Reflections of a stormy petrel

Well, as a matter of mere history, it does not. There were Christians in Rome at least since the time of the Emperor Claudius (41AD), and the institutional continuity from the residence of Peter and Paul in the city to this day is certain. An early Christian Church was not just a group of friends meeting informally to discuss the Bible; it was an organization with a large number of salaried officers and a great deal of money. Ever since apostolic times, the order of deacons had been establihed for the specific purpose of managing church goods - Luke connects them with the first collective act of charity of the Church, a widespread collection to help the Jerusalem brothers in a famine. But this became immediately an institutionalized reality, with the Churches owning and managing large funds for the purpose of hunger relief, poverty relief, hospitals and the like. That was a real novelty in the ancient world, and made the churches powerful long before they became the majority. When the deacon Lawrence of Rome was arrested and ordered to hand over the goods of the Church, he answered that the wealth of the Church were the poor; he was speaking in riddles, but what he meant was that the Church did not own goods for her own advantage, but for the poor. And he was right. I will consult Eusebius if I have to, but I remember that at some time in the late second or early third century, the Church in the city of Rome had about fifty thousand members (a small number in a city of almost two million), but over a thousand dependent widows and several thousand poor. And they did not limit themselves to Christians; during one siege of Alexandria in the third century, while the pagan authorities fled, the Christians organized the relief of the starving population and even negotiated a ceasefire to let food through. The result of this charitable but very terrestrial activity was huge assets. Anyone who visits the catacombs in Rome ought to realize that the organization that dug those labyrinths must have had access to more than ordinary resources. The same message is passed by the enormous amount of Gospel and Bible manuscripts surviving from imperial times - each expensively copied by hand. Long before Constantine, the bishop of Antioch (a great city at the time), Paul of Samosata, turned the local church into a power base that made him the most powerful man in the city, in collaboration with the notorious Queen Zenobia. At the same time, as the historian Robin Lane Fox (no friend of the Church) points out, the bishop of Neocesarea in Anatolia, Gregory the Wonderworker, was in the habit of ruling on matters of civil and criminal law as though the Empire did not even happen. That is, the fact that Constantine allowed bishops to act as judges only legalized a situation that had obtained in the Christian Church for decades if not centuries. The superstition about Constantine, which Rodney Stark did not invent, is simply the most widespread variant of an ancient anti-CAtholic game: identify "the" moment in which the saintly, and oh-so-obviously congregational/protestant, Church of the beginnings, was corrupted into the diabolical, monarchic, bishop-ridden historical Church. This tradition has corrupted Church history to a quite fantastic degree. For a long time, Presbyterian and other scholars tried hard to "prove" that the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch (100AD) were forgeries. And have you noticed that the Pauline letters most often attacked by German Protestant scholars are those in which Paul mentions and even codifies the institution of Bishops?