Michael Adegoke

For more than a century, the Byzantine Empire fought over whether Christians should bow before painted faces of Christ and the saints. Emperors banned images, soldiers scraped mosaics, monks hid panels, and popes in Rome refused to treat the quarrel as a local Greek fashion. The Iconoclastic Controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries was … Read More

In the sixth and seventh centuries, two Christianizing currents met in Britain: traditions shaped by Irish and British churches—often labeled “Celtic”—and a Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons associated with Augustine of Canterbury and papal sponsorship. They shared the same creedal core of catholic Christianity, yet differed in organization, missionary style, calendar custom, and monastic culture. … Read More

In the generation after the western Roman administration collapsed in Gaul, a Frankish war-leader named Clovis chose baptism into the catholic (Nicene) church rather than into the Arian Christianity favored by many Gothic rulers. That choice did not invent Western Christendom by itself, but it redirected the religious politics of post-Roman Gaul. Gallo-Roman bishops gained … Read More

When Visigothic troops entered Rome in August 410, the shock traveled faster than the armies. For centuries the city had been more than a capital; it was a symbol of order, destiny, and sacred continuity. Refugees carried stories of humiliation to North Africa. Pagan critics revived an old accusation: the empire had prospered under the … Read More

Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa—the Cappadocian Fathers—did not merely “defend the Trinity” with warmer piety. They repaired the Christian vocabulary itself. In the decades after Nicaea, Greek-speaking churches nearly choked on ambiguous words: ousia, hypostasis, prosopon, and related terms could signal unity or threeness depending on the speaker. The Cappadocians’ … Read More

In 381, bishops gathered in Constantinople under Theodosius I and produced what later Christians would treat as the completed Nicene Creed—especially its expanded confession of the Holy Spirit. The council did not invent the Spirit; it settled a long quarrel about whether the Spirit was fully divine, a created intermediary, or something awkwardly in between. … Read More

Before emperors called councils and before Christianity became a public religion of the Roman state, bishops were already becoming the hinge of local Christian life. In the second and third centuries they taught, baptized, judged communion, administered charity, corresponded across cities, and argued about who belonged to “the church.” This article treats the bishop not … Read More

In the second and third centuries, Christian teachers fought not only with pagan critics and Roman officials, but with other Christians about what the faith even was. Later writers called many of their opponents “gnostics”—people of gnosis, saving knowledge. Modern scholars argue about whether “Gnosticism” names one religion, many movements, or a heresiologist’s recycling bin. … Read More

Jesus and his first followers were Jews. Within a few centuries, most people who called themselves Christians were Gentiles, and “Christian” and “Jew” functioned as distinct communal identities across much of the Roman world. How that happened—and how long Jewish believers in Jesus remained a living bridge—is one of the most sensitive problems in ancient … Read More

Paul of Tarsus did not invent urban religion. He used it. The Mediterranean’s ports, roads, workshops, synagogues, and households became the wiring through which his teams carried a message about Israel’s Messiah for Jews and Gentiles. Letters then kept the wires live when the travelers moved on. This article explains Pauline mission as a network … Read More