The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

by Robert L. Wilken

In the first month, Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, was arrested and died in prison, Fabian bishop of Antioch was martyred, Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, was apprehended and imprisoned. And, as we have seen, Origen, the Church’s most prominent thinker, living in Caesarea in Palestine, was cruelly tortured on the rack.

The immediate impact of the commission’s work on the Christian community of Carthage was devastating. Many Christians complied, some coming forth voluntarily to sacrifice. Some even brought their own wine or other offerings. In one city a bishop showed up with a lamb under his arms for sacrifice! Cyprian laments that only a tiny band stood firm. This is not surprising. As the number of Christians increased, the boundaries between the Christian community and the larger society were becoming porous. Some Christian parents, for example, gave their daughters in marriage to pagan men. Some saw no contradiction between participating in the civic cult one day and presenting themselves for the Eucharist on Sunday. And of course the price for refusing to sacrifice was high: confiscation of property, imprisonment, torture, or death. Some bribed officials to secure a libellus, others went into hiding, and yet others fled. In some cases the authorities finessed the matter, allowing a father to sacrifice for his family. The aim was not execution, but to weaken and thin out the Christian community.

Persecution had divided the community between those who had stood firm and those who had, in Cyprian’s words, “broken their oath to Christ” by offering sacrifice. Idolatry, venerating false gods, transgressed Christianity’s most fundamental belief in one God. Dubbed the “lapsed” because they had either sacrificed or obtained certificates (by whatever means) stating that they had sacrificed, by Church law they were excluded from participation in the Eucharist. The other group was made up of those who had courageously confessed their faith, been imprisoned, flogged, twisted on the rack, starved in dark damp dungeons, and in some cases executed. Their steadfastness not only brought honor, it conferred on them unique spiritual prerogatives. And there was the rub. The lapsed began to turn to the “confessors,” those who had confessed their faith in Christ yet lived through the persecution, to ease their return to full fellowship. The confessors complied by issuing letters of reconciliation stating that the bearer of the letter should be received into communion on the strength of the intercession of the confessor. At first the letters were given to specific individuals, but soon the confessors were issuing generic letters, “vague and indefinite certificates,” says Cyprian, that could be used by anyone. In effect the confessors were usurping the authority of the bishop, who alone had the right to forgive sins and impose penance. When some presbyters (who had not supported Cyprian’...

By spring 251, Cyprian was back in Carthage. Summoning all his rhetorical skills, he addressed the community in a memorable oration “on the lapsed,” a work at once wise, generous, biting, and resolute. He praises the courage and faith of the confessors, he grieves for the “wounded,” meaning those who had sacrificed, and even counts himself among the “fallen” because of his flight. The long years of peace had “undermined the practice of the faith,” and all must share the blame. Nevertheless Cyprian was unbending on the key point: no one except the bishop can forgive a sin committed against God through worshiping false gods, by practicing idolatry.

in the end a moderating position was adopted. Each case must be considered individually on its merits. Those who had received certificates of sacrifice (but had not actually sacrificed) were to be readmitted after a time of penance (depending on the circumstances in which the certificate had been received). Those who had sacrificed would undergo “prolonged penance” and be reconciled to the Church on their deathbeds.

The martyrs defined the true nature of the Church. One tiny detail makes this clear. He instructed his presbyters to give special care to the bodies of the martyrs in Carthage. He wished them not only to see to their proper burial, but also to keep a record of the day on which each martyr died. If we know the date of their martyrdom, said Cyprian, “we will be able to include the celebration of their memories in our commemoration of the martyrs.”

“You cannot have God for your Father if you do not have the Church for your mother.”

He was chary of breaking communion with Rome. In this matter, he wrote, we judge no one nor do we reject communion with anyone “if he thinks differently from us.” And for good measure he adds: “None of us has set himself up as bishop of bishops.”

Cyprian’s time as bishop of the church in Carthage in the mid third century is a good vantage point from which to look back on the first two hundred years of Christian history and to cast an eye toward the future. In the early centuries Christianity was made up of small, tightly knit communities distinct from society, an “enclosed garden,” to use Cyprian’s metaphor. To become a Christian meant a break with family and friends, neighbors, colleagues, and business associates. The norms of behavior were set very high, and the churches had an elaborate and rigorous system of penance to deal with grave offenses. The Church had a keen sense of its otherness, a society within society with its own standards of admission and moral expectations, organization, and rituals.

In the decades since the death of Cyprian in the mid third century the advance of Christianity had quickened. In some regions Christians made up a significant minority of the populace, and across the empire Christians were growing in number and influence. By the beginning of the fourth century there were more than two hundred bishops in Latin-speaking North Africa, and in Egypt Christianity had put down roots not only in the Greek-speaking city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast but up the Nile River among the native Coptic-speaking people.

In theory it was a reasonable system, but the dispersal of authority increased rather than diminished rivalry among contenders for the empire’s highest office. And by decentralizing the empire it led to a de facto division between East and West, roughly between Italy, North Africa, Gaul, and Spain, in the west, and Greece, the Balkans, Syria, and Egypt in the east.

In 297 Diocletian proscribed the practice of Manichaeism, an Eastern religion imported from Persia, whose missionaries were active in the empire.

A Roman proconsul, on a routine visit to the city of Tebessa in Numidia (Algeria) to recruit soldiers for the third Augustan legion stationed there, interviewed a young Christian man, Maximilian, twenty-one years old. The young man refused induction (though he was reminded that other Christians served in the military) on the grounds that he could not wear the lead seal around his neck marking his legion since he had been marked by the “seal” of Christ. For his refusal and his disloyalty he was sentenced to death and summarily executed. A few years later a Christian centurion publicly renounced his military oath.

But in February 303, after a visit to the oracle of Apollo at Didyma in western Asia Minor, Diocletian relented. He insisted, however, that the goal was not to kill Christians but to put pressure on them to give up their religion and return to the worship of the ancient gods and goddesses of Rome. In a dawn raid imperial soldiers plundered the Christian church in Nicomedia, burned the Scriptures, and razed the building. The next day an edict was published ordering that churches across the empire were to be destroyed, Christians forbidden to assemble, the Scriptures handed over to authorities to be cast into the flames, and Christians of rank deprived of their privileges (acting as plaintiffs in cases of injury, for instance). A few months later another edict enjoined the arrest of the higher clergy (bishops and priests).

Eusebius wrote a book recounting the stories of the martyrs of Palestine, the province in which his city of Caesarea was located. Many churches were destroyed, the Scriptures and liturgical books burned, and Christians imprisoned, maimed, or horribly burned (from a gridiron). And, as in earlier persecutions, there were some who capitulated by handing over the Scriptures, offering sacrifice, or managing through guile to get around the laws.

Constantine shrewdly accepted the lesser honor, thereby securing the legitimacy of his rule in the West and his place in the college of emperors. His first action on assuming imperial power was to proclaim a formal end to the persecutions in the regions under his rule, Britain, Gaul, and Spain. By restoring the right of Christians to worship God according to their rituals Constantine set himself apart from his imperial colleagues and put himself on record as a friend of Christianity.

So he gathered his army, crossed the Alps, and marched purposefully and deliberately toward Rome, where Maxentius and his army were waiting. What happened next is a matter of great dispute. A Christian account written shortly after the battle reports that in a dream Constantine was instructed to “mark the heavenly sign of God” on the shields of his soldiers before taking the field. The sign was the letter X with a vertical stroke through it. Armed with this sign, Constantine’s soldiers gained the victory. But a later account by Eusebius based on Constantine’s own report to him says that the sign appeared in the heavens during the day, in fact in the afternoon when the sun was beginning to wane, and that it was also seen by the army. All were astounded at the sight, and Constantine was at a loss as to what it meant. According to Eusebius’s account this unusual spectacle in the sky did not take place at the Milvian Bridge up the Tiber River from Rome, but when Constantine was on the march with his troops elsewhere, probably in Gaul. A third account in a panegyric of Constantine written by a Roman orator, dated two years earlier in 310, also says the event took place on a march and what Constantine saw was the sun God Apollo surrounded by a circle or wreath of light.

According to Lactantius, a contemporary Christian writer, Constantine took the vision to mean, “in this sign you will be victor.” So he instructed his soldiers to prepare a new military standard bearing an X with a line running down through the middle in a circle. Viewed from one perspective it looked like the familiar Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of “Christ” in Greek (equivalent to “Ch” and “R”) superimposed on each other.

There were two other “emperors” in the East, Licinius and Maximin Daia, and each was determined to eliminate the other. They met in battle at Adrianople (modern Edirne in European Turkey, west of Istanbul) in the spring of 313. Maximin was hostile toward Christianity and made a vow to Jupiter that if he was victorious he would “utterly destroy the Christian name.” Licinius, on the other hand, was sympathetic to Christianity—at least for a time—and ordered that a prayer addressed to the “great God, the holy God,” be copied and distributed to his lieutenants so they could teach it to those in their command. Before his final battle with Maximin in Adrianople in the spring of 313, when the armies were in sight of each other, his soldiers put down their shields and removed their helmets. Stretching their hands to heaven they joined the emperor in reciting the prayer three times. Whether by piety or military valor, Licinius carried the day.

Like other official correspondence, however, it was written in the name of both emperors and its content reflects the hand of Constantine. The letter is noteworthy in several respects. For one thing it deals not only with Christianity but with all forms of religious worship practiced in the empire. To assure “reverence for the divinity,” Licinius wrote, “we grant both to Christians and to all men the freedom to follow whatever religion each one wished.” Second, it goes beyond toleration and adumbrates in a few phrases a new understanding of religious freedom. Each person should be granted the freedom “to give his mind to the religion which he felt was most fitting to himself.” Because the supreme divinity is to be served with a “free mind,” the worship of God cannot be coerced; it must be an act of the will and arise out of genuine devotion and piety.

Constantine celebrated his victory over Licinius by founding a new city in the east. He had never felt at home in Rome, and he began to envision a new capital, a metropolis that would be free of the monuments and memories of pagan Rome, a city built from the ground up as a fitting embodiment of the new religion and a throne for himself. He chose a place where a small Greek city, Byzantium, had existed for centuries. It was a promontory on the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara, on the European side near the entrance to the Bosporus, surrounded to the east by a deep inlet known as the Golden Horn, facing Nicomedia across the sea, the residence of the Eastern emperor.

So it was with surprise and some dismay that Constantine learned that Christians did not agree on certain things, even on matters of great import. In the decade after Constantine became emperor, controversy broke out in the Christian East on a teaching of such consequence that it divided the Christian world for the next several generations. Not only was there division among leaders and faithful, wrote Eusebius, “sacred matters” were “subject to disgraceful public mockery in the theaters by unbelievers.” What is more, the dispute dealt with a highly complex theological and philosophical matter, the likes of which had no precedent in Roman religion, and which Constantine, a man who had spent more time in the field leading armies than reading books in a library, was ill-equipped to grasp. Even though the emperor was pontifex maximus, the highest priest in the empire, the initiative in religious matters had passed from him to leading bishops of the Church. Or so it seemed.

Almost immediately after the condemnation of Arius, bishops in the Greek-speaking cities of the eastern Mediterranean began to take sides, some coming to Arius’s defense, others championing Alexander or staking out another position. Some wrote letters to other bishops to muster support for their views. And so began one of the most historic epochs in Christianity, a time when leading bishops of the Church disagreed profoundly on central matters of Christian teaching. Ecclesiastical councils publicly debated deep theological issues, with the aim of reaching consensus on language to express central Christian beliefs in formal statements of faith. The disagreements ran deep, and the disputes were often bitter and sometimes violent. From the beginning of the fourth century to the middle of the sixth century, more than 250 councils dealt with a wide range of topics.

arian controversy an eastern event

Over the generations Syriac-speaking Christians in the Sasanid Empire forged a distinct sense of their identity. This was the work of geography, politics, and religion.

The global outreach of Christianity in the early centuries is a testimony to its cultural adaptability and diversity. Christianity as practiced among the Armenians differed from the ways of the Greeks or Ethiopians. Of course the Armenians, Greeks, and Ethiopians had much in common: they were governed by bishops; they fostered monastic life; they baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; they confessed the Creed of Nicaea. But the differences in language, customs, liturgical practices, architecture, and art gave birth to distinctive spiritual and cultural forms of life across the Christian world. When the Crusaders arrived in the East to free their fellow Christians from the yoke of Islam, they had great difficulty recognizing and understanding the way Eastern Christians lived and prayed.

The ancient world was ruled by emperors and kings, and they played a major role in the establishment of Christianity as a global religion. To be sure, kings and emperors were not there from the beginning. Unlike Islam, Christianity began as a community distinct from the body politic, and for the first several centuries it existed independent of political authority. Only with the conversion of Constantine, the Roman emperor in the early fourth century, did Christianity receive the blessing of the ruling powers.

the conventional account (seen from the perspective of Europe and North America) gives the impression that Christianity is always moving forward. Seen in global perspective that picture is illusory. If one injects into this sanguine narrative the spread of Islam, things take on a different coloring. Set against the success of Islam and its staying power, the career of Christianity is marked as much by decline and attrition as it is by growth and triumph.

But Christianity is an Eastern religion, and its homeland is in the Middle East. A far better vantage point is Jerusalem. It was located on the western edge of a vast Aramaic-speaking area to the east, and was at the eastern edge of an empire that reached to the British Isles in the west. The prophet Isaiah said that “all the nations shall flow . . . to the mountain of the house of the Lord” (Isaiah 2:2). Jerusalem welcomed people from both East and West, and if one keeps the holy city in mind, the global history of Christianity will not be forgotten.