The early Christians startled the Roman world with this unique facet of their identity. Until that time, one’s religion and faith were nothing but an extension of one’s national identity. Your race determined who your gods were—race came first and religion was just a way of expressing it. Christians said that their God was the God of the whole world, and that people of all races could be Christians, and that therefore faith was more important than race.24 The early Christian churches were multiethnic in an unprecedented way. They brought together people who would never have gotten along before
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