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Dec. 26, 2005 In 324 AD, Constantine made himself sole Emperor of the Roman Empire, moving his capital from Rome to Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople in his own honor. When the Seljuk Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, they renamed it Istanbul, the name it still bears today as the largest city in modern Turkey. Accordingly, the eastern portion of the Roman Empire, in the period from 324 until 1453, is ussually called the Byzantine Empire, and over the centuries bore a Greek rather than Roman character. Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman or Byzantine Empire. This explains why all the countries of the Mediterranean region went Catholic. It was a matter of politics rather than faith. Only with the advent of Islam in the seventh century were many Mediterranean lands wrested from Byzantine Catholic control. Upon Constantine’s assumption of Christianity, he also prevailed upon his mother, St. Helena, to adopt the faith. Whether she did this as an adoring mother, pious Christian or shrewd politician is anyone’s guess. But she did become something of an activist in the name of Christianity. At that time, Constantine convoked the First Council of Nicaea, where all the bishops of Christendom gathered to establish church policy in the Nicene Creed that they composed, and probably to edit and finalize the New Testament as it has come down to the present day. One of the bishops in attendance was Makarios of Jerusalem, who described the abject condition of the holy places there, winning the sympathies of St. Helena, who went to the Holy Land in company of Makarios. There they directed together the construction of the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at locations where Christ was held to have been born and died. From the first century or so, pilgrims had been visiting sites that tradition had made the places of the birth and the death of Jesus, but there is no binding evidence that they had any valid reason for their choice. Whatever motivated the pilgrimages, apparently Makarios and St. Helena acquiesced in building their churches there. The Church of the Nativity, built around 325, was severely damaged in the Samaritan Revolt and rebuilt by Emperor Justinian, in the sixth century. So when modern tourists and pilgrims visit the basilica, believing they are visiting the birthplace of Christ, supposedly located under the foundation, they are taking a lot for granted which may not be genuinely historical. One thing is certain, and that is that St. Helena wanted to build a fitting memorial to a possibly legendary individual who had lived 300 years before her time, and the result is the Church of the Nativity. Similarly, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built by Helena and Makarios around 326, was burned by the Persians in 614, partly destroyed by earthquake in 808, razed by Caliph al-Hakim in 1009, partly rebuilt in 1048 by Emperor Constantine Monomachus, and reconstructed by the Crusaders in 1144. So again, the present structure has nothing to do with the death of Jesus and is not even known for a fact to be at the place of his death, if indeed he was a real person. Of course, those considerations do not render the church completely worthless as an historical landmark or architectural heirloom. St. Helena was also supposed to have found the True Cross during the demolition of a Roman temple that had been built where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands. One wonders if St. Helena did not deliberately engage in a policy of deception and dissimulation as she and her son assembled the hardware and the software of that would become the Catholic Church as we now know it. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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