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March 22, 2024
The fall of the city of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple changed forever the life and institutions of the Jewish people.
In the early history of Christianity the bishops are often the central players.
The Apostolic Tradition, an early “church order”—a collection of directives on liturgy and administration—gives us the words of a prayer used most likely in Rome in the third century. We give thanks to you God, through your beloved child Jesus Christ, whom in the last times, you sent to us as savior and redeemer and angel of your will, who is your inseparable Word through whom you made all things and who was well pleasing to you. When he was handed over to voluntary suffering, in order to dissolve death and break the chains of the devil . . . he took bread and giving thanks to you he said;
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The Septuagint was the first Christian “Bible.”
The Christian Bible was not the work of a group of bishops sitting down with a stack of books before them, discussing the merits of each, and putting some in one pile and others in another. The process was gradual, a slow winnowing over several generations as the books commended themselves.
For Irenaeus the “rule of faith” handed on orally was the key to the interpretation of the Bible. The written books were to be understood in light of what was found in a simple confession of faith, that is, in the Church’s tradition.
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.
Few decisions were more momentous for the history of Christianity and Western civilization than the admission of religious images on the walls of the catacombs.
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.
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
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“You cannot have God for your Father if you do not have the Church for your mother.”
Emperor Constantine died in 337, and after some months of political maneuvering, along with the execution of several members of his family by other family members, he was succeeded by his three sons, Constantine II, who became caesar in the West, Constantius II, who ruled in the East, and Constans, who had responsibility for Italy and North Africa.
Julian believed that animal sacrifice was the highest form of worship, and he was dismayed that with the rise of Christianity the practice had declined.
A good example of a classical Christian basilica, still standing without radical alterations, is the church of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill in Rome, constructed between A.D. 422 and 432.
Basil was born into a large and prosperous Christian family in Neocaesarea, some 150 miles northeast of Caesarea, in A.D. 330. His parents could trace their history back to the third century, and his grandmother had known disciples of the heroic “apostle” of the region, Gregory the Wonderworker. Legend has it that when Gregory became bishop of Neocaesarea there were only seventeen Christians, and when he died only seventeen people were still pagans.
