What if Christianity had never emerged as a major religion?

What if Christianity had never emerged as a major religion?

Christendom, 600 CE

Western Europe around the year 600 in the Common Era or Anno Domini was not a fantastic place and time to live. Despite efforts by some historians in recent times to argue that this era shouldn’t be referred to as the Dark Ages, there is substantial reason for referring to it as such. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed in the fifth century CE.

Sources:

‘Neo-Platonism’, in Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (eds), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition, Oxford, 2005).

Jan N. Bremmer. ‘Philosophers and the Mysteries’, in Philosophia in der Konkurrenz von Schulen, Wissenschaften und Religionen: Zur Pluralisierung des Philosophiebegriffs in Kaiserzeit und Spätantike, ed. by Christoph Riedweg (Berlin, 2017), pp. 99–126.

J. G. Davies, The Early Christian Church (Oxford, 1965).

E. R. Dodds, ‘Theurgy and Its Relationship to Neoplatonism’, in The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 37, Nos 1–2 (1947), pp. 55–69.

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World (Princeton, 2019).

Lloyd P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge, 1996).

Michael Tierney, ‘Julian the Apostate and the Religion of Hellenism’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 80 (December, 1931), pp. 583–597.

Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco, 1997).