No, Constantine didn’t corrupt Christianity by introducing Paganism
The secret history of the “Pagan Corruption” Myth that they don't want you to know.
<tinfoil hat>
Gather round, friends and readers, and those who barely tolerate me, because I am about to reveal the secret history they don’t want you to know.
A pure, faithful early Church kept the Saturday Sabbath, exactly the way God intended. Then, in the fourth century, a scheming, power-hungry Roman emperor named Constantine conveniently “converted” to Christianity to glue his crumbling empire back together. In doing so, he made the empire a Christian empire and quietly fused the faith of the martyrs with paganism (sun) worship. He moved the holy day from Saturday to Sunday to flatter his favorite pagan deity, Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. He rubber-stamped the whole heist at the Council of Laodicea in 364. And so the Christianity you’ve inherited is really just paganism wearing a clergy collar. Thus, the total corruption of a pure original early Christianity that worshipped in house churches just like modern protestants, proving "beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the early church was thoroughly corrupt and needed either reforming or restoring (depending on who you are hearing the story from.)
</takes off tinfoil hat>
Were you paying attention? Because almost every load-bearing claim in that paragraph is false, and we can prove it — not with vibes, not with "faith," not with another Graham Hancock series on Netflix, but with documents that any of you can pull up on your phone before you finish your coffee.
This article owes its existence to a piece by Dr. Nathan Jacobs over at Theological Letters — the same scholar whose work on the Trinity I leaned on in an earlier article (The Trinity Actually Makes Sense).
Dr. Jacobs very effectively dismantles this whole “Constantine paganized the Church” narrative, and I’d encourage you to go read and watch it for yourself.1 What I want to do here is something slightly different. Jacobs shows you the myth is false. I am interested in where the body of this myth came from, why it refuses to stay buried, and why it has a special, white-knuckle grip on the two communities I love most: my Protestant friends and my cradle faith, the Latter-day Saints.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you. This isn’t ancient history. It’s a charter myth — and a fairly recent one. Before you read this article, I suggest reading or watching/listening to Dr. Jacob's very fine article. Links below.
and You can watch/listen to it here
Go watch it. I’ll wait. (I won’t actually wait. We both know how good I am at sticking to a plan.)
