The First Thousand Years Quotes

“If the story of Christianity is told solely from the perspective of the West, an essential element is ignored.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“the incongruity of spreading the faith by the sword was not lost on Charlemagne’s contemporaries.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“The crowning of Charlemagne as emperor by the pope in the year 800, thereby establishing a rival to the emperor in Constantinople, only deepened the political, cultural, and religious divide between East and West.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“Once the Mediterranean had been a western lake joining the deserts of Egypt with the cities of Italy and North Africa, but with the coming of Islam it became an immense moat dividing the Muslim East from the Christian West.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“Few irruptions in history have transformed societies as rapidly and irrevocably as did the conquest and expansion of the Arabs of Islam in the seventh century. And none came with greater swiftness.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“In the course of seven or eight centuries, most of western Europe embraced Christianity, and the foundations were laid for a distinctive Western Christianity in which Latin was the language of learning and of worship, bishops were in fellowship with Rome, and monks followed the Rule of Benedict.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“More than any other ancient Christian communion the Church of the East made Christianity into a global religion.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“Though the Church in India was founded by Greek-speaking Christians sailing from Roman Egypt, in the third and fourth centuries, as trade between Egypt and India declined, it came under the influence, and eventually the jurisdiction, of the Syriac-speaking Church in Persia.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“The adoption of Christianity by a new people had less to do with the reorientation of the soul than it did with rituals and behavior and the customs and laws of the society.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“as Christianity spread beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. In the early centuries Christianity grew slowly as individuals were drawn to the Church, instructed in the faith, taught Christian prayers, and baptized. But when Christianity spread among the peoples living on the borders of the empire or beyond, conversion took place beginning with the king and queen.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“The historian Peter Brown goes so far as to say that Christian bishops “invented” the poor. For the notion that the “poor” made a claim on the community as a whole was unknown in the ancient world.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“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.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“It is tempting to romanticize the early Church and imagine a golden age of peace and harmony. In truth there was never a time, even in the first decades, that Christians had no differences.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“Christianity came into the world as a community, not a casual association of individual believers.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

“Christianity was not a revolt against Israel.”
― Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity