History of Christianity

The history of Christianity begins with the ministry of Jesus, a Jewish teacher and healer, who was crucified and died c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem in the Roman province of Judea.

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.

[73] 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.

[81] 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.

[119] 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.

[124] 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.

[165][193] 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.

[197][198] 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.

[215] 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.

[239] 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.

[254][255][256] 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.

[357] 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.

[359][358][360] 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][367][368] The many calamities of the "long fourteenth century" – plague, famine, multiple wars, social unrest, urban riots, peasant revolts, and renegade feudal armies – led folk to believe the end of the world prophesied in the New Testament book of Revelation was imminent.

[403][402][400] Groups of laymen and secular clerics sought a more sincere spiritual life, giving rise to a vernacular religious culture called the new devotion which worked toward a pious society of ordinary non-ordained people.

[427] In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Church was a leading patron of art and architecture, directly commissioning many individual works and supporting many artists such as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, Fra Angelico, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci.

[428][429] Through much of the fifteenth century, popes struggled to reestablish papal authority, restore finances, and protect the papacy from predatory princes by becoming supplicants who offered privileges and income in exchange for support.

They constructed the Vatican, roads, and residences fit for church princes and other nobility that attracted wealthy investors and established the city as a prestigious centre of learning.

[445] The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks effectively destroyed the Eastern Orthodox Church as an institution inaugurated by Constantine, sealing off Greek-speaking Orthodoxy from the West for almost a century and a half.

[468] New monastic orders were formed within the church, including the Society of Jesus – also known as the "Jesuits" – who adopted military-style discipline and a vow of loyalty to the Pope, leading them to be called "the shock troops of the papacy".

[480] In the early seventeenth century, Baroque art, characterized by grandeur and opulence, offered the Catholic Church and secular rulers a means of expressing their magnificence and political power.

[484] Abuses from political absolutism practised by kings supported by Catholicism gave rise to a virulent anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian sentiment that emerged in the 1680s as an aspect of the Age of Enlightenment.

[495][496][497] According to Sheridan Gilley "Catholic Christianity became a global religion through the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in the sixteenth century and French missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth.

[501] Gilley writes that "The cruel martyrdom of Catholics in China, Indochina, Japan and Korea, another heroic missionary country, was connected to local fears of European invasion and conquest, which in some cases were not unjustified.

[523] Verbal battles over the movement raged at both the congregational and denominational levels creating divisions which became 'Parties', which turned political and eventually led to critical support for the American Revolution.

[532] Moral objections within Christianity had arisen immediately:[533] by the eighteenth century, individual Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists had begun a written campaign against slavery.

[note 17] Nazis interfered in The Confessing Church's affairs, harassed its members, executed mass arrests, and targeted well-known pastors like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

[628] 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.