Spread of Christianity

• 1. Introduction

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  The Spread of Christianity is one of history's most far-reaching religious journeys, beginning in a single Roman province and eventually touching nearly every corner of the ancient world. In the 1st century AD, in the Roman province of Judea, a small Jewish sect gathered around the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Within ten years of his death, apostles had carried "the Christian Way" from Jerusalem all the way to Rome. By 350, more than half the Roman population identified as Christian. How did a movement that started with roughly 120 believers in an upper room in Jerusalem transform the religious landscape of entire empires? What forces drove it outward, what persecutions tried to stop it, and what compromises shaped its final form? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The First Missionaries

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  According to the Acts of the Apostles, the Jerusalem church started at Pentecost with around 120 believers gathered in what tradition holds to be the Cenacle, an upper room where the apostles received the Holy Spirit. That small gathering did not stay put. The first Christians were Jews, forming what scholars describe as a Second Temple Jewish sect with an apocalyptic eschatology. Their Jerusalem community was itself divided between "Hebrews," Jews who spoke both Aramaic and Greek, and "Hellenists," Jews who spoke only Greek, many of them diaspora Jews who had resettled in the city.

  Early on, the Hellenists proved especially mobile and influential. According to James Dunn, Paul's initial persecution of Christians was probably directed specifically against these Greek-speaking Hellenists because of their anti-Temple attitudes. That tension within the movement would prove consequential, because it was the Hellenists who became the primary bridge to a Greek-speaking Gentile audience. They played a notable role at Antioch, a city with a large Jewish community and significant numbers of Gentile "God-fearers" who were drawn to Judaism without fully converting.

  Antioch became the launchpad for the mission to Gentiles, including Paul's. According to Dunn, it was there that the new movement "began to modulate into something different" and where one can first speak of "Christianity" as a distinct entity. Peter baptized the Roman centurion Cornelius, traditionally regarded as the first Gentile convert, and the Antioch church was founded in that same period. It was at Antioch, tradition holds, that the word "Christian" was first coined. That single city, with its mix of Jews and curious Gentiles, set the course for what the faith would become.

• 3. Paul and the Gentile Turn

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  Paul was personally responsible for bringing Christianity to Ephesus, Corinth, Philippi, and Thessalonica. According to Larry Hurtado, Paul understood Jesus's resurrection as the opening of an eschatological era foretold by biblical prophets, one in which pagan Gentile nations would turn from idols toward the God of Israel. Paul saw himself as specially called to announce that turn and summon Gentiles to it.

  But Paul's interpretation did not go unchallenged. "Hebrew" Jewish Christians, exemplified by the Ebionites, opposed his approach. According to Krister Stendahl, Paul's core concern was not the individual conscience of sinners worried about salvation, but the specific theological problem of whether Gentile Torah-observers could be included in God's covenant. His answer, which relaxed traditional Jewish requirements for Gentile converts, opened the movement to a far larger population than any purely Jewish mission could have reached.

  The theological wrestling is visible in Luke-Acts, which takes on the question of how the Messiah of the Jews came to lead an overwhelmingly non-Jewish church. The answer Luke offers is that the message of Christ was sent to the Gentiles because many Jews had rejected it. That framing reflected a real historical shift. Over forty churches had been established by the year 100, most of them in Asia Minor and Upper Mesopotamia, including the seven churches of Asia, along with communities in Greece and Italy.

• 4. Why It Spread

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  Rodney Stark, in his study The Rise of Christianity, argues that the faith replaced paganism primarily because it improved the lives of its adherents in practical ways. Dag Øistein Endsjø points to a different advantage: Christianity's promise of a bodily resurrection at the end of the world was compatible with the traditional Greek belief that true immortality required the survival of the body, making the Christian message less alien to Greek audiences than it might otherwise have seemed. Will Durant attributed the church's success to an unusually attractive doctrine and to church leaders who addressed human needs more effectively than their rivals.

  Bart D. Ehrman identifies five specific factors. First, the promise of salvation and eternal life for everyone offered something Roman religions did not. Second, stories of miracles and healings portrayed the Christian God as more powerful than the many Roman gods. Third, Christianity attracted the lower classes by offering hope of a better future in the next life. Fourth, unlike most ancient religions, Christianity required converts to abandon the worship of all other gods, which gave it a sharper identity and stronger communal loyalty. Fifth, in the Roman world, converting the head of a household typically meant converting the entire household, including wife, children, and slaves, multiplying the effect of each conversion many times over.

  By the year 300, Christians accounted for roughly 10% of the Roman population, according to some estimates. By 350, that figure had climbed to 56.5%. That pace of growth did not happen accidentally; it reflected a combination of theological appeal, social structure, and the specific dynamics of Roman household organization.

• 5. Persecution and Tolerance

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  There was no empire-wide persecution of Christians until the reign of Decius in the 3rd century. Before that, the policy was that Christians were not to be sought out and prosecuted as inherently disloyal. In 212, universal citizenship had been granted to all freeborn inhabitants of the empire. When Decius enacted his edict of religious conformity in 250, Christian citizens faced a direct conflict: any citizen who refused to participate in the required imperial religious ceremonies was subject to the death penalty. The Decian persecution lasted only a year but marked a sharp break from earlier practice.

  A calmer era followed. Christianity flourished during four decades known as the "Little Peace of the Church," beginning with the reign of Gallienus from 253 to 268, who issued the first official edict of tolerance regarding the faith. That period ended when Diocletian launched what the sources call the final and "Great" Persecution in 303. The Edict of Serdica, issued by the emperor Galerius in 311, officially ended the Diocletianic persecution in the East. Two years later, in 313, the Edict of Milan, issued jointly by Constantine the Great and Licinius, legalized the Christian religion throughout the empire.

  On the 27th of February, 380, the Roman Empire formally adopted Trinitarian Nicene Christianity as its state religion under Theodosius I. That decision reversed the positions of his predecessors Constantius II and Valens, who had personally favored Arian or Semi-Arian forms of Christianity. The move toward state sponsorship carried a dark consequence: pagans and Christians deemed heretical were now routinely persecuted by the Empire and by the kingdoms that later occupied its territory.

• 6. Christianity in Persia

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  While the Roman Empire eventually embraced Christianity, the Persian Empire's relationship with the faith took a radically different path. The Church of the East, historically the most widespread Christian church in Asia, had its origins in the buffer zone between the Parthian and Roman Empires in Assyria. Edessa, known today as Sanliurfa in northwestern Mesopotamia, was from apostolic times the principal center of Syriac-speaking Christianity. Some Christians fleeing Roman persecution had found refuge there, and from Edessa the missionary movement spread throughout Mesopotamia and Persia.

  The great persecution of Christians in Persia fell around the year 340, and its primary cause was political rather than purely religious. Around 315, a letter from the Christian emperor Constantine to the Persian shah Shapur II, intended to express support for Persian Christians, backfired badly. Constantine wrote that he commended the Christians of Persia to Shapur's protection. The letter made any Persian ruler conditioned by three centuries of war with Rome suspicious that Christians formed a fifth column. When Constantine later began gathering forces for an eastern campaign, and when the Persian preacher Aphrahat publicly predicted that Rome would defeat Persia, those suspicions hardened into action.

  Shapur II ordered double taxation on Christians and held their bishop responsible for collecting it. Bishop Simon refused, calling the tax unjust and declaring, "I am no tax collector but a shepherd of the Lord's flock." A second decree ordered the destruction of churches and the execution of clergy who refused to worship the sun. Bishop Simon was brought before the shah, offered gifts for a symbolic gesture of submission, then promised that apostasy alone would spare his congregation. The Christians themselves refused that bargain. In the year 344, according to tradition, Simon was led outside the city of Susa, five bishops and one hundred priests were beheaded before him, and he was then put to death.

  The persecution lasted for roughly four decades, from 339 to 379, ending only with the death of Shapur II. Persian converts from Zoroastrianism faced the harshest treatment, losing family, property rights, and often their lives. Yet despite this sustained violence, the Church of the East survived, and at Seleucia in 424 a council elected the first patriarch with jurisdiction over the whole Church of the East, including India and Ceylon.

• 7. Armenia, the Caucasus, and Africa

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  In 301 or 314, Armenia became the first state to declare Christianity its official religion, doing so while the faith was still illegal inside the Roman Empire itself. The Armenian Apostolic Church traces part of its founding to Gregory the Illuminator of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, though Armenian Christians also claim origins in the 1st-century missions of Bartholomew the Apostle and Thaddeus.

  In Georgia, then known as ancient Iberia, the Iberian king Mirian III converted to Christianity, probably in 326. To the south, in the kingdom of Aksum, the 4th-century Western historian Rufinius records that it was Frumentius who brought Christianity to Ethiopia, to the city of Axum itself, probably shortly after 325, serving as its first bishop. In India, traditional legends hold that Thomas the Apostle arrived along the southern Malabar Coast in 52 AD, founding what became Thomasine Christianity, though no contemporary evidence supports this account. Bar-Daisan, writing between AD 154 and 223, reported that in his time Christian tribes existed in Northwest India who claimed conversion by Thomas and possessed books and relics to prove it.

  Armenia, Georgia, and Aksum all share the distinction of becoming Christian as independent states rather than through Roman imperial pressure. That path shaped the particular character of their churches, which developed theology and liturgy with considerable independence from Rome and Constantinople.

• 8. Germanic Peoples and the Medieval Church

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  On Christmas 496, the Frankish king Clovis I was baptized at Rheims following his victory at the Battle of Tolbiac, converting to the orthodox faith of the Catholic Church. Gregory of Tours recorded the details of that event, which marked a turning point for the Christianization of western Europe. The Franks and their Merovingian dynasty had migrated to Gaul from the 3rd century and had remained pagan until that moment.

  The Gothic path to Christianity was older and followed a different course. Wulfila, whose parents or grandparents were Christian captives from Sadagolthina in Cappadocia, became the first bishop of the Christian Goths in 337 or 341. When a pagan Gothic king began persecuting Christian Goths in 348, Wulfila led a group of refugees to Moesia Secunda in what is now Bulgaria. Between 348 and 383, he translated the Bible into the Gothic language, making it one of the earliest vernacular Christian scriptures. The Goths and Vandals adopted Arianism rather than Nicene orthodoxy, a distinction that would carry political consequences for centuries.

  From the 6th century AD, Catholic missionaries converted and in some cases reconverted Germanic tribes. Most Franks and Anglo-Saxons converted a few generations after their tribes settled within former Roman territory. The reign of Charlemagne eventually brought most Germanic peoples firmly into alignment with the Catholic Church in the West. Wulfila's Gothic Bible, one of the oldest records of any Germanic language, stands as a quiet monument to the earlier, more fractured phase of that long process of conversion.