The Barbarity of Christianity (as compared to Islam)

Depends on what you mean. From the 1st through the fourth centuries, our knowledge of Christianity increases with each succeeding century.There may not be a lot of outside sources that could be used to clarify points we consider the Christians biased on, there is a lot of internal writings of Christians that give us at least some picture of what they believed and practiced.I'm writing this because it's a common myth among Christians that we know a lot about the apostolic period because of the Bible, but then there's a big gap till Constantine. No gap at all. The information increases consistently starting right at the beginning of the 2nd century.

There was a time that it was a tenet of Christianity that it was "as impossible for a Christian to be a Caesar as it is for a Caesar to be a Christian."As long as that was true, Christian warfare remained only spiritual. When it was forgotten under Constantine the change was immediate and dramatic. The ancient histories written before and after the era of the Arian controversy, Nicea, and Constantine and the histories written just 50 years afterward (Sozomen and Socrates) are dramatically different.I remember a discussion once about the Anabaptists, who were the non-violent, radical section of the Reformation. Someone pointed out that even Anabaptists, when they had governmental power, were terribly violent (Munster, Germany), and I remember thinking that the early Christian and early Anabaptist conviction that Christians have no business running governments or fighting wars was probably a very good one.