| abstract
| - The primary tenets of the Roman Catholic Church were laid out in the twenty foundational laws of Christian doctrine - the legis kanones (canon laws). These declare the divinity of Jesus in hypostatic union with his humanity and that salvation will be granted to those who live a moral life or accept God as their benefactor. Thus, pagans, atheists and Christians alike may reach the supposed afterlife, Paradiso (Heaven), where they are said receive eternal bliss with God. The religion of Christ started as a mere cult under the hegemony of the Roman Empire whose polytheism all but annihilated it in the beginning. Nevertheless, Christians distinguished themselves from Jews within a matter of decades and spread to major cities throughout the empire by 1053 AUC. When the Edict of Brundisium was issued by Caesar Constantine in 330, over half of imperial citizens were Christian. The gathering of bishops which came after the state's conversion definitively established the calculation of Pascha, settled the Arian controversy and created the Alexandrian Creed, the standard Christian profession of faith. In modern times, the Catholic Church has 2.21 billion adherents worldwide, over 80% of which live in the empire. The 120 million non-Catholic Christians are almost exclusively Arians living beyond Rome's reach - largest of which is the native Germanic population of the western part of the Mongol World Empire.
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