand better as we are even here in our Christian season.
	We'll be right back.
	The Chronicles of the Christians, The Rise of Christianity.
	Jack Posobiec, Blake Duff.
	Et Trinitate, inunitate.
	Sous-titrage ST' 501 And we're back.
	The Chronicles of the Christians, the rise of Christianity.
	Now, Blake, someone that I want to talk to, you know, going back as well, is the role of St. Helena, who was the mother of Constantine.
	And correct me if I'm wrong, but she was Christian before him, right?
	So the mom had converted before the son.
	I double-checked this.
	It is debated.
	So there are some narratives where she converted before and may have exposed him to Christianity, you know, prayed for him.
	There are other accounts.
	I know Eusebius writes in early church history, and in his version, Constantine converts first.
	So it's not clear, but there are definitely traditions in which she was the person who came first.
	And that's very common throughout Christian history.
	Yeah, but everyone agrees there was definitely a mother-son dynamic to it.
	Yes, yes, for sure.
	And she was definitely a very enthusiastic Christian.
	Right, right, very devout.
	And coming from a mother who is also a very devout and enthusiastic Christian, Catholic Christian, I can certainly relate to Constantine when it comes to that.
	So one of the big things that St. Helena is known for, though, is she's the one who embarks in, so this is a couple of decades later, and she's still around after the Edict of Milan, I guess about 10 years after that.
	She conducts this first pilgrimage to the Holy Land and she kind of becomes the first pilgrim to the Holy Land.
	So she goes to Jerusalem and she's looking for the holy sites and saying, look, I'm a Christian now.
	I really believe this stuff.
	And, you know, travel was expensive back then.
	But, you know, when your son's the emperor, it's not so bad.
	And so she goes in and says, look, I want to find these relics.
	Like, where was the site of the crucifixion?
	Where was Jesus's tomb?
	And of course, one of the big ones that she's associated with is the finding of the true cross.
	And of course, this one is hotly debated.
	And I'll just tell the quick story, though, is that one of the One of the traditions that we have regarding the True Cross that was supposedly found by St. Helena was that a terminally ill woman was brought before the site of the True Cross and each cross was touched to her,
	but only when the third cross was applied that it led to an immediate And that was how she was able to identify it as the cross and that of course it also had the title above it the INRI Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews and she then has them sent to Constantinople she has this this sent around and then thus begins to be the building of I
	sites.
	And to be fair, there had been pilgrimages before, and she certainly wasn't the first one.
	But the fact that the emperor's mother was going to these places certainly brought with it an amount of prestige and an amount of wealth that just sort of your average peasant pilgrim wouldn't necessarily bring, and a lot of renown.
	And it really kind of started this overall process of Europeans conducting pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
	Exactly.
	And this was a huge part of the Christian experience, especially in this period.
	I mean, we obviously still have pilgrimage today, but it was enormously popular in a time where it was very difficult to be a pilgrim.
	We have evidence that, you know, even in the Middle Ages, you'd have bishops and they would organize these giant, multiple thousands of people would go on a big pilgrimage journey.
	To the Holy Land.
	And then you had more local pilgrimages, famously the Canterbury Tales, one of the foundational works of English literature.
	It's about pilgrims going to Canterbury, so the chief church in the English church at the time.
	And you have, there's famously a pilgrimage site at What's the name?
	It's in northwestern Spain.
	It's like the route of St. James, and they would go to a shrine there.
	And, of course, Rome has always been a popular site for pilgrims.
	And so there's a strong tradition of piety expressing itself through actions.
	And that's been, from the earliest days of Christianity as a big public religion, that's been a part of it.
	And we owe that to a Roman emperor's mother.
	Well, now, one of the pieces, though, going back to this, is that it's not just Golgotha, so the spot where this had gone on.
	However, listen to this.
	According to tradition, upon arriving in Jerusalem, St. Helena aimed to find the site of Jesus' crucifixion.
	Which was then buried under a temple of Venus, which had been erected by Emperor Hadrian to suppress Christian veneration at the site.
	And so this is, you know, Christians had been going here and pilgrims for a long time since the crucifixion because they knew this was the site.
	And yet a pagan temple had been built on top of the site.
	St. Helena, of course, orders that to be destroyed and then the site converted into a church.
	But this really speaks to how there was a huge process of the conversion from and of course as the title of your book is this process of conversion of the pagans into Christianity.
	This was not and the pagan pantheon of people I think know the Roman gods and the Greek gods and There were and the Norse gods, but there were so many others and even lesser gods and there were just there were religions all over the place and everyone was competing for to be like the top religion at the time which was a huge thing and not really in a sense that we have today in society where sure you know you can you know you can go on google and look up a bunch of different churches in your area but you don't really have this competition like
	we did back then and these claims of primacy and claims that we are the one true religion so How is it that Christianity in that context is able to really come out on top?
	I mean, certainly if the emperor converts, that's not just going to be enough to get people who are true believers to say, all right, never mind, forget about Venus and Jupiter and Zeus and all that nonsense and Thor.
	No, we're going to go with this guy from where?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, Israel and Jerusalem and these places that no one's ever heard of.
	Yeah, it's another, I think, I'd say it's a myth of early Christianity, is the claim that, or you'll have critics who will say, you know, Christianity is just another religion, it could have been anything.
	You'll run into this, you'd see this in the online hot takes about why Christianity is bad.
	They'll say, for example, Mithraism is basically the same religion, they'll say, and that could have been picked instead, or there's other faiths.
	That's really not the case.
	If you read into the details, you definitely find we have a handful of critics of Christianity whose writings have survived and what they'll say.
	For example, the Emperor Julian, Julian the Apostate.
	He was the last Roman Emperor to be a pagan.
	And he wrote these attacks on Christianity, and one of the things he says in these attacks is, you know, it's a big problem how those Christians are actually so much better at following through on their moral claims, and they're really good.
	One of the things he says is the Christians are great at...
	Universally loving people.
	So we have accounts from people who aren't Christians where they say, when a plague hits a city, the pagans will treat the pagans and the Christians will treat everybody.
	They will treat everyone basically equally in that regard.
	And we have accounts where In the ancient pagan world, the pagans would, it was common to expose infants, for example, if they weren't wanted or if they were disabled, and they say, the Christians don't do this.
	The Christians, like, they care for every life, they would say.
	Like, you're not talking about child sacrifice, are you, and child killing?
	Ooh!
	Because certainly there were no pagans that would ever participate in that.
	Yeah, child sacrifice, but also just treating lives as not holding value.
	And that was a big innovation of Christianity.
	And I think that's one of the most important things.
	It's not just that Christianity is monotheistic.
	There had been other monotheistic religions, and there was a trend towards a more monotheistic attitude in the pagan times.
	Judaism obviously was a monotheistic religion, and there were Tons of Jews that lived in Rome, the city, and also obviously throughout the empire, but you don't really see a, you don't see that level of, some obviously who are even citizens, but you don't necessarily see that level of spiritual or theological acceptance of Judaism anywhere in the Roman elite.
	Not nearly as much.
	And you do even see a trend, like I say, towards a monotheistic attitude.
	So, for example, there's a cult of this syncretic Egyptian Greek god named Serapis.
	And this is a big god in the East, and it is...
	People do go towards that faith, and you start seeing people say things like, Yeah, there are other gods, but Serapis is definitely the number one god, and he's cooler than the other ones, and he answers prayers that other gods won't necessarily answer.
	There's a trend there, but Christianity really is a level up over this, where it's a very strong belief in this monotheistic god, but also just the level of moral seriousness they bring to it.
	It's such an advance over paganism.
	In paganism, the gods are much more capricious.
	The gods might have moral expectations of you, but they don't necessarily listen to prayers.
	The gods themselves are often not very moral beings.
	You have the famous stories where Zeus has slept with every single woman, which is probably some holdover from every town had its own chief god and they all got merged into Zeus.
	And Christianity was just such an advance on that, of a God who individually cares about you, who, like, your fate is, he cares deeply about your spiritual fate, and he has very sincere expectations for you,
	that our faith Our faith carries with it moral commandments that we Expect people to follow and this seems to have just really worked and resonated with people I think one of the most incredible things about Christian history and we can talk more about this if you want is one of the reasons Christianity wins is it really embeds itself into people's mindsets they think this is The faith that the world needs.
	And you have elites, you have very wealthy, very powerful people spreading it for centuries on end.
	And so I want to get into that in the next segment here, but let me just ask you that question right there.
	Did they actually believe it, or was it all just cynical?
	They 100% believed it.
	What they did makes no sense unless millions of people really believed this.
	Millions of people really and truly cared about Christianity and the Christian project to bring it forward through the ages, starting in the Roman Empire, all the way up to today.
	That's something that we need to talk about because that is absolutely fascinating and you're not going to hear this anywhere else.
	Stay tuned.
	Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, more The Rise of Christianity in the Chronicles of the Christians.
	In Unitate, in Unitate, in Verum, in Trinitate. in Verum, in Trinitate.
	Okay folks, we're back here.
	Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff, The Chronicles of the Christians, The Rise of Christianity.
	Folks, we are in crunch time right now.
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	Go to mypatriotsupply.com to order your three-month emergency food kit Alright, Blake, so we're talking about this idea that the early Christians and the Christians as Europe became Christian and we're talking kings and elites and lords and all of these other royals that this wasn't just some cynical, you know, one-off, oh, you know, we're doing this because the emperor said to, that they actually devoutly believed in Christianity.
	And you and I were talking prior to the episode that one of the ways that we see this is through the founding of the great monasteries, which really become the blueprint for universities, but the fact that tons of money, the equivalent of like billions of dollars today, were spent on this project.
	Yeah, it's exactly the case, Jack.
	We have pretty good source records on this that, you know, we'll have people's wills where they'll leave money for this and, you know, of course we have the sites, the monasteries themselves.
	We have, people are spending, yeah, as you say, Millions, billions of modern-day dollars to establish churches, to establish monasteries, to support priests, to support mission work in other places.
	And the author of that book I mentioned, the word he uses is staggering.
	He says the numbers are practically unbelievable, except that it's so well-attested that they actually did this.
	And, you know, obviously it's monasteries where there's an element where you'd build a church and the monks there would pray for your soul and all of that stuff.
	But even like the Christianization of the public, a big reason this happens, it used to be the vast majority of churches in early Europe were built by lay people.
	They were basically a private endeavor.
	You would endow a church for the people within the lands that you ruled.
	The vast majority of churches are built this way and a notable thing that he hits upon is once they scale this back and they had reasons for scaling it back because you had a lot of simony where you know you'd endow a church and then you'd get to name who the priest was and oh the priest is your nephew and then he collects the tithes.
	There was stuff like that but once that went away the number of new churches went down and it was much more difficult to get those churches founded.
	So for hundreds and hundreds of years you have the case where Christianity is mostly spreading as a private endeavor, as in it's not the pope or a central organization that's doing all the missionary activity.
	Thousands and thousands, really millions and millions of lay Christians are doing it.
	You'll have all of these religious figures who decide, I want to go become a missionary, and they'll go into Saxony, they'll go into Poland, they'll go into Scandinavia, they'll go into Russia, preaching Christianity in dangerous places, and a lot of them die.
	We have no shortage of accounts of these individuals getting martyred.
	Some of them get martyred Five minutes after they walk over the border.
	They were very tough people they were running into.
	And we just have so many accounts like this.
	So many that It's impossible, it's simply impossible to argue that these are all made up or exaggerated.
	There's just too much of it.
	It just overflows the number of examples we have.
	And it just, it really was, people believed in this and they thought it was important to encourage other people to believe in this.
	One of my favorites is the English of the Dark Ages, early Middle Ages, the Anglo-Saxons.
	They were very aware Oh yeah, we're part Saxon.
	We came from Saxony.
	And so you have a ton of English missionaries who go to Saxony in modern-day Germany because they think it's very important.
	We need to get the other Saxons to become Christians because they're our brethren.
	This is our homeland, and they should join the Christian faith.
	And tons of them do this, and eventually they do succeed.
	And that's what's so amazing because I do think that part of this that is well known to a lot of people that through the Middle Ages, it's in this monastery system where we get the ideas of higher learning, where the Bible is, of course, hand copied.
	Hand-copied down again.
	Remember, this is prior to the printing press, prior to any of that, folks.
	So where the Bible itself is hand-copied word-for-word, translated here and there into the various monasteries.
	You have the Book of Kells, which, again, in Ireland speaks to the ancient Irish tradition of spreading Christianity.
	And it's through this system that they really were able to preserve the document of the Bible As well as keep the flame of the faith throughout the entire Middle Ages, which is the time, as we know, were just brought with warfare and constant threats on all sides,
	that it was the fact that you had kings and knights and lords that truly believed in it and believed that having this religion Would be the best way forward for their people that actually kept it together.
	And at one point, and we'll be going further in depth in all of this, in this period you have the founding of Oxford as a university and you even have the building of the Notre Dame, the founding of that almost a thousand years ago.
	Exactly, exactly.
	I'm looking at my notes here, just all of the, some of the fascinating stuff that was going on in this period that would just capture the enthusiasm for it.
	There was one, this is interesting, so during the 800s, of course, Spain was conquered by Muslims, and you had Christians living under Muslim lords, and in the 800s, There was a fad where Christians in Cordoba, which was a Muslim city, they would come out and they would publicly denounce Islam and say they're Christians, and then they would be put to death for this because you weren't allowed to do that.
	And there was actually a big debate among Christian leaders, which was, are these people martyrs?
	Because martyrdom properly, you're not supposed to intentionally seek death.
	You accept death if it is inflicted on you, but you can't just Do it as a fancy way to commit suicide.
	So they had to tell people, you should affirm your faith, but you should not go recklessly commit suicide in the city of Cordoba.
	And it's just amazing to read something like that and then see some loser on the internet who just says, they were pretending because Christianity lets you control people.
	Dork losers.
	Yeah, it's kind of a joke when you actually look back.
	And so this is one of those myths.
	And just talk a little bit about how people totally get this wrong, especially your typical Reddit atheist type.
	Yeah, it's just you run into all of these bizarre takes where it's so clear, I think, that they've never been around people of faith.
	They've never been in a really avid faith community.
	So they come up with these bizarre narratives where Like everyone just does it to get money or to get wealth or to get status and it's totally alien to them It's alien to them that someone would sacrifice a great deal like a huge amount of wealth a huge amount of time potentially their very life that they would sacrifice that for an idea an idea that they really truly believed in and yet throughout the Middle Ages we have There are countless cases of people doing this,
	and in ancient times too, during the early rise of Christianity.
	We have so many cases where it's so clear that this is hugely important to people, that they would dedicate their entire lives to this in a period where life is relatively cheap.
	Your life is not as long.
	You don't have a secure retirement to look forward to.
	Things can be very tenuous, and people growing up in that environment, they think, I, like, what am I going to do?
	I'm going to dedicate my life to God, and I'm going to try to dedicate it to bringing God to the heathens, whether they're in my own country or in another country.
	And that's one of the most remarkable things with Christianity, is them taking their faith of their locality and saying, I want my enemy to accept this faith.
	I'm going to go to the place where they send raiders, they kill us, and I'm going to preach the word of God to them.
	And they did so because they had devout and deep faith in Christ.
	The true rise of Christianity, the Chronicles of the Christians.
	We'll be right back.
	All right, folks, we're back.
	The Chronicles of the Christians, Rise of Christianity.
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	So, Blake, all of this is going on, and we're right about the, you know, the first, we covered a thousand years so far in the show, so just give people a place marker.
	We're at the 1,000-year mark.
	There's something pretty big that happens in 1054, and that's called the Great Schism, where the church...
	And obviously, there have been other schisms, and there have been different sects and things that have broken up, but this is the really big one that people point back to.
	Basically splits into West and East and personally I've always viewed it as kind of you know just just kind of political in nature because this is where you also kind of see Byzantium is growing in its own regard in the East whereas the Western Empire has totally changed its character into Into a different,
	you know, different kingdoms and different areas where, you know, the Western Empire is like just not the Roman Empire anymore.
	You've got different kingdoms, people who claim to the Roman Empire, etc.
	But Byzantium really becomes the home of Eastern Christianity.
	Talk to me a little about the Great Schism.
	Yeah, so the Great Schism, for those, a lot of our viewers are probably Protestant, they might not be familiar.
	There's divisions within the church that predate the Reformation in the 1500s, which broke up Western Christianity.
	So, initially, of course, ideally, there is only one Christian faith community, but They do like to argue about things.
	They disagree about things.
	And so one of the big disputes, by 1050, you've got a big growing chasm between Christianity as it's practiced in the eastern part of the Mediterranean in the Greek Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, what you might call it, and in the west, which is where there's the Pope in Rome, and then you have tons of different Kingdoms in Spain, in France, in England, in Ireland, in Germany, all these places, and they've diverged in their practices, they've diverged in their beliefs.
	In the West, there was increasingly the sense that the Pope in Rome was the boss, the number one guy to look to for guidance.
	In the East, they tended to disagree with that.
	They also had some religious disputes that would be very confusing to a lot of people today.
	For example, there's a huge debate over something called the Filioque.
	If you are familiar with the Nicene Creed, it's where the Holy Spirit, we say in the West, will say it proceeds from the Father and from the Son.
	In the Eastern Creed, it just proceeds from the Father.
	And this is a huge debate.
	If we didn't have this dispute, the Great Schism might not have happened.
	But they did schism over that, and when they did, they thought it was going to be temporary.
	They'd split before, and then they'd reunited, and they just had a fractious relationship.
	But 1054, it turns out, is the one that basically stuck.
	The churches have not reunited since then.
	And that paves the way towards today where you can say, unfortunately, we have a huge diversity of Christian churches that are not in accord with one another, are often very hostile to one another, and that should trouble us.
	It might be inevitable, we're humans, that this would happen, but it should trouble us because we want there to be one community of Christian believers.
	And instead, we have many small communities of Christian believers that are often in conflict with one another.
	And we have a duty as Christians to try to heal schisms and to try to prevent new ones from emerging.
	It is a sin to sow discord within the Christian community.
	You know, just so you know, I've been doing my part.
	As everybody knows, I'm Catholic, but of course my wife is Orthodox.
	So, you know, I'm going above and beyond over here to heal the schism in my own personal capacity.
	And I have actually taken her to the Vatican.
	We've discussed the Filioque.
	In the Sistine Chapel, but that is a story for another time.
	But, you know, Blake, going back on this, and before we end part one of this here, what's the role of Rome?
	Just very quickly, has Rome fallen out of, you know, grace?
	Is it still seen as a position of leadership as the empire fell?
	What's the role of Rome in the church here?
	In this time, I mean, in the West, it's clearly become the leading voice in Christianity.
	In the East, it's a little funny because they do regard the Pope as this, you know, the Bishop of Rome as at least a first among equals.
	But it's just a question, how much do you defer to him?
	And one of the issues they had is they still had an emperor who was kind of a quasi-religious position.
	And so they would have an emperor who actually could weigh in on religious questions.
	And we've moved on from that in the West, but in the East it was much stronger.
	That caused a lot of issues.
	And so this becomes a huge, huge point going forward because just about 40 years after this, in 1096, and we'll talk about this in part two, we get to the start of the First Crusade.
	So stay tuned, folks.
	Jack Posobiec, Blake Neff will be back at you with part two of The Chronicles of the Christians, the Crusades.
	Stay tuned and thank you.
	Once again, I've been Jack Posobiec.

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