Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Who were the first Christians?
The first Christians (whom historians refer to as Jewish Christians) were the original Jewish followers of Jesus, a Galilean preacher and, according to early Christian belief, the resurrected messiah. After his crucifixion by the Romans, his followers broke over whether they should continue to observe Jewish law, such as at the Council of Jerusalem. Those who argued that the law was abrogated (either partially or fully, either by Jesus or Paul or by the Roman destruction of the Temple) broke to form Christianity.
Group D
Early Christian art survives from dates near the origins of Christianity. The oldest surviving Christian paintings are from the site at Megiddo, dated to around the year 70, and the oldest Christian sculptures are from sarcophagi, dating to the beginning of the 2nd century. Until the adoption of Christianity by Constantine Christian art derived its style and much of its iconography from popular Roman art, but from this point grand Christian buildings built under imperial patronage brought a need for Christian versions of Roman elite and official art, of which mosaics in churches in Rome are the most prominent surviving examples.
In the year 457, Leo I became the first emperor to be crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Anthemius (467-472), one of the last Western Roman emperors, seems to have planned a pagan revival at Rome. He was a descendant of Procopius, the relative of Julian. Anthemius gave Messius Phoebus Severus, a pagan philosopher who was a close friend of his, the important offices of Praefectus urbi of Rome, Consul and Patrician. Anthemius placed the image of Hercules, in the act of vanquishing the Nemean lion, on his coins. The murder of Anthemius (by Ricimer) destroyed the hopes of those pagans who believed that the traditional rites would now be restored. Shortly thereafter, in 476, the western emperor was deposed by Odoacer, who became the first barbarian king of Italy. In spite of this disaster, pagans made one last attempt to revive the pagan rites. In 484, the Magister militum per Orientem, Illus, revolted against Zeno and raised his own candidate, Leontius, to the throne. Leontius hoped to reopen the temples and restore the ancient ceremonies and because of this many pagans joined in his revolt against Zeno. Illus and Leontius were compelled, however, to flee to a remote Isaurian fortress, where Zeno besieged them for four years. Zeno finally captured them in 488 and promptly had them executed.
Most scholars believe there is no historical evidence of any influence by Buddhism on Christianity, Paula Fredriksen stating that no serious scholarly work has placed the origins of Christianity outside the backdrop of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. Leslie Houlden states that although modern parallels between the teachings of Jesus and Buddha have been drawn, these comparisons emerged after missionary contacts in the 19th century and there is no historically reliable evidence of contacts between Buddhism and Jesus.
Around the 1st century CE, there were several small Jewish sects: the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Essenes, and Christians. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, these sects vanished. Christianity survived, but by breaking with Judaism and becoming a separate religion; the Pharisees survived but in the form of Rabbinic Judaism (today, known simply as "Judaism"). The Sadducees rejected the divine inspiration of the Prophets and the Writings, relying only on the Torah as divinely inspired. Consequently, a number of other core tenets of the Pharisees' belief system (which became the basis for modern Judaism), were also dismissed by the Sadducees. (The Samaritans practiced a similar religion, which is traditionally considered separate from Judaism.)
The Great Schism of 1054 split Christianity between Greek East and Latin West. Attempts were made over the subsequent centuries to heal the rift, such as the 1274 Second Council of Lyon and the 1439 Council of Florence, but these failed. More recent attempts to foster closer relations between the churches included the Catholic–Orthodox Joint Declaration of 1965 following the 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople in Jerusalem. Following that meeting and declaration, a number of meetings, visits and symbolic events had taken place involving Catholic and Orthodox leaders (including visits by Pope John Paul II, and especially between several popes and Bartholomew I of Constantinople), but never a meeting between a Pope and a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. The first time a Pope visited a predominantly Eastern Orthodox country was in 1999 when Pope John Paul II visited Romania. Since 1980, regular plenary sessions of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, the latter being led by the Church of Constantinople, had been held.
The Christianization of Scandinavia as well as other Nordic countries and the Baltic countries, took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. The realms of Scandinavia proper, Denmark, Norway and Sweden (Sweden is an 11th or 12th century merger of the former countries Götaland and Svealand), established their own Archdioceses, responsible directly to the Pope, in 1104, 1154 and 1164, respectively. The conversion to Christianity of the Scandinavian people required more time, since it took additional efforts to establish a network of churches. The Sami remained unconverted until the 18th century. Newer archaeological research suggests there were Christians in Götaland already during the 9th century, it is further believed Christianity came from the southwest and moved towards the north.
The Metropolis of Pergamon () was an ecclesiastical territory (diocese) of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in western Asia Minor, modern Turkey. Christianity in the city of Pergamon (modern Bergama), was introduced already from 1st century AD, while the local Christian community comprised one of the seven Churches of Asia mentioned at the Book of Revelation, written by John of Patmos. The bishopric of Pergamon was twice promoted to a metropolis: during the 13th–14th centuries, as well as for a short period in 1922. Today the "Metropolis of Pergamon and Adramyttium" is the see of a titular metropolitan.
Though some early Christians were aware of Buddhism which was practiced in both the Greek and Roman Empires in the pre-Christian period, the majority of modern Christian scholarship has roundly rejected any historical basis for the travels of Jesus to India or Tibet or direct influences between the teachings of Christianity in the West and Buddhism; and has seen the attempts at parallel symbolism as cases of parallelomania which exaggerate resemblances. However, in the East syncretism between Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism was widespread along the Silk Road in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and was especially pronounced in the medieval Church of the East in China, as evidenced by the Jesus Sutras.
Diocletian divided the empire into four regions, each ruled by a separate Emperor (the Tetrarchy). Confident that he fixed the disorders plaguing Rome, he abdicated along with his co-emperor, and the Tetrarchy soon collapsed. Order was eventually restored by Constantine, who became the first emperor to convert to Christianity, and who established Constantinople as the new capital of the eastern empire. During the decades of the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties, the Empire was divided along an east–west axis, with dual power centers in Constantinople and Rome. The reign of Julian, who under the influence of his adviser Mardonius attempted to restore Classical Roman and Hellenistic religion, only briefly interrupted the succession of Christian emperors. Theodosius I, the last emperor to rule over both East and West, died in 395 AD after making Christianity the official religion of the Empire.
An edict of toleration was issued by the emperor Galerius from Serdica and posted at Nicomedia on 30 April 311. By its provisions, the Christians, who had "followed such a caprice and had fallen into such a folly that they would not obey the institutes of antiquity", were granted an indulgence. Their confiscated property, however, was not restored until 313 when instructions were given for the Christians' meeting places and other properties were to be returned and compensation paid by the state to the current owners: The Christian communities of Mediolanum contributed its share of martyrs during the persecutions, but the first bishop of Milan who has a firm historical presence is Merocles, who was at the Council of Rome of 313.
In the 20th century, scholars became more likely to see early Christian faith and practice as evolving out of the religious beliefs and practices of Second Temple Judaism and Hellenic pagans, rather than standing out in sharp contrast to them. Modern historians have come to accept Jesus' Jewish identity and that of the apostolic church (referred to as Jewish Christianity). The relationship of Paul of Tarsus and Judaism is still disputed. The anti-Jewish Jesus of the gospels is now recognized as a later interpretation, perhaps Marcionite, as are the universalist themes in Acts and Luke. H. G. Wells, in his Outline of History, depicted Jesus as a man and Christianity as a religion of no divine distinction. Scholars such as Walter Bauer and Bart Ehrman have emphasized the diversity of early Christianity, with Proto-orthodox Christianity being one thread, against the traditional account of catholic unanimity.The historical and contextual time of the early church.
Constantinople became established in the ecclesiastical hierarchy at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Second only to Rome, the legendary origins of the Patriarchate of Constantinople go back to St. Andrew, Metrophanes and Alexander of Constantinople. Constantinople's primacy over the Patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch was reaffirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 481, after which the papacy in Rome supported Constantinople in its dispute with Alexandria over monophysitism. Later, when Rome sought to assert its primacy over Byzantium, the Eastern Orthodox church developed the doctrine of pentarchy as a response.
Christians ranked as the second most educated religious group around in the world with an average of 9.3 years of schooling. Christians were found to have the second highest number of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita while in absolute numbers ranked in the first place (220 million). According to the study, Christians in North America, Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Asia-Pacific regions are highly educated since many of the world universities were built by the historic Christian churches, in addition to the historical evidence that "Christian monks built libraries and, in the days before printing presses, preserved important earlier writings produced in Latin, Greek and Arabic". According to the same study, Christians have a significant amount of gender equality in educational attainment, and the study suggests that one of the reasons is the encouragement of the Protestant Reformers in promoting the education of women, which led to the eradication of illiteracy among females in Protestant communities.
Only one work in this genre is included in the New Testament canon, entitled the "Acts of the Apostles", sometimes called the "Book of Acts" or simply "Acts", and primarily concerns the activities of Saint Peter, John the Apostle, and Paul the Apostle, who converts to Christianity in chapter 9 and becomes the main character. It is presumably the second part of a two-part work, the Canonical Gospel of Luke being the first part, with both works being addressed to Theophilus, and sharing a similar style. Almost all scholars believe that they were written by the same person.
Disunion in the Roman Empire contributed to disunion in the Church. Theodosius the Great, who in 380 established Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire (see Edict of Thessalonica), was the last Emperor to rule over a united Roman Empire. Following the death of Theodosius in 395, the Empire was divided for the final time into western and eastern halves. In the 4th century, the Roman emperor (reigning in Constantinople) started to control the Church in his territory.
Mar Yohannan VIII Hormizd (often referred to by European missionaries as "John Hormez" or "Hanna Hormizd") (1760–1838) was the last hereditary patriarch of the Eliya line of the Church of the East and the first patriarch of a united Chaldean Church. After succeeding his uncle Eliya XII Denha in 1780 as patriarch of Mosul, he made a Catholic profession of faith and was recognised in 1783 by the Vatican as patriarchal administrator and archbishop of Mosul. His career as patriarchal administrator was controversial, and was marked by a series of conflicts with his own bishops and also with the Vatican. Suspended from his functions in 1812 and again in 1818, he was reinstated by the Vatican in 1828. In 1830, following the death of the Amid patriarchal administrator Augustine Hindi, he was recognised by the Vatican as "patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans" and the Mosul and Amid patriarchates were united under his leadership. This event marked the birth of the since unbroken patriarchal line of the Chaldean Catholic Church. Yohannan Hormizd died in 1838 and his successor Nicholas I Zaya was chosen by the Vatican, ending the centuries-old practice of hereditary succession in the Eliya line of the Church of the East.
Based on the numbers of adherents, the Eastern Orthodox Church (also known as Eastern Orthodoxy) is the second largest Christian communion in the world after the Roman Catholic Church. The most common estimates of the number of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide is approximately 200–260 million. The numerous Protestant groups in the world, if taken all together, outnumber the Eastern Orthodox, but they differ theologically and do not form a single communion.
The Christianisation of the Slavic peoples was, however, a slow and—in many cases—superficial phenomenon, especially in what is today Russia. Christianisation was vigorous in western and central parts of what is today Ukraine, as they were closer to the capital Kiev, but even there, popular resistance led by "volkhv"s, pagan priests or shamans, recurred periodically for centuries. Even though the Byzantine Christianization firstly has slowed down the Eastern Slavic traditions in Rus', it has preserved the Slavic traditions in the long term. While local Slavic figures and myths, such as Baba Roga in Croatia were forgotten, Slavic culture continued to exist and even flourish in the Eastern Slavic countries. In the case of a Christian Latinization of the Eastern Slavic countries, this may not have been the case.
In 395 Theodosius I, who had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, would be the last emperor to preside over a united Roman Empire. The empire was split into two halves: the Western Roman Empire centred in Ravenna, and the Eastern Roman Empire (later to be referred to as the Byzantine Empire) centred in Constantinople. The Roman Empire was repeatedly attacked by Hunnic, Germanic, Slavic and other “barbarian” tribes (see: Migration Period), and in 476 finally the Western part fell to the Heruli chieftain Odoacer.
In 258 AD, Shapur the First pushed west, besieged Edessa, captured emperor Valerian and vast numbers of prisoners were brought into Persia. Many of these were Christians. "The first figure of the Christian church who emerges clearly is Papa who became Bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon around 300 AD. The Chronicle references Papa and from Papa onward there is good support for the historicity of the text. On Good Friday, April 17, 341, Shapur the second had 100 Christians put to death beginning a persecution lasting nearly forty years without remission, calling them "traitors who shared sentiments with Caesar." "The persecution was reported to be very fierce between AD 344 and 367 in Susiana and Adiabene with some 16,000 names listed as martyrs, which points to an even larger number of victims." By the late fourth century, Christianity is recognized as a legitimate minority with a decree of toleration from Yazdgard I. Some persecution returns under Bahram V. and in "AD 422 a new treaty is signed between Persia and the Roman Empire which guaranteed freedom of worship to Christians in Persia."
The spread of Christianity in Gaza was initiated by Philip the Arab around 250 CE; first in the port of Maiuma, but later into the city. The religion faced obstacles as it spread through the inland population because pagan worship was strong. In 299, an unverified number of local Christians who assembled in Gaza to hear the Scriptures read were seized and mutilated by the Romans. Also, its Christians were harshly repressed during the Diocletianic Persecution in 303. The first bishop of Gaza was Philemon, believed to have been one of the 72 disciples, but the first cleric was Saint Silvanus who, during the persecution by Maximinianus in 310, was arrested along with about 30 other Christians, and condemned to death.
The first Arab tribes to adopt Christianity were likely Nabataeans and Ghassanids. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the Ghassanids, who at first adopted monophysitism, formed one of the most powerful confederations allied to Christian Byzantium, being a buffer against the pagan tribes of Arabia. The last king of the Lakhmids, al-Nu'man III ibn al-Mundhir, a client of the Sasanian Empire in the late sixth century, also converted to Christianity (in this case, to the Nestorian sect). Arab Christians played important roles in al-Nahda movement in modern times, and because Arab Christians formed the educated upper class and the bourgeoisie, they have had a significant impact in politics, business and culture of the Arab world. Today Arab Christians still play important roles in the Arab world, and Christians are relatively wealthy, well educated, and politically moderate.
Christian missionaries started to visit Iceland in the last decades of the 10th century. A German missionary bishop, Friedrich who arrived in 981 was the first among them. He was forced to depart from the island in 986 after his Icelandic aide, Thorvald Konradsson, had murdered two men in a battle. Next the Icelandic Stefnir Thorgilsson arrived, who had been dispatched with this mission by Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway (r. 997–1000). He was expelled from the country after he had destroyed pagan sanctuaries. Likewise, the next missionary sent to Iceland by the king, the German or Flemish Thangbrand, was forced to leave around 999 because he had murdered some of those who opposed his mission. He reported to the king "that it was beyond all expectation that Christianity might yet be accepted" in Iceland, although he had succeeded in converting many chieftains. On hearing this, King Olaf decided to have all pagan Icelanders who were staying in Norway captured and to forbid all Icelanders from Norwegian ports. Since Norway was Iceland's main trading partner, Icelanders needed to maintain the peace. Accordingly, two Christian chieftains who were related to King Olaf, Gissur Teitsson and Hjalti Skeggjason, were sent to Norway. They promised the monarch that they would be making every effort to convert the whole island. In response, King Olaf released his hostages, many of whom were related to pagan Icelandic chieftains.