Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament of the Bible. Christians believe Jesus to be the Son of God and the Judaic Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament.

For specific forms of Christianity, see:


 * Catholicism
 * Eastern Orthodox
 * Mormon
 * Protestantism
 * Puritanism
 * The Second Revelation (fictional, existing only in In High Places)

A sizable number of Harry Turtledove's characters are, have been, Christians. This article should focus on those works where Christianity is particularly pertinent to the plot (such as Thessalonica) or has been altered from OTL (such as In High Places).

Christianity in "The Emperor's Return"
As the Ottoman Empire's armies overran Constantinople on May 29, 1453, the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos entered the Hagia Sophia and pleaded for a divine miracle: to let God see the city in Christian hands again. With that, a mantle of flame bathed the emperor, and he sank into the marble floor before the eyes of the startled priest. Constantinople fell shortly afterwards.

The Last Emperor, Constantine, returned on June 10, 2003, three years after Istanbul was overrun by the forces of Greece and the Soviet Union. The city once again fell under Christian control. Ironically, Constantine was gunned down by Greek soldiers who found him at the Hagia Sophia.

Christianity in Gunpowder Empire
In its early centuries, the Roman Empire tried to destroy Christianity by executing many of its followers, with the Christians being adamantly opposed to all other religions of the Empire, refusing to take part in any religious ceremony even when paying for such defiance with their lives. Christians remained a minority in the Empire, never reaching a position of power to enforce the spread of their religion, as in the home timeline.

After several centuries, a modus vivendi was achieved whereby those who became known as "Imperial Christians" agreed to make an offering of incense (rather than an animal sacrifice) and make this offering for "The Spirit of the Emperor" without recognizing the Emperor's divinity or referring to any other deity.

An Imperial Christian moving to a new city was required by law to make such an offering, and had to pay for the handful of incense the full price of a sacrificial animal. Officials harboring anti-Christian prejudice often provided Imperial Christians performing this duty with an inferior quality incense, to punish them for their insincerity.

A more intransigent faction, calling themselves "Hard Christians", refused to take part in such ceremonies and scorned the Imperial Christians for their willingness to compromise. The Imperial authorities did not actively persecute the Hard Christians, either, but such defiance could entail various disabilities in daily life.

The difference between the two kinds of Christians often overlapped with class differences: The Imperial Christians tended to be well-to-do merchants and artisans, whose business interests required being on reasonably good terms with the authorities, while the Hard Christians were often from the lower classes, in many cases slaves or former slaves.

For their part, the Imperial authorities persisted in regarding Jesus as one among the Empire's many gods, giving him a statue and a niche in official temples on an equal footing with the other deities. Christians of all kinds resented this representation of Jesus, but were powerless to change it.

In the rival Empire of Lietuva, Christianity was not tolerated, the Lietuvan authorities greatly resenting the Christians' refusal to recognise Perkunas and proclaiming him a "false god". Lietuva was known among Christians as "the place where one can still become a martyr," which made it somewhat attractive to certain Christians.

Crosstime travelers who visited Agrippan Rome and studied its culture became interested in the differences between the Bible used by its Christians and the Bible of the home timeline. For example, in the Bible of Agrippan Rome there were only three Gospels, the Book of John had never been written (and John the Apostle himself possibly never born); the Acts of the Apostles had the same name, but recorded quite different acts; and the Epistles of Paul included several addressed to churches in locations to which the Paul the Apostle in the home timeline never wrote. St. Jerome never lived in this alternate, and so others had translated the Bible into Latin. Such differences provided scholars in the Home timeline with material to embark on the new field of Comparative Crosstime Bible Studies.

Christianity in In High Places
Dumnorix was from an alternate in which Christianity seemingly never existed as he knew nothing of it.

In an alternate in which the Roman Republic lost the Samnite Wars in the 4th Century BC, neither Christianity nor Islam existed.

Annette Klein visited an alternate where a more virulent Black Death caused a drastically different form of Christianity: the Christians of this world believed that God had a second son named Henri, who was a French peasant before the plague.

Christianity in "Shock and Awe"
A collection of hill tribes in the east under the leader of a certain Jewish chieftain called the Son of God launched a brief uprising against the ruling Roman Empire. As his name implied, the Son believed that he and his men were guided by God. Despite some initial successes, the Romans finally sent an overwhelming force under the leadership of General Pontius Pilate and obliterated the Son's forces. The Son was executed by crucifixion.

Christianity in Southern Victory
Both whites and blacks in the Confederate States were predominantly Christian but this common religion did not bring them close together and did not prevent Jake Featherston and his Freedom Party from perpetrating the mass murder of their black co-religionists. In fact, during the Second Great War, they on occasion made cynical use of blacks gathering in Church for Sunday prayers in order to arrest them en masse and send them to their deaths - as happened to Scipio, Bathsheba, and Antoinette.

Pope Pius XII in Rome did nothing for the Confederate Blacks as they went through the "population reductions" leading some to believe this was because the Blacks were, for the most part, not Catholic. However, this argument fell apart in light of Confederate brutality in occupied Haiti, about which the Pope did not do anything either.

Christianity in Thessalonica
At the time of the Slav and Avar siege of the city of Thessalonica, the Christian Church had no trouble convincing people of the veritable existence of its God and Saints. There was truly no place for atheists or skeptics when the Saints - and occasionally, God Himself - made obvious and unmistakable manifestations of their presence, often to large numbers of people at once. As was clear for all to see, prayers and other religious acts often had a direct and tangible result, being aimed at achieving a direct physical effect and often succeeding - especially when they were the prayers of a powerful cleric and/or the prayers of an entire congregation, aimed and focused by such a powerful cleric towards a specific aim. The religious blessing of a weapon could directly and perceptively increase the power of that specific weapon, and this effect was recognized by soldiers and taken into account in planning battles.

The problem for the Church was that various non-Christian deities, gods, demigods and other beings related to other systems of belief also manifested themselves, and just as clearly and unambiguously left no doubt about their own veritable existence. Christian clerics still asserted that their God was supreme and would inevitably win out in the end against all competitors. More bigoted Christian clerics such as Bishop Eusebius regarded all non-Christian beings as demons, to be fought, exorcised and extirpated as soon as possible. More broad-minded clerics such as Father Luke were ready to extend their Christian charity also to non-Christian beings such as Centaurs and Satyrs.

However, common people such as George the Shoemaker entertained occasional doubts as to the certainty that the Christian God was truly superior to all rivals and that his eventual victory was assured. From what George could see, the Avar sorcerer involved in the siege of Thessalonica was roughly as powerful on the anti-Christian side as Bishop Eusebius on the Christian side, and every supernatural act taken by one side was effectively matched by the other. Even Thessalonica's final deliverance from the threatening siege was not purely due to the help of the Christian God and His Saints, but owed much to the intervention of the Centaurs, surviving element of the Classical Greek Pagan world  displaced by Christianity.

That was less disturbing to the tolerant Father Luke than to the zealous Bishop Eusebius. Father Luke believed that Centaurs and Satyrs, too, had a role in God's plan for the world - and he also was secretly in love with a female Centaur, a love which had no chance of consummation even if Luke had not been sworn to celibacy and chastity.