The foundation of canon law is found in its earliest texts and their interpretation in the church fathers' writings. Christianity began as a Jewish sect in the mid-1st century arising out of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The life of Jesus is recounted in the New Testament of the Bible, one of the bedrock texts of Western Civilization and inspiration for countless works of Western art.BBC, BBC—Religion & Ethics—566, Christianity Jesus' birth is commemorated in the festival of Christmas, his death during the Paschal Triduum, and his resurrection during Easter. Christmas and Easter remain holidays in many Western nations.
The early followers of Jesus, including Paul and Peter, carried their new theology concerning Jesus and its ethic throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, sowing the seeds for the development of the Catholic Church, of which Saint Peter is considered the first Pope. Christians sometimes faced persecution during these early centuries, particularly for their refusal to join in worshiping the emperors. Nevertheless, carried through the synagogues, merchants and missionaries across the known world, Christianity quickly grew in size and influence.Geoffrey Blainey; A Very Short History of the World; Penguin Books, 2004 Its unique appeal was partly the result of its values and ethics.
The Bible has had a profound influence on Western civilization and on cultures around the globe; it has contributed to the formation of Western law, art, texts, and education. With a literary tradition spanning two millennia, the Bible is one of the most influential works ever written. From practices of personal hygiene to philosophy and ethics, the Bible has directly and indirectly influenced politics and law, war and peace, sexual morals, marriage and family life, toilet etiquette, letters and learning, the arts, economics, social justice, medical care and more.
Antiquity
Human value as a foundation to law The world's first civilizations were Mesopotamian sacred states ruled in the name of a divinity or by rulers who were seen as divine. Rulers, and the priests, soldiers and bureaucrats who carried out their will, were a small minority who kept power by exploiting the many.
W.E.H.Lecky gives the now classical account of the sanctity of human life in his history of European morals saying Christianity "formed a new standard, higher than any which then existed in the world...". Christian ethicist David P. Gushee says "The justice teachings of Jesus are closely related to a commitment to life's sanctity...".
John Keown, a professor of Christian ethics distinguishes this 'sanctity of life' doctrine from "a quality of life approach, which recognizes only instrumental value in human life, and a vitalistic approach, which regards life as an absolute moral value... [Kewon says it is the] sanctity of life approach ... which embeds a presumption in favor of preserving life, but concedes that there are circumstances in which life should not be preserved at all costs", and it is this which provides the solid foundation for law concerning end of life issues.
Early legal views of women Rome had a social caste system, with women having "no legal independence and no independent property". Early Christianity, as Pliny the Younger explains in his letters to Emperor Trajan, had people from "every age and rank, and both sexes". Pliny reports arresting two slave women who claimed to be 'deaconesses' in the first decade of the second century. There was a rite for the ordination of women deacons in the Roman Pontifical (a liturgical book) up through the 12th century. For women deacons, the oldest rite in the West comes from an eighth-century book, whereas Eastern rites go back to the third century and there are more of them.
The New Testament refers to a number of women in Jesus' inner circle. There are several Gospel accounts of Jesus imparting important teachings to and about women: his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, his anointing by Mary of Bethany, his public admiration for a poor widow who donated two copper coins to the Temple in Jerusalem, his stepping to the aid of the woman accused of adultery, his friendship with Mary and Martha the sisters of Lazarus, and the presence of Mary Magdalene, his mother, and the other women as he was crucified. Historian Geoffrey Blainey concludes that "as the standing of women was not high in Palestine, Jesus' kindnesses towards them were not always approved by those who strictly upheld tradition".
According to Christian apologist Tim Keller, it was common in the Greco-Roman world to expose female infants because of the low status of women in society. The church forbade its members to do so. Greco-Roman society saw no value in an unmarried woman, and therefore it was illegal for a widow to go more than two years without remarrying. Christianity did not force widows to marry and supported them financially. Pagan widows lost all control of their husband's estate when they remarried, but the church allowed widows to maintain their husband's estate. Christians did not believe in cohabitation. If a Christian man wanted to live with a woman, the church required marriage, and this gave women legal rights and far greater security. Finally, the pagan double standard of allowing married men to have extramarital sex and mistresses was forbidden. Jesus' teachings on divorce and Paul's advocacy of monogamy began the process of elevating the status of women so that Christian women tended to enjoy greater security and equality than women in surrounding cultures.
Laws affecting children In the ancient world, infanticide was not legal but was rarely prosecuted. A broad distinction was popularly made between infanticide and infant exposure, which was widely practiced. Many exposed children died, but many were taken by speculators who raised them to be slaves or prostitutes. It is not possible to ascertain, with any degree of accuracy, what diminution of infanticide resulted from legal efforts against it in the Roman empire. "It may, however, be safely asserted that the publicity of the trade in exposed children became impossible under the influence of Christianity, and that the sense of the seriousness of the crime was very considerably increased."
Legal status under Constantine Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313 AD ended the state-sponsored persecution of Christians in the East, and his own conversion to Christianity was a significant turning point in history.Religion in the Roman Empire, Wiley-Blackwell, by James B. Rives, p. 196 In 312, Constantine offered civic toleration to Christians, and through his reign instigated laws and policies in keeping with Christian principles making Sunday the Sabbath "day of rest" for Roman society (though initially this was only for urban dwellers) and embarking on a church building program. In AD 325, Constantine conferred the First Council of Nicaea to gain consensus and unity within Christianity, with a view to establishing it as the religion of the Empire. The population and wealth of the Roman Empire had been shifting east, and around the year 330, Constantine established the city of Constantinople as a new imperial city which would be the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Patriarch in Constantinople now came to rival the Pope in Rome. Although cultural continuity and interchange would continue between these Eastern and Western Roman Empires, the history of Christianity and Western culture took divergent routes, with a final Great Schism separating Roman and Eastern Christianity in 1054 AD.
Fourth century political influence and laws against pagans
During the fourth century, Christian writing and theology blossomed into a "Golden Age" of literary and scholarly activity unmatched since the days of Virgil and Horace. Many of these works remain influential in politics, law, ethics and other fields. A new genre of literature was also born in the fourth century: church history.
The remarkable transformation of Christianity from peripheral sect to major force within the Empire is often held to be a result of the influence held by St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, but this is unlikely. In April of 390, the Emperor Theodosius I ordered the punitive massacre of thousands of the citizens of Thessaloniki. In a private letter from Ambrose to Theodosius, sometime in August after this event, Ambrose told Theodosius he cannot be given communion while Theodosius is unrepentant of this terrible act.Cotten, Christopher Ryan. Ambrose and Stilicho. Diss. uga, 2007. url=https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/cotten_christopher_r_200708_ma.pdf Wolf Liebeschuetz says records show "Theodosius duly complied and came to church humbly, without his imperial robes, until Christmas, when Ambrose openly readmitted him to communion."
McLynn states that "the encounter at the church door has long been known as a pious fiction." Daniel Washburn explains that the image of the mitered prelate braced in the door of the cathedral in Milan blocking Theodosius from entering, is a product of the imagination of Theodoret, a historian of the fifth century who wrote of the events of 390 "using his own ideology to fill the gaps in the historical record." According to Peter Brown, these events concern personal piety; they do not represent a turning point in history with the State submitting to the Church.
According to Christian literature of the fourth century, paganism ended by the early to mid—fifth century with everyone either converted or cowed. Contemporary archaeology, on the other hand, indicates this is not so; paganism continued across the empire, and the end of paganism varied from place to place. Violence such as temple destructions are attested in some locations, generally in small numbers, and are not spread equally throughout the empire. In most regions away from the imperial court, the end of paganism was, more often, gradual and untraumatic.Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition, and Coexistence in the Fourth Century. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Theodosius reigned (albeit for a brief interim) as the last Emperor of a united Eastern and Western Roman Empire. Between 389 and 391, Theodosius promulgated the Theodosian Decrees, a collection of laws from the time of Constantine including laws against heretics and pagans. In 391 Theodosius blocked the restoration of the pagan Altar of Victory to the Roman Senate and then fought against Eugenius, who courted pagan support for his own bid for the imperial throne. Brown says the language of the Theodosian Decrees is "uniformly vehement and the penalties are harsh and frequently horrifying." They may have provided a foundation for similar laws in the High Middle Ages. However, in antiquity, these laws were not much enforced, and Brown adds that, "In most areas, polytheists were not molested, and, apart from a few ugly incidents of local violence, Jewish communities also enjoyed a century of stable, even privileged, existence."Brown, Peter. Late antiquity. Harvard University Press, 1998 Contemporary scholars indicate pagans were not wiped out or fully converted by the fifth century as Christian sources claim. Pagans remained throughout the fourth and fifth centuries in sufficient numbers to preserve a broad spectrum of pagan practices into the 6th century and even beyond in some places.
The political and legal impact of the fall of Rome