The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

by Robert L. Wilken

The Church’s history is more than the history of a religious community. Christianity is a culture-forming religion, and the planting and growth of Christian communities led to the remaking of the cultures of the ancient world along with the creation of a new civilization, or more accurately several new civilizations.

Christianity has no sacred tongue, but it cannot exist without books.

For Rome, the alliance with Christianity came late; outside the empire, in Ethiopia or Armenia and later in early medieval Europe, the Christian mission began at the top and the king became the head of the Christian people. Conversion was not a warming of the heart, but a change of public practice.

If the story of Christianity is told solely from the perspective of the West, an essential element is ignored.

Christianity is transcultural and migratory, and each interaction with a new people and language brought changes in how Christians practiced their faith. At the same time, Christian rituals such as baptism and the Eucharist, the Bible, the Nicene Creed, the office of bishop, and monasticism bound Christians in a spiritual unity that transcended the deep cultural differences.

Although the gospels give us a narrative account of the discovery of the empty tomb, our earliest record of the resurrection comes in a letter by Paul that focuses entirely on the appearances of Jesus to his disciples.

Tacitus may have gotten his theology wrong, but his historical sense is sound. For in saying that the Christian movement (the “deadly superstition”) had “broken out afresh” after a “temporary setback,” he recognized that those who carried on Jesus’s mission in spite of his death were the same men and women who had followed Jesus during his lifetime. This is a point of capital importance for understanding the origins of Christianity and the Church’s nascent self-understanding.

At first the movement spread among Jews in Jerusalem and the surrounding regions, Judea, and Galilee to the north, but soon there were communities in Lydda and Joppa on the coast, to the east in Damascus in modern-day Syria, even north up the coast in Antioch, the home of a thriving Jewish community. Jerusalem, however, remained the center.

Paul’s purpose in going to Jerusalem was twofold. First, from the leaders in Jerusalem he sought legitimation of his mission to the gentiles. Peter had already made some tentative efforts to reach out to non-Jews, but Paul was the first to give the gentiles an equal place in the emerging Church. Second, he wanted to learn at first hand more about the life of the churches in Judea (Galatians 1:22). He also knew very little about Jesus’s life and teaching, and people in Jerusalem had known Jesus in the flesh and had put his sayings and parables to memory. Already something like the account of Christ’s life that we know from the gospels was circulating orally.

Paul’s unbounded confidence, irrepressible energy, directness, and personal charm were irresistible (though not to all), and soon there were tiny Christian communities scattered throughout the region. He was an indefatigable traveler. Given the difficulties and dangers of travel in those days and the extent of territory he covered, his success as a missionary is astonishing. The tiny band that had gathered in Jerusalem only two decades earlier was on the way to becoming a religion not only for Jews but also for gentiles—a form, as it were, of Judaism for the nations.

He is sometimes regarded as the first Christian theologian, for he began the daunting task of interpreting the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth in the light of his resurrection from the dead, the central conviction of the young community. In Paul’s letters we see how after the resurrection Jesus was confessed as the Son of God, and Christian faith came to be centered on his death and resurrection. Jesus was not one thing and Christ another. The Christ of Christian faith was the same person as the Jesus of Nazareth who proclaimed the kingdom of God, prayed to God the Father, healed the sick, and was crucified outside Jerusalem.

For Paul to become a Christian meant being joined to a body of persons in intimate union with Christ. His thinking is profoundly corporate.

Reading Paul’s letters one understands why as a missionary he was not content to “convert” individuals; he established local churches that were bound together by their fellowship with Christ and with other believers.

Paul’s co-worker Apollos was a native of Alexandria, and early Christian tradition venerates the evangelist Mark as the founder of Christianity in Egypt. There is no hard evidence from the first century of a Christian community there, but archaeologists have found fragments of papyri in Egypt with verses from the Gospel of John dating to the early second century. By the middle of the second century Christianity was well established in Egypt, and Alexandria was to become one of the premier Christian cities, along with Antioch and Rome.

The gospel was brought to Central Asia and to China by Syriac-speaking missionaries. There were other linguistic worlds, those of the Copts up the Nile River in Egypt, the Nubians (of present-day Sudan), the Ethiopians farther south, the Armenians east of Asia Minor, and the Georgians between the Black and Caspian Seas, but the three most important Christian languages in the early centuries were Latin in Italy, North Africa, Spain, and western Europe, Greek (and later Slavic) in the eastern Mediterranean and eastern Europe, and Syriac in the Middle East. Already in the early centuries Christianity had the makings of a global religion.

The fall of the city of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple changed forever the life and institutions of the Jewish people.

He was to become one of the most celebrated martyrs in the Church’s early history. After the paucity of information about Christian leaders during the first generations (save Paul), Ignatius is the first major figure to come clearly into view. His letters reveal a man whose mind and heart were passionately devoted to Christ. His intense and fervid piety, his affecting witness, his florid images, and the evocative language of his prose have endeared him to later generations.

Christianity came into the world as a community, not a casual association of individual believers.

Note that the terms “elder” (presbyter) and “overseer” (episcopos) are used interchangeably. In time the term episcopos would become the Greek word for “bishop,” and presbyter would become “priest,” but at this stage the two terms were used without distinction for members of a council of elders. The invocation of the Holy Spirit implies not only that there was a process of selection but also a ritual for setting the elders apart for their distinctive service.

In the course of the second century, however, the principle of one bishop for a city gradually took hold, and by the end of the century it had become almost universal.

By the second century the blessing of bread and wine had become part of a service that included readings from the Scriptures interspersed with psalms or canticles. The readings were followed by a homily or sermon in which the bishop explained and interpreted what had been read and applied it to the lives of the faithful. After the exposition of the reading, the congregation offered prayers for their needs and the needs of others and greeted each other with a kiss. Then bread and wine and water were brought forth. We are not certain as to why water was included, but the practice of adding water to the wine was widespread. In the third century a Christian bishop insisted that the practice went back to the apostles. The bishop took the bread and wine mixed with water and offered thanksgiving “to the Father of the universe through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The office of the bishop, baptism, and the Eucharist gave shape to the community. There would be other things, such as creeds, fixed formulations of Christian belief, and a collection of authoritative writings, a Christian sacred Scripture. But I single out these three at the beginning to stress that what set Christianity apart was not simply its beliefs but also the architecture of its communal life.

By the second century Christians had begun to celebrate an annual festival on a day in the spring at the time of the Jewish Passover. Unlike the later Christian festival of Easter, the ancient celebration marked not simply the resurrection of Christ from the dead; it was a solemn observance of Christ’s passion (suffering), death, and resurrection—a kind of Good Friday and Easter combined—called the Pasch, from Pascha, the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew term for Passover, pesach. The Paschal celebration, which included the reading of the account of the first Passover in Exodus 12, began in the evening and ended early the next morning with the offering of the Eucharist.

But two decades later, another bishop of Rome, Victor (d. 198), thought that the churches in Asia Minor were out of step with the rest of the Christian world and set out to persuade them to conform to the Roman practice (and also the custom in Jerusalem). He called together a gathering of bishops in Rome and urged his fellow bishops elsewhere, such as in Gaul, to oppose the Quartodecimans. Some who followed the Roman practice considered Victor head-strong and pleaded with him not to divide the churches over the issue. The ancient custom of the churches of Asia Minor should be respected.

In time, as other festivals and holy days were added, such as the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas) and days to commemorate the death of martyrs and saints, the Christian calendar would shape the civic as well as the religious life of a new civilization.

Gnostics drew widely on the writings that became part of the New Testament, and toward the end of the second century Heracleon, a gnostic thinker, wrote the first commentary on the Gospel of John. Their works display a deep spiritual yearning expressed at times with poetic beauty and religious imagination. Yet when one takes up a gnostic treatise—and many are now available to us—one senses a different spirit at work in them from other Christian writings. Their authors dismember the biblical narrative, and the words of the New Testament are scrambled in strange and confusing patterns, shrouded in clouds of abstractions and unchecked astral speculations. Though their ideas seem original, they are not profound, and their mysteries, often alluring, are merely recondite.

According to a pious legend, the project to translate the Jewish sacred books was undertaken by the Egyptian king Ptolemy Philadelphus (285–246 B.C.), who wanted to have a Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures for his great library in Alexandria. He assigned the task to seventy scholars (hence the name Septuagint) and, working independently of one another, they produced word-for-word identical Greek translations. In truth the translation was the work of a smaller company of scholars working in different places over a long period of time. It was completed before the rise of Christianity, and it is this version, not the original Hebrew (and Aramaic) version, that was cited in the New Testament and in other early Christian writings. The Septuagint was the first Christian “Bible.”

Ignatius was not alone in preferring oral tradition over written books. A few years later a bishop from Asia Minor named Papias remarked that although the evangelist Mark had done nothing wrong in writing down the sayings of the Lord, he preferred what Andrew or Peter or Philip, the apostles, had said. “For I did not suppose that information from books would help me so much as the word of a living and surviving voice.” But as the decades rolled by oral tradition became more diffuse and less reliable, and written texts began to gain acceptance. Already in the second century the letters of Paul were handed on not as individual works but as a corpus of writings.

Irenaeus’s summary of the biblical narrative reflects what was called the “rule of faith.” In the second century there were no creeds as such, but at baptism, catechumens—men and women who had been instructed in Christian teaching and were about to be received into the Church—were asked a set of three questions dealing with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The “rule of faith” had a Trinitarian structure and identified God by events recorded in the Scriptures, the creation of the world, the call of Abraham, the coming of Christ in the flesh, and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

Christianity was not simply an affair of beliefs or ideas drawn from the Scriptures; the apostolic faith was known through the witness of persons and the teachings and practices of a community that extended back in time. One cannot ignore, said Irenaeus, the public and documented lineage of teachers who have handed on the faith from one generation to the next.

Yet Irenaeus represents the form of Christianity that would endure, spread to all corners of the known world, and transform ancient civilization.

In the oft-cited passage from the Epistle to Diognetus, a second-century writing, it is said that Christians are distinguished from others neither by nationality (Egyptians or Scythians, for example), nor by language (such as Aramaic or Coptic), nor by customs. They call no country home, they do not live in their own cities, and they observe the mores of the people among whom they live. They are known to honor Christ as God, they shun the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, and they gather weekly for a ritual meal. Yet, there is little else that set them apart. When they worship they use the language of the city in which they dwell, they have no temples, in fact no buildings of any kind, nor a religious calendar. During the first two centuries Christianity as a body was largely invisible.

Christians were not the first to bury their dead in catacombs. A century earlier Jews had begun to inter underground. Like the Jews, Christians considered the Roman practice of cremation an offense against the sanctity of the body.

In constructing a catacomb with chapels and altars as well as tombs Christian leaders had more in mind than a place of burial. The dead created for the first time a Christian space that bound the community together over time, knitting the tremulous present to the grander past and forging solid and stable feelings through collective memory. And it is in this setting, where the irresistible ravages of time and mortality were most palpable, where hope was joined to memory, that the first Christian art is found.

We who are forbidden to attach ourselves to idols must not engrave the face of idols [on our rings], or the sword or the bow, since we follow the path of peace, or drinking cups, since we are sober. Many licentious people carry images of their lovers and favorite prostitutes on their rings.”

The early Christians had no objections to images. They were happy to employ symbols, even the figure of a human being, such as a fisherman, to signify Christian beliefs. But at this stage in Christian history they did not yet have their own artistic vocabulary; they had to adapt what was available in the wider culture. Still, in wearing certain kinds of rings or using lamps engraved with particular images they were making choices about what symbols were appropriate for Christian art. The list of images that Clement deemed acceptable offers the first repertory of Christian symbols, some of which are still in use today, including a fish or an anchor or a ship. In these early years what the symbols represented lay in the eyes of the beholder. As far as Roman society was concerned, the Christian meaning was hidden and known only to the faithful.

An early charge against the Christians was that they were superstitious, and in the minds of the Romans the opposite of superstition was “piety.” Justin Martyr, a second-century apologist (one who wrote in defense of Christianity), addressed a treatise to the emperor Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138–161) in which he argues that Christians, like the Romans, are pious and virtuous. The adoption of the orant may have carried a similar message, this time in a work of art rather than in words.

What is not found is any depiction of the crucifixion. It was apparently too degrading to be pictured in Roman society. The earliest known representation of the crucifixion is found on the wooden doors of the Church of Santa Sabina in Rome in the mid fifth century. Neither do we find facial portraits of Christ like those familiar from later Christian art, or images of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus.

Origen’s teacher, a Jew from Palestine who had converted to Christianity, not only taught Origen Hebrew, he also introduced him to Jewish biblical exegesis. At the very beginning of the scholarly study of the Old Testament, Christians had access to an alternate exegetical tradition, not as something to be refuted—though of course there was argument—but as a different way of interpreting the biblical text.

All this scholarly work in Caesarea over the course of a hundred years led to the formation of the first Christian library. Begun during Origen’s day, it was expanded after his death by a wealthy patron who wished to preserve Origen’s writings. Over time it became a large collection of pagan, Jewish, and Christian writings, and a scholarly center for the copying of books was established. One of the beneficiaries of the library in Caesarea was Jerome, who lived in Palestine at the end of the fourth century. Jerome was unusual in that he knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and by drawing on the books collected in Caesarea he bequeathed to later generations an ideal of “trilingual scholarship” (Hebrew, Greek, Latin) that lives on to this day among learned Christians.

This book, Origen’s first venture into theology, deals with the chief points of Christian doctrine. Here is how he explains his reasons for writing the book: “Many of those who profess to believe in Christ hold conflicting opinions not only on small and trivial questions but also on matters of the greatest importance; that is about God or the Lord Jesus Christ himself or about the Holy Spirit.”

For Origen, human life, in this world and in the next, was a continuous process of moral purification whose end was to “behold God” with purity of heart. Though purgation may be long, arduous, and painful, at the end no creatures will be left out. One can detect here the seeds of the later doctrine of purgatory.

By the time Origen was writing there was a small body of apologies written in Greek by such figures as Justin in Rome, Athenagoras in Athens, Melito in Sardis in Asia Minor, Theophilus in Antioch, and Clement, Origen’s predecessor, in Alexandria, and in Latin by Tertullian of Carthage. But Origen towers over all earlier writers, not only for the brilliance of his arguments, but also for the strategy he adopted in responding to critics of Christianity.

Origen decided to write not a general defense of Christianity as others had done, but a detailed refutation of Celsus’s work. It was a fortuitous decision that has had unintended and happy consequences. For in his book Origen cited Celsus’s actual words, paragraph by paragraph, before offering his rebuttal. Though Celsus’s book has been lost, it is possible on the basis of Origen’s citations to reconstruct not only his arguments but the actual words he used. And his excerpts from Celsus’s book give us a very good idea of how the ancient Romans viewed Christianity at an early stage in its history.

Christianity brought into being a new kind of community, defined not by nation or people or language, but by its worship of the one God as known through Jesus Christ. Though it had similarities with Judaism, Christianity had no ties to a people or a land. By severing the bonds that fastened religion to people and place—a characteristic feature of religion in the ancient world—Christianity created a community whose practices, beliefs, and self-understanding set it apart.

The first general persecution of Christians began in January 250. The date is noteworthy. Christianity had been around for more than two hundred years, yet this was the first systematic effort on the part of imperial authorities to force Christians to give up their beliefs and worship the Roman gods.

We know about some of these incidents: the execution of bishop Polycarp by fire early in the second century, the beheading of Justin Martyr and his companions in Rome in mid second century, the cruel mistreatment of a group of martyrs in Lyons in Gaul several decades later, the “passion” (suffering) of two women—Perpetua, a young mother, and her pregnant slave Felicity—in Carthage early in the third century.

At the end of the first century there were fewer than ten thousand Christians in the Roman Empire. The population at the time numbered some sixty million, which meant that Christians made up one hundredth of one percent, or 0.0017 percent according to the figures of a contemporary sociologist. By the year 200, the number may have increased to a little more than two hundred thousand, still a tiny minority, under one percent (0.36). By the year 250, however, the number had risen to more than a million, almost two percent of the population. The most striking figure, however, comes two generations later. By the year 300 Christians made up 10 percent of the population, approximately six million.

Decius was born in Pannonia in the Balkans, on the northeastern frontier of the empire, early in the third century. Within the same decade, at the other end of the empire, in the province of Africa, near Carthage, the great city in North Africa, second only to Rome in the western Mediterranean, a wealthy landholding Roman family celebrated the birth of a son. His name was Thascius Caecilianus Cyprianus. Cyprian and Decius would never meet, but Decius’s reign as emperor would be the fateful turning point in Cyprian’s life.

Sacrifices for the emperor’s health and longevity were traditionally offered on January 3, and it is likely Decius’s decree was issued in anticipation of this festival at the beginning of 250. The first person to be arrested was the bishop of Rome, Fabian, and he died a few weeks later in prison from harsh and brutal mistreatment. It was understandable that imperial authorities acted first in Rome. By the middle of the third century the Church in Rome was large and well known.