Jews themselves.
This was the complex world of Jewish faith into which Jesus was born and which shaped the early Christian movement. The diversity of Judaism that already existed opened plenty of space for adding new Jewish voices to the mix. Jesus’s voice was one of them, and at first neither he nor his followers thought of the movement as anything other than Jewish. Jesus and his followers obeyed Jewish law, they attended synagogue services, they participated in Jerusalem’s temple rituals, and they were proud of being Jewish. When a Gentile woman once sought help from Jesus, he called her a dog because she was not Jewish; the apostle Peter thought it was degrading to eat with non‐Jews; and even the apostle Paul, who championed Gentile inclusion in the movement, happily described himself as proud to be “a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5).
Many of Christianity’s core beliefs, like monotheism and an ethic of love for God and neighbor (the “Golden Rule”), were taken wholesale from Judaism, and the Christian practice of church meetings is clearly derived from the synagogue model. Perhaps most notably, Christianity retained the Hebrew scriptures as part of its own collection of holy writings. In fact, the Hebrew scriptures make up fully three‐quarters of the text of the Christian Bible. However, the two religious movements eventually began to go their separate ways, and the history of the Bible reflects this divide. By the mid‐second century of the Christian era, Christians began referring to the Hebrew scriptures as the “Old Testament” in contrast to their own writings, which were being collected and organized as the “New Testament.” As soon as this way of thinking became the norm, Christians started interpreting the Old Testament (the Hebrew scriptures) almost entirely as pointing toward, and being fulfilled by, the message of the New Testament, and any sense of the Hebrew scriptures having their own separate voice was lost – a sure sign that the two movements were rapidly drifting apart.
The split between Judaism and Christianity was precipitated by Christianity’s ever‐increasing emphasis on the deity of Christ, but other dynamics were also in play. Initially, it was politically advantageous for Christians to be seen as a particular subset of Jews, because Judaism was an officially tolerated religion within the Roman Empire, and new religious movements (like Christianity) could never expect to get that kind of status. But in 70 CE Palestinian Jews revolted against Roman rule. The revolt was crushed, the Jewish Temple was destroyed, and Judaism ceased to be a tolerated religion. After a second Jewish revolt in the 130s, Rome began to view Jews as traitors and terrorists. In this context, being associated with Judaism became a political liability, rather than a political advantage, and Christians living within the Roman Empire began to distance themselves from the Jewish community whenever and however they could. Jews responded in kind, and soon many traditional Jews began viewing Christians not only as Jewish heretics, but as religious enemies. In territories outside the Roman Empire, where being Jewish never had any significant political advantage, Jewish–Christian relations were more straightforward even though they were also sometimes contentious. As a result, Christians and Jews remained religious dialogue partners in eastern Syria and Persia much longer than they did in the Roman Empire. Eventually, however, these links were severed as well.
As the social distance between Christians and Jews increased, Christian zealots began to develop a variety of negative and grotesque caricatures of Jews. As Christianity grew in size and power, those negative stereotypes fueled a long and shameful history of Christian antisemitism and persecution of Jews. The objective reality is, however, that Christianity has Jewish roots and that many of its central values, ideas, and practices are derived directly from Judaism. In recent years, many Christians have begun to re‐acknowledge that fact, and hopefully this is a sign that Christianity is finally moving beyond its past antisemitism.
Christian History and Globalizations
Christianity’s journey from being a small Jewish religious sect to a global faith was neither smooth nor direct. The first five hundred years of the movement were primarily devoted to sorting out the central theological ideas and ecclesiastical practices that still define Christianity today. In these early centuries, Christianity took on the institutional form of church (local communities of Christians meeting weekly for worship), the doctrines of Christ’s divinity and the Trinity were formed, and the Christian Bible was created. Much of Christianity’s early story was played out in the Roman Empire, but alternative notions about what it might mean to be a follower of Jesus were already appearing in other locations.
The next five hundred years of Christian history (500–1000) were a time of rapid expansion, especially in the East. This is when the movement became global for the first time, and it is also when Christianity began to fragment into a variety of distinct sub‐traditions. During these centuries, more than half of the world’s Christian population lived in Asia, but the Christian population was also growing in Africa (in Ethiopia and Nubia) and in Europe. This is when Christianity met its first new rival, a religion founded after the rise of Christianity that claimed to supersede Christianity. That religion was Islam, and Christianity has had a complex and sometimes violent relationship with Islam ever since.
During the years 1000–1500, Christianity experienced a great contraction geographically. Asian Christianity was decimated by persecution, war, and social unrest, while western European Christianity grew rapidly in terms of numbers, wealth, and a desire to control the Christian movement worldwide. By the year 1500, more than 85 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe. Most of those European Christians believed that their version of faith was the only true and proper way of following Jesus. Christianity came to be seen worldwide as a white, western religion, a perspective with which most European Christians emphatically agreed.
The last five hundred years (1500 to the present) have been a time of Christian re‐globalization. This era began with the European conquest, colonization, and Christianization of the Americas, a process that seemed at times to be motivated by genuinely spiritual concerns but that always involved economic gain for the colonizing countries. In subsequent centuries, this same awkward mix of faith and greed shaped Christianity’s expansion into Asia and Africa. Christianity was becoming a global religion, but that globalism was decidedly Eurocentric and European‐controlled. Then social dynamics began to change. At first slowly and then more rapidly, people all around the world began to make Christianity their own. They pushed aside Europe‐imposed ideas about Christianity and began to explore their own new understandings of what it might mean to be a follower of Jesus in the contemporary world. Today, no single region of the world controls Christianity’s development. Contemporary Christianity is diverse, dispersed, and de‐centered.
The goal of Part II is to explain “how Christians got there,” with the word “there” referring to both theology/spirituality and geography/culture. The four chapters in this section of The World’s Christians are all structured similarly to highlight these two concerns. After a very brief overview of the time period, the first half of each chapter concentrates on the core convictions of the Christian communities that flourished during that era. The focus here is on how Christians got to where they are in terms of theology and church practices. The second half of each chapter then discusses how Christianity changed and developed as a result of its encounters with other cultures. These two different dimensions of global Christian history are obviously interconnected, but they are discussed separately here to make the storylines easier to follow.
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