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Most historians, however, hold that Christianity was brought to Romania by the occupying Romans. The Roman province had traces of all imperial religions, including Mithraism, but Christianity, a ''religio illicita'', existed among some of the Romans.
The Roman Empire soon found it was too costly to maintain a permanent garrison north of the lower Danube. As a whole, from 106 AD a permanent military and administrative Roman presence was registered only until 276 AD. (In comparison, Britain was militarily occupied by Romans for more than six centuries—and English is certainly not a Romance language, while the Church of England had no Archbishop before the times of Pope St. [[Gregory the Dialogist|Gregory the Great]].) Clearly, Dacians must have been favored linguistically and religiously by some unique ethnological features, so that after only 169 years of an anemic military occupation they emerged as a major Romance people, strongly represented religiously at the first [[Ecumenical Councils]], as the [[Ante-Nicene ]] Fathers duly recorded.
When the Romanians formed as a people, it is quite clear that they already had the Christian faith, as proved by tradition, as well as by some interesting archeological and linguistic evidence. Basic terms of Christianity are of Latin origin: such as ''church'' (''biserică'' from ''basilica''), ''God'' (''Dumnezeu'' from ''Domine Deus''), ''Pascha'' (''Paşti'' from ''Paschae''), ''Pagan'' (''Păgân'' from ''Paganus''), ''Angel'' (''Înger'' from ''Angelus''). Some of them (especially ''Biserică'') are unique to Orthodoxy as it is found in Romania.
