This is not a history written by the Church (obviously), but goes through the
large changes in attitudes toward Christianity, after the emperor Constantine
decreed that Christianity was now "legal".
Indeed, but like many books by Western historians, it is inaccurate in its treatment of the Eastern churches.
By the way, what I am saying is not controversial or disputed among scholars, whether Christian or secular, and can be readily gleaned from even the most accessible sources of docuemntation on the history of Eastern Christianity, which, as a matter of fact, did not use Latin (except for the Romanians, Moldovans and Aromanians, who speak a language derived from a Vulgar Latin dialect), did not write any of their theological works in Latin, and indeed, none of the seven Ecumenical councils were conducted in Latin, and at the aforesaid councils only a few of the attendees, such as Emperor Constantine and Emperor Justinian, and the handful of legates sent by the Bishop of Rome (no Bishop of Rome - they were not styled Pope until the sixth century, after the first five councils had happened, attended one of the seven ecumenical synods personally, except perhaps the sixth, I can’t remember, although I doubt it; indeed, even at the councils the Roman Church actively participated in, at Ephesus and Chalcedon*, the Roman bishops were not personally present but interacted with through legations and correspondence, notably the Tome of Leo; Rome did not participate in the Second Ecumenical Council at all.
This council, which was received by the rest of the church as Ecumenical after the fact, is responsible for the current version of the Nicene Creed (which was revised at that council in 381 BC), but which was actually initially a local council of the Church of Constantinople convened by St. Gregory the Theologian, who, exhausted, resigned early into the council, but the council did good work in terms of refining the Creed to exclude the Semi-Arians and Pneumatomachs (those who denied the Holy Spirit) and the Apollinarians (who believed our Lord had a human body and a divine soul, rather than being fully human and fully God, which was the position of the Nicene fathers such as St. Athanasius of Alexandria and their allies such as St. Gregory the Theologian). So at the second Council, it is possible no one present even spoke Latin as the language was not widely used in the Eastern Roman Empire (conversely, Greek was always widely used in ancient Rome, being the language associated with philosophy, taught to Patrician and Equestrian youths at in the Rhaetor, the Roman equivalent of high school, from which we get the Greek word Rhaetoric.
*The Council of Chalcedon Leo I tried to prevent, but he was unsuccessful, thus he made his weight felt with a Tome which was unhelpful and contributed to the schism with the Oriental Orthodox and the short-lived ascendancy of certain bishops who were crypto-Nestorians, such as the sinister figure of Ibas; this was reversed under Emperor Justinian, who initially was a great friend of the Oriental churches, even marrying St. Theodora, a woman venerated by both the Chalcedonians and the Oriental Orthodox, who was Syriac Orthodox, and who would later thwart his attempts to arrest the Syriac Orthodox bishop St. Jacob bar Addai, after the rest of the Oriental Orthodox bishops of Antioch had been arrested, and St. Jacob, known in the west as Baradaeus, proceeded to ordain a few hundred bishops, making the Syriac Orthodox invulnerable to further attempts at decapitation, and the perjorative title “Jacobite” is used in India by the Mar Thoma Christians under the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch).
Edward Gibbon, for all his faults, at least did not make that mistake, although I do not by any means suggest The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he attributes to Christianity, when it was much more complex, although one thing he did get right was the adverse impact on the Byzantine Empire caused by Justinian’s persecution of the Oriental Orthodox.
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