Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon

Gibbon opens chapter 15 by announcing that he'll be looking at the role Christianity played in the decline of Rome.

The theologian may indulge the please task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.  

Nowadays, it is fairly common for academics to look for errors and corruption when dealing with religion.  Gibbon ran something more of a risk back in the 1770's.  He then moves on to provide five reasons why Christianity became so dominant throughout Europe and increasingly the rest of the world.  They are as follows:

• 1. Early Christians kept the Jewish tradition of shutting out other gods, which made them less likely to be seduced away.  But they changed from the Jewish tradition and instead reached out to make converts of the Gentiles.
• 2. They believed in an afterlife.  They also believed that the end of the world would happen soon and urged people to join them very quickly.
• 3. The Christian churches produced miracles for the non-believers.  They often spoke of other miracles that were happening in other Christian churches.
• 4. The Christians themselves lived up to their ideals and moral values.  They proved fairly incorruptible. 
• 5. The church developed a hierarchy inside of the Roman world, that was not guided by the Roman world.     

Gibbon speaks at length on each of these points.  I found the comparison between the early Christians and the Jews to be the most interesting.  Also interesting was the step by step development of the hierarchy of the early Catholic church.  (As a non-Catholic, I was fairly ignorant in how Christian history got from the book of Acts to the world of the Vatican.)

He also writes of the early Christians as being pacifists who would not work to defend the empire (or serve it in administrative ways).  I'd never heard this particular criticism before.  It falls very strange on modern ears.