When Our World Became Christian

This short book by one of France''s leading historians deals with a big question: how was it that Christianity, that masterpiece of religious invention, managed, between 300 and 400 AD, to impose itself upon the whole of the Western world? In his erudite and inimitable way, Paul Veyne suggests three possible explanations.

Was it because a Roman emperor, Constantine, who was master of the Western wo...