Which christianity was first

It was this teaching which was essential for the development and success of the early church which would otherwise have remained nothing more than another Jewish sect. Paul established Christian churches throughout the Roman Empire, including Europe, and beyond - even into Africa.

However, in all cases, the church remained small and was persecuted, particularly under tyrannical Roman emperors like Nero , Domitian , under whom being a Christian was an illegal act, and Diocletian Many Christian believers died for their faith and became martyrs for the church Bishop Polycarp and St Alban amongst others. When a Roman soldier, Constantine, won victory over his rival in battle to become the Roman emperor, he attributed his success to the Christian God and immediately proclaimed his conversion to Christianity.

Constantine then needed to establish exactly what the Christian faith was and called the First Council of Nicea in AD which formulated and codified the faith. Over the next few centuries, there were debates and controversies about the precise interpretation of the faith, as ideas were formulated and discussed. The Council of Chalcedon held in was the last council held whilst the Roman Empire was intact. It gave rise to the Nicene Creed which Christians still say today to affirm their belief in God, Christ and his church.

When Rome fell in , it meant that Western and Eastern Christians were no longer under the same political rule and differences in belief and practice arose between them. The differences between Eastern and Western Christianity culminated in what has been called the Great Schism, in , when the patriarchs of the Eastern and Western division of Constantinople and Rome respectively were unable to resolve their differences.

The split led to the Orthodox church and the Roman Catholic church. The Orthodox church does not recognise the authority of the Roman papacy and claims a Christian heritage in direct descent from the Christian church of Christ's believers. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.

Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Like Tacitus, then, Josephus' primary attention seems to rest not on Christianity itself but the plight and political crises facing his own people in his day. The language of the New Testament only further complicates the situation, since it's all but certain that the gospels and epistles and other works which make up its canon of twenty-seven books are, at best, translations of what Jesus actually said.

Instead of Greek, the language of the New Testament, Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic , a Semitic tongue used commonly throughout the Holy Lands in his day. And because he was born a Jew and most Jewish boys at the time were trained in Hebrew, he almost certainly could speak that language, too, or at least read it.

But Greek? It's a fair question to ask if Jesus even knew Greek , and yet that is the language in which his words are recorded. Whether or not he did, one thing is clear, the reason the authors of the Gospels chose to write their accounts of Jesus' life in Greek. As the international language of science, philosophy and commerce, both intellectual and economic, the Greek tongue would in those days have reached a much wider audience than Aramaic or Hebrew.

The result is that the gospels seem unlikely to represent the actual words spoken by Christ—surely, however, they're close to what he actually said—still, as anyone who communicates in a second language can attest, translations are never exact.

So if the New Testament does not transmit Christ's words literally—which is not the same thing as saying it's not the "Word of God"—the situation encompasses a hopeless conundrum for those intent on deciphering what-really-happened-in-the-past. On the other hand, believers and theologians who have freedom to traffic in mysteries or miracles may find easy and ready solutions to this problem—or difficult ones, but solutions all the same—by calling on resources historians do not find on their menu of executable options.

So, without external sources to contradict, corroborate or give dimension to the testimony of its authors, the gospels of the New Testament do not admit history as such, which exempts the life of Christ itself from the direct scrutiny of historical investigation.

And perhaps, in the end, that's not a bad thing for historians. It's always good not to attract the attention of anyone's Inquisition. Little makes the desperation of this situation more apparent than the thorny issue of the year in which Jesus was born. The year we call "1 CE or AD " is almost certainly not the date of his birth —ironically then, Jesus was most likely born several years "before Christ," by perhaps as much as a decade—moreover, his birth story as related in the gospels is highly problematical, at least from a historian's perspective.

For one thing, Romans in the day wouldn't have ordered a census so that they could tax "all the world," as the Gospel of Luke claims, because with the resources they had at the time it would have been utterly infeasible.

Neither would they have made those they were assessing return to their ancestral cities—that was a Jewish custom, not a Roman one—nor does the historical record support the proposition that, out of fear of Herod's wrath and subsequent proclamation to kill all male infants in his realm, Jesus' family fled from Judea to Egypt, a story related in the second chapter of Matthew.

All in all, the life of Jesus, especially his early days, is a narrative so fraught with bias and so frail in corroborating data that it's best left for specialists in religion to explore. I think he kind of designed it so that we'd never be able to prove his existence.

And I think that's really cool. This means that the historical study of Christianity begins not with Christ but with his most important early follower, Paul. Often called the "second founder of the Christian church," he was a Jew who had Roman citizenship and initially oppressed Christians until he experienced an intense vision of Christ and converted to Christianity. Though never having met Jesus in person, at least not in a conventional sense, Paul became the most visible of the apostles after Christ's execution since he was the best educated and uniquely positioned to bridge the Jewish and Roman worlds, opening the new religion up to a much larger audience.

More important from a historian's standpoint, Paul is an individual with clear connections to things attested in non-biblical sources outside of the Holy Lands. Addressed to budding communities of Christians in cities around the Roman world, Paul's letters are, as far as we know, the earliest Christian documents extant, predating by a decade or more the gospels themselves, at least in the form we have them. In Paul's writings are also found for the first time several features of Christian life central in later worship, for instance, the rituals of communion and mass, the doctrine of redemption through Christ's suffering and a growing sense of separation between Christians and Jews.

Over time, the last developed into a schism, then open contempt and finally outright insurgency, forging a long-standing tradition of animosity between these religious sects. In leaning toward the wider pagan world, Paul set a precedent for incorporating aspects of Roman and Greek culture into the burgeoning cult, "christianizing" several useful and admirable aspects of ancient life. In particular, from the Greek philosophical system called Stoicism he adopted notions such as the assumption that all people are fundamentally equal, that slavery is an abomination and that war does less good in the world than peace.

Greek literature also clearly informed his upbringing, as is visible in the high quality of lyric expression he produces at times:. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we look through a mirror darkly, but later we will see him face to face. Now I understand only partly; then I will understand fully, just as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope and love live on, three things; but the greatest of them is love.

While there's no external corroboration of the tradition that Paul died a martyr in the Roman arena, this apostle stands out from the others as a visionary, organizer and motivator who gave the religion he adopted a definite form, molding inspired teaching into a working belief system. Among his many titles, Saint Paul should also be proclaimed Christianity's "Darius," its shopkeeper. As it grew and prospered, Christianity came more and more into the public eye, and that ultimately brought its membership into conflict with Roman authority.

In particular, the predilection of early believers in Christ to proclaim that the end of the world was imminent smacked to the Romans of insurrection, the sort of cabal that promoted general despair and hysteria and late payment of taxes. From the early Empire's perspective, doom-cults like Christianos did not contribute to Roman life the way good religions were expected to.

Moreover, the Romans saw the Christians as a subset of Jews who had already been granted special privileges because of their unusual religion and, in return, delivered little more than a ragged promise of peaceful cooperation. Because of their non-conformist monotheistic notions, they had also received a general exemption from emperor-worship see Chapter 12 , which in the minds of many Romans amounted to tax-dodging.

Worse still, this mercy imported the potential for setting other sects off which might decide to petition for the same sort of licence. Thus, into an already noxious environment, Christianity was pumping only more poison. But persecution was not the way Romans as a rule preferred to handle their civic and social responsibilities. To the contrary, open acceptance of new ideas was their default position, whenever feasible.

From any polytheist's perspective, after all, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with having a few more gods—the more the holier, in fact—ironically, then, the Christians' insistence on exclusivity branded them atheists in the eyes of many Romans, because not letting people worship freely seemed selfish and pointless, by the standards of the day. A Pantheon , a space consecrated to "all gods," is the type of temple the Romans and their coalition partners encouraged everyone to embrace.

So, because the Christians riled the already irritable Jewish element in Roman society and furthermore claimed their god was returning at any moment to end all time—which implied that serving the state or doing any work at all was pointless—the Romans felt they had to come down hard on these gloomy rebels who were so inexplicably ungrateful for the government's largesse.

And so they did, several times in history, though never harder, it should be noted, than they did on the Jews themselves or, for that matter, other barbarian groups whom they slaughtered mercilessly and displaced in droves, always in the name of protecting Rome and the greater good. But that's mostly because there were much larger numbers of barbarians and even Jews compared to Christians, at least in the first few centuries of the modern age.

Later pro-Christian historians played up these random persecutions as some sort of organized devilry on the Romans' part. The fact is, decades often passed between assaults on Christian groups and, while it's true that several emperors did, in fact, go after Christians per se , most weren't persecuting them for their religion but their wealth. Especially in the great economic depression of the third century CE when it was becoming harder and harder for the Roman government to pay its armies and keep at bay the hordes of foreigners pounding on the gates of the frontier , emperors sought reasons to confiscate wealth anywhere they could and, because Christians lived in a tax-shelter of sorts, exempted from having to participate in certain forms of revenue collection, some of them had become quite well-off.

Many more used their religious convictions to beg off serving in the army. If the emperors of Rome were wrong to attack Christians as such—and there's no question they were wrong! They feared for the Roman state's survival and, as history ultimately proved, they were right about that, at least.

Nevertheless, late third-century Rome finally found the savior it so desperately needed, not a divine one but a hard-nosed, working-class emperor named Diocletian. This no-nonsense general who had risen to pre-eminence out of the lowest caste of Roman society looked with suspicion upon those who appealed to ideology as a means of escaping any form of public service.

When he fell seriously ill toward the end of his life in CE, Diocletian commanded everyone in the Empire, including Christian authorities, to sacrifice to the emperor's health. Some Christians obeyed even though the Church was against it, others didn't, some died and that was the last systematic Roman assault on Christians in the West. In the East, on the other hand, it took a few more years, until CE and the death of the Emperor Galerius who was a fierce opponent of Christianity.

Then, general persecutions ended once and for all. Within the century, Rome would not only learn to tolerate this new belief-system but come to embrace it exclusively. In the generation after Diocletian, Constantine ca. He was the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity—that much at least is clear, even if little else about Constantine is—but as a man he's a historical enigma, and a great deal of conflicting information surrounds this imperial paradox, the primordial "Christian general.

Constantine was born the illegitimate son of a Roman ruler but was later made his father's heir. As a child he grew up in the Roman West, yet he later preferred the Hellenized East and, in fact, moved the center of Roman government there, where he built a grand new capital named after himself, Constantinople "Constantine's city".

Furthermore, during his tumultuous rise to power he fomented civil war on the pretext of re-uniting Rome and, even after he'd embraced Christianity, he continued to worship the sun the way many pagans did. Without doubt, one of history's most important transitional figures, this conundrum of a man seems to have been constantly in the process of transformation himself.

What matters to the issue at hand here is that he converted to some sort of Christianity at some point during his life.

The story goes that he'd had a vision of the cross before one of the crucial battles in the civil wars that brought him to power, and on that cross was written in hoc signo vince , "With this ensign, conquer!

But close examination of the historical evidence from the day muddies the waters considerably, suggesting this is an invented history since it's confirmed only long after the fact and then by sources with a direct interest in promoting the emperor's allegiance to Christian belief. The truth is, Constantine was only finally baptized on his deathbed, and his biography hardly constitutes a model of the good Christian life. Whatever the what-really-happened, this emperor's adoption of Christianity stopped once and for all the persecution of Christians in the West.

If, in issuing the Edict of Milan in , Constantine did not go so far as to declare Rome a Christian state, he did enforce a policy of official neutrality in Christian affairs. Under his regime, Christians were free at last to speak as themselves in public without fear of reprisal or torture and, more important, to worship as they wished. It was surely his hope that the Edict of Milan and a general posture of tolerance would help restore order within the government and the state.

During this time, there were several groups of Christians with different ideas about how to interpret scripture and the role of the church. In A. He later tried to unify Christianity and resolve issues that divided the church by establishing the Nicene Creed. Catholics expressed a deep devotion for the Virgin Mary, recognized the seven sacraments, and honored relics and sacred sites. When the Roman Empire collapsed in A. Between about A. In these battles, Christians fought against Islamic rulers and their Muslim soldiers to reclaim holy land in the city of Jerusalem.

The Christians were successful in occupying Jerusalem during some of the Crusades, but they were ultimately defeated. In , a German monk named Martin Luther published 95 Theses— a text that criticized certain acts of the Pope and protested some of the practices and priorities of the Roman Catholic church.

As a result, Protestantism was created, and different denominations of Christianity eventually began to form. The Catholic branch is governed by the Pope and Catholic bishops around the world. The Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox is split into independent units each governed by a Holy Synod; there is no central governing structure akin to the Pope.

There are numerous denominations within Protestant Christianity, many of which differ in their interpretation of the Bible and understanding of the church. Although the many sects of Christianity have differing views, uphold separate traditions and worship in distinct ways, the core of their faith is centered around the life and teachings of Jesus. Christianity Fast Facts. The Basics of Christian History. Death and Resurrection of Jesus.

Harvard Divinity School. Life and Teachings of Jesus. Legitimization Under Constantine. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Generally described as taking place from the 14th century to the 17th century, the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, The Protestant Reformation was the 16th-century religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval that splintered Catholic Europe, setting in place the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the modern era.

In northern and central Europe, reformers Luther spent his early years in relative anonymity as a monk and scholar. The Bible is the holy scripture of the Christian religion, purporting to tell the history of the Earth from its earliest creation to the spread of Christianity in the first century A.

Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have undergone changes over the centuries,