History of Christianity

By the ninth and into the twelfth centuries, the Eastern church had spread further east along the Silk Road, into Tibet and China, and along all of the main trade routes of Central Asia.

[2][11] The Christian church established incarnation and resurrection as its first doctrines,[12] with baptism and the celebration of the Eucharist meal (Jesus's Last Supper) as its two primary rituals.

The departure of Christians before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70, alongside the development of what would become Rabbinic Judaism, disagreements about Jewish law, and insurrections against Rome, contributed to their divergence.

[72] The four gospels and the letters of Paul were generally regarded as authoritative, but other writings, such as the Book of Revelation and the epistles to the Hebrews, James, and I John, were assigned different degrees of authority.

[80] In the 250s, the emperors Decius and Valerian made it a capital offence to refuse to make sacrifices to Roman gods, resulting in widespread persecution of Christians.

[112] For most of Late Antiquity, the popes – the successors to Saint Peter as bishop of Rome – had limited influence, and did not yet have the power needed to break free of secular interference in church affairs.

[117] In the 370s, Basil the Great founded the Basileias, a monastic community in Caesarea (Mazaca) that developed the first health care system for the poor which became the model of public hospitals thereafter.

[134][135] Gregory the Great (590-604) gained prestige and power for the papacy by leading the response to invasion by the Lombards in 592 and 593, reforming the clergy, standardizing music in worship, sending out missionaries and founding new monasteries.

[195][196] Islamic rule devastated the Chalcedonian Asian churches in the cities, but intense missionary activity between the fifth and eighth centuries had led to miaphysite Christianity being adopted in the more remote areas of eastern Iran, Arabia, central Asia, parts of China, and the coasts of India and Indonesia.

[205] Until the end of the Early Middle Ages, Western culture was preserved and passed on primarily by monks known as "regular clergy" because they followed a regula: a rule.

[213] From the sixth to the eighth centuries, most schools were connected to monasteries, but methods of teaching an illiterate populace could also include mystery plays, vernacular sermons, saints' lives in epic form, and artwork.

[237] Within the tenets of feudalism, the church created a new model of consecrated kingship unknown to the East, and in 800, Clovis' descendant Charlemagne became its recipient when Pope Leo III crowned him emperor.

[252][253][254] Every follower was supposed to have some knowledge of the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, to rest on Sunday and feast days, attend mass, fast at specified times, take communion at Easter, pay various fees for the needy, and receive last rites at death.

[349] A turning point in Jewish-Christian relations occurred when the Talmud was put "on trial" in 1239 by Pope Gregory IX because of contents that mocked the central figures of Christianity.

[351][350][352] A rhetoric with elaborate stories grew among the folk casting Jews as enemies accused of ritual murder, the blood libel, and desecration of the Christian eucharist host.

[366] The many calamities of the "long fourteenth century" – plague, famine, wars, and social unrest – led ordinary European people to believe the end of the world was imminent.

The schism was finally resolved in 1417, with the election of Pope Martin V.[381][382] Throughout the Late Middle Ages, the church faced powerful challenges and vigorous political confrontations.

[383][384] The English scholastic philosopher John Wycliffe (1320–1384) urged the Church to again embrace simplicity by giving up its property and wealth, to stop being subservient to secular politics, and to deny papal authority.

[390] A proposed reunion agreement between the Orthodox and Catholic churches was negated by the Fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453,[391][392] which sealed off Orthodoxy from the West for more than a century.

[402] Although fifteenth-century popes struggled to reestablish papal authority, the Renaissance Papacy transformed Rome by rebuilding St. Peter's Basilica and establishing the city as a prestigious centre of learning.

[403] The church became a leading patron of art and architecture, commissioning many works and supporting renowned artists such as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, Fra Angelico, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci.

[406][note 10] However, there were women who became distinguished leaders of nunneries, exercising the same powers and privileges as their male counterparts, such as Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), Elisabeth of Schönau (d. 1164/65), and Marie d'Oignies (d.

[413][411] While the medieval church never officially repudiated Augustine's doctrine of protecting the Jews, defining them as heretical outsiders became increasingly common throughout society during the fifteenth century.

At the same time, a collection of loosely related groups including Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Evangelical Rationalists, began the Radical Reformation in Germany and Switzerland.

New monastic orders were formed, including the Society of Jesus – the "Jesuits" – who adopted military-style discipline and strict loyalty to the Pope and who soon became the chief weapon against Protestantism.

[438] Abuses from absolutist Catholic kings gave rise to a virulent critique of Christianity that first emerged among the more extreme Protestant reformers in the 1680s as an aspect of the Age of Enlightenment.

[439][440] By the 1690s, many secular thinkers had rethought the state's reasons for persecution and begun advocating for religious toleration,[441][442] as Protestants and other Christian moderates had long argued.

[478] The 300-year-old trans-Atlantic slave trade, in which some Christians had participated, had always garnered moral objections: by the eighteenth century, individual Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists began a written campaign against it.

[539][540][541] The challenges of secularism, and the changing moral climate concerning sexual ethics, gender, and exclusivity produced a demand for greater individual freedom.

[569] The missionary movement of the twenty-first century has transformed into a multi-cultural, multi-faceted global network of NGO's, short-term amateur volunteers, and traditional long-term bilingual, bicultural professionals who focus on evangelism and local development and not on 'civilizing' native people.