What was the difference between christianity and other religions?

Focusruli: What was the difference between christianity and other religions?
How did christianity gain so many followers? We all know what happened after the roman empire embraced it as the official religion, but my question concerns what happened before that.

Im certain that it wasn’t the only religion, so im curious about how did christianity stand out among all the other religions.

Answers and Views:

Answer by Leverage
Christ was the difference.

He preached tolerance and love of your fellow man. Completely different that the previous “will of the gods” that was going on before it.

Answer by Boles: Bigger than Jesus
Christians have been the most successful at forcing their religions onto others. Recently they stopped forcing Christianity on people and decided to start bribing starving people with food and water into believing. They call them “missions”.

Answer by Shalu-Emma.
They forced people to convert. Hah.

Answer by HyuuHyuu
You know the Church was in charge way back in Medieval times and the Renaissance Era and before then. I mean, not in charge but had a lot of power. The clergy was well educated and told the people (Peasants and such, who couldn’t afford a good education and were easily manipulated) what to do for a better life when they die. The monarchs of those times believed and enforced the Catholic religions too. Because they were well educated, they were able to use their power to tell people what was what.
Martin Luther posted the 95 theses, and soon the Lutheran way of thinking came to be.
Branches of Christianity grew and spread, Bibles became translated and rewritten, many things got written out judging on who was translating it.
There were other religions in other countries, yes, but Christians moved around the world and spread their religion until it was big. Other religions were proclaimed to be wrong, and several had to be in hiding at risk of death.

Now, people are being raised into it because the American government was based on Christianity, the religion of our founding fathers, and the religion of many of our presidents since then.
Missionaries in other countries are spreading the word too.

And many people feel that Christians are idiots and target them because they’re so big, which just makes them bigger.

And for the record, I only had half a clue of what I said here. ^_^

~Hyuu

Answer by Jewish Girl891
Wow. This is a bigger question than you probably think. I’ll try to condense it.

Christianity is based off of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew and (as you probably know) Christians follow what he said. As for Christianity becoming an official religion in the Roman Empire, this allowed many people who either did not follow a religion or were unsure of what to believe to have a specific path to follow.

There were (and still are) other religions that people can and did follow but at that time Christianity and Judaism were the two major religions. After Jesus was crucified many rumors went around that a Jew had done this to him for preaching which resulted in another religion. Also, in the Jewish religion we do not try to convert everyone to follow Judaism. While there were misionaries going around the world promoting Christianity. Many of these missionaries convinced other people that their religion was wrong. That doesn’t exactly help those religions, does it?

I could keep going but I don’t think you want me to get too detailed.

Answer by Gary Oster
The first century mission of the apostles was to proselytize and establish churches. We know most about Paul and Peter’s works, and there are some lesser known people such as Barnabas.

Churches were established mostly along the east and north of the Mediterranean, and much of the NT is composed of Paul’s letters to the various churches: Corinthians are letters to the church in Corinth, Romans to the church in Rome, Ephesians to the Ephesian church, etc.

Paul appears to have been most invested in the Romans, and probably thought that the most important church — the seat of the early Christian church.

Others who lived during Paul’s time and after include Ignatius of Antioch (who first coined the terms Catholic and Christian), Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen.

A critical part of the work of the time was establishing the doctrine and practices of the church.

You may be interested in the recently aired NOVA show on the Biblical archeology. The full show is online here (click the Play Video link on the right side of the page): https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/archeology-hebrew-bible.html