Changes in Christianity
When Christianity made its way into Europe from Syria and Palestine, Greek philosophy dominated European thought. In order to facilitate the spread of their religion, Christian theologians presented the faith of Jesus in a manner, which would fit into the intellectual framework of the day. In the words of the Quran, ‘They imitated the sayings of those who disbelieved before them.’ (9:30) The Greeks, for instance, worshipped Zeus and considered him to be the only son of Saturn, the oldest divinity. The Christians imitated this by calling Jesus the only son of God. They also adopted prevalent theories in the fields of geography and physics as explanations of the Holy Scriptures. These theories were then incorporated into their religious books, as if God had also revealed them.
The conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity provided the Church with a welcome boost. Constantine presided over the mighty Roman empire for more than thirty years (306-337), and under his imperial influence the Christian faith spread throughout Europe. But 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 existence, which in fact were only a new expression of old Greek ideas.
