Christianity began as a small movement in Roman Judea in the 1st century CE, yet within a few centuries it had become visible across the Mediterranean world and, by the late 4th century, closely tied to imperial power. That transformation did not happen because of a single miracle explanation or a single political decree. It … Read More
Between the death of Jesus and the rise of Constantine, Christianity did not stay the same movement with a longer mailing list. It changed in organization, worship, texts, social profile, and public reputation. Across roughly the years 30 to 300 CE, a Jewish messianic network became a Mediterranean religion with bishops, developing scripture collections, charity … Read More
In the early thirteenth century, two new kinds of religious life walked into Europe’s growing cities. Franciscans followed Francis of Assisi into evangelical poverty, preaching, and care for the marginalized. Dominicans followed Dominic of Osma into a disciplined order of preachers aimed at teaching the faith and confronting heresy. Together with later recognized mendicant families, … Read More
Few turning points in Christian history are discussed more often than Constantine. He did not found Christianity, and he did not make it the Roman Empire’s official religion in one stroke. But his reign changed Christianity’s public status, property rights, political leverage, and relationship with imperial power so dramatically that historians often speak of a … Read More
Christians did not wake up one morning with a leather-bound New Testament lowered from the sky. The twenty-seven-book collection familiar in most churches today is the end of a long reception process: writings composed in the first and early second centuries, copied and read in worship, defended against rivals, debated at the edges, and gradually … Read More
Medieval Christianity did not only build cathedrals and crusade armies. It also built classrooms. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Latin Europe invented the university as a durable institution and perfected scholasticism as a method of questioning, distinguishing, and reconciling authorities. Masters lectured on Scripture and Peter Lombard’s Sentences; students disputed; Aristotle’s recovered works forced … Read More
Between 325 and 451, three councils—Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon—tried to settle the most explosive questions of early Christian teaching: Who is the Son in relation to the Father? How should Mary be named? How can Jesus be both fully divine and fully human? They were not three copies of the same meeting. Each council faced … Read More
Early Christians did not only endure Roman pressure. They remembered it—on purpose. Martyrdom became a way of telling who the church was: a people who could lose a trial and still claim victory, who could bury the dead and keep a name on a calendar, who could argue about courage without turning every conflict into … Read More
For nearly seventy years, the bishops of Rome did not live in Rome. From 1309 to 1377 the papal court resided mainly at Avignon, a city on the Rhône under heavy French influence. Critics called it a Babylonian Captivity. Then, after Gregory XI returned to Rome and died, Latin Christendom split in the Western Schism … Read More
Roman officials sometimes killed Christians, seized property, burned books, and demanded sacrifice to the gods and the emperor. Yet the movement was not erased. By the early fourth century it was large enough that Constantine and Licinius chose toleration rather than another round of destruction. Survival was not a miracle that needs no explanation, and … Read More