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Christianity

Christianity, The First 1000 Years

A complete history of the Christian church for the first 1000 yrs. With a thorough prospective of the Roman Empire, and the Papacy, Rome never died. And the Papacy is not the True Church of God. Know your enemy. It’s your individual Salvation, that is at stake.

190px-StJohnsAshfield_StainedGlass_GoodShepherd_PortraitJesus Christ

The term Christian Church when used as a proper noun usually refers to the whole Christian religious tradition throughout history. When used in this way the term does not refer to a particular denomination or to a building. However, the majority of Christians belong to groups that consider themselves to be the one true church. The three largest such groups are the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Oriental Orthodox communion.

Thus, some Christians identify the Christian Church with a visible structure (the view of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches), while others understand it as an invisible reality not identified with any earthly structure (the general Protestant view) and others equate it with particular groups that share certain essential elements of doctrine and practice though divided on other points of doctrine and government (such as the branch theory as taught by some Anglicans).

The Greek term ἐκκλησία, which is transliterated as “ecclesia”, generally meant an “assembly,” but in most English translations of the New Testament is usually translated as “church,” This term appears in two verses of the Gospel of Matthew, twenty-four verses of the Acts of the Apostles, fifty-eight verses of the Pauline Epistles (including the earliest instances of its use in relation to a Christian body), two verses of the Letter to the Hebrews, one verse of the Epistle of James, three verses of the Third Epistle of John, and nineteen verses of the Book of Revelation. In total, ἐκκλησία appears in the New Testament text 114 times, although not every instance is a technical reference to the church.

In the New Testament, the term ἐκκλησία (“church” or “assembly”) is used for local communities as well as in a universal sense to mean all believers.  Traditionally, onlyorthodox believers are considered part of the true church, but convictions of what is orthodox vary.

The four traditional “notes of the Christian Church” or descriptors of the church, first expressed in the Nicene Creed are unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity.

Etymology

The Greek word ekklēsia, literally “called out” or “called forth” and commonly used to indicate a group of individuals called to gather for some function, in particular an assembly of the citizens of a city, as in Acts 19:32-41, is the New Testament term referring to the Christian Church (either a particular local group or the whole body of the faithful). Most Romance and Celtic languages use derivations of this word, either inherited or borrowed from the Latin form ecclesia.

The English language word “church” is from the Old English word cirice, derived from West Germanic *kirika, which in turn comes from the Greek κυριακή kuriakē, meaning “of the Lord” (possessive form of κύριος kurios “ruler” or “lord”). Kuriakē in the sense of “church” is most likely a shortening of κυριακὴ οἰκία kuriakē oikia (“house of the Lord”) or ἐκκλησία κυριακή ekklēsia kuriakē(“congregation of the Lord”).  Christian churches were sometimes called κυριακόν kuriakon (adjective meaning “of the Lord”) in Greek starting in the 4th century, but ekklēsia and βασιλική basilikē were more common.

The word is one of many direct Greek-to-Germanic loans of Christian terminology, via the Goths. The Slavic terms for “church” (Old Church Slavonic црькꙑ [crĭky], Russian церковь [cerkov’], Slovenian cerkev) are via the Old High German cognatechirihha.

Use by Early Christians

In using the word ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia, “church”), early Christians were employing a term that, while it designated the assembly of a Greek city-state, in which only citizens could participate, was traditionally used by Greek-speaking Jews to speak of Israel, the people of God, and that appeared in the Septuagint in the sense of an assembly gathered for religious reasons, often for a liturgy; in that translation ἐκκλησία stood for the Hebrew word קהל (qahal), which however it also rendered as συναγωγή (synagōgē, “synagogue”), the two Greek words being largely synonymous until Christians distinguished them more clearly.

The term ἐκκλησία appears in only two verses of the Gospels, in both cases in the Gospel of Matthew.  When Jesus says to Simon Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church,” the church is the community instituted by Christ, but in the other passage the church is the local community to which one belongs: “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.”

The term is used much more frequently in other parts of the New Testament, designating, as in the Gospel of Matthew, either an individual local community or all of them collectively. Even passages that do not use the term ἐκκλησία may refer to the church with other expressions, as in the first 14 chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, in which ἐκκλησία is totally absent but which repeatedly uses the cognate word κλήτοι (klētoi, “called”). The church may be referred to also through images traditionally employed in the Bible to speak of the people of God, such as the image of the vineyard used particularly in the Gospel of John.

The New Testament never uses the adjectives “catholic” or “universal” with reference to the church, but does indicate that the local communities are one church, that Christians must always seek to be in concord, that the Gospel must extend to the ends of the earth and to all nations, that the church is open to all peoples and must not be divided, etc.

History of Christianity

The Sermon on the Mount, by Carl Heinrich Bloch. The New Testament depicts Jesus as regularly preaching to his disciples and large crowds.

The early church originated in Roman Judea in the first century AD, founded on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth who is believed by Christians to be the Son of God and Christ the Messiah. It is usually thought of as beginning with Jesus’ Apostles. According to scripture Jesus commanded them to spread his teachings to all the world.

Springing out of Second Temple Judaism, from Christianity’s earliest days, Christians accepted non-Jews (Gentiles) without requiring them to fully adopt Jewish customs (such as circumcision).  The parallels in the Jewish faith are the Proselytes,Godfearers, and Noahide Law, see also Biblical law in Christianity. Some think that conflict with Jewish religious authorities quickly led to the expulsion of the Christians from the synagogues in Jerusalem[13] (see also Council of Jamnia and List of events in early Christianity).

The Last Supper, by Jacopo Bassano, believed to have taken place in the Cenacle.

The Church gradually spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond, gaining major establishments in cities such as JerusalemAntioch, and Edessa.  It also became a widely persecuted religion. It was condemned by the Jewish authorities as a heresy (see also Rejection of Jesus). The Roman authorities persecuted it because, like Judaism, itsmonotheistic teachings were fundamentally foreign to the polytheistic traditions of the ancient world and a challenge to the imperial cult.  The Church grew rapidly until finally legalized and then promoted by Emperors Constantine and Theodosius I in the 4th century as the state church of the Roman Empire.

An icon depicting Constantine I, accompanied by the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea (325), holding the Niceno–Constantinopolitan Creed of 381.

Already in the 2nd century, Christians denounced teachings that they saw as heresies, especially Gnosticism but also MontanismIgnatius of Antioch at the beginning of that century and Irenaeus at the end saw union with the bishops as the test of correct Christian faith. After legalization of the Church in the 4th century, the debate between Arianism and Trinitarianism, with the emperors favouring now one side now the other, was a major controversy.

Christianity as Roman state religion (380 AD)

On February 27, 380, the Roman Empire officially adopted the Trinitarian version of Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire. Prior to this date, Constantius II (337-361) and Valens (364-378) had personally favored Arian or Semi-Arian forms of Christianity, but Valens’ successor Theodosius I supported the Trinitarian doctrine as expounded in the Nicene Creed from the 1st Council of Nicea.

On this date, Theodosius I decreed that only the followers of Trinitarian Christianity were entitled to be referred to as Catholic Christians, while all others were to be considered to be heretics, which was considered illegal.  In 385, this new legal situation resulted, in the first case of many to come, in the capital punishment of a heretic, namely Priscillian, condemned to death, with several of his followers, by a civil tribunal for the crime of magic.  In the centuries of state-sponsored Christianity that followed, pagans and “heretical” Christians were routinely persecuted by the Empire and the many kingdoms and countries that later occupied the place of the Empire, but some Germanic tribes remained Arian well into the Middle Ages (see also Christendom).

The Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, once the greatest basilica in all of Christendom.

The Church within the Roman Empire was organized under metropolitan sees, with five rising to particular prominence and forming the basis for the Pentarchy proposed by Justinian I. Of these five, one was in the West (Rome) and the rest in the East (ConstantinopleJerusalemAntioch, and Alexandria).

Even after the split of the Roman Empire the Church remained a relatively united institution (apart from Oriental Orthodoxy and some other groups which separated from the rest of the Church earlier). The Church came to be a central and defining institution of the Empire, especially in the East or Byzantine Empire, where Constantinople came to be seen as the center of the Christian world, owing in great part to its economic and political power.

Once the Western Empire fell to Germanic incursions in the 5th century, the (Roman) Church became for centuries the primary link to Roman civilization for medieval Western Europe and an important channel of influence in the West for the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, emperors. While, in the West, the so-called orthodox Church competed against the Arian Christian and pagan faiths of the Germanic rulers and spread outside what had been the Empire to Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and the western Slavs, in the East Christianity spread to the Slavs in what is now Russia, south-central and eastern Europe.  The reign of Charlemagne in Western Europe is particularly noted for bringing the last major Western Arian tribes into communion with Rome, in part through conquest and forced conversion.

Starting in the 7th century the Islamic Caliphates rose and gradually began to conquer larger and larger areas of the Christian world. Excepting North Africa and most of Spain, northern and western Europe escaped largely unscathed by Islamic expansion, in great part because richer Constantinople and its empire acted as a magnet for the onslaught. The challenge presented by the Muslims would help to solidify the religious identity of eastern Christians even as it gradually weakened the Eastern Empire. Even in the Muslim World, the Church survived (e.g., the modern CoptsMaronites, and others) albeit at times with great difficulty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Church

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