Religious scholar and theologian Mikhail Finkel, an expert on interfaith Judeo-Islamic and Judeo-Christian dialogue, spoke about the mechanisms of the creation of the state religion by the Roman Empire and the subsequent ban on religious literature that did not comply with the approved dogmas.
According to him, in the 4th century AD, Emperor Constantine, seeing a weakening Rome, which is threatened by a huge number of enemies, decided to strengthen the state with the help of a new monolithic ideology and declare Christianity the religion of the entire Roman Empire.
In 325 AD, Constantine holds a pan-Roman conference in Nicaea - the Council of Nicaea with the participation of all Christian bishops, priests and orders to unify a huge number of versions of the Gospel that go among the people and often contradict each other.
During the event, Konstantin criticized the current state of affairs, when many Christians, based on the gospels distributed among the people, believe that the church as an institution is not needed, that according to the teachings of Jesus, a person himself can communicate with God directly without intermediaries. He spoke in favor of the need to assert the dogma of the divine nature of secular power, which should be reflected in religious literature.
And then the bishops, the participants in the conference, having consulted with each other, endowed the emperor of the Roman Empire with the sacred right to decide this issue for them. That is, yesterday's pagan Constantine had to decide which gospels are real and which are not, and carry out a complete revision of the Greek texts, including translations from Aramaic and Hebrew, which Jesus and the apostles spoke, Finkel explained.
He explained that thus, it was decided to establish a state religion. All scriptures that asserted that the church was not needed as an institution were ordered to be removed. Therefore, for example, the Gospel of Thomas and many other Gospels were banned.
Earlier, Rav Michael Finkel said that Muhammad is undoubtedly the prophet of the Almighty, and the Koran is God's message.
bbabo.Net