Christianity is the most widely practiced religion in the world, with more than 2 billion

followers. The Christian faith centers on beliefs regarding the birth, life, death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. While it started with a small group of adherents, many
historians regard the spread and adoption of Christianity throughout the world as one of
the most successful spiritual missions in human history.

Christianity Beliefs
Some basic Christian concepts include:

 Christians are monotheistic, i.e., they believe there’s only one God, and he created the
heavens and the earth. This divine Godhead consists of three parts: the father (God
himself), the son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit.
 The essence of Christianity revolves around the life, death and Christian beliefs on the
resurrection of Jesus. Christians believe God sent his son Jesus, the messiah, to save the
world. They believe Jesus was crucified on a cross to offer the forgiveness of sins and
was resurrected three days after his death before ascending to heaven.
 Christians contend that Jesus will return to earth again in what’s known as the Second
Coming.
 The Holy Bible includes important scriptures that outline Jesus’s teachings, the lives and
teachings of major prophets and disciples, and offer instructions for how Christians should
live.
 Both Christians and Jews follow the Old Testament of the Bible, but Christians also
embrace the New Testament.
 The cross is a symbol of Christianity.
 The most important Christian holidays are Christmas (which celebrates the birth of Jesus)
and Easter (which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus).
Who was Jesus?
Most historians believe that Jesus was a real person who was born between 2 B.C. and 7
B.C. Much of what scholars know about Jesus comes from the New Testament of the
Christian Bible.

According to the text, Jesus was born to a young Jewish virgin named Mary in the town of
Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem in modern-day Palestine. Christians believe the conception
was a supernatural event, with God impregnating Mary via the Holy Spirit.

Very little is known about Jesus’s childhood. Scriptures reveal that he grew up in
Nazareth, he and his family fled persecution from King Herod and moved to Egypt, and his
“earthly” father, Joseph, was a carpenter.
 Jesus was raised Jewish, and according to most scholars, he aimed to reform Judaism—
not create a new religion.

READ MORE: What Did Jesus Look Like?

When he was around 30 years old, Jesus started his public ministry after being baptized in
the Jordan River by the prophet known as John the Baptist.

For about three years, Jesus traveled with 12 appointed disciples (also known as the
12 apostles), teaching large groups of people and performing what witnesses described
as miracles. Some of the most well-known miraculous events included raising a dead man
named Lazarus from the grave, walking on water and curing the blind.

Jesus’s Teachings
Jesus used parables—short stories with hidden messages—in his teachings.

Some of the main themes that Jesus taught, which Christians later embraced, include:

 Love God.
 Love your neighbor as yourself.
 Forgive others who have wronged you.
 Love your enemies.
 Ask God for forgiveness of your sins.
 Jesus is the Messiah and was given the authority to forgive others.
 Repentance of sins is essential.
 Don’t be hypocritical.
 Don’t judge others.
 The Kingdom of God is near. It’s not the rich and powerful—but the weak and poor—who
will inherit this kingdom.
In one of Jesus’s most famous speeches, which became known as the Sermon on the
Mount, he summarized many of his moral instructions for his followers.

Jesus’s Death and Resurrection

Many scholars believe Jesus died between 30 A.D. and 33 A.D., although the exact date
is debated among theologians.

According to the Bible, Jesus was arrested, tried and condemned to death. Roman
governor Pontius Pilate issued the order to kill Jesus after being pressured by Jewish
leaders who alleged that Jesus was guilty of a variety of crimes, including blasphemy.
Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers in Jerusalem, and his body was laid in a tomb.
According to scripture, three days after his crucifixion, Jesus’s body was missing.

In the days after Jesus’s death, some people reported sightings and encounters with him.
Authors in the Bible say the resurrected Jesus ascended into Heaven.

The Christian Bible

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The Christian Bible is a collection of 66 books written by various authors. It’s divided into
two parts: The Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Old Testament, which is also recognized by followers of Judaism, describes the history
of the Jewish people, outlines specific laws to follow, details the lives of many prophets,
and predicts the coming of the Messiah.

The New Testament was written after Jesus’s death. The first four books—
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—are known as the “Gospels,” which means “good news.”
These texts, composed sometime between 70 A.D. and 100 A.D., provide accounts of the
life and death of Jesus.

Letters written by early Christian leaders, which are known as “epistles,” make up a large
part of the New Testament. These letters offer instructions for how the church should
operate.
The Acts of the Apostles is a book in the New Testament that gives an account of the
apostles’ ministry after Jesus’s death. The author of Acts is the same author as one of the
Gospels—it is effectively “part two” to the Gospels, what happened after Jesus’s death
and resurrection.

The final book in the New Testament, Revelation, describes a vision and prophecies that
will occur at the end of the world, as well as metaphors to describe the state of the world.

History of Christianity
According to the Bible, the first church organized itself 50 days after Jesus’s death on the
Day of Pentecost—when the Holy Spirit was said to descend onto Jesus’s followers.

Most of the first Christians were Jewish converts, and the church was centered in
Jerusalem. Shortly after the creation of the church, many Gentiles (non-Jews) embraced
Christianity.

READ MORE: Inside the Conversion Tactics of the Early Christian Church
Early Christians considered it their calling to spread and teach the gospel. One of the most
important missionaries was the apostle Paul, a former persecutor of Christians.

Paul’s conversion to Christianity after he had a supernatural encounter with Jesus is

described in Acts of the Apostles. Paul preached the gospel and established churches
throughout the Roman Empire, Europe and Africa.

Many historians believe Christianity wouldn’t be as widespread without the work of Paul.
In addition to preaching, Paul is thought to have written 13 of the 27 books in the New
Testament.

Persecution of Christians
Early Christians were persecuted for their faith by both Jewish and Roman leaders.

In 64 A.D., Emperor Nero blamed Christians for a fire that broke out in Rome. Many were
brutally tortured and killed during this time.

Under Emperor Domitian, Christianity was illegal. If a person confessed to being a

Christian, he or she was executed.

Starting in 303 A.D., Christians faced the most severe persecutions to date under the co-
emperors Diocletian and Galerius. This became known as the Great Persecution.
Constantine Embraces Christianity
When Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, religious tolerance shifted in
the Roman Empire.

During this time, there were several groups of Christians with different ideas about how to
interpret scripture and the role of the church.

In 313 A.D., Constantine lifted the ban on Christianity with the Edict of Milan. He later tried
to unify Christianity and resolve issues that divided the church by establishing the Nicene
Creed.

Many scholars believe Constantine’s conversion was a turning point in Christian history.

The Catholic Church

In 380 A.D., Emperor Theodosius I declared Catholicism the state religion of the Roman
Empire. The Pope, or Bishop of Rome, operated as the head of the Roman Catholic
Church.

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 476 A.D., differences emerged among Eastern and
Western Christians.

In 1054 A.D., the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox church split into two
groups.

The Crusades
Between about 1095 A.D. and 1230 A.D., the Crusades, a series of holy wars, took place.
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.

After the Crusades, the Catholic Church’s power and wealth increased.

The Reformation
 In 1517, 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.

Later, Luther publicly said that the Bible didn’t give the Pope the sole right to read and
interpret scripture.

Luther’s ideas triggered the Reformation—a movement that aimed to reform the Catholic
church. As a result, Protestantism was created, and different denominations of Christianity
eventually began to form.

Types of Christianity
Christianity is broadly split into three branches: Catholic, Protestant and (Eastern)
Orthodox.

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.

Some of the many denominations that fall under the category of Protestant Christianity
include:

 Baptist
 Episcopalian
 Evangelist
 Methodist
 Presbyterian
 Pentecostal/Charismatic
 Lutheran
 Anglican
 Evangelical
 Assemblies of God
 Christian Reform/Dutch Reform
 Church of the Nazarene
 Disciples of Christ
 United Church of Christ
 Mennonite
 Christian Science
 Quaker
 Seventh-Day Adventist
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.

Sources
Christianity Fast Facts. CNN.
The Basics of Christian History. BBC.
Christianity. BBC.
Death and Resurrection of Jesus. Harvard Divinity School.
Life and Teachings of Jesus. Harvard Divinity School.
Legitimization Under Constantine. PBS.

Citation Information
Article Title
Christianity

Author
History.com Editors

Website Name
HISTORY

URL
https://www.history.com/topics/religion/history-of-christianity

Access Date
September 5, 2019

Publisher
A&E Television Networks

Last Updated
August 20, 2019

Original Published Date

October 13, 2017

TAGS
MARTIN LUTHER
BY
HISTORY.COM EDITORS

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 Christianity
WRITTEN BY:
 Matt Stefon
 William Richey Hogg
 Ernst Wilhelm Benz
 Linwood Fredericksen
 Bernard J. McGinn
 Sidney Spencer

…See All Contributors

LAST UPDATED: Aug 22, 2019 See Article History

Christianity, major religion stemming from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of
Nazareth (the Christ, or the Anointed One of God) in the 1st century CE. It has become the
largest of the world’s religions and, geographically, the most widely diffused of all faiths. It
has a constituency of more than two billion believers. Its largest groups are the Roman
Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Protestant churches. The
Oriental Orthodox churches constitute one of the oldest branches of the tradition but had
been out of contact with Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy from the middle of
the 5th century until the late 20th century because of a dispute over Christology (the
doctrine of Jesus Christ’s nature and significance). Significant movements within the
broader Christian world and sometimes transcending denominational boundaries
are Pentecostalism, Charismatic Christianity, Evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. In
addition, there are numerous independent churches throughout the world. See
also Anglicanism; Baptist; Calvinism; Congregationalism; Evangelical
church; Lutheranism; Oriental Orthodoxy; presbyterian; Reformed and Presbyterian
churches.
This article first considers the nature and development of the Christian religion, its ideas,
and its institutions. This is followed by an examination of
several intellectual manifestations of Christianity. Finally, the position of Christianity in the
world, the relations among its divisions and denominations, its missionary outreach to
other peoples, and its relations with other world religions are discussed. For supporting
material on various topics, see angel and demon; Bible; biblical literature; canon
law; creed; Christology; doctrine and
dogma; ecumenism; eschatology; exegesis; faith; grace; heaven; hell; heresy; Jesus
Christ; liturgical movement; millennialism; miracle; monasticism; monotheism; New
Testament; Old Testament; original
sin; papacy; prayer; priesthood; purgatory; sacrament; salvation; schism; scripture; theism
; theology; and worship.
The Church And Its History
The essence and identity of Christianity

At its most basic, Christianity is the faith tradition that focuses on the figure of Jesus
Christ. In this context, faith refers both to the believers’ act of trust and to the content of
their faith. As a tradition, Christianity is more than a system of religious belief. It also has
generated a culture, a set of ideas and ways of life, practices, and artifacts that have been
handed down from generation to generation since Jesus first became the object of faith.
Christianity is thus both a living tradition of faith and the culture that the faith leaves
behind. The agent of Christianity is the church, the communityof people who make up the
body of believers.

To say that Christianity “focuses” on Jesus Christ is to say that somehow it brings together
its beliefs and practices and other traditions in reference to a historical figure. Few
Christians, however, would be content to keep this reference merely historical. Although
their faith tradition is historical—i.e., they believe that transactions with the divine do not
occur in the realm of timeless ideas but among ordinary humans through the ages—the
vast majority of Christians focus their faith in Jesus Christ as someone who is also a
present reality. They may include many other references in their tradition and thus may
speak of “God” and “human nature” or of the “church” and the “world,” but they would not
be called Christian if they did not bring their attentions first and last to Jesus Christ.
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While there is something simple about this focus on Jesus as the central figure, there is
also something very complicated. That complexity is revealed by the thousands of
separate churches, sects, and denominations that make up the modern Christian tradition.
To project these separate bodies against the background of their development in the
nations of the world is to suggest the bewildering variety. To picture people expressing
their adherence to that tradition in their prayer life and church-building, in their quiet
worship or their strenuous efforts to change the world, is to suggest even more of the
variety.
Given such complexity, it is natural that throughout Christian history both those in the
tradition and those surrounding it have made attempts at simplification. Two ways to do
this have been to concentrate on the “essence” of the faith, and thus on the ideas that
are integral to it, or to be concerned with the “identity” of the tradition, and thus on the
boundaries of its historical experience.
Modern scholars have located the focus of this faith tradition in the context
of monotheistic religions. Christianity addresses the historical figure of Jesus Christ
against the background of, and while seeking to remain faithful to, the experience of one
God. It has consistently rejected polytheism and atheism.
A second element of the faith tradition of Christianity, with rare exceptions, is a plan
of salvation or redemption. That is to say, the believers in the church picture themselves
as in a plight from which they need rescue. For whatever reason, they have been
distanced from God and need to be saved. Christianity is based on a particular experience
or scheme directed to the act of saving—that is, of bringing or “buying back,” which is part
of what redemption means, these creatures of God to their source in God. The agent of
that redemption is Jesus Christ.
It is possible that through the centuries the vast majority of believers have not used the
term essence to describe the central focus of their faith. The term is itself of Greek origin
and thus represents only one part of the tradition, one element in the terms that have gone
into making up Christianity. Essence refers to those qualities that give something its
identity and are at the centre of what makes that thing different from everything else. To
Greek philosophers it meant something intrinsic to and inherent in a thing or category of
things, which gave it its character and thus separated it from everything of different
character. Thus, Jesus Christ belongs to the essential character of Christianity and gives it
a unique identity.
If most people are not concerned with defining the essence of Christianity, in practice they
must come to terms with what the word essence implies. Whether they are engaged in
being saved or redeemed on the one hand, or thinking and speaking about that
redemption, its agent, and its meaning on the other, they are concentrating on the
essence of their experience. Those who have concentrated from within the faith tradition
have also helped to give it its identity. It is not possible to speak of the essence of a
historical tradition without referring to how its ideal qualities have been discussed through
the ages. Yet one can take up the separate subjects of essence and identity in sequence,
being always aware of how they interrelate.

Christianity

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KEY PEOPLE
 St. Paul the Apostle
 St. Augustine
 Martin Buber
 Jan Hus
 St. Albertus Magnus
 Nikolaus Ludwig, count von Zinzendorf
 Pseudo-Dionysius The Areopagite
 Sir Sigmund Sternberg
 Vladimir I
 Jerome Of Prague
RELATED TOPICS
 Biblical literature
 Judaism
 Roman Catholicism
 Protestantism
 Eastern Orthodoxy
 Patristic literature
 Christology
 Canon law
 Church year
 Lutheranism

Historical views of the essence

Early views

Jesus and the earliest members of the Christian faith tradition were Jews, and thus they
stood in the faith tradition inherited by Hebrew people in Israel and the lands of
the Diaspora. They were monotheists, devoted to the God of Israel. When they claimed
that Jesus was divine, they had to do so in ways that would not challenge monotheism.
Insofar as they began to separate or be separated from Judaism, which did not accept
Jesus as the Messiah, the earliest Christians expressed certain ideas about the one on
whom their faith focused. As with other religious people, they became involved in a search
for truth. God, in the very nature of things, was necessarily the final truth. In a reference
preserved in the Gospel According to John, however, Jesus refers to himself not only as
“the way” and “the life” but also as “the truth.” Roughly, this meant “all the reality there is”
and was a reference to Jesus’ participation in the reality of the one God.
From the beginning there were Christians who may not have seen Jesus as the truth or as
a unique participant in the reality of God. There have been “humanist” devotees of Jesus,
modernist adapters of the truth about the Christ, but even in the act of adapting him
to humanist concepts in their day they have contributed to the debate of the essence of
Christianity and brought it back to the issues of monotheism and a way of salvation.
It has been suggested that the best way to preserve the essence of Christianity is to look
at the earliest documents—the four Gospels and the letters that make up much of the New
Testament—which contain the best account of what the earliest Christians remembered,
taught, or believed about Jesus Christ. It is presumed that “the simple Jesus” and the
“primitive faith” emerge from these documents as the core of the essence. This view has
been challenged, however, by the view that the writings that make up the New Testament
themselves reflect Jewish and Greek ways of thinking about Jesus and God. They are
seen through the experience of different personalities, such as St. Paul the Apostle or the
nameless composers—traditionally identified as St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St.
John—of documents that came to be edited as the Gospels. Indeed, there are not
only diverse ways of worship, of polity or governance of the Christian community, and of
behaviour pictured or prescribed in the New Testamentbut also diverse theologies, or
interpretations of the heart of the faith. Most believers see these diversities as
complementing each other and leave to scholars the argument that the primal documents
may compete with and even contradict each other.
Yet there is a core of ideas that all New Testament scholars and believers would agree
are central to ancient Christian beliefs. One British scholar, James G. Dunn, for example,
says they would all agree that “the Risen Jesus is the Ascended Lord.” That is to say,
there would have been no faith tradition and no scriptures had not the early believers
thought that Jesus was “Risen,” raised from the dead, and, “Ascended,” somehow above
the ordinary plane of mortal and temporal experience. From that simple assertion early
Christians could begin to complicate the search for essence.

An immediate question was how to combine the essential focus on Jesus with the
essential monotheism. At various points in the New Testament and especially in the works
of the Apologists, late 1st- and 2nd-century writers who sought to defend and explain the
faith to members of Greco-Roman society, Jesus is identified as the “preexistent Logos.”
That is, before there was a historical Jesus born of Mary and accessible to the sight and
touch of Jews and others in his own day, there was a Logos—a principle of reason, an
element of ordering, a “Word”—that participated in the Godhead and thus existed, but
which only preexisted as far as the “incarnate” Logos, the Word that took on flesh and
humanity (John 1:1–14), was concerned.
In searching for an essence of truth and the way of salvation, some primitive Jewish
Christian groups, such as the Ebionites, and occasional theologians in later ages
employed a metaphor of adoption. These theologians used as their source certain biblical
passages (e.g., Acts 2:22). Much as an earthly parent might adopt a child, so the divine
parent, the one Jesus called abba (Aramaic: “daddy,” or “father”), had adopted him and
taken him into the heart of the nature of what it is to be God. There were countless
variations of themes such as the preexistent Logos or the concept of adoption, but they
provide some sense of the ways the early Apologists carried out their task of contributing
to the definition of the essence of their Jesus-focused yet monotheistic faith.
While it is easier to point to diversity than to simplicity or clarity among those who early
expressed faith, it must also be said that from the beginning the believers insisted that
they were, or were intended to be, or were commanded and were striving to be, united in
their devotion to the essence of their faith tradition. There could not have been many final
truths, and there were not many legitimate ways of salvation. It was of the essence of their
tradition to reject other gods and other ways, and most defining of essence and identity
occurred as one set of Christians was concerned lest others might deviate from the
essential faith and might, for example, be attracted to other gods or other ways.
While Jesus lived among his disciples and those who ignored or rejected him, to make
him the focus of faith or denial presented one type of issue. After the “Risen Jesus” had
become the “Ascended Lord” and was no longer a visible physical presence, those at the
head of the tradition had a different problem. Jesus remained a present reality to them,
and, when they gathered to worship, they believed that he was “in the midst of them.” He
was present in their minds and hearts, in the spoken word that testified to him, and also
present in some form when they had their sacred meal and ingested bread and wine as
his “body and blood.” They created a reality around this experience; if once Judaism was
that reality, now Christianity resulted.
The search for the essence of Christianity led people in the Greek world to concentrate on
ideas. The focus on Jesus narrowed to ideas, to “beliefs about” and not only “belief in,”
and to doctrines. The essence began to be cognitive, referring to what was known,
or substantive. As debates over the cognitive or substantive aspects of Jesus’
participation in God became both intense and refined, the pursuit of essences became
almost a matter of competition in the minds of the Apologists and the formulators of
doctrines in the 3rd through the 6th century. During this time Christians met in council to
develop statements of faith, confessions, and creeds. The claimed essence was used in
conflict and rivalry with others. Christian Apologists began to speak, both to the Jews and
to the other members of the Greco-Roman world, in terms that unfavourably compared
their religions to Christianity. The essence also came to be a way to define who had the
best credentials and was most faithful. The claim that one had discerned the essence of
Christianity could be used to rule out the faithless, the apostate, or the heretic. The
believers in the essential truth and way of salvation saw themselves as insiders and
others as outsiders. This concept became important after the Christian movement had
triumphed in the Roman Empire, which became officially Christian by the late 4th century.
To fail to grasp or to misconceive what was believed to be the essence of faith might
mean exile, harassment, or even death.
In the early stages of the development of their faith, Christians did something rare if not
unique in the history of religion: they adopted the entire scriptural canon of what they now
saw to be another faith, Judaism, and embraced the Hebrew Scriptures, which they called
the Old Testament. But while doing so, they also incorporated the insistent monotheism of
Judaism as part of the essence of their truth and way of salvation, just as they
incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures’ story as part of their own identity-giving narrative and
experience.
This narrowing of focus on Jesus Christ as truth meant also a complementary sharpening
of focus on the way of salvation. There is no purpose in saving someone who does not
need salvation. Christianity therefore began to make, through its councils and creeds,
theologians and scholars, some attempts at definitive descriptions of what it is to be
human. Later some of these descriptions were called “original sin,” the idea that all
humans inherited from Adam, the first-created human, a condition that made it impossible
for them to be perfect or to please a personal God on their own. While Christians never
agreed on a specific teaching on original sin, they did describe as the essence of
Christianity the fact that something limited humans and led them to need redemption. Yet
the concentration always returned to Jesus Christ as belonging more to the essence of
Christianity than did any statements about the human condition.
 Detail from Expulsion of Adam and Eve, fresco by Masaccio, c. 1427; in the Brancacci Chapel, Church of Santa Maria del
Carmine, Florence.Scala/Art Resource, New York

The essence of Christianity eventually included statements about the reality to God.
Christians inherited from the Jews a relatively intimate picture of a God who made their
young and small universe, with its starry heavens, and then carried on discourse with
humans, making covenants with them and rewarding or punishing them. But the Greek
part of their tradition contributed the concept of a God who was greater than any ideas of
God but who had to be addressed through ideas. Indeed, it was during this time that
words such as essence, substance, and being—terms that did not belong to the Old or
New Testament traditions—came to be wedded to biblical witness in the creeds.
Christians used the vocabulary and repertory of options then available to them in speaking
of the all-encompassing and the ineffable and grafted these onto the witness to God that
was essential to their faith. Contemporary Christians, including many who reject the notion
of creeds or any non-biblical language, are still left with the problems and intentions of the
ancients: how to think of Jesus in such a way that they are devoted to him not in isolation,
as an end in himself—for that would be idolatry of a human—but in the context of the total
divine reality.
It is impossible to chronicle the efforts at expressing essence without pointing to diversity
within the unity. Yet the belief in final unity belongs to any claims of finding an essence.
Thus it was both a typical and a decisive moment when in the 5th century St. Vincent of
Lérins, a Gallo-Roman theologian, provided a formula according to which Christianity
expressed a faith that “has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” (quod ubique,
quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est). Even if not all Christians could agree on all
formulations, it was widely held that there was some fundamental “thing” that had thus
been believed.

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 Judaism: Jewish-Christian relations
 Judaism: Contribution of Haggada to Christian and Islamic legends
 Spain: Christian Spain from the Muslim invasion to about 1260
 Ancient Rome: The rise of Christianity
Medieval and Reformation views
For a thousand years, a period that began with what some historians called the “Dark
Ages” in the Christian West and that endured through both the Eastern and Western
extensions of the Roman Empire, the essence of Christian faith was guarded differently
than it had been in the first three centuries, before Christianity became official; throughout
the Middle Agesitself the understanding of the essence evolved. In the 4th and 5th
centuries, theologians including St. Ambrose, St. Augustine of Hippo, and St. Jerome laid
the foundations for the development of Christian thought. By the 5th century, the bishop of
Rome, the pope, as a result of conciliar decisions and unique events in Rome, had
become the leading spokesman for the faith in Latin, or Western, Christendom. This
position would assume greater institutional strength in later periods of the Middle Ages. In
the Eastern churches, despite the claims of the patriarch of Constantinople, no single
pontiff ruled over the bishops, but they saw themselves just as surely and energetically in
command of the doctrines that made up the essence of Christianity.

history of Europe: The organization of late imperial Christianity

Many Roman provincials were Christian higher clergy. Between the legalization of Christianity by

Constantine about 313…

The Western drama, especially after the year 1000, was more fateful for Christianity in the
modern world. The pope and the bishops of Latin Christendom progressively determined
the essence through doctrines and canons that enhanced the ancient grasp of faith. As
they came to dominate in Europe, they sought to suppress contrary understandings of the
essence of the faith. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Jews were confined to ghettos,
segregated and self-segregated enclaves where they did not and could not share the
full prerogatives of Christendom. When sects were defined as heretical—
Waldenses, Cathari, and others—because of their repudiation of Roman Catholic
concepts of Christian essence, they had to go into hiding or were pushed into enclaves
beyond the reach of the custodians of official teaching. The essence of Christianity had
become a set of doctrines and laws articulated and controlled by a hierarchy that saw
those doctrines as a divine deposit of truth. Theologians might argue about the
articulations with great subtlety and intensity, but in that millennium few would have
chosen to engage in basic disagreement over the official teachings, all of which were seen
to be corollaries of the basic faith in Jesus Christ as participating in the truth of God and
providing the way of salvation.
Through these centuries there was also increasing differentiation between the
official clergy, which administered the sacraments and oversaw the body of the faithful,
and the laity. Most of what was debated centuries later about the essence
of medieval Christianity came from the records of these authorities. As more is learned
about the faith of the ordinary believers, it becomes more evident in the records of social
history that people offered countless variations on the essence of the faith. Many people
used the church’s officially legitimated faith in the power of saints’ relics to develop
patterns of dealing with God that, according to the Protestant reformers, detracted from
the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only agent of salvation.
During this thousand years in both Western and Eastern Christianity, when the faith had a
cultural monopoly, there was an outburst of creativity and a fashioning of a
Christian culture that greatly enhanced and complicated any once-simple notions of an
essence. Christianity was as much a cultural tradition as it was a faith tradition, an
assertion that the leadership of the medieval church would not have regarded as
diminishing or insulting. Christianity as a cultural tradition is perhaps most vividly revealed
in the magnificent cathedrals and churches that were built in the Middle Ages and in
the illuminated manuscripts of the period.

Lindisfarne GospelsThe Lindisfarne Gospels are from the late 7th or early 8th century.© BL/Robana—Robana Picture
Library/age fotostock

As Christian culture grew ever more complex, however, there arose a constant stream of
individual reformers who tried to get back to what they thought was its original essence.
Among these was St. Francis of Assisi, who in his personal style of devotion and simple
way of life was often seen as capturing in his person and teachings more of the original
essence of Jesus’ truth and way of salvation than did the ordained authorities in the
church and empires. Unlike the Waldenses and members of other dissident groups,
Francis accepted the authority of the ordained clergy and contributed to a reform and
revival of the broader church.
 St. Francis of AssisiSt. Francis of Assisi, painting by an unknown artist.© zatletic/Fotolia

In the late Middle Ages a number of dissenters emerged—such as Jan Husin

Bohemia, John Wycliffe in England, and Girolamo Savonarola in Florence—who
challenged the teachings of the church in more radical ways than someone like St. Francis
did. For all their differences, they were united in their critique of what they thought
complicated the essence of Christianity. On biblical prophetic grounds they sought
simplicity in the cognitive, moral, and devotional life of Christianity.
When the Protestant Reformation divided Western Christianity—as Eastern Christians,
already separated since the 11th century, looked on—the 16th-century European world
experienced a foretaste of the infinite Christian variety to come. The reforms that gave rise
to the many Protestant bodies—Lutheran, Anglican,
Presbyterian, Reformed, Anabaptist, Quaker, and others—were themselves debates over
the essence of Christianity. Taken together, they made it increasingly difficult for any one
to claim a monopoly on the custodianship of that essence, try as they might. Each new
sect offered a partial discernment of a different essence or way of speaking of it, even if
the vast majority of Protestants agreed that the essence could be retrieved best, or,
indeed uniquely, through recovery of the central message of the Scriptures.
After the ferment of the Reformation, most of the dissenting groups, as they established
themselves in various nations, found it necessary to engage in their own narrowing of
focus, rendering of precise doctrines, and understanding of divine truth and the way of
salvation. Within a century theologians at many Protestant universities were adopting
systems that paralleled the old scholasticisms against which some reformers had railed.
Those who had once thought that definition of doctrine failed to capture the essence of
Christianity were now defining their concept of the essence in doctrinal terms but were
doing so for Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterians, and even more radical dissenters and
resistors of creeds, such as the Anabaptists.
The belief of St. Vincent of Lérins that there is a faith that has been held by everyone,
always and everywhere, lived on through the proliferation of Protestant denominations and
Roman Catholic movements and, in sophisticated ways, has helped animate the
modern ecumenical movement. Thus, some have spoken of that movement as a reunion
of churches, an idea that carries an implication that they had once been “one,” and a
further hint that one included an essence on which people agreed. Reunion, then, would
mean a stripping away of accretions, a reducing of the number of arguments, and a
refocusing on essentials.

Modern views

The modern church and world brought new difficulties to the quest for defining an essence
of Christianity. Both as a result of Renaissancehumanism, which gloried in human
achievement and encouraged human autonomy, and of Reformation ideas that believers
were responsible in conscience and reason for their faith, an autonomy in expressing faith
developed. Some spoke of Protestantism as being devoted to the right of private
judgment. Roman Catholics warned that believers who did not submit to church authority
would issue as many concepts of essence as there were believers to make the claims.
In the 18th century the Western philosophical movement called the Enlightenment further
obscured searches for the essence of Christianity. The Enlightenment proclaimed
optimistic views of human reach and perfectibility that challenged formerly essential
Christian views of human limits. The Deity became a benevolent if impersonal force, not
an agent that arranged a way of salvation to people in need of rescue. The Enlightenment
also urged a view of human autonomy and of the use of reason in a search for truth. But,
in the view of Enlightenment thinkers, reason did not need to be responsive to
supernatural revelation, as contained in the Old and New Testaments. Indeed, reason
questioned the integrity of those scriptures themselves through methods of historical
and literary criticism. No longer should one rely on the word of priests who passed on
notions of essential Christianity.
While many Westerners moved out of the orbit of faith as a result of the Enlightenment
and the rise of criticism, many others—in Germany, France, England, Scotland, and,
eventually, the Americas—remained Christians, people of faith if now of faith differently
expressed. Some Christians, the Unitarians, rejected the ideas of both a preexistent
Logos made incarnate in Christ and a Jesus adopted into the Godhead. Jesus was seen
as the great teacher or exemplar. They thus also tested the boundaries of essential
teaching about a way of salvation. And at the heart of Deist Christianity was a view of God
that remained “mono-” in that it was devoted to a single principle, but as “deist” instead of
“theist” it departed from the ancient picture of a personal God engaged in human affairs.
These were blows to the integrity of St. Vincent of Lérins’s concept and more reasons for
the orthodox to use Vincent’s concept to exclude Unitarians, Deists, and other innovators
from the circle of Christianity.
In the 19th century philosophical and historical criticism inspired some Christians to renew
the search for essences. For example, in the wake of the German idealist
philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Hegelian scholars tried to rescue Christianity by viewing it as
an unfolding of “absolute spirit.” They followed Christian history through a constant
dialectic, a series of forces and counterforces producing new syntheses. A problem with
the Hegelian approach arose as the historical Jesus came to be seen merely as one stage
in the unfolding of absolute spirit; he was not a decisive agent of the way of salvation
“once for all,” as the biblical Letter to the Hebrews had claimed him to be. Soon biblical
scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss were speaking of the historical Jesus as
a myth of a certain set of people in one moment of the dialectical unfolding. The Christian
faith itself began to dissolve, and many Hegelians began to reject the God of the Christian
faith along with the historical Jesus.
Another group of 19th-century theologians took the opposite course. In the spirit of the
18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, these neo-Kantians spoke not of the
noumenal world, the unseen realm of essences beyond visible reality, but of the
phenomenal realm, the world of history in which things happened. Theologians in this
school engaged in a century-long “quest for the historical Jesus,” in which they sought the
simple essence of Christianity. Significantly, the greatest exemplar of this historical
tradition, the German theologian Adolf von Harnack, wrote one of the best-known modern
books on the essence of Christianity, Das Wesen des Christentums (1900; What Is
Christianity?).
The call had come to purge Christianity of what Harnack called traces of “acute
Hellenization,” the Greek ideas of essence, substance, and being that were introduced
into the Christian tradition in its early history. The focus was shifted to the fatherhood of
God and the announcement of the kingdom, as Jesus had proclaimed in the Gospels.
While this approach matched the thirst for simplification in the minds of many of the
Christian faithful, it also diminished the concept of God. The result was a form of Christian
humanism that more traditional Christians regarded as a departure from the essence of
Christianity. This view claimed to be based on the historical Jesus, but scholars could not
agree on the details.

Throughout the modern period some thinkers took another route toward expressing the
essence of Christianity. The notion that the theologians would never find the essence of
Christianity grew among German Pietists, among the followers of John
Wesley into Methodism, and in any number of Roman Catholic or Protestant devotional
movements. Instead, according to these groups, the Christian essence was discernible in
acts of piety, closeness to the fatherly heart of God as shown in the life of Jesus,
and intimate communion with God on emotional or affective—not cognitive, rational, or
substantial (i.e., doctrinal)—grounds. Although these pietisms have been immensely
satisfying to millions of modern believers, they have been handicapped in
the intellectual arena when pressed for the definitions people need in a world of choice.
Some modern Christians have shifted the topic from the essence of Christianity to its
absoluteness among the religions. They have been moved by what the Germans
called Religionswissenschaft, the study of world religions. In that school, the focus fell on
the sacred, what the German theologian Rudolf Otto called “the idea of the Holy.” On
those terms, as the German scholar Ernst Troeltsch showed, it was more difficult to speak
of the “absoluteness” of Christianity and its truth; one had to speak of it on comparative
terms. Yet some early 20th-century comparativists, such as the Swedish
Lutheran archbishop Nathan Söderblom, applied their understanding of the study of
religion to help animate the movement for Christian reunion.
The ecumenical movement that arose in the 20th century was based upon the belief that
the church has different cultural expressions that must be honoured and differing
confessional or doctrinal traditions designed to express the essential faith. These
traditions demand criticism, comparison, and perhaps revision, with some possible
blending toward greater consensus in the future. At the same time, supporters of the
movement have shown that, among Christians of good will, elaborations of
what constitutes the essence of Christianity are as confusing as they are inevitable and
necessary.
Despite this confusion, the ecumenical movement was an important development in the
20th century. It took institutional form in the World Council of Churches in 1948, which was
composed of Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches. The World
Council emerged out of two organizations that offered distinct approaches to the essential
concepts of the faith. One approach was devoted first to “Life and Work,” a view that the
essentials of Christianity could be best found and expressed when people followed the
way or did the works of Christ, since this constituted his essence. The other approach,
concerned with “Faith and Order,” stressed the need for comparative study of doctrine,
with critical devotion to the search for what was central. By no means did these groups
cling any longer to the notion that when they found unity they would have found a simple
essence of Christianity. Yet they believed that they could find compatible elements that
would help to sustain them on the never-ending search for what was central to the faith
tradition.
Some modern scholars—for example, the British theologian John Hick—viewing
the chaos of languages dealing with the essentials of the faith and the complex of
historical arguments, pose the understanding of the essence in the future. They speak of
“eschatological verification,” referring to the end, the time beyond history, or the time of
fulfillment. In that future, one might say, it will have become possible to assess the claims
of faith. Theologians of these schools argue that such futuristic notions motivate Christians
and the scholars among them to clarify their language, refine their historical
understandings, and focus their devotion and spirituality.

The question of Christian identity

These comments on the search for the essence of Christianity, the task of defining the
core of the faith tradition, demonstrate that the question of Christian identity is at stake at
all times. What the psychologist Erik Eriksonsaid of the individual—that a sense of identity
means “the accruedconfidence that one’s ability to maintain inner sameness and
continuity…is matched by the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for others”—can
be translated to the concerns of the group. This means that Christians strive, in the midst
of change, to have some “inner sameness and continuity” through the focus on Jesus
Christ and the way of salvation. At the same time, Christians posit that this identity will be
discoverable by and useful to those who are not part of the
tradition: secularists, Buddhists, communists, or other people who parallel or rival
Christian claims about truth and salvation.

Christianity Quiz

Which of the following was the first to adopt Christianity as its national religion?

On these terms, writers of Christian history normally begin phenomenologically when

discussing Christian identity; that is, they do not bring norms or standards by which they
have determined the truth of this or that branch of Christianity or even of the faith tradition
as a whole but identify everyone as Christian who call themselves Christian. Thus, from
one point of view, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons as they
are commonly called, is, in the view of scholar Jan Shipps, “a new religious tradition.” The
followers of the Book of Mormonincorporated the Old and New Testaments into their
canon—just as the New Testament Christians incorporated the entire scripture of a
previous tradition—and then supplied reinterpretations. As a new religious tradition,
Mormonism would not be Christian. But because Mormons use Christian terminology and
call themselves Christian, they might also belong to a discussion of Christianity. They may
be perceived as departing from the essence of Christianity because other Christians
regard their progressive doctrine of God as heretical. Yet Mormons in turn point to
perfectionist views of humanity and progressive views of God among more conventionally
accepted Christian groups. In areas where the Mormons want to be seen as “latter-day”
restorers, basing their essential faith on scriptures not previously accessible to Christians,
they would be ruled out of conventional Christian discussion and treatment. Yet they share
much of Christian culture, focus their faith in Jesus, proclaim a way of salvation, and want
to be included for other purposes, and thus fall into the context of a Christian identity at
such times.
This phenomenological approach, one that accents historical and contemporary
description and resists prescription, does not allow the historian to state the essence of
Christianity as a simple guide for all discussion. It is necessary for scholars to put their
own truth claims in a kind of suspension and to record faithfully, sorting out large schools
of coherence and pointing to major strains. It is not difficult to state that something was a
majority view if the supporting data are present. For example, it is not difficult to say what
Roman Catholics at particular times have regarded as the essence of Christianity or what
the various Orthodox and Protestant confessions regard as the true way of salvation.
Someone using the phenomenological method, however, would stand back and refuse to
be the arbiter when these confessional traditions disagree over truth.
St. Vincent of Lérins, then, speaks more for the hunger of the Christian heart or the dream
of Christian union than for the researcher, who finds it more difficult to see a moment
when everyone agreed on everything everywhere. Yet it remains safe to say that Christian
identity begins and ends with a reference to Jesus in relation to God’s truth and a way of
salvation. The rest is a corollary of this central claim, an infinite set of variations and
elaborations that are of great importance to the separated Christians who hold to them in
various times and places.
Martin E. Marty

The history of Christianity

The primitive church

The relation of the early church to late Judaism
Christianity began as a movement within Judaism at a period when the Jews had long
been dominated culturally and politically by foreign powers and had found in
their religion (rather than in their politics or cultural achievements) the linchpin of
their community. From Amos (8th century BCE) onward the religion of Israel was marked
by tension between the concept of monotheism, with its universal ideal of salvation (for all
nations), and the notion of God’s special choice of Israel. In the Hellenistic Age (323 BCE–
3rd century CE), the dispersion of the Jews throughout the kingdoms of the eastern
Mediterranean and the Roman Empire reinforced this universalistic tendency. But the
attempts of foreign rulers, especially the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (in 168–
165 BCE), to impose Greek culture in Palestine provoked zealous resistance on the part of
many Jews, leading to the revolt of Judas Maccabeus against Antiochus. In Palestinian
Judaism the predominant note was separation and exclusiveness. Jewish missionaries to
other areas were strictly expected to impose the distinctive Jewish customs
of circumcision, kosher food, and Sabbaths and other festivals. Other Jews, however,
were not so exclusive, welcoming Greek culture and accepting converts without requiring
circumcision.
The relationship of the earliest Christian churches to Judaism turned principally on two
questions: (1) the messianic role of Jesus of Nazareth and (2) the permanent validity of
the Mosaic Law for all.
 Bury BibleMoses expounding the law, illuminated manuscript page from the Bury Bible, about 1130; in Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge.Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

The Hebrew Scriptures presented history as the stage of a providential drama eventually
ending in a triumph of God over all present sources of frustration (e.g., foreign domination
or the sins of Israel). God’s rule would be established by an anointed prince, or Messiah
(from mashiaḥ, “anointed”), of the line of David, king of Israel in the 10th century BCE. The
proper course of action leading to the consummation of the drama, however, was the
subject of some disagreement. Among the diversegroups were the aristocratic
and conservative Sadducees, who accepted only the five books of Moses (the
Pentateuch) and whose lives and political power were intimately associated with
Temple worship, and the Pharisees, who accepted the force of oral tradition and were
widely respected for their learning and piety. The Pharisees not only accepted biblical
books outside the Pentateuch but also embraced doctrines—such as those
on resurrection and the existence of angels—of recent acceptance in Judaism, many of
which were derived from apocalyptic expectations that the consummation of history would
be heralded by God’s intervention in the affairs of men in dramatic, cataclysmic terms.
The Great Sanhedrin (central council) at Jerusalem was made up of both Pharisees and
Sadducees. The Zealots were aggressive revolutionaries known for their violent
opposition to Rome and its polytheisms. Other groups were the Herodians, supporters of
the client kingdom of the Herods (a dynasty that supported Rome) and abhorrent to
the Zealots, and the Essenes, a quasi-monastic dissident group, probably including the
sect that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls. This latter sect did not participate in the Temple
worship at Jerusalem and observed another religious calendar, and from their desert
retreat they awaited divine intervention and searched prophetic writings for signs
indicating the consummation.
What relation the followers of Jesus had to some of these groups is not clear. In
the canonical Gospels (those accepted as authentic by the church) the main targets
of criticism are the scribes and Pharisees, whose attachment to the tradition of Judaism is
presented as legalistic and pettifogging. The Sadducees and Herodians likewise receive
an unfriendly portrait. The Essenes are never mentioned. Simon, one of Jesus’
12 disciples, was or had once been a Zealot. Jesus probably stood close to the Pharisees.
Under the social and political conditions of the time, there could be no long future either
for the Sadducees or for the Zealots: their attempts to make apocalyptic dreams effective
led to the desolation of Judaea and the destruction of the Temple after the two major
Jewish revolts against the Romans in 66–70 and 132–135. The choice for many Jews,
who were barred from Jerusalem after 135, thus lay between the Pharisees and the
emerging Christian movement. Pharisaism as enshrined in the Mishna (oral law) and
the Talmud (commentary on and addition to the oral law) became normative Judaism. By
looking to the Gentile (non-Jewish) world and carefully dissociating itself from the Zealot
revolutionaries and the Pharisees, Christianity made possible its ideal of a world religion,
at the price of sacrificing Jewish particularity and exclusiveness. The fact that Christianity
has never succeeded in gaining the allegiance of more than a small minority of Jews is
more a mystery to theologians than to historians.

The relation of the early church to the career and intentions of Jesus

The prime sources for knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth are the four canonical Gospels in
the New Testament. There are also a number of noncanonical sources, notably
the apocryphal gospels, which contain stories about Jesus and sayings attributed to him.
The Gospel of Thomas, preserved in a Coptic gnostic library found about 1945 in Egypt,
contains several such sayings, besides some independent versions of canonical sayings.
At certain points the Gospel tradition finds independent confirmation in the letters of
the Apostle Paul. Although the allusions in non-Christian sources (the Jewish
historian Josephus, the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and Talmudic texts) are
almost negligible, they refute the unsubstantiated notion that Jesus might never have
existed.
The first three Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are closely related in form, structure,
and content. Because they can be studied in parallel columns called a synopsis, they are
known as the Synoptic Gospels. Mark was probably used by Matthew and Luke, who may
also have used the Q Gospel (so-called from the German Quelle, “source”; Q is
the hypotheticalGospel that is the origin of common material in later Gospels). John,
differing in both pattern and content, appears richer in theological interpretation but may
also preserve good historical information. The Gospels are not detached reports but were
written to serve the religious needs of the early Christian communities. Legendary and
apologetic (defensive) motifs, and the various preoccupations of the communities for
which they were first produced, can readily be discerned as influences upon their
narratives. Although many details of the Gospels remain the subject of disagreement and
uncertainty, the scholarly consensus accepts the substance of the Gospel tradition as a
truthful account.
The chronology of the life of Jesus is one of the matters of uncertainty. Matthew places
the birth Jesus at least two years before the death late in 5 BCE or early in 4 BCE of Herod
the Great. Luke connects Jesus’ birth with a Roman census that, according to Josephus,
occurred in 6–7 CE and caused a revolt against the governor Quirinius. Luke could be right
about the census and wrong about the governor. The Crucifixion, under Pontius Pilate,
who was prefect of Judaea in 26–36 CE, was probably about the year 29–30, but again
certainty is impossible.
Jesus’ encounter with St. John the Baptist, the ascetic in the Judaean desert who
preached repentance and baptism in view of God’s coming kingdom, marked a decisive
moment for his career. He recognized in John the forerunner of the kingdom that his own
ministry proclaimed. The first preaching of Jesus, in his home region of Galilee, took the
form of vivid parables and was accompanied by miraculous healings. The Synoptic writers
describe a single climactic visit of Jesus to Jerusalem at the end of his career, but John
may be right (implicitly supported by Luke 13:7) in representing his visits as more frequent
and the period of ministry as lasting more than a single year. Jesus’ attitude to the
observance of the lawgenerated conflict with the Pharisees, and he also aroused the fear
and hostility of the ruling Jewish authorities. A triumphal entry to Jerusalem
at Passover time (the period celebrating the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt in the
13th century BCE) was the prelude to a final crisis. After a last supper with his disciples, he
was betrayed by one of them, Judas Iscariot. Arrest and trial followed, first before the
Sanhedrin and then before Pilate, who condemned him to crucifixion. According to the
Evangelists, Pilate condemned Jesus reluctantly, finding no fault in him. Their version of
the condemnation was an attempt to keep Jesus from appearing guilty in Roman eyes,
and it was a means for the early Christian community to find its way in the Roman world.
In any event, Jesus was executed in a manner reserved for political or religious agitators.
It is a universal Christian belief that three days after his death he was raised from the dead
by divinepower.
Jesus preached the imminent presence of God’s kingdom—in some texts as future
consummation, in others as already present. The words and acts of Jesus were believed
to be the inauguration of a process that was to culminate in a final triumph of God. His
disciples recognized him as the Messiah, the Anointed One, though there is no record of
him using the word (except indirectly) in reference to himself. The
titles prophet and rabbialso were applied to him. His own enigmatic self-designation was
“Son of Man,” sometimes in allusion to his suffering, sometimes to his future role as judge.
This title is derived from the version of the Book of Daniel (7:13), where “one like a son of
man,” contrasted with beast figures, represents the humiliated people of God, ascending
to be vindicated by the Divine Judge. In the developed Gospel tradition, the theme of
the transcendent judge seems to be most prominent.
Apocalyptic hope could easily merge into messianic zealotry. Moreover, Jesus’ teaching
was critical of the established order and encouraged the poor and oppressed, even
though it contained an implicit rejection of revolution. Violence was viewed as
incompatible with the ethic of the kingdom of God. Whatever contacts there may have
been with the Zealotmovement (as the narrative of feeding 5,000 people in the desert may
hint), the Gospels assume the widest distance between Jesus’ understanding of his role
and the Zealot revolution.
With this distance from revolutionary idealism goes a sombre estimate of human
perfectibility. The gospel of repentance presupposes deep defilement in individuals and in
society. The sufferings and pains of humanity under the power of evil spirits calls out for
compassion and an urgent mission. All the acts of a disciple must express love and
forgiveness, even to enemies, and also detachment from property and worldly wealth. To
Jesus, the outcasts of society (prostitutes, the hated and oppressive tax agents, and
others) were objects of special care, and censoriousness was no virtue. Though the state
is regarded as a distant entity in certain respects, it yet has the right to require taxes and
civic obligations: Caesar has rights that must be respected and are not incompatible with
the fulfillment of God’s demands.
Some of the futurist sayings, if taken by themselves, raise the question of whether Jesus
intended to found a church. A negative answer emerges only if the historical Jesus is
assumed to have expected an immediate catastrophic intervention by God. There is no
doubt that he gathered and intended to gather around him a community of followers. This
community continued after his time, regarding itself as the specially called congregation of
God’s people, possessing as covenant signs the rites of baptism and the Eucharist (Lord’s
Supper) with which Jesus was particularly associated—baptism because of his example,
the Eucharist because the Last Supper, on the night before the Crucifixion, was marked
as an anticipation of the messianic feast of the coming age.
A closely related question is whether Jesus intended his gospel to be addressed to Jews
only or if the Gentiles were also to be included. In the Gospels the Gentiles appear as
isolated exceptions, and the choice of 12 Apostles has an evident symbolic relation to the
12 tribes of Israel. The fact that the extension of Christian preaching to the Gentiles
caused intense debate in the 40s of the 1st century is decisive proof that Jesus had given
no unambiguous directive on the matter. Gospel sayings that make the Jews’ refusal to
recognize Jesus’ authority as the ground for extending the kingdom of God to the Gentiles
must, therefore, have been cast by the early community.
The Gentile mission and St. Paul
Saul, or St. Paul (as he was later called), was a Pharisee who persecuted the
primitive church. Born at Tarsus (Asia Minor), he had come to Jerusalem as a student of
the famous rabbi Gamaliel and had harried a Christian group called by Luke the
“Hellenists,” who were led by St. Stephen (the first Christian martyr) and who
regarded Jesus as a spiritual reformer sent to purge the corrupt worship of Jerusalem.
While on a mission to Damascusto persecute the followers of Jesus, Paul was suddenly
converted to faith in Christ and, simultaneously, to a conviction that the Gospel must pass
to the non-Jewish world under conditions that dispensed with exclusively and distinctively
Jewish ceremonies. Paul was disapproved by Christian Jews and remained throughout his
career a controversial figure. He gained recognition for the converts of the Gentile mission
by the Christian community in Jerusalem, but his work was considered an affront to
Jewish traditionalism. He saw clearly that the universal mission of the church to all
humanity, implicit in the coming of the Messiah, Christ, meant a radical break with
rabbinical traditions.
Because of the preservation of 13 weighty letters (seven of which are accepted by a
majority of scholars as authentic), Paul is the only vivid figure of the apostolic age (1st
century CE). Like his elder contemporary Philo of Alexandria, also a Hellenized Jew of the
dispersion, he interpreted the Old Testament allegorically and affirmed the primacy of
spirit over letter in a manner that was in line with Jesus’ freedom with regard to
the Sabbath. The crucifixion of Jesus he viewed as the supreme redemptive act and also
as the means of expiation for the sin of humankind. Salvation is, in Paul’s thought,
therefore, not found by a conscientious moralism but rather is a gift of grace, a doctrine in
which Paul was anticipated by Philo. But Paul linked this doctrine with his theme that the
Gospel represents liberation from the Mosaic Law. The latter thesis created difficulties at
Jerusalem, where the Christian community was led by St. James, the brother of Jesus,
and the circle of the intimate disciples of Jesus. James, martyred at Jerusalem in 62, was
the primary authority for the Christian Jews, especially those made anxious by Paul;
the canonical letter ascribed to James opposes the antinomian (anti-law) interpretations of
the doctrine of justification by faith. A middle position seems to have been occupied by St.
Peter. All the Gospels record a special commission of Jesus to Peter as the leader among
the Twelve Apostles. But Peter’s biography can only be dimly constructed; he died
in Rome (according to early tradition) in Nero’s persecution (64) about the same time as
Paul.
The supremacy of the Gentile mission within the church was ensured by the effects on
Jewish Christianity of the fall of Jerusalem (70) and Hadrian’s exclusion of all Jews from
the city (135). Jewish Christianity declined and became the faith of a very small group
without links to either synagogue or Gentile church. Some bore the title Ebionites, “the
Poor” (compare Matthew 5:3), and did not accept the tradition that Jesus was born of a
virgin.
In Paul’s theology, the human achievement of Jesus was important because his
obedient fidelity to his vocation gave moral and redemptive value to his self-sacrifice. A
different emphasis appears in the Gospel According to John, written (according to 2nd-
century tradition) at Ephesus. John’s Gospel partly reflects local disputes, not only
between the church and the Hellenized synagogue but also between various Christian
groups, including gnostic communities in Asia Minor. John’s special individuality lies in his
view of the relation between the historical events of the tradition and the Christian
community’s present experience of redemption. The history is treated symbolically to
provide a vehicle for faith. Because it is less attached to the contingent events of a
particular man’s life, John’s conception of the preexistent Logos becoming incarnate
(made flesh) in Jesus made intelligible to the Hellenistic world the universal significance of
Jesus. In antiquity, divine presence had to be understood as either inspiration or
incarnation. If the Synoptic Gospels suggest inspiration, the Gospel According to John
chooses incarnation. The tension between these two types of Christology (doctrines of
Christ) first became acute in the debate between the schools of Antioch and Alexandria in
the late 4th century.

The contemporary social, religious, and intellectual world

Many Palestinian Jews appreciated the benefits of Roman rule in guaranteeing peace and
order. The Roman government tolerated regional and local religious groups and found it
convenient to control Palestine through client kings like the Herods. The demand
that divine honours be paid not only to the traditional Roman or similar gods but also to
the emperors was not extended to Judaea except under the emperor Caligula(reigned 37–
41), whose early death prevented desecration of Jerusalem’sholy sites and social unrest.
It was enough that the Jews dedicated temple sacrifices and synagogues in the emperor’s
honour. The privileges of Roman citizenship were possessed by some Jewish families,
including that of the Apostle Paul.
In his Letter to the Romans, Paul affirmed the providential role of government in
restraining evil. Christians did not need to be disaffected from the empire, though the
deification of the emperor was offensive to them. Moreover, although the church as an
agency of social welfare offered much to the downtrodden elements in society, the
Christians did not at any stage represent a social and political threat. After the example of
their master, the Christians encouraged humility and patience before wicked people. Even
the institution of slavery was not the subject of fundamental Christian criticism before the
4th century. However, the church was not lost in pious mysticism. It provided for far more
than the cultic (liturgical) needs of its members. Inheriting a Jewish moral ideal, its
activities included providing food for the poor, orphans, and foundlings; care for prisoners;
and a community funeral service.
Christianity also inherited from Judaism a strong sense of being holy, separate
from idolatry and pagan eroticism. As polytheism permeated ancient society, a moral
rigorism severely limited Christian participation in some trades and professions.
At baptism a Christian was expected to renounce his occupation if that implicated him in
public or private compromise with polytheism, superstition, dishonesty, or vice. There was
disagreement about military service, however. The majority held that a soldier, if
converted and baptized, was not required to leave the army, but there was hesitation
about whether an already baptized Christian might properly enlist. Strict Christians also
thought poorly of the teachingprofession because it involved instructing the young
in literature replete with pagan ideals and what was viewed as indecency. Acting and
dancing were similarly suspect occupations, and any involvement in magic was
completely forbidden.
The Christian ethic therefore demanded some detachment from society, which in some
cases made for economic difficulties. The structure of ancient society was dominated not
by class but by the relationship of patron and client. A slave or freedman depended for his
livelihood and prospects upon his patron, and a man’s power in society was reflected in
the extent of his dependents and supporters. In antiquity a strong patron was
indispensable if one was negotiating with police or tax authorities or law courts or if one
had ambitions in the imperial service. The authority of the father of the family was
considerable. Often, Christianity penetrated the social strata first through women and
children, especially in the upper classes. But once the householder was a Christian, his
dependents tended to follow. The Christian community itself was close-knit. Third-century
evidence portrays Christians banking their money with fellow believers, and widely
separated groups helped one another with trade and mutual assistance.
Women in ancient society—Greek, Roman, or Jewish—had a domestic, not a public, role;
feminine subordination was self-evident. To St. Paul, however,
Christian faith transcends barriers to make all free and equal (Galatians3:28). Of all
ancient writers, Paul was the most powerful spokesman for equality. Nevertheless, just as
he refused to harbour a runaway slave, so he opposed any practice that would identify the
church with social radicalism (a principal pagan charge against it). Paul did not avoid self-
contradiction (1 Corinthians 11:5, 14:34–35). His opposition to a public liturgical role for
women decided subsequent Catholic tradition in the East and West. Yet in the Greek
churches (though not often in the Latin) women were ordained as deacons—in the 4th
century by prayer and imposition of hands with the same rite as male deacons—and had a
special responsibility at women’s baptism. Widows and orphans were the neediest in
antiquity, and the church provided them substantial relief. It also encouraged vows of
virginity, and by 400 CE women from wealthy or politically powerful families acquired
prominence as superiors of religious communities. It seemed natural to elect as abbess a
woman whose family connections might bring benefactions.
The religious environment of the Gentile mission was a tolerant, syncretistic blend of many
cults and myths. Paganism was concerned with success, and the gods were believed to
give victory in war, good harvests, success in love and marriage, and sons and daughters.
Defeat, famine, civil disorder, and infertility were recognized as signs of cultic pollution and
disfavour. People looked to religion for help in mastering the forces of nature rather than
to achieve moral improvement. Individual gods cared either for specific human needs or
for specific places and groups. The transcendentGod of biblical religion was, therefore,
very different from the numerous gods of limited power and local significance. In Asia
Minor Paul and his coworker St. Barnabas were taken to be gods in mortal form because
of their miracles. To offer sacrifice on an altar seemed a natural expression of gratitude to
any dead, or even living, benefactor. Popular enthusiasm could bestow divine honours on
such heroes as dead pugilists and athletes. In the Roman Empire it seemed natural to
offer sacrifice and burn incense to the divine emperor as a symbol of loyalty, much like
standing for a national anthem today.
Traditional Roman religion was a public cult, not private mysticism, and was upheld
because it was the received way of keeping heaven friendly. To refuse participation was
thought to be an expression of disloyalty. The Jews were granted exemption for their
refusal because their monotheism was an ancestral national tradition. The Christians,
however, did everything in their power to dissuade people from following the customs of
their fathers, whether Gentiles or Jews, and thereby seemed to threaten the cohesion of
society and the principle that each group was entitled to follow its national customs in
religion.
If ancient religion was tolerant, the philosophical schools were seldom
so. Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics tended to be very critical of
one another. By the 1st century BCE an eclecticism had emerged, and by the 2nd
century CE there had developed a common stock of philosophy shared by most educated
people and by some professional philosophers, which derived metaphysics involving
theories on the nature of Being from Plato, ethics from the Stoics, and logic from Aristotle.
This eclectic Platonism provided an important background and springboard for early
Christian apologetics. Its main outlines appear already in Philo of Alexandria, whose
thought influenced not only perhaps the anonymous writer of the Letter to the Hebrews,
traditionally held to be St. Paul, in the New Testament but also the great Christian
thinkers St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Ambrose of Milan. Because of this
widespread philosophical tendency in ancient society, Christians could generally assume
some belief in Providence and assent to high moral imperativesamong their pagan
contemporaries. Platonism in particular provided a metaphysical framework within which
the Christians could interpret the entire pattern of creation, the Fall of humanity,
the Incarnation, redemption, the church, sacraments, and last things.

The internal development of the early Christian church

The problem of jurisdictional authority

In the first Christian generation, authority in the church lay either in the kinsmen
of Jesus or in those whom he had commissioned as Apostles and missionaries.
The Jerusalem church under St. James, the brother of Jesus, was the mother church.
Paul admitted that if they had refused to grant recognition to his Gentile converts, he
would have laboured in vain. If there was an attempt to establish a
hereditary family overlordship in the church, it did not succeed. Among the Gentile
congregations, the Apostles sent by Jesus enjoyed supreme authority. As long as the
Apostles lived, there existed a living authoritative voice to which appeal could be made.
But once they all had died, there was an acute question regarding the locus of authority.
The earliest documents of the 3rd and 4th Christian generations are mainly concerned
with this issue: What is the authority of the ministerial hierarchy? The apostolic
congregations had normally been served by elders (Greek presbyteroi, “priests”) or
overseers (episkopoi, “bishops”), assisted by attendants (diakonoi, “deacons”).
The clergy were responsible for preaching, for administering baptism and the Eucharist,
and for distributing aid to the poor. In each city the senior member of the college
(assembly) of presbyters, the bishop, naturally had some special authority; he
corresponded with other churches and would attend the ordinations of new bishops as the
representative of his own communityand as a symbol of the catholicity—the universality
and unity—of the church of Christ.
St. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch early in the 2nd century, wrote seven letters on his way to
martyrdom at Rome that indicate how critical the centrifugal forces in the church had
made the problem of authority. The bishop, he insisted, is the unique focus of unity without
whose authority there is no sacrament and no church. A few years earlier the letter of
Bishop Clement of Rome (c. 95 CE) to the church at Corinth based the hierarchy’s
authority on the concept of a historical succession of duly authorized teachers. Clement
understood the clergy and laity to be essentially distinct orders within the one community,
just as in the Hebrew Bible there were high priests, priests, Levites (Temple functionaries),
and laymen. The principles of Clement and Ignatius became important when the church
was faced by people claiming recognition for their special charismatic (spiritual) gifts and
especially by gnostics claiming to possess secret oral traditions whispered by Jesus to
his disciples and not contained in publicly accessible records such as the Gospels.
Indeed, in his conflicts with the gnostics in the late 2nd century, St. Irenaeus of
Lyons promoted the idea of apostolic succession, the teaching that the bishops stand in a
direct line of succession from the Apostles.
The authority of the duly authorized hierarchy was enhanced by the outcome of another
2nd-century debate, which concerned the possibility of absolution for sins committed after
baptism. The Shepherd of Hermas, a book that enjoyed canonical status in some areas of
the early church, enforced the point that excessive rigorism produces hypocrisies. By the
3rd century the old notion of the church as a society of holy people was being replaced by
the conception that it was a school for frail sinners. In spite of protests, especially that of
the schism led by the theologian and schismatic pope Novatian at Rome in 251, the
final consensus held that the power to bind and loose (compare Matthew 16:18–19),
to excommunicate and absolve, was vested in bishops and presbyters by their ordination.
Early Christianity was predominantly urban; peasants on farms were deeply attached to
old ways and followed the paganism favoured by most aristocratic landowners. By
400 CE some landowners had converted and built churches on their property, providing a
“benefice” for the priest, who might often be one of the magnate’s servants. In the East
and in North Africa, each township normally had its own bishop. In the Western provinces,
bishops were fewer and were responsible for larger areas, which would ultimately be
called by the secular term dioceses (administrative districts). In the 4th century, pressure
to bring Western custom into line with Eastern and to multiply bishops was resisted on the
grounds that it would diminish the bishops’ social status. By the end of the 3rd century, the
bishop of the provincial capital was acquiring authority over his colleagues:
the metropolitan (from the 4th century on, often titled archbishop) was chief consecrator of
his episcopal colleagues. The bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch in the 3rd
century were accorded some authority beyond their own provinces, in part because the
first bishop of each of those cities was thought to have been one of the Apostles. Along
with Jerusalem and Constantinople (founded in 330), these three sees (seats of episcopal
authority) became the five patriarchates. The title papa (“father”) was for 600 years an
affectionate term applied to any bishop to whom one’s relation was intimate; it began to be
specially used of bishops of Romefrom the 6th century and by the 9th century was almost
exclusively applied to them.
From the beginning, Christians in Rome claimed for themselves special responsibilities to
lead the church. About 165 CE, memorials were erected at Rome to the Apostles Peter—
traditionally considered the first bishop of Rome—and Paul: to Peter in a necropolis on the
Vatican Hill and to Paul on the road to Ostia. The construction reflects a sense of being
guardians of an apostolic tradition, a self-consciousness expressed in another form when
about 190 Bishop Victor of Rome threatened with excommunicationChristians in Asia
Minor who, following local custom, observed Easter on the day of the
Jewish Passover rather than (as at Rome) on the Sunday after the first full moon after
the spring equinox. Stephen of Rome (256) is the first known pope to base claims to
authority on Jesus’ commission to Peter (Matthew 16:18–19).
Bishops were elected by their congregations—i.e., by the clergy and laity assembled
together. But the consent of the laity decreased in importance as recognition by other
churches increased. The metropolitan and other provincial bishops soon became just as
important as the congregation as a whole, and, though they could never successfully
impose a man on a solidly hostile community, they could often prevent the appointment
falling under the control of one powerful lay family or faction. From the 4th century on, the
emperors occasionally intervened to fill important sees, but such occurrences were not a
regular phenomenon (until the 6th century in Merovingian Gaul).

The problem of scriptural authority

After the initial problems regarding the continuity and authority of the hierarchy, the
greatest guarantee of true continuity and authenticity was found in the Scriptures.
Christians inherited (without debate at first) the Hebrew Bible as the Word of God to the
people of God at a now superseded stage of their pilgrimage through history. If St. Paul’s
Gentile mission was valid, then the Mosaic Law was viewed as no longer God’s final word
to his people. Thus, the Hebrew Bible began to be called the “old” covenant. There was
some hesitation in the church about the exact books included. The Greek version of
the Old Testament (Septuagint) included books (such as the Wisdom of Solomon,
Ecclesiasticus, and others) that were not accepted in the Hebrew canon. Most, but not all,
Gentile Christian communitiesaccepted the Septuagintal canon. The 3rd-century
Alexandrian theologian Origen and especially the Latin biblical scholar St. Jerome (4th–
5th century) believed it imprudent to base theological affirmations on books enjoying less
than universal recognition. The fact that in many English Bibles the parts of the Old
Testament accepted in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew canon are often printed
separately under the (misleading) title Apocrypha is a tribute to these ancient hesitations.
The growth of the New Testament is more complex and controversial. The earliest
Christians used oral tradition to pass on the story of Jesus’ acts and words, often told in
the context of preaching and teaching. As the first generation passed away, however, the
need for a more permanent and lasting tradition of the life of Jesus became apparent. St.
Mark first conceived the plan of composing a connected narrative, probably in the decade
before—or at some time near—70 CE, when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans.
The Gospels that traditionally were thought to have been written by St. Matthew and St.
Luke borrowed from Mark and were compiled in the generation after his Gospel. Toward
the end of the 1st century and reflecting the persecutions of the emperor Domitian,
the Gospel According to John was written. Nevertheless, even after the Gospels were in
common circulation, oral tradition was still current; it may even have been preferred. The
Gospels themselves, which were probably intended for pastoral uses, did not immediately
assume the status of Scripture. Well into the 3rd century, new gospels were being
compiled, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas, which were not
incorporated into the canonical New Testament. The Synoptic Gospelsseem to have been
used by the apologist St. Justin Martyr at Rome about 150 CE in the form of an early
harmony (or synthesis of the Gospels); to this, Justin’s Syrian pupil Tatian added the
Gospel According to John to make his Diatessaron (according to the four), a harmony of
all four Gospels so successful that in Mesopotamia (Tatian’s homeland) it virtually ousted
the separate Gospels for 250 years. In the late 2nd century, St. Irenaeus accepted as the
standard version of the Christian Scriptures the four Gospels and several other texts that
would become part of the canonical New Testament.
On a second level of authority stood the apostolic letters, especially those of St. Paul. The
first of the letters appeared about 50 CE, and well before 90 CEthe main body of his
correspondence was circulating as a corpus (body of writings). Paul’s letters were the
earliest texts of the Christian Scriptures. In addition to them, there are the seven so-called
Catholic Letters (i.e., James; I and II Peter; I, II, and III John; and Jude), which were
among the last of the literature to be accepted as part of the canonical New Testament.
St. Paul’s antitheses of law and grace, justice and goodness, and the letter and the spirit
were extended further than Paul intended by the radical semi-gnostic Marcion of
Pontus (c. 140–150), who taught that the Old Testament came from the inferior vengeful
Jewish God of justice and that the New Testament told of the kindly universal Father. As
the current texts of Gospels and letters presupposed some divine revelation through the
Old Testament, Marcion concluded that they had been corrupted and interpolated by
Judaizers. Marcion therefore established a fixed canon of an edited version of Luke’s
Gospel and some of the Pauline Letters (expurgated), and with Old Testament at all. He
was ultimately denounced as a heretic.
The orthodox reaction (by such theologians as Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian in the 2nd
century) was to insist on the Gospel as the fulfillment of prophecy and on creation as the
ground of redemption. Reasons were found for accepting the four already current
Gospels, the full corpus of Pauline Letters, the Acts of the Apostles, John’s Revelation
(Apocalypse), and the Catholic Letters. On the authorship of the Letter to the
Hebrewsthere were doubts: Rome rejected it as non-Pauline, and Alexandriaaccepted it
as Pauline. The list once established was a criterion (the meaning of “canon”) for the
authentic Gospel of the new covenant and soon (by transference from the old) became
entitled the New Testament. (The Greek word diathēkē means both “covenant” and
“testament.”) The formation of the canon meant that special revelation ended with the
death of the Apostles and that no authority could be attached to the apocryphalgospels,
acts, and apocalypses proliferating in the 2nd century.
The problem of theological authority

Third, a check was found in the creed, an authoritative profession of the faith. At baptism,
after renouncing “the devil and his pomps,” initiates declared their faith in response to
three questions of the form:
Do you believe in God the Father almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ his Son our Lord…? Do
you believe in the Holy Spirit in the church and in the Resurrection?

In time, these interrogations became the basis of declaratory creeds, adapted for use
by clergy who felt themselves required to reassure colleagues who were not especially
confident of their orthodoxy. The so-called Apostles’ Creed, a direct descendant of the
baptismal interrogation used at Rome by 200 CE, is similar to the creed used in Rome in
the 3rd and 4th centuries. Each church (or region) might have its own variant form, but all
had the threefold structure.
The internal coherence given by creed, canon, and hierarchy was necessary both in the
defense of orthodox Christianity against gnostic theosophical speculations and also in
confronting pagan society. The strong coherence of the scattered congregations was
remarkable to pagan observers.

Early heretical movements

Gnosticism, from the Greek gnōstikos (one who has gnōsis, or “secret knowledge”), was
an important movement in the early Christian centuries—especially the 2nd—that offered
an alternative to emerging orthodoxChristian teaching. Gnostics taught that the world was
created by a demiurge or satanic power—which they often associated with the God of
the Old Testament—and that there is total opposition between this world and
God. Redemption was viewed as liberation from the chaos of a creation derived from
either incompetent or malevolent powers, a world in which the elect are alien prisoners.
The method of salvation was to discover the kingdom of God within one’s elect soul and to
learn how to pass the hostile powers barring the soul’s ascent to bliss. The gnostics held
a DocetistChristology, in which Jesus only appeared to assume the flesh. Although not
assuming material form according to the gnostics, Jesus nonetheless was the redeemer
sent by God to reveal his special gnōsis. St. Irenaeus and other Christian theologians
dismissed gnosticism as pretentious but dangerous nonsense.
Along with Irenaeus and others, the writers of the later New Testament books seem to
have opposed early gnosticism. The supporters of what would become orthodox
Christianity stressed the need to adhere to tradition, which was attested by the churches
of apostolic foundation. A more hazardous reply was to appeal to ecstatic prophecy. About
172 CE a quasi-pentecostal movement in Phrygia was led by Montanus with two
prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla, reasserting the imminence of the end of the world.
He taught that there was an age of the Father (Old Testament), an age of the Son (New
Testament), and an age of the Spirit(heralded by the prophet Montanus). Montanism won
its chief convert in Tertullian. Its claim to supplement the New Testament was generally
rejected, and the age of prophecy was held to have ended in the time of the Apostles.

Relations between Christianity and the Roman government and

the Hellenistic culture
Church-state relations

The Christians were not respectful toward ancestral pagan customs, and their preaching
of a new king sounded like revolution. The opposition of the Jews to them led
to breaches of the peace. Thus, the Christians could very well be unpopular, and they
often were. Paul’s success at Ephesus provoked a riot to defend the cult of the goddess
Artemis. In 64 CE a fire destroyed much of Rome, and, in order to escape blame, the
emperor Nero killed a “vast multitude” of Christians as scapegoats. For the first time,
Rome was conscious that Christians were distinct from Jews. But there probably was no
formal senatorial enactment proscribing Christianity at this time. Nero’s persecution, which
was local and short, was condemned by Tacitus as an expression of the emperor’s cruelty
rather than as a service to the public good. Soon thereafter, however, the profession of
Christianity was defined as a capital crime—though of a special kind, because one gained
pardon by apostasy (rejection of a faith once confessed) demonstrated by
offering sacrifice to the pagan gods or to the emperor. Popular gossip soon accused the
Christians of secret vices, such as eating murdered infants (because of the secrecy
surrounding the Lord’s Supper and the use of the words bodyand blood) and sexual
promiscuity (because of the practice of Christians calling each other “brother” or “sister”
while living as husband and wife).
Early persecutions were sporadic, caused by local conditions and dependent on the
attitude of the governor. The fundamental cause of persecution was the
Christians’ conscientious rejection of the gods whose favour was believed to have brought
success to the empire. But distrust was increased by Christian detachment and reluctance
to serve in the imperial service and in the army. At any time in the 2nd or 3rd centuries,
Christians could find themselves the object of unpleasant attention. Violence against them
could be precipitated by a bad harvest, a barbarian attack, or a public festival of the
emperor cult. Yet, there were also long periods of peace, and the stability provided by the
empire and its network of roads and communications may have facilitated Christianity’s
growth.
The ambivalence of official policy is perhaps best revealed in the exchange between Pliny
the Younger, governor of Bithynia, and the emperor Trajan in 111. Pliny executed
Christians who were brought before him and who refused to worship the emperor and
Roman gods but then sought the emperor’s advice on how to treat Christians in his
province. Trajan responded that Christians legitimately brought before Pliny should be
punished but that the governor should not seek out Christians for persecution. The
Christians should be left alone as long as they did not stir up trouble.
Organized empire-wide persecutions occurred, however, at moments of extreme crisis
and as a response to the growth of the faith. During the 3rd century, economic collapse,
political chaos, military revolt, and barbarian invasion nearly destroyed the empire.
Christians were blamed for the desperate situation because they denied the gods who
were thought to protect Rome, thereby bringing down their wrath. To
regain divineprotection, the emperors introduced the systematic persecution of Christians
throughout the empire. The emperor Decius (reigned 249–251) issued an edict requiring
all citizens to offer sacrifice to the emperor and to obtain from commissioners a certificate
witnessing to the act. Many of these certificates have survived. The requirement created
an issue of conscience, especially because certificates could be bought.
The great bishop-theologian Cyprian of Carthage was martyred during the next great
wave of persecutions (257–259), which were aimed at eradicatingthe leaders of
the church. The persecuting emperor Valerian, however, became a Persian prisoner of
war, and his son Gallienus issued an edict of toleration restoring confiscated churches and
cemeteries.
Beginning in February 303, under the co-emperors Diocletian and Galeriusthe church
faced the worst of all persecutions. The reasons for this persecution are uncertain but
have been ascribed, among other things, to the influence of Galerius, a fanatic follower of
the traditional Roman religion; Diocletian’s own devotion to traditional religion and his
desire to use Roman religion to restore complete unity in the empire; and the fear of an
alienation of rebellious armies from emperor worship. After Diocletian’s retirement,
Galerius continued the persecution until 311, when he was stricken by a painful disease,
described in exquisite detail by the church historian Eusebius, who believed it was an act
of revenge by the Christian God. Galerius died shortly after ending the persecution.
 Diocletian's tetrarchyStatue of Diocletian's tetrarchy, red porphyry, c. 300 CE, brought to Venice in 1258.Alinari/Art
Resource, New York

The situation of the early church improved further the following year, when the
emperor Constantine, prior to a battle against a rival emperor, experienced a vision of
the cross in the heavens with the legend “In this sign, conquer.” Constantine’s victory led
to his eventual conversion to Christianity. In 313 the joint emperors Constantine and
Licinius issued the Edict of Milan, a manifesto of toleration, which, among other things,
granted Christians full legal rights.
The persecutions had two lasting consequences. Although the blood of the martyrs, as
contemporaries declared, had helped the church to grow, schism eventually arose with
those who had yielded to imperial pressure. Groups such as the Donatists in North Africa,
for example, refused to recognize as Christians those who had sacrificed to the emperor
or turned over holy books during the persecutions.
Christianity and Classical culture
The attitude of the earliest Christians toward paganism and the imperial government was
complicated by their close association with Greco-Roman literary and artistic culture: it
was difficult to attack the former without seeming to criticize the latter. Nevertheless, the
Christian opinion of other religions (except Judaism) was generally very negative. All
forms of paganism—the Oriental mystery (salvational) religions of Isis, Attis, Adonis,
and Mithra as well as the traditional Greco-Roman polytheisms and the cult of the
emperor—were regarded as the worship of evil spirits. Like the Jews, the Christians
(unless they were gnostic) were opposed to syncretism. With the exception of the notion
of baptism as a rebirth, Christians generally and significantly avoided the characteristic
vocabularies of the mystery religions.
Many Christians also rejected the literary traditions of the Classical world, denouncing the
immoral and unethical behaviour of the deities and heroes of ancient myth and literature.
Reflecting this position, Tertullian once asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”
Despite this hostility, many Christians recognized the value of ancient letters. St. Paul
could quote such pagan poets as Aratus, Menander, and Epimenides. St. Clement of
Rome cited the dramatists Sophocles and Euripides. Educated Christians shared this
literary tradition with educated pagans. The defenders of Christianity against pagan attack
(especially St. Justin Martyr and St. Clement of Alexandria in the 2nd century) welcomed
Classical philosophyand literature. They wished only to reject all polytheistic myth and cult
and all metaphysical and ethical doctrines irreconcilable with Christian belief
(e.g., Stoic materialism and Platonic doctrines of the transmigration of souls and the
eternity of the world). Clement of Alexandria, the second known head of the catechetical
school at Alexandria, possessed a wide erudition in the main classics and knew the works
of Plato and Homer intimately. His successor at Alexandria, Origen, showed less interest
in literary and aesthetic matters but was a greater scholar and thinker; he first applied the
methods of Alexandrian philology to the text of the Bible. St. Augustineheld that
although Classical literature contained superstitious imaginings, it included references
to moral truths and learning that could be used in the service of God. The great Church
Father compared Classical literature to the gold of the Egyptians, which God permitted the
Hebrews to use on their journey to the Promised Land even though it had once been used
in pagan religious practice.
The Apologists
The Christian Apologists of the 2nd century were a group of writers who sought to defend
the faith against Jewish and Greco-Roman critics. They refuted a variety of scandalous
rumours, including allegations of cannibalism and promiscuity. By and large, they sought
both to make Christianity intelligible to members of Greco-Roman society and to define
the Christian understanding of God, the divinity of Christ, and the resurrection of the body.
To accomplish this, the Apologists adopted the philosophical and literary vocabulary of the
broader culture to develop a more refined expression of the faith that could appeal to the
sophisticated sensibilities of their pagan contemporaries.
Second-century Platonists, for example, found it easy to think of Mind (nous) or Reason
(Logos) as divine power immanent within the world. Philo of Alexandria had spoken of the
Logos as mediating between the transcendent God and the created order. Although some
of their coreligionists were offended by the use of Greek philosophical ideas, the
Apologists made important advances in the development of Christian thought and were
the first of the Christian theologians.

The early liturgy, the calendar, and the arts

St. Paul’s letters mention worship on the first day of the week. In
John’s Apocalypse, Sunday is called “the Lord’s day.” The weekly commemoration of the
Resurrection replaced for Christians the synagogue meetings on Saturdays; the practice
of circumcision was dropped, and initiation was by baptism; and continuing membership in
the church was signified by weekly participation in the Eucharist. Baptism in water in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit was preceded
by instruction(catechesis) and fasting. Persons about to be baptized renounced evil and,
as they made the declaration of faith, were dipped in water. They then received by
anointing and by the laying on of hands (confirmation) the gift of the Holy Spirit and
incorporation within the body of Christ. Only the baptized were allowed to be admitted to
the Eucharist, when the words of Jesus at the Last Supper were recalled; the Holy Spirit
was invoked upon the people of God making the offering, and the consecrated bread and
wine were distributed to the faithful. Accounts of these rites are given in the works of
Justin (c. 150) and especially in the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus of Rome (c. 220).
Before the 4th century, worship was in private houses. A house church of 232 CE has
been excavated at Doura-Europus on the Euphrates. Whereas pagan temples were
intended as the residence of the gods, churches were designed for the community. The
rectangular basilica with an apse (semicircular projection to house the altar), which had
been used for Roman judicial buildings, was found especially suitable. The Doura-
Europus church has Gospel scenes on the walls. But many Old Testament heroes also
appear in the earliest Christian art; Jewish models probably were followed. The artists
adapted conventional pagan forms as well (good shepherd; praying persons with hands
uplifted). Fishing scenes, doves, and lyres were popular. In themselves neutral, they
carried special meaning to the Christians. The words of several pre-Constantinian hymns
survive (e.g., “Shepherd of tender youth,” by St. Clement of Alexandria), but only one
with musical notation (Oxyrhynchus papyrus 1786 of the 3rd century).
The earliest Christians wrote to convert or to edify, not to please. Their literature was not
produced with aesthetic intentions. Nevertheless, the pulpit offered scope for oratory (as
in Melito of Sardis’s Homily on the Pascha, c. 170). Desire for romance and adventure
was satisfied by apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, recounting their travels, with continence
replacing love. Justin and Irenaeus did not write for high style but simply to convey
information. Apologists hoping for well-educated readers, however, could not be indifferent
to literary tastes. By 200 CE the most graceful living writer of Greek literature was St.
Clement of Alexandria, and the liveliest writer of Latin was Tertullian. Wholly different in
temperament (Clement urbane and allusive, Tertullian vigorous and vulgar), both men
wrote distinguished prose with regard to form and rhetorical convention.
By the 3rd century the Bible needed explanation. Origen of Alexandria set out to provide
commentaries and undertook for the Old Testament a collation of the various Greek
versions with the original Hebrew. Many of his sermons and commentaries were
translated into Latin between 385 and 400 by Tyrannius Rufinus and St. Jerome; their
learning and passionate mystical aspiration shaped Western medieval exegesis (critical
interpretive methods).

The alliance between church and empire

Constantine the Great, declared emperor at York, Britain (306), converted to
Christianity, convened the Council of Arles (314), became sole emperor (324), virtually
presided over the ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325), founded the city
of Constantinople (330), and died in 337. In the 4th century he was regarded as the great
revolutionary, especially in religion. He did not make Christianity the religion of the empire,
but he granted important concessions to the church and its bishops, and his conversion
encouraged other Roman citizens to become Christian. His foundation of Constantinople
(conceived to be the new Rome) as a Christian city untainted by pagan religion profoundly
affected the future political and ecclesiastical structure of the empire and the church.
Relations with old Rome, whether in matters of church or of state, were not to be cordial.

Constantine IMarble colossal head of Constantine I the Great, part of the remains of a giant statue from the Basilica of
Constantine in the Roman Forum, c. 313 CE; in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich

Constantine completely altered the relationship between the church and the imperial
government, thereby beginning a process that eventually made Christianity the official
religion of the empire. Many new converts were won, including those who converted only
with the hope of advancing their careers. The church was also faced by a new form of
governmental interference when Constantine presided at the Council of Nicaea, which
addressed the Arian controversy (a debate between Arius and Athanasius and their
followers over the nature of the Son of God); the council provided the definition of the
relationship between God the Father and God the Son that is still accepted by most
Christians today. Although Nicaea spoke against Arianism, which maintained that the Son
is a created being and not equal to God the Father, Constantine in later life leaned toward
it, and his successor, Constantius II, was openly Arian. Despite this turmoil and the
outright hostility toward Christianity of the emperor Julian the Apostate(reigned 361–363),
the church survived, and the adherents of the traditional Roman religion relapsed
into passive resistance. The quietly mounting pressure against paganism in the 4th
century culminated in the decrees of Emperor Theodosius I (reigned 379–395), who made
Catholic Christianity the official religion of the empire and who closed many pagan
temples. By the end of the 4th century, therefore, Christianity had been transformed from
a persecuted sect to the dominant faith of the empire, in the process becoming intertwined
with the imperial government.
The link between church and state was expressed in the civil dignity and insignia granted
to bishops, who also began to be entrusted with ambassadorial roles. Constantine himself
appointed bishops, and he and his successors convened councils of bishops to address
important matters of the faith. By 400 the patriarch of Constantinople (to his avowed
embarrassment) enjoyed precedence at court before all civil officials. The emperors
issued a number of rulings that afforded greater privilege and responsibility to the
bishops, enhancing their position in both church and society. The close relations between
the empire and the church in the 4th century were reflected in the writings of St.
Ambrose (bishop of Milan, 374–397), who used “Roman” and “Christian” almost as
synonyms. After Theodosius ordered the massacre of the citizens of Thessalonica,
however, Ambrose demanded that the emperor undergo penance, thereby enforcing upon
Theodosius submission to the church as its son, not its master.
A new movement took shape in the late 3rd and 4th centuries that was a response to both
the tragedy of the final persecutions and to the triumph of Constantine’s
conversion. Monasticism began in the Egyptian desert in the 3rd century in response to
contemporary social conditions, but it had scriptural roots and reflected the attraction of
the ascetic life that had long been part of the Christian and philosophical traditions. The
first of the Christian monks was St. Anthony (251–356). Communal, or cenobitic,
monasticism was first organized by St. Pachomius (c. 290–346), who also composed the
first monastic rule. St. Basil, bishop of Caesarea Cappadociae(370–379), rejected the
hermetic ideal, insisting on communities with a rule safeguarding the bishop’s authority
and with concrete acts of service to perform (e.g., hospital work and teaching).
Monasticism quickly spread to the West, where it was decisively shaped by St. John
Cassian of Marseille (c. 360–435) and St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 547), recognized
as the father of Western monasticism. Benedict’s Rule, which eventually became
predominant, was noted for its humanity and its balance of prayer and work. Because the
manual work of monks often consisted of the copying of manuscripts, the monasteries
became a great centre of cultural life for centuries. Benedict’s
contemporary Cassiodorus (c.490–c. 585) had the works of Classical authors copied (e.g.,
Cicero and Quintilian) as well as Bibles and the works of the early Church Fathers.
The church was significantly slow to undertake missionary work beyond the frontiers of the
empire. The Goth Ulfilas converted the Goths to Arian Christianity (c. 340–350) and
translated the Bible from Greek to Gothic—omitting, as unsuitable, warlike passages of
the Old Testament. The Goths passed their Arian faith on to other Germanic tribes, such
as the Vandals. (Sometime between 496 and 508 the Franks, under their great
king Clovis, became the first of the Germanic peoples to convert to Catholic Christianity,
and they were soon followed by the Visigoths.) In the 5th century the Western provinces
were overrun by Goths, Vandals, and Huns, and the imperial succession was ended when
a German leader, Odoacer, decided to rule without an emperor (476). The position of
the papacy was enhanced by the decline of state power, and this prepared the way for the
popes’ temporal sovereignty over parts of Italy (which they retained from the 7th to the
19th century; Vatican City’s independent sovereignty was recognized in 1929).

Theological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries

Western controversies

Until about 250, most Western Christian leaders (e.g., Irenaeus and Hippolytus) spoke
Greek, not Latin. The main Latin theology came primarily from such figures
as Tertullian and Cyprian (bishop of Carthage, 248–258) rather than from any figure
in Rome. Tertullian wrote Against Praxeas, in which he discussed the doctrines of
the Trinity and the person of Christ. But in 251 Novatian’s schism at Rome diverted
interest away from speculative theology to juridical questions about the membership of the
church and the validity of sacraments. Differences of opinion over similar issues in the 4th
century led to a schism between Rome and the churches of North Africa.
The Donatist controversy, which raised questions about the validity of the sacraments,
dominated all North African church life. Cyprianand the Donatists said that the validity of
the sacraments depended on the worthiness of the minister, while Rome and North
African Christians in communion with Rome said that it did not, because the sacraments
received their validity from Christ, not man. Much of the great
theologian Augustine’s energies as bishop of Hippo (from 396 to 430) went into trying to
settle the Donatist issue, in which he finally despaired of rational argument and reluctantly
came to justify the use of limited coercion.
The other major controversy of the Western church was a more confused issue—namely,
whether faith is acquired through divine grace or human freedom. In response to his
perception of the teachings of the British monkPelagius, St. Augustine ascribed all credit
to God. Pelagius, however, protested that Augustine was destroying human responsibility
and denying the capacity of humans to do what God commands. Augustine, in turn,
responded in a series of treatises against Pelagius and his discipleJulian of
Eclanum. Pelagianism was later condemned at the councils of Carthage (416), Milevis
(416), and Ephesus (431) and by two bishops of Rome, St. Innocent I in 416 and Honorius
I in 418.
Henry ChadwickThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Eastern controversies

In the Greek East the 4th century was dominated by the controversy over the position
of Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter (c. 250–336), that the incarnate Lord—who was born,
wept, suffered, and died—could not be one with the transcendent first cause of creation,
who is beyond all suffering. The Council of Nicaea (325) condemned Arianism and
affirmed the Son of God to be identical in essence with the Father. Because this formula
included no safeguard against Monarchianism, a long controversy followed, especially
after Constantine’s death (337). St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria (reigned 328–373),
fought zealously against Arianism in the East and owed much to Rome’s support, which
only added to the tensions between East and West. These tensions survived the
settlement of the Arian dispute in 381, when the Council of Constantinople (381)
proclaimed Catholic Christianity the official religion of the empire, thus eliminating
Arianism in the East, but also asserted Constantinople, as the new Rome, to be the
second see of Christendom. This assertion was unwelcome to Alexandria, traditionally the
second city of the empire, and to Rome, because it implied that the dignity of a bishop
depended on the secularstanding of his city. Rivalry between Alexandria and
Constantinople led to the fall of St. John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople (reigned
398–404), when he appeared to support Egyptian monks who admired the controversial
theology of Origen. It became a major feature of the emerging controversy
over Christology, church teaching regarding the nature of Christ.
The Christological controversy stemmed from the rival doctrines of Apollinaris of Laodicea
(flourished 360–380) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (c.350–428), representatives of the
rival schools of Alexandria and Antioch, respectively. The Council of Ephesus (431)—led
by St. Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria (reigned 412–444) and nephew of Athanasius—
condemned an extreme Antiochene Christology taught by Nestorius, patriarch of
Constantinople. The position of Nestorius was that Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, may
not properly be called mother of God (Greek theotokos, or “God-bearer”), because she
was the mother only of the human Jesus, not of the preexistent Word of God. This position
shocked not only the Alexandrians but also the majority of other Christians, who had held
that Jesus Christ had both human and divine natures that were equally present in his
person (hypostasis). Nestorius’s dyophysite, or “two-nature,” doctrinewas vigorously
attacked by Cyril, who proposed a carefully worded Christological formula declaring that
there was “one nature of the Word which became incarnate.”
Although the Council of Ephesus thus dispensed with one perceived threat to Christian
orthodoxy, it gave rise to another. Cyril’s Christological statement, which was accepted by
many Eastern Christians, came to be associated with a stance called monophysitism. This
“one-nature” teaching, espoused by a 5th-century priest named Eutyches, a staunch
opponent of Nestorius, emphasized Christ’s divine nature to such an extent that it
apparently devalued, disparaged, and effectively negated Christ’s humanity (Eutyches
compared the relationship between Christ’s humanity and his divinity to a single grain of
sugar in the ocean). Cyril affirmed the equal presence of Christ’s humanity and divinity,
and his Christology found wide acceptance among the Christians
of Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Syria in particular.
Meanwhile, Pope Leo I (reigned 440–461) led a reaction against this
purported monophysite doctrine that culminated in the Council of Chalcedon (451). The
council issued a Christological formula affirming that Christ had two distinct natures that
were neither commingled nor divided and that were equally present in one person. The
Egyptian (Coptic) and Syrian Christians, soon joined by Ethiopian and Armenian
Christians, rejected the Chalcedonian formula as a promotion of dyophysitism and upheld
Cyril’s Christological formula from Ephesus. These “non-Chalcedonian” churches were
subsequently regarded as monophysite heretics by the Roman and Eastern Orthodox
churches. However, they consistently refuted the claim, declaringthat Christ’s human and
divine natures, while distinct, were equally present through the mystery of
the Incarnation in a single person, a doctrine that later became known as miaphysitism.
During the next 250 years, the Byzantine emperors and patriarchs attempted
to reconcile the non-Chalcedonians with the churches that had recognized Chalcedon.
First, under the emperor Zeno (reigned 474–491), the Henotikon (union formula) offended
Rome by suggesting that the criticism of Chalcedon might be justified. Then, under the
emperor Justinian (reigned 527–565), the Chalcedonian definition was glossed by
condemning the “Three Chapters,” which included the writings of Theodore of
Mopsuestia, Theodoret, and Ibas, all strong critics of St. Cyril of Alexandria’s theology and
of the alleged monophysitism of the non-Chalcedonian churches. In Syria, Jacob
Baradaeus, a bishop, responded to this by establishing a non-Chalcedonian episcopate.
In the West he was perceived as having created a monophysite schism; the Syriac
Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, which arose from his efforts, is often
pejoratively referred to as “Jacobite.” Finally, under the emperor Heraclius (reigned 610–
641), the Chalcedonians invited the non-Chalcedonians to reunite under the formula that
Christ had two natures but only one will (monothelitism), but this only created divisions
among the Chalcedonians themselves.
From the 7th century until the mid-20th century, the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian
churches, also known as Oriental Orthodox churches, remained out of contact. In the mid-
20th century, under the influence of the ecumenical movement, the Oriental Orthodox
churches began dialogue with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches in
hopes of finally resolving the schism that had emerged after the Council of Chalcedon. By
the final third of the century, most of the ancient disputes had been resolved, and Oriental
Orthodox Christians had come to be viewed by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
churches as Christians in good standing and no longer heretical. However, Chalcedon’s
“two natures” formula continues to be rejected by the Oriental Orthodox churches:
the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox
Tewahedo Church, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the
East (erroneously and disparagingly referred to as “Syrian Jacobites”), the Malankara
(Indian) Orthodox Syrian Church, and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Matt Stefon

Liturgy and the arts after Constantine

New forms of worship

Along with these developments in higher theology, various forms of religious devotion
emerged, one of the more important of which was the “cult of the saints,” the public
veneration of saints and its related shrinesand rituals. Shrines were erected in honour of
local holy men and women and those who had suffered for the faith. The saints were
recognized as the special representatives of God and were thought to be vehicles for his
miraculous power. The shrines became the focus of religious pilgrimage, and the relics of
the saints were highly valued.
The veneration of martyrs and the growth of pilgrimages stimulated liturgical elaboration.
Great centres (Jerusalem and Rome, in particular) became models for others, which
encouraged regional standardization and cross-fertilization. Though the pattern of the
eucharistic liturgy was settled by the 4th century, there were many variant forms,
especially of the central prayer called by the Greeks anaphora (“offering”) and by the
Latins canon(“prescribed form”). Liturgical prayers of St. Basil of Caesarea became widely
influential in the East. Later, liturgies were ascribed to local saints: Jerusalem’s to St.
James, Alexandria’s to St. Mark, and Constantinople’s to St. John Chrysostom. The spirit
of Greek liturgies encouraged rich and imaginative prose. Latin style was restrained, with
epigrammatic antitheses, and the Roman church changed from Greek to Latin about
370 CE. The canon of the Latin mass as used in the 6th century was already close to the
form it has since retained.
Music also became elaborate, with antiphonal psalm chanting. Some reaction came from
those who believed that the music was obscuring the words. Both St. Athanasius of
Alexandria and St. Augustine defended music on the condition that the sense of the words
remained primary in importance. The Latin theologians St. Ambrose of Milan, Prudentius,
and Venantius Fortunatus provided Latin hymns of distinction. The ascription of the
Roman chants (Gregorian) to Pope Gregory I the Great was first made in the 9th century.
In the Greek East in the time of Justinian, Romanos Melodos created the kontakion, a
long poetic homily.
The development of church architecture was stimulated by Constantine’sgreat buildings at
Jerusalem and Rome, and his example as a church builder was emulated by his
successors, most notably by Justinian in the 6th century. The exteriors of these churches
remained simple, but inside they were richly ornamented with marble and mosaic, the
decoration being arranged on a coherent plan to represent the angels and saints
in heaven with whom the church on earth was joining for worship. An enormous number of
churches built in and after the 4th century have been excavated. The outstanding
buildings that survive largely intact, Hagia Sophia at Constantinople (now Istanbul)
and San Vitale at Ravenna in Italy, belong to the age of Justinian.

Apse of the church of St. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, Italy, second half of the 6th century.SCALA/Art Resource, New York

The veneration of saints led to the production of a specific category of literature known
as hagiography, which told the story of a saint’s life. Hagiography was not biography in the
modern sense but was a work of religious devotion that portrayed the saint as a model of
Christian virtue. If available, authentic tradition would be used, but hagiographers also
drew from a stock of conventional tales about earlier saints that were generally intended to
convey a moral lesson. Saints’ lives included accounts of the miracles performed by the
saints in their lifetimes and at their shrines after their deaths. The lives of saints belong to
the poetry of the Middle Ages but are important to the historian as documents of social
and religious history.
Historical and polemical writing

The first church historian was Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in the 4th century, who
collected records up to the reign of Constantine. He wrote four historical works, including a
life of Constantine and the Ecclesiastical History, his most important contribution. His
history was translated and continued in Latin by Tyrannius Rufinus of Aquileia. The history
of the church from Constantine to about 430 was continued by three Greek
historians: Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, and Theodoret (whose works were adapted
for the Latin world by Cassiodorus). Ecclesiastical history from 431 to 594 was chronicled
by Evagrius Scholasticus. The consequences of Chalcedon as interpreted by non-
Chalcedonian historians were recorded by Timothy Aelurus, Zacharias Scholasticus, and
John of Nikiu.
The monastic movement produced its own special literature, especially the classic Life of
St. Antony by Athanasius, the collections of sayings of the Desert Fathers, St. John
Climacus’s Heavenly Ladder, and John Moschus’s Spiritual Meadow. Along with these
works, monastic rules—most notably the Rule of the Master (an anonymous monastic rule
that influenced St. Benedict of Nursia), the rules of Basil, and the Rule of Benedict—are
unique contributions to the tradition of Christian literature that offer insight into religious
beliefs and practices.
The Arian and Christological controversies produced important polemical writers—St.
Athanasius, the three Cappadocian Fathers (St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St.
Gregory of Nyssa), St. Cyril of Alexandria, and Theodoret. After 500, non-Chalcedonian
theology had eminent figures—Severus of Antioch and the Alexandrian grammarian John
Philoponus, who was also a commentator on Aristotle. But much theology was non-
polemical—e.g., catechesis and biblical commentaries. In the 6th century, “chains”
(catenae) began to be produced in which the reader was given a summary of
the exegesis of a succession of commentators on each verse.
In the West, St. Hilary of Poitiers, St. Ambrose of Milan, and, above all, the incomparable
scholar St. Jerome (translator of the standard Latin Bible, or Vulgate) gave Latin theology
confidence. The greatest of the ancient Western theologians, and one of the most
important in all of Christian history, was St. Augustine. Author of sermons, letters,
polemical texts, and other works, he adapted Platonic thought to Christian ideas and
created a theological system of lasting power. His most influential works
included Confessions, an autobiography and confession of faith, and his The City of God,
a monumental work of apology, theology, and Christian philosophy of history. Finally, in
the 6th century, Gregory I built upon the legacy of Augustine and the other 4th-century
Fathers. Gregory’s works of moral theology, pastoral care, and hagiography greatly
influenced medievalspirituality.

Political relations between East and West

The old tensions between East and West were sharpened by the quarrels about
Chalcedon. In Rome every concession made by Constantinople toward the purported
monophysites increased the distrust. Justinian’s condemnation of the Three Chapters
(Fifth Council, Constantinople, 553) was forced on a reluctant West, parts of which had
been brought back under imperial control by Justinian’s conquests. From the time of
Pope Gregory I, the papacy—encouraged by the successful mission to the Anglo-
Saxons—was looking as much to the Western kingdoms as to Byzantium.
The growing division between East and West was reinforced by developments outside
the church itself. In the 7th century the Eastern Empire fought for its life, first against the
Persians and then the Arabs, and the Balkans were occupied by the Slavs. The rise
of Islam had an especially profound impact on the church and East-West relations.
The Arab military conquest broke upon the Byzantine Empire in 634, just as it was
exhausted after defeating Persia. The will to resist was wholly absent. Moreover, the
provinces initially overrun, Syria (636) and Egypt (641), were already alienated from the
Byzantine government that was persecuting non-Chalcedonian Christians in those areas.
In 678 and again in 718, the Arabs were at the walls of Constantinople. The Copts in
Egypt and the Syriac church soon found that they enjoyed greater toleration under Muslim
Arabs than under Chalcedonian Byzantines. Christian territory from the Holy Land
to Spain was conquered by the forces of Islam, and many of the inhabitants of this region
eventually converted to the new faith.
The submergence of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem under Muslim rule left
the patriarch of Constantinople with enhanced authority, which altered the
internal dynamic of the Christian community. The attempts of the Byzantine emperors to
force the papacy to accept the monothelite (one-will) compromise produced
a martyr pope, St. Martin I (reigned 649–655), but the story of his tortures did nothing to
make Rome love the Byzantines. When monothelitism was rejected as a heresy at the
Sixth Council (Constantinople, 680–681), the imprudent pope Honorius (reigned 625–
638), who had supported monothelitism, was expressly condemned, which distressed
Roman defenders of papal prerogatives. Greek hostility to the West became explicit in the
canons of a council held at Constantinople (Quinisext, 692) that claimed to
have ecumenical status but was not recognized in Rome.
The divisions between East and West were heightened by developments in both the Latin
and the Greek churches. In 726 the emperor Leo III the Isaurian, after his successful
defense against the Islamic advance, introduced a policy of iconoclasm (destruction of
images) to the Byzantine church that was continued and expanded by his son Constantine
V. For much of the rest of the century, the empire was absorbed in the Iconoclastic
Controversy, which became a struggle not only to keep icons, a traditional focus of
religious veneration, but also to combat the subjection of the church to the will of the
emperor. The greatest champion of icons was St. John of Damascus, an Arab monk in
Muslim Palestine, who was the author of an encyclopaedic compendium of logic
and theology. Within the empire, St. Theodore Studites, abbot of the Studium (monastery)
near Constantinople, vigorously attacked iconoclasm, and he also led a revival
of monasticism and stressed the importance of copying manuscripts. His ideals passed to
the monastic houses that began to appear on Mount Athos from 963 onward.
The imperial attack on images was severely criticized in the West. Yet, after the
Greek iconoclasts were condemned at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 787), the
bishops of the Frankish king Charlemagne, who had not been invited to Nicaea and had
learned of its decrees from a faulty translation, censured the decision at the synod of
Frankfurt in Germany(794). Icons were differently evaluated in the Western churches,
where holy pictures were viewed as devotional aids, not—as was the case in the East—
virtually sacramental media of salvation. The bishops of the Frankish church also added to
the creed the Filioque (Latin: “and from the Son”) clause, which stated that the Holy
Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son. The insertion was originally rejected at
Rome and Constantinople; it would, however, be adopted at Rome by the 11th century.
The hostility between the iconoclast emperors and the popes encouraged the 8th-century
popes to seek a protector. This was provided by the rise of Charles Martel (mayor of the
palace 715–741) and the Carolingian Franks. The Frankish kings guarded Western church
interests, and the papal-Frankish alliance reached its climax in the papal coronation
of Charlemagne as the first emperor at Rome on Christmas Day, 800—laying the
foundation for the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806. Charlemagne exercised
immense authority over the Western church, and the revival of church life produced
controversies about predestination(Gottschalk, John Scotus Erigena, Hincmar of Reims)
and the Eucharist(Paschasius Radbertus, Ratramnus, Rabanus Maurus). The
Christological controversy was revived over the Adoptionist teachings of Felix of Urgel and
Elipandus of Toledo, a dispute as to whether Christ was adopted to be Son of God.
Although Carolingian fortunes waned later in the 9th century, the Carolingians continued
to assert their right to protect the church and papacy. In the 10th century, however,
the Ottonian dynasty in Germany established a new imperial line and became the
preeminent power in Latin Europe. The Ottos, accustomed to the tradition in which great
landowners built and owned the churches on their estates as private property, treated
Rome and all important sees in this spirit. Bishops were appointed on royal nomination
and forbidden to appeal to Rome.

Literature and art of the “Dark Ages”

The monothelite and iconoclastic controversies produced herculean theological

endeavours: the criticism of monothelitism by the monk St. Maximus the Confessor (580–
662) was based upon subtle and very careful considerations of the implications of
Chalcedon. The great opponents of iconoclasm, John of Damascus and Theodore
Studites, also composed hymns and other theological treatises. Greek mystical
theology had an outstanding representative in St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–
1022), abbot of St. Mamas at Constantinople, whose doctrines about light visions
anticipated the hesychasm (quietistic prayer methods) of St. Gregory Palamas in the 14th
century. But the most learned theologian of the age was beyond doubt the patriarch St.
Photius (see below The Photian schism).
Iconoclasm was not an anti-intellectual, anti-art movement. The iconoclastseverywhere
replaced figures with the cross or with exquisite patterns. The ending of iconoclasm in 843
(the restoration of orthodoxy), however, liberated the artists adept in mosaic and fresco to
portray figures once again, spurring a new revival of decoration. Music also became more
elaborate; the kontakion was replaced by the kanon, a cycle of nine odes, each of six to
nine stanzas and with a different melody. The kanon gave more scope to the musicians by
providing greater variety. Byzantine hymns were classified according to their mode, and
the mode changed each week. Besides St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore Studites,
the great hymn writers of this period were Cosmas of Jerusalem and Joseph of Studium.
The so-called Dark Ages in the West produced virtually no sculpture or painting—with the
notable exception of illuminated manuscripts, of which marvelous specimens were made
(e.g., the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels). The Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks
did not construct noble buildings but knew how to write and to illustrate a book. In the age
of Charlemagne exquisite calligraphy was continued (e.g., the Utrecht Psalter), as was
the composition of illuminated manuscripts (e.g. the Coronation Gospels and the Codex
aureus). Manuscripts during the Carolingian period were often bound with covers of
intricate ivory and metalwork of superb finesse. Great buildings, notably the palace
complex at Aachen, also began to emerge, partly based on Byzantine models, such as the
churches at Ravenna. The Ottonian renaissance in Germany encouraged even more
confidently the erection of church buildings, producing such masterpieces as the surviving
cathedrals at Hildesheim and Spires and setting out a characteristically German style of
architecture; it also continued the Carolingian tradition of manuscript illumination.
The so-called barbarian kingdoms soon produced their own Christian literature: St.
Gregory of Tours wrote the history of the Franks, St. Isidore of Sevilla that of
the Visigoths, and Cassiodorus that of the Ostrogoths. Isidore, utilizing his vast reading,
compiled encyclopaedias on everything from liturgical ceremonies to the natural sciences.
The outstanding figure of this incipient “nationalist” movement was the English monk St.
Bede the Venerable, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People was completed in
731 and whose exegetical works came to stand beside St. Augustine and St. Gregory I as
indispensable for the medieval student. Carolingian authors compiled a broad range of
literary works, including sermons, biblical commentaries, works on the liturgy and canon
law, and theological treatises on the Eucharist, predestination, and other topics.

Missions and monasticism

The Arians soon became Catholics, including, by 700, even the Lombards in
northern Italy. There remained immense areas of Europe, however, to which
the Gospel had not yet been brought. St. Gregory I evangelized the Anglo-Saxons, who in
turn sent missionaries to northwestern Europe—St. Wilfrid and St. Willibrord to what is
now the Netherlands and St. Bonifaceto Hesse, Thuringia, and Bavaria. In consequence
of Boniface’s work in Germany in the 8th century, a mission to Scandinavia was initiated
by St. Ansgar (801–865), and the mission reached Iceland by 996. In the 10th century the
mission from Germany moved eastward to Bohemia, to the Magyars, and (from 966) to
the Poles. By 1050 most of Europe was under Christian influence with the exception of
Muslim Spain.
In the Byzantine sphere, early missions went to the Hunnish tribesmen north of the
Caucasus. The Nestorians, entrenched in Persia, carried the gospel to the Turkmen and
across Central Asia to China. In the 9th century the mission to the Slavs began with the
work of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created a Slavonic alphabet and translated
the Bible into the Slavonic language. Although their labours in Moravia were undermined
by Frankish clergy, it was their achievement that made possible
the faith and medievalculture of both Russia and Serbia.
The Benedictine Rule—initiated by St. Benedict of Nursia—succeeded in the West
because of its simplicity and restraint; more formidablealternatives were available in the
6th century. By 800, abbeys existed throughout western Europe, and the observance of
Benedict’s Rule was fostered by Charlemagne and, especially, his son Louis the Pious.
These houses, such as Bede’s monastery at Jarrow (England) or the foundations
of Columban (c. 543–615) at Luxeuil (France) and Bobbio (Italy), which followed
Columban’s Rule and not Benedict’s, became centres of study and made possible
the Carolingian renaissance of learning. In this renaissance the 8th-century English
scholar Alcuin, an heir to the tradition of Bede, and his monastery at Tours occupy the
chief place. Around monasteries and cathedrals, schools were created to teach
acceptable Latin, to write careful manuscripts, and to study not only the Bible and writings
of the Church Fathers but also science. Scribes developed the beautiful script that was
known as Carolingian minuscule. Although the Carolingian renaissance was short-lived, it
laid the foundation for later cultural and intellectualgrowth.
Monasticism in 9th-century Byzantium was centred upon the Studites, who came to be a
faction against the court. A remoter and otherworldly asceticism developed with the
foundation of monasteries on Mount Athos(Greece) from 963 onward. A distinctive feature
of Athonite monasticism was that nothing female was to be allowed on the peninsula.

The Photian schism and the great East-West schism

The Photian schism

The end of iconoclasm (843) left a legacy of faction. Ignatius, patriarch of Constantinople
intermittently from 847 to 877, was exiled by the government in 858 and replaced by St.
Photius, a scholarly layman who was head of the imperial chancery—he was elected
patriarch and ordained within six days. Ignatius’s supporters dissuaded Pope Nicholas
I (reigned 858–867) from recognizing Photius. Nicholas was angered
by Byzantinemissions among the Bulgars, whom he regarded as belonging to his sphere.
When Nicholas wrote to the Bulgars attacking Greek practices, Photius replied by
accusing the West of heretically altering the creed in saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds
from the Father and from the Son (Filioque). He declared Pope Nicholas deposed (867),
but his position was not strong enough for such impudence.
A new emperor, Basil the Macedonian, reinstated Ignatius, and in 869 Nicholas’s
successor, Adrian II (reigned 867–872), condemned Photius and sent legates to
Constantinople to extort submission to papal supremacy from the Greeks. The Greeks
resented the papal demands, and, when Ignatius died in 877, Photius quietly became
patriarch again. Rome (at that moment needing Byzantine military support against
Muslims in Sicily and southern Italy) reluctantly agreed to recognize Photius but on the
condition of an apology and of the withdrawal of Greek missions to the Bulgars. Photius
acknowledged Rome as the first see of Christendom, discreetly said nothing explicitly
against the Filioque clause, and agreed to the provision that the Bulgars could be put
under Roman jurisdiction provided that Greek missions were allowed to continue.
The main issue in the Photian schism was whether Rome possessed monarchical power
of jurisdiction over all churches (as Nicholas and Adrian held), or whether Rome was the
senior of five semi-independent patriarchates (as Photius and the Greeks thought) and
therefore could not canonically interfere with the internal affairs of another patriarchate.

The great East-West schism

The mutual distrust shown in the time of Photius erupted again in the middle of the 11th
century after papal enforcement of Latin customs upon Greeks in southern Italy. The
patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, closed Latin churches in Constantinople as
a reprisal. Cardinal Humbert came from Italy to protest, was accorded an icy reception, and
left a bull of excommunication (July 16, 1054) on the altar of the great church of Hagia Sophia.
The bull anathematized (condemned) Michael Cerularius, the Greek doctrine of the Holy
Spirit, the marriage of Greek priests, and the Greek use of leavened bread for the Eucharist.
At the time, the breach was treated as a minor storm in which both sides had behaved with
some arrogance. As Greeks and Latins became more estranged, however, people looked
back on the events of 1054 as the moment of the final breach between East and West.
(Not until December 7, 1965, were the mutual excommunications of 1054 abolished, by
Pope Paul VI and the ecumenical patriarch Athenagoras I.)
Henry ChadwickThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

From the schism to the Reformation

A major factor in the consolidation and expansion of Christianity in the West was the
growth in the prestige and power of the bishop of Rome. The pope St. Leo I made the
primacy of the Roman bishop explicit both in theory and in practice and must be counted
as one of the most important figures in the history of the centralization of authority in the
church. The next such figure was the pope St. Gregory I the Great, whose work shaped
the worship, the thought, and the structure of the church as well as its temporal wealth and
power. Although some of Gregory’s successors advocated papal primacy, it was the
popes of the 11th century and thereafter who sought to exploit claims of papal authority
over the church hierarchy and over all Christians.
Even while still a part of the universal church, Byzantine Christianity had become
increasingly isolated from the West by difference of language, culture, politics,
and religion and followed its own course in shaping its heritage. The Eastern churches
never had so centralized a polity as did the church in the West but developed the principle
of the administrative independence, or “autocephaly,” of each national church. During the
centuries when Western culture was striving to domesticate the German
tribes, Constantinople, probably the most civilized city in Christendom, blended classical
and Christian elements with a refinement that expressed itself in philosophy, the arts,
statecraft, jurisprudence, and scholarship. A thinker such as Michael Psellus in the 11th
century, who worked in several of these fields, epitomizes this synthesis. It was from
Byzantine rather than Roman missionaries that Christianity came to most of the Slavic
peoples, including some who eventually sided with Rome rather than Constantinople (see
also Eastern rite church). Byzantium was also the victim of Muslim aggressions throughout the
period known in the West as the Middle Ages. Following the pattern established by the
emperors Constantine and Justinian, the relation between church and state in the Byzantine
empire coordinated the two in such a way as to sometimes subject the life and even the
teaching of the church to the decisions of the temporal ruler—the phenomenon often,
though imprecisely, termed caesaropapism.
All these differences between the Eastern and Western parts of the church, both the
religious differences and those that were largely cultural or political, came together to
cause the schism between the two. The break in 1054 was followed by further evidence of
alienation—in the 13th century, in the sack of Constantinople by Western Christians in
1204 and the establishment of the Latin patriarchate there; and in the 15th century, after
the failure of the union of Florence and after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453.
Papacy and empire
Conflict with the East was both a cause and an effect of the distinctive development of
Western Christianity during the Middle Ages. If Leo I and Gregory I may be styled the
architects of the medieval papacy, the popes St. Gregory VII (reigned 1073–85) and Innocent
III (reigned 1198–1216) should be called its master builders. Gregory VII reformed both
the church and the papacy from within, establishing the canonical and moral authority of the
papal office when it was threatened by corruption and attack, and in the pontificate of
Innocent III the papal claims to universality reached their zenith at all levels of the life of
the church. Significantly, both these popes were obliged to defend the papacy against
the Holy Roman emperor and other temporal rulers. The battle between the church and the
empire is a persistent theme in the history of medieval Christianity. Both the involvement
of the church in secular affairs and the participation of temporal rulers in the Crusades can
be read as variations on this theme. Preoccupied as they usually are with the history of
the church as an institution and with the life and thought of the leaders of the church, the
documentary sources of knowledge about medieval Christianity make it difficult for the
social historian to descry “the religion of the common man” during this period. Both the
“age of faith” depicted by neo-Gothic Romanticism and the “Dark Ages” depicted by
secularist and Protestantpolemics are gross oversimplifications of history. Faith there was
during the Middle Ages, and intellectual darkness and superstition too, but only that
historical judgment of medieval Christianity which discerns how subtly faith and
superstition can be blended in human piety and thought is valid.
Medieval thought

No product of medieval Christianity has been more influential in the centuries since
the Middle Ages than medieval thought, particularly the philosophy
and theology of Scholasticism, whose outstanding exponent was St. Thomas
Aquinas (1224/25–1274). Scholastic theology was an effort to harmonize the doctrinal
traditions inherited from the Fathers of the early church with the intellectual achievements
of classical antiquity—in other words, to create a synthesis of faith and reason. Because
many of the early Fathers both in the East and in the West had developed their theologies
under the influence of Neoplatonism, the recovery of Aristotle—first through the influence of
Aristotelian philosophers and theologians among the Muslims and eventually, with help
from Byzantium, through translation and study of the authentic texts of Aristotle himself—
caused a profound transformation in the methodology and substance of medieval thought.
Because it combined fidelity to Scripture and tradition with a positive, though critical,
attitude toward the “natural” mind, Scholasticism is a landmark both in the history of
Christianity and in the history of Western culture and a symbol of the Christianization of
society and culture.
Reformation
Initially, the Protestant reformers maintained the hope that they could accomplish the
reformation of the doctrine and life of the church from within, but this proved impossible
because of the intransigence of the church, the polemic of the Protestant movements, or
the political and cultural situation—or because of all these factors. The several parties of
the Reformation may be conveniently classified according to the extent of their protest
against medieval theology, piety, and polity. The Anglican reformers, as well as Martin
Luther and his movement, were, in general, the most conservative in their treatment of the
Roman Catholic tradition; John Calvinand his followers were less conservative, and
the Anabaptists and related groups were least conservative of all. Despite their deep
differences, almost all the various Reformation movements were characterized by an
emphasis upon the Bible, as distinguished from the church or its tradition, as the authority
in religion; by an insistence upon the sovereignty of free grace in the forgiveness of sins; by
a stress upon faith alone, without works, as the preconditions of acceptance with God; and
by the demand that the laity assume a more significant place in both the work and the
worship of the church.
The Reformation envisaged neither schism within the church nor the dissolution of the
Christian culture that had developed for more than a millennium. But when the
Reformation was over, both the church and the culture had been radically transformed. In
part this transformation was the effect of the Reformation, and in part it was the cause of
the Reformation. The voyages of discovery, the beginnings of a capitalist economy, the rise
of modern nationalism, the dawn of the scientific age, the culture of the Renaissance—all
these factors, and others besides, helped to break up the “medieval synthesis.” Among
these factors, however, the Reformation was one of the most important and, certainly for
the history of Christianity, the most significant, for the consequences of the Reformation,
not in intention but in fact, were a divided Christendom and a secularized West. Roman
Catholicism, no less than Protestantism, has developed historically in the modern world as
an effort to adapt historic forms to the implications of these consequences. Established
Christianity, as it had been known in the West since the 4th century, ended after the
Reformation, though not everywhere at once.

Christianity from the 16th to the 21st century

Paradoxically, the end of “established Christianity” in the old sense resulted in the most
rapid and widespread expansion in the history of Christianity. The Christianization of the
Americas and the evangelization of Asia, Africa, and Australasia gave geographic
substance to the Christian title “ecumenical.” Growth in areas and in numbers, however,
need not be equivalent to growth in influence. Despite its continuing strength throughout
the modern period, Christianity retreated on many fronts and lost much of its prestige and
authority both politically and intellectually.
During the formative period of modern Western history, roughly from the beginning of the
16th to the middle of the 18th century, Christianity participated in many of the movements
of cultural and political expansion. The explorers of the New World were followed closely
by missionaries—that is, when the two were not in fact identical. Protestant and Roman
Catholic clergymen were prominent in politics, letters, and science. Although the
rationalism of the Enlightenment alienated many people from the Christian faith, especially
among the intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries, those who were alienated often kept
a loyalty to the figure of Jesus or to the teachings of the Bible even when they broke with
traditional forms of Christian doctrine and life. Citing the theological conflicts of
the Reformation and the political conflicts that followed upon these as evidence of the
dangers of religious intolerance, representatives of the Enlightenment gradually
introduced disestablishment, toleration, and religious liberty into most Western countries. In
this movement they were joined by Christian individuals and groups that advocated
religious freedom not out of indifference to dogmatic truth but out of a concern for the free
decision of personal faith.
The state of Christian faith and life within the churches during the 17th and 18th centuries
both reflected and resisted the spirit of the time. Even though the Protestant Reformation
had absorbed some of the reform energy within Roman Catholicism,
the theology and morals underwent serious revision in the Roman Catholic Counter-
Reformation. Fighting off the attempts by various countries to establish national Catholic
churches, the papacy sought to learn from the history of its encounter with the Reformation
and to avoid the mistakes that had been made then. Protestantism in turn discovered that
separation from Rome did not necessarily inoculate it against many of the trends that it had
denounced in Roman Catholicism. Orthodox theology of the 17th century both
in Lutheranism and in the Reformed churches displayed many features
of medieval Scholasticism, despite the attacks of the reformers upon the latter. Partly as a
compensation for the overemphasis of orthodoxy upon doctrine at the expense of
morals, Pietism summoned Protestant believers to greater seriousness of personal faith
and practical living.
In alliance with the spirit of the Enlightenment, the so-called “democratic” revolutions of
the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries aided this process of undermining Christianity. Roman
Catholicism in France, Eastern Orthodoxyin Russia, and Protestantism in former European
colonies in Africa and Asia were identified—by their enemies if not also by themselves—
as part of the ancien régime and were nearly swept away with it. As the discoveries of
science proceeded, they clashed with old and cherished notions about the doctrine of
creation, many of which were passionately supported by various leaders of organized
Christianity. The age of the revolutions—political, economic, technological, intellectual—
was an age of crisis for Christianity. The critical methods of modern scholarship, despite
their frequent attacks upon traditional Christian ideas, helped to produce editions of the
chief documents of the Christian faith—the Bible and the writings of the Fathers and
reformers—and to arouse an unprecedented interest in the history of the church. The 19th
century was called the great century in the history of Christian missions, both Roman
Catholic and Protestant. By the very force of their attacks upon Christianity, the critics of
the church helped to arouse within the church new apologists for the faith, who creatively
reinterpreted it in relation to the new philosophy and science of the modern period. The
20th century saw additional challenges to the Christian cause in the form of totalitarianism,
of resurgent world religions, and of indifference. Both the relation of church and state and
the missionary program of the churches thus demanded reconsideration. But the 20th
century also saw renewed efforts to heal the schisms within Christendom. The ecumenical
movementbegan within Protestantism and Anglicanism, eventually included some of the
Eastern Orthodox churches, and, especially since the Second Vatican Council (1962–65),
engaged the sympathetic attention of Roman Catholicism as well.

Contemporary Christianity

By the late 20th century Christianity had become the most widely disseminated religion on
earth. Virtually no nation remained unaffected by the activities of Christian missionaries,
although in many countries Christians are only a small fraction of the total population.
Most of the countries of Asia and of Africa have Christian minorities, some of which, as
in India and even in China, number several million members. South Korea’s Christian
minority, representing one-quarter of the country’s population, includes Methodists,
Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, and Pentecostals. Massive increases in the size of such
churches challenged the traditional dominance of Western Christianity.
 World distribution of Christianity, c. 2000.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Each major division of Christianity—Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Roman

Catholicism, and Protestantism—is treated in a separate article where its history, tenets, and
practices receive a fuller exposition than this article can give them and where a
bibliography on the denominations of the division is supplied. The purpose here is to
provide an overview of the principal divisions and thus to set the articles about the
individual traditions into their proper context.
Roman Catholicism
The Roman Catholics in the world outnumber all other Christians combined. They are
organized in an intricate system that spans the structure of the church from the
local parish to the papacy. Under the central authority of the papacy, the church is divided
into dioceses, whose bishops act in the name and by the authority of the pope but retain
administrative freedom within their individual jurisdictions. Similarly, the
parish priest stands as the executor of papal and diocesan directives. Alongside the
diocesan organization and interacting with it is a chain of orders, congregations, and
societies; all of them are, of course, subject to the pope, but they are not directly
responsible to the bishop as are the local parishes. It would, however, be a mistake to
interpret the polity of the Roman Catholic Church in so purely an organizational manner as
this, for Roman Catholic polity rests upon a mandate that is traced to the action of Jesus
Christ himself, when he invested St. Peter and, through Peter, his successors with the
power of the keys in the church. Christ is the invisible head of his church, and by his
authority the pope is the visible head.
This interpretation of the origin and authority of the church determines both the attitude of
Roman Catholicism to the rest of Christendom and its relation to the social order.
Believing itself to be the true church of Jesus Christ on earth, it cannot deal with other
Christian traditions as equals without betraying its very identity. This does not mean,
however, that anyone outside the visible fellowship of the Roman Catholic Church cannot
be saved, nor does it preclude the presence of “vestiges of the church” in the other
Christian bodies. At the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church strongly
affirmed its ties with its “separated brethren” both in Eastern Orthodoxy and in the several
Protestant churches. As the true church of Christ on earth, the Roman Catholic Church
also believes itself responsible for the proclamation of the will of God to organized society
and to the state. The church asserts its fundamental obligation, as the “light of the world”
to which the revelation of God has been entrusted, to address the meaning of that
revelation and of the moral law to the nations and to work for a social and political order in
which both revelation and the moral law can function.
The understanding that Roman Catholicism has of itself, its interpretation of the proper
relation between the church and the state, and its attitude toward other Christian traditions
are all based upon Roman Catholic doctrine. In great measure this doctrine is identical to
that confessed by orthodox Christians of every label and consists of the Bible,
the dogmaticheritage of the ancient church as laid down in the historic creeds and in the
decrees of the ecumenical councils, and the theological work of the great doctors of
the faith in the East and West. If, therefore, the presentation of the other Christian
traditions in this article compares them with Roman Catholicism, this comparison has a
descriptive rather than a normative function, for, to a considerable degree, Protestantism
and Eastern Orthodoxy have often defined themselves in relation to Roman Catholicism.
In addition, most Christians past and present do have a shared body of beliefs about God,
Christ, and the way of salvation.
Roman Catholic doctrine is more than this shared body of beliefs, as is the doctrine of
each of the Christian groups. It is necessary here to mention only the three distinctive
Roman Catholic doctrines that achieved definitive formulation during the 19th and 20th
centuries: the infallibility of the pope, the Immaculate Conception, and the
bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary. On most other major issues of Christian doctrine,
Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are largely in agreement, while Protestantism
differs from both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism on several issues. For
example, Roman Catholic theology defines and numbers the sacramentsdifferently from
Orthodox theology, but, over against Protestantism, Roman Catholic doctrine insists, as
does Eastern Orthodoxy, upon the centrality of the seven sacraments—
baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, anointing of the sick, penance, matrimony,
and holy orders—as channels of divine grace.

The Eastern churches

Separated from the West, the Orthodox churches of the East have developed their own way
for more than half of Christian history. Orthodoxyhere refers to the two great bodies of
Christianity that use the term to characterize their theologies and liturgies: the churches
of Eastern Orthodoxy and the churches that constitute the so-called Oriental Orthodox
communion.
Eastern Orthodoxy

Each of the national churches of Eastern Orthodoxy is autonomous. The “ecumenical

patriarch” of Constantinople is not the Eastern pope but merely the first in honour among
equals in jurisdiction. Eastern Orthodoxy interprets the primacy of St. Peter and therefore
that of the pope similarly, denying the right of the pope to speak and act for the entire
church by himself, without a church council and without his episcopal colleagues. Because
of this polity, Eastern Orthodoxy has identified itself more intimately with
national cultures and with national regimes than has Roman Catholicism. Therefore, the
history of church-state relations in the East has been very different from the Western
development, because the church in the East has sometimes tended toward the extreme
of becoming a mere instrument of national policy while the church in the West has
sometimes tended toward the extreme of attempting to dominate the state. The history
of ecumenical relations between Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism during the 20th
century was also different from the history of Protestant–Roman Catholic relations. While
keeping alive their prayer for an eventual healing of the schism with the Latin church, some
of the Orthodox churches have established communion with Anglicanism and with the Old
Catholic Church and have participated in the conferences and organizations of the World
Council of Churches.
Doctrinal authority for Eastern Orthodoxy resides in the Scriptures, the ancient creeds, the
decrees of the first seven ecumenical councils, and the traditions of the church. In addition
to the issues mentioned in the discussion of Roman Catholicism above, the
chief dogmatic difference between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thought is on the
question of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and from the Son, or
the Filioque.
But “Orthodoxy,” in the Eastern use of the term, means primarily not a species
of doctrine but a species of worship. The Feast of Orthodoxy on the first Sunday
of Lent celebrates the end of the Iconoclastic Controversy and the restoration to the churches
of the icons, which are basic to Orthodox piety. In Eastern Orthodox churches (as well as
in the Eastern rite churches, which have reestablished communion with Rome), the most
obvious points of divergence from general Western practice are the Byzantine liturgy, the
right of the clergy to marry before ordination—though bishops may not be married—and the
administration to the laity of both bread and wine in the Eucharist at the same time by the
method of intinction.
Oriental Orthodoxy

The other main branch of Orthodoxy is constituted by the six national churches of the
Oriental Orthodox communion: the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church of
Alexandria, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, the Malankara (Indian)
Syrian Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and the Eritrean
Orthodox Tewahedo Church. With the exception of the Eritrean church, which was
granted autocephaly in 1998, these churches were largely out of contact with the other
main branches of Christianity from the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451), which
resulted in their being branded monophysites—and hence heretics—by the Roman and
Greek churches (see above Eastern controversies).
Beginning in the mid-20th century, when the Armenian and Coptic churches helped to
form the World Council of Churches, the Oriental Orthodox communion—also called non-
Chalcedonian churches because of their rejection of the Council of Chalcedon—engaged
in ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches in
hopes of resolving the ancient disputes. Increasingly frequent talks eventually resulted in
historic joint declarations by the three branches of Christianity stating that the schism of
451 was largely based on a grave misunderstanding, that many of the points of dispute
had been resolved, and that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches now
regarded the Oriental churches as confessing Christians in full standing. Meanwhile, the
Coptic Orthodox Church expanded outside Egypt to form strong enclaves in the United
Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and South America.
Oriental Orthodox Christianity displays rich variation. Each national church is
autocephalous (though the Coptic pope enjoys spiritual primacy in the Ethiopian and
Eritrean churches). Each church also has its own structure, usually with a single head
(though the Armenian church has two catholicoses), its own liturgy, and other distinctive
practices. For example, the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches include indigenous practices
in exorcism and spiritual healing. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches also use a
larger Bible, regarding as scriptural texts such as the First Book of Enoch, which most of
mainstream Christianity considers pseudepigraphical. Like the Eastern Orthodox
churches, the Oriental Orthodox churches uphold the Nicene Creed without the Filioque.
Matt Stefon

Protestantism

Formulating a definition of Protestantism that would include all its varieties has long been
the despair of Protestant historians and theologians, for there is greater diversity within
Protestantism than there is between some forms of Protestantism and some non-
Protestant Christianity. For example, a High Church Anglican or Lutheran has more in
common with an Orthodox theologian than with a Baptist theologian. Amid this diversity,
however, it is possible to define Protestantism formally as non-Roman Western
Christianity and to divide most of Protestantism into four major confessions or
confessional families—Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, and Free Church.
Lutheranism
The largest of these non-Roman Catholic denominations in the West is the Lutheran
Church. The Lutheran churches in Germany, in Scandinavian countries, and in the
Americas are distinct from one another in polity, but almost all of them are related through
various national and international councils, of which the Lutheran World Federation is the
most comprehensive. Doctrinally, Lutheranism sets forth its distinctive position in the Book of
Concord, especially in the Augsburg Confession. A long tradition of theological scholarship
has been responsible for the development of this position into many and varied doctrinal
systems. Martin Luther moved conservatively in this reform of the Roman Catholic liturgy,
and the Lutheran Church, though it has altered many of his liturgical forms, has remained
a liturgically traditional church. Most of the Lutheran churches of the world have
participated in the ecumenical movement and are members of the World Council of Churches,
but Lutheranism has not moved very often across its denominational boundaries to
establish full communion with other bodies. The prominence of Lutheran mission societies
in the history of missions during the 18th and 19th centuries gave an international character
to the Lutheran Church; so did the development of strong Lutheran churches in North
America, where the traditionally German and Scandinavian membership of the church was
gradually replaced by a more cosmopolitan constituency.
Anglicanism

The Anglican Communion encompasses not only the established Church of England but also
various national Anglican churches throughout the world. Like
Lutheranism, Anglicanism has striven to retain the Roman Catholic tradition of liturgy and
piety, and, after the middle of the 19th century, the Oxford movement argued the essential
Catholic character of Anglicanism in the restoration of ancient liturgical usage and
doctrinal belief. Although the Catholic revival also served to rehabilitate the authority of
tradition in Anglican theology generally, great variety continued to characterize the
theologians of the Anglican Communion. Anglicanism is set off from most other non-
Roman Catholic churches in the West by its retention of and its insistence upon
the apostolic succession of ordaining bishops. The Anglican claim to this apostolic
succession, despite its repudiation by Pope Leo XIII in 1896, has largely determined the
role of the Church of England in the discussions among the churches. Anglicanism has
often taken the lead in inaugurating such discussions, but in such statements as
the Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886) it has demanded the presence of the historic episcopate
as a prerequisite to the establishment of full communion. During the 19th century and
especially in the last third of the 20th century, many leaders of Anglican thought were
engaged in finding new avenues of communication with industrial society and with the
modern intellectual. Meanwhile, the strength of Anglicanism in the New World and in the
younger churches of Asia and Africa confronted this communion with the problem of
deciding its relation to new forms of Christian life in these new cultures.
Beginning in the late 20th century, a number of theologically liberal developments in
Anglican churches in the United Kingdom and in North America aggravated fault lines not
only between traditionalists and liberals but also between the more traditionally Anglican
areas (the U.K., the U.S., and Canada) and the countries of the Global South—those of
Africa, Asia, and Latin America—where the majority of the world’s Anglicans lived.
The ordination of women as priests and bishops by the American, Canadian, and English
churches faced stringent objections from African and Asian churches as well as from
English, American, and Canadian theological conservatives. When the Rev. Gene
Robinson, an openly homosexual man in a noncelibate relationship, was ordained
a bishop in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA) in 2003,
traditionalists around the globe dissented, and the ordination of other openly gay clergyand
the blessing of same-sex unions by some congregations further incensed conservatives. In
June 2008, having decided to skip the decennial Lambeth Conference taking place the
following month, traditionalists held the Global Anglican Forum Convention (GAFCON)
in Jerusalem, issuing a declaration of traditional Anglican values. Later that year, U.S. and
Canadian traditionalists left their respective national provinces (churches), and in 2009
they launched the Anglican Church in North America, which immediately appealed for
recognition by the Anglican Communion, whose leadership was compelled to retrench and
seek a means of reconcilingconflicting interpretations of Anglican tradition.

Presbyterian and Reformed churches

Protestant bodies that owe their origins to the reformatory work of John Calvin and his
associates in various parts of Europe are often termed Reformed, particularly
in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In Britain and in the United States they have usually
taken their name from their distinctive polity and have been called Presbyterian. They are
distinguished from both Lutheranism and Anglicanism by the thoroughness of their
separation from Roman Catholic patterns of liturgy, piety, and even doctrine.
Reformed theology has tended to emphasize the sole authority of the Bible with more rigour
than has characterized the practice of Anglican or Lutheran thought, and it has looked with
deeper suspicion upon the symbolic and sacramental traditions of the Catholic centuries.
Perhaps because of its stress upon biblical authority, Reformed Protestantism has
sometimes tended to produce a separation of churches along the lines of divergent
doctrine or polity, by contrast with the inclusive or even latitudinarian churchmanship of the
more traditionalistic Protestant communions. This understanding of the authority of the
Bible has also led Reformed Protestantism to its characteristic interpretation of the relation
between church and state, sometimes labeled theocratic, according to which those charged
with the proclamation of the revealed will of God in the Scriptures (i.e., the ministers) are to
address this will also to civil magistrates; Puritanism in England and America gave classic
expression to this view. As the church is “reformed according to the Word of God,” so the
lives of the individuals in the church are to conform to the Word of God; hence the
Reformed tradition has assigned great prominence to the cultivation of moral uprightness
among its members. Beginning in the 20th century, most of the Reformed churches of the
world took an active part in the ecumenical movement.
Other Protestant churches

In the 19th century the term Free Church was applied in Great Britain to those Protestant
bodies that did not conform to the establishment, such as Congregationalists, Methodists,
and Baptists (and Presbyterians in England), but since that time it has come into usage
among the counterparts to these churches in the United States, where each of them has
grown larger than its British parent body. Just as the Reformed denominations go beyond
both Anglicanism and Lutheranism in their independence of Roman Catholic traditions and
usages, so the Free Church denominations have tended to reject some of the Roman
Catholic remnants also present in classical Presbyterian worship and theology. Baptists and
Congregationalists see the local congregation of gathered believers as the most nearly
adequate visible representation of Christ’s people on earth. The Baptist requirement of free
personal decision as a prerequisite of membership in the congregation leads to the
restriction of baptism to believers (i.e., those who have made and confessed such a
decision of faith) and therefore to the repudiation of infant baptism, and this in turn leads
to the restriction of Communion at the Lord’s Supper to those who have been properly
baptized. In Methodism the Free Church emphasis upon the place of religious experience
and upon personal commitment leads to a deep concern for moral perfection in the
individual and for moral purity in the community. The Disciples of Christ, a Free Church that
originated in the United States, makes the New Testament the sole authority of doctrine and
practice in the church, requiring no creedal subscription at all; a distinctive feature of their
worship is their weekly celebration of Communion. Emphasizing as they do the need for
the continuing reformation of the church, the Free Church denominations have, in most
(though not all) cases, entered into the activities of interchurch cooperation and have
provided leadership and support for the ecumenical movement. This cooperation—as well
as the course of their own historical development from spontaneous movements
to ecclesiasticalinstitutions possessing many of the features that the Free Church founders
had originally found objectionable in the establishment—has made the question of their
future role in Christendom a central concern of theirs on both sides of the Atlantic.
In addition to these major divisions of Protestantism, there are other churches and
movements not so readily classifiable; some of them are quite small, but others number
millions of members. Some, such as the Society of Friends (or Quakers), known both for
their cultivation of the “Inward Light” and for their pacifism, maintain a Christian
identity. Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, which profess to return to the primitive
church and subordinate liturgy to the direct experience of the Holy Spirit, were among the
fastest-growing forms of Christianity by the early 21st century. Christian Science (formally
the Church of Christ, Scientist) combines Christian teachings with spiritual healing. Others
began within Protestant movements but no longer consistently identify themselves as
Christian. For example, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) identifies itself as a
creedless association of congregations that maintain particular principles and respect and
revere their Christian roots while placing primacy on the individual’s spiritual
search. Unity grew out of the teachings promulgated by the Unity School of Christianity,
founded by the spiritual healers Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, but it has been a
nondenominational religious movement since the mid-20th century.
Still other movements generally maintain, at least in their mainstream varieties, a Christian
identity that is not generally recognized by Christians the world over as being in line with
Christian orthodoxy. The most prominent example is Mormonism, which emerged in the
early to mid-19th century amid the religious (overwhelmingly Protestant and revivalist)
ferment of the Second Great Awakening in the United States. Mormonism was sparked by
the divine revelations supposedly received by Joseph Smith, who is regarded by Mormons
as a prophet. It maintains an expanded body of Scripture—claiming not only the Old and
New Testaments of the traditional Bible but also the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and
Covenants—and in some branches has practiced temple marriages, proxy baptism of the
dead, and polygamy (the latter was largely confined to smaller Mormon fundamentalist
churches in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains from the mid-20th century). The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), the largest branch of mainstream Mormonism,
rejected polygamy in the late 19th century and began emphasizing its Christian heritage in
the late 20th century. The second mainstream branch of Mormonism, the Community of
Christ—formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, founded by Joseph
Smith III, the prophet’s son—never adopted the elaborate temple ceremonies, proxy
baptisms, polygamy, and other traditions that came to demarcate Mormonism from the
rest of Christianity, maintaining a largely orthodoxChristian identity since its founding.
Separately and together, these groups illustrate how persistent has been the tendency of
Christianity since its beginnings to proliferate parties, sects, heresies, and movements.
They illustrate also how elusive is the precise demarcation of Christendom, even for those
observers whose definition of normative Christianity is quite exact.
Jaroslav Jan PelikanMatt Stefon

Christian doctrine

The nature and functions of doctrine

Indirectly or directly, Jesus and his Apostles left their principal—though perhaps not their
only—records in the writings of the New Testament, the canonical texts that form the second
part of the Christian Bible, which also includes the Hebrew Scriptures, or (in the Christian
view) the Old Testament. The basic meaning of the term doctrine is “teaching.”
Christian doctrine, accordingly, is the attempt to state in intellectually responsible terms the
message of the gospel and the content of the faith it elicits. The doctrine,
therefore, encompasses both the substance of what is taught and the act of setting that
substance forth. While a certain reticence is appropriate in the face of
the transcendent mystery of God, Christians hold that God has revealed himself sufficiently
to allow and require truthful speech about him and his ways. Thus, Christian talk of God
claims to be a response to the divine initiative, not simply a record of humanly generated
experience. As Hilary of Poitiers wrote in the mid-4th century in his On the Trinity (IV.4),
“God is to be believed when he speaks of himself, and whatever he grants us to think
concerning himself is to be followed.”

Communion of the Apostles, panel by Justus of Ghent, c. 1473–74; in the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, Italy.SCALA/Art
Resource, New York

From the first, church teaching has occurred in several contexts and for several purposes: it
happens when the gospel is newly preached to people who have not heard it before
(evangelism), when those who accept the message are instructed in preparation
for baptism (catechesis), when the believing and baptized communities gather
for worship (liturgy), and when application is sought to daily life (ethics). Teaching may be
specially required for the sake of clarification and consolidation, as when distortions
threaten within (aversion of heresy), when the faith is under attack from outside
(apologetics), when linguistic or epistemological shifts over time hinder intelligibility or
change the terms of reference (restatement), or when geographical expansion prompts a
more local expression (inculturation). The teaching may vary in the weight of the authority
it claims and is granted, ranging from the most solemn definitions of supervisory bodies
(dogma) through a broadly prevalent but internally somewhat differentiated “common mind”
(consensus) to the works of individual thinkers (theology).
The most stable and widely recognized teaching is that preserved in the ancient creeds—
the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed—that are transmitted in the worship of the
churches and expounded in their confessions (symbolics). The agreed doctrine may
sometimes have been achieved only through a period of maturing reflection and debate,
and the continuation of these processes within the established parameters is not excluded
(development). In the course of history, however, differences concerning accepted
teaching sometimes became so serious that communities divided over them (schism). The
divided communities may continue their conversation in tones that range from the
persuasive to the polemical (controversy). In the 20th century, determined efforts on the
part of several Christian communions were made to overcome the doctrinal differences
between them with the aim of restoring ecclesiastical unity (ecumenism).
Thus, there are many aspects to the question of Christian doctrine, and in what follows
they will be treated in the sequence just outlined: the permanent basis,
the perennial functions, the levels of authority, the stable pattern, and the
institutional vicissitudes.

Scripture and tradition: the apostolic witness

In his First Letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul summarized the gospel he himself had
received and then preached to them, in which they now stood for their salvation:
“that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures [that is, the Old Testament],
and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve” (15:1–8). The
speeches in the Acts of the Apostles are the basis of the following synthesis, by the biblical
scholar C.H. Dodd, of the early apostolic preaching, or kerygma (from the Greek term for a
herald’s proclamation). In Dodd’s synthesis, the story of Jesus is located a little more fully
in God’s history with Israel and with the entire human race:
The Kingdom of God had made its appearance with the coming of the Messiah; His works of power
and His ‘new teaching with authority’ had provided evidence of the presence of God among men; His
death ‘according to the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God’ had marked the end of the
old order, and his resurrection and exaltation had definitely inaugurated the new age, characterized,
as the prophets had foretold, by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the people of God. It remained
only for the new order to be consummated by the return of Christ in glory to judge the quick and the
dead and to save His own from the wrath to come.
Moreover, according to Dodd, “the kerygma always closes with an appeal for repentance,
the offer of forgiveness and of the Holy Spirit, and the promise of ‘salvation,’ that is, of ‘the
life of the Age to come,’ to those who enter the elect community.”

Embedded in the New Testament also are certain short formulas used by believers to
confess their faith (homologein): “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:3), “Jesus
is the Son of God” (1 John 4:15), and Peter’s “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29) and
Thomas’s “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Confessions of faith were sometimes sung
when the Christians assembled for worship (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16); Paul seems
to use quotations from such hymns in arguments in his letters to the Philippians (2:5–11)
and Colossians (1:15–20). The earthly worship of the church is probably the immediate
source for the heavenly songs of the Apocalypse (Revelation 4:8–11; 5:9–10, 13–14; 7:9–
12; 11:16–18; 19:1–8).
The fullest apostolic record of the teachings of Jesus is found in narrative form in the
Gospels, where his life and sayings are set amid faithful conclusions about who he was
and is and what he will still accomplish. Although a degree of diversity in presentation and
emphasis is found in the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) as a
result of the material available to the authors (the Evangelists), the interests of their
audience, and the authors’ own interpretations, the overwhelming perception of the church
through the centuries has been that the four canonical Gospels are mutually
complementary rather than contradictory. Turning from the traditional understanding,
modern scholarship for a time maximized the differences among the Gospels, but this was
followed by the recovered sense of a complex unity as in fact characteristic of the
Scriptures in their entirety (an important record in this regard is the 1993 report of the
Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church).
The most discursive reflections of the apostolic faith are found in the New Testament
epistles, where salvation is at stake in the matter of right belief and right practice. Thus, in
the Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul first shows how worshipping creatures rather
than the Creator leads to destruction. He then expounds the redemptive work of God in
Christ and shows how those who believe are renewed by the Holy Spirit for life as God
means it to be. In the First Letter of John, faith in the Incarnation—that “Jesus Christ has
come in the flesh”—is bound up with God’s love for humankind and humankind’s love for
God, as well as with human beings’ love for each other, in all of which eternal life consists.
By the late 2nd century there was widespread agreement among the local churches about
which writings were to be reckoned apostolic by virtue of their origin and content, but it
was not until the 4th century that the list became settled into what is now known as the
“New Testament.” This canon has remained virtually invariable ever since, being drawn on
for regular positive teaching and appealed to whenever controversies have arisen. The
writings that form it are believed by Christians to have been divinely inspired, whether the
mode of inspiration was that of dictation or of a more complex mediation through the
human writers’ minds, experiences, and churchly location.

About 400 St. Augustine wrote the highly influential De doctrina christiana(On Christian
Doctrine), which provides practical guidance for interpreting the faith. The work consists
largely of rules for the reading and teaching of Scripture, both Old Testament and New.
Augustine emphasized that familiarity with the text, sound philology, and an understanding
of the relation between signs and things are all needed, and he demonstrated how
different literary genres and figures are to be recognized. De doctrina christiana also
showed how difficult passages can be illuminated by clearer ones and how basic axioms,
themselves internal to the Scriptures—such as love of God and love of neighbour—should
guide the reading of the whole.
In medieval terms, sacred doctrine (sacra doctrina) is to be read as directly as possible from
the sacred page (sacra pagina). Moreover, it is a commonplace—from Thomas à
Kempis (The Imitation of Christ, I.5) in the 15th century through John Calvin (Institutes I.7.1–
5) in the 16th century to the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church (§ 111)—that
Scripture must be read in the same (Holy) Spirit as that in which it was written. In other
words, the reading of Scripture, whether corporate or individual, is properly done
prayerfully by people who have pure hearts and live holy lives. It is such use that permits
Scripture to function authoritatively in Christian teaching.
While the New Testament, which sets the terms also for the reading of the Hebrew
Scriptures as the promissory and prophetic Old Testament, is consistently held to be the
primary witness to the apostolic preaching and a permanent statement of “the faith once
delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), there are other possible legacies from the Apostles.
Thus Basil of Caesarea, a 4th-century Church Father and bishop, claimed that certain
practices and expressions not mentioned in the New Testament—such as facing East
for prayer, the renunciation of Satan before baptism, the threefold immersion, the words
for invoking the Spirit over the bread and cup—are nevertheless of apostolic origin. In the
16th century, when the Protestant reformers sought to bring the Western church back
from what they perceived as departures from Scripture, the Council of Trent responded with
the declaration that equal respect was to be shown to “the truth and discipline contained in
the written books and (Latin et) in the unwritten traditions handed down to us, which the
Apostles received from the mouth of Christ himself or by the dictation of the Holy Spirit.”
As some scholars have argued, the et seemingly left open the question whether oral and
practical traditions may add substantially to what is known from the Apostles through the
Scriptures or are rather to be viewed as parallel modes for transmitting the same content.

Evangelism: the first teaching about the God of Jesus Christ

When the gospel is preached to people for the first time, the hearers usually have some
idea of “the divine” in their minds. This idea provides an initial point of contact for the
evangelist. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul, in addressing the Athenians, noted
that their altars included one “to an unknown god.” Whether that designated a supreme
deity or simply one who might have been left out, Paul took the opportunity to teach them
about “the God who made the world and everything in it, the Lord of heaven and earth.”
The Greek poets Epimenides and Aratus, he said, had hinted at such a God, “in whom we
live and move and have our being” (Epimenides), for “we are indeed his offspring”
(Aratus). As such, Paul confirmed, “He is not far from each of us.” The crucial point,
however, is that God now “commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed
a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed,
and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead.” In this way
Paul appealed to what he could in his hearers’ conceptions but brought radical news
concerning the will and actions of God in history. The responses of his audience are
reported as ranging from scorn through mild curiosity to belief.
Christian evangelists must often decide which name of the divine they will employ among
those used by their hearers. Jesuit missionaries to China in the 16th and 17th centuries
could use tian (simply “heaven,” a Confucian usage), shangdi (“sovereign on high”),
and tianzhu or tiandi (“lord of heaven”). Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) favoured using all three
interchangeably. He rejected other terms—e.g., taiji (“supreme ultimate”)
and li (“principle”)—from Neo-Confucian philosophy. In Vietnam, Alexandre de
Rhodes (1591–1660) rejected the terms but and phat because they were used for
the Buddha, whom he regarded as an idol. Instead he chose the vernacularcompound Duc
Chua Troi Dat (“noble ruler of heaven and earth”), thus coming close to Acts 17:24 and
Luke 10:21. Some missionaries to East Asia resorted to transliterating the
Latin Deus (“God”), which had either the advantage or the disadvantage of being an
empty container waiting to be filled.
A modern missionary to India, Lesslie Newbigin (1909–98), recounted how, in preaching to
villagers in the south, he would tell stories about Jesus that could not be told about the
Hindu gods Shiva, Vishnu, or Ganesha, until gradually their conceptions of the Divine would
be changed. Newbigin saw a radical contrast between the nature of God implied in “the
higher Hinduism”—when atman and brahman are identified and the material world is
considered an illusion (maya)—and in the Bible—when the universal Creator is presented
as one who personally engages with humankind in concrete history.