The popes! The cardinals! The bishops! The curia! All because of the Jews and Constantine. Christianity was the religion of a Jewish sect who saw themselves as the true Jews: they thought God had granted them the right to bring the saving work of the people of the Old Covenant to a conclusion because they had found the Messiah. The other Jews merely referred to them as `the Nazarenes'. Questions of agonizing urgency began to bother this sect, but the biggest question was whether Christianity should supplant Jewish orthodoxy or whether it should remain distinct from but closely linked with the Jewish community, its synagogue and its traditions. By the third century Anno Domini, by their counting, they were regarded as a heretical sect by other Jews. These Christians, disowned by the Jewish people, at last, three hundred years after their leader had died, called out to convert the whole of mankind to their Lord's message, in order to survive. Then the whole thing. the entire misunderstanding, was made legitimate by a politicians accident.

It is almost impossible to believe that because Constantine claimed to attribute his cavalry victory at the Milvian bridge to the God of the Christians, who had been nurtured so feebly in Rome by a handful of renegade Jewish fanatics, we must now suffer hundreds of cardinals, thousands of bishops and tens of thousands of indolent priests and monks, in all of the arrogance of their plump wealth; it is almost enough to shatter the spirit.