Dr Paul Allen

It was October, 312. A young general who had the allegiance of all the Roman troops from Britain and Gaul was marching toward Rome to challenge Maxentius, another claimant to the imperial throne. As the story goes, General Constantine looked up and saw a cross of light in the sky. An inscription read, “In this conquer.” The superstitious soldier was already beginning to reject the Roman deities in favor of a single god. His father had worshiped a supreme sun-god. Could this be a favorable omen from that god on the eve of battle? Later, Christ appeared to Constantine in a dream , bearing the same sign, a cross with the top bent over, resembling the Greek letters chi and rho, the first two letters of Christos. The general was instructed to mark this sign on his soldiers’ shields. He did. As promised, Constantine won the battle. It was one of several decisive moments in a quarter century of violent change. If you had left Rome in A.D. 305, to spend twenty years in the desert

STATION II: Jesus accepts his cross (Photo credit: contemplative imaging ) In the bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail , the authors claim that in A.D. 303  Emperor Diocletian destroyed all Christian writings that could be found. That’s why, they assert, there are no New Testament manuscripts prior to the  fourth century . Later, Emperor Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, which allowed the “custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit, and rewrite their material as they saw fit.” It was at this point that “most of the crucial alterations in the New Testament were probably made and Jesus  assumed the unique status he has enjoyed ever since.” In response to this book, Dr. Daniel B. Wallace , a New Testament Greek scholar, says, “Do these authors know anything about history at all? Diocletian did not destroy all the Christian manuscripts. He did destroy several, but mostly in the East and South. As far as having no manuscripts prior to the fourth century— well, we h