The second claim is remarkable in that everyone agrees that Constantine, if baptised at all (the only sources for this claim are interested parties), was only inducted to the Church on his deathbed. The first claim is remarkable in that patristic writers-and their Christian successors to the present day-suggest, often insistently, otherwise. The first is that Christians were a tiny minority (under 5% is estimated) in the Roman empire until the "conversion" of Constantine in the fourth century and that second is that Constantine converted. Pagans and Christians has two major-and quite controversial-theses running throughout the bulk of the text. Having read some Fox previously (and not his gardening books), seeing this at the Evanston Library booksale and finding books which address both church and classical history rare, I snapped it up.
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