The spread of Christianity: History Summarized

By Karl Dean Alegre

Introduction
If you live in the northern hemisphere in the month of December and have stepped outside,
you will notice that it is colder than some parts of space. That’s because it’s winter. Hopefully
this isn’t news to you, because if it is, you need to stop reading this immediately and brush up
on your first year science textbook as fast as you possibly can.

Assuming we are all on the same page and know how seasons work, you are probably enjoying
the holiday season, and if you are a westerner, odds are the biggest one for you is Christmas.
You’ve probably decorated your tree, hung up lights and wrapped up enough presents to
furnish a Viking funeral or maybe watched that one movie they show on TV on an endless loop.
The thing is, you probably already know that none of these are original Christmas traditions
way back in the day and if we’re really trying to go for authenticity here we shouldn’t be doing
any of this at winter at all. But, you know what, to just explain what Christianity is and how it
got to where it is now, I think we need to back up and start from the beginning. Yes, THAT
beginning.

The Gospel of John starts with “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and
the word was God.” Now, what’s all this about the “word”? What does that even mean? While
we’re at it, how is the word with God and also God? Why do the other three gospels start
completely differently? Also, where does Jesus come into all of this? And wasn’t he Jewish? My
point is that certainly a lot of questions that come up here and Christianity is rife with all this
kinds of historical and theological intrigue. Despite how widespread it is all over the world, it
seems like the history of Christianity is universally glossed over or mythologized. But the fact of
the matter is, there is solid and well documented history here and it would do us a world of
good to be educated on it. We won’t discuss Jesus’ life because you all know the highlights
already. Instead we’ll discuss how the development of Christian Doctrine is heavily influenced
by its political, historical, and philosophical context.

The Origins of Christianity:

We start at the 1st century AD. The time period contained in the growth of early Christianity is a
fascinating time historically. As the newly formed Roman Empire was having a grand old time
expanding into the Levant. The relationship between Romans and the history of Judaism are
easily their own articles, but for the time being it’s suffice to say that they really, really, didn’t
go along very well. It can be said, however, that Roman religion was defined by inclusivity.
Shocker, right? Well the Romans believed that they have to do what they could to secure
what’s called the Pax Deorum or the Good will of the gods. And they were totally cool with
whatever they needed to do to get it. That is why their pantheon is full of gods and every time
they conquered some new territory, the top of their to do list is to either find a way to
incorporate the gods of those territories into their pantheon as is, or combining them with an
existing roman god. For example, when Rome conquered Gaul they merged the goddess
Minerva with the Celtic goddess Sulis to form Sulis Minerva.
Acquiring this Pax Deorum is absolutely essential to the welfare of Rome, so religious life went
hand in hand with politics. It was similar to the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven. If
the emperors lost the divine double thumbs up, then the empire would crumble, and nobody
wanted that. Well nobody Roman, that is. It’s not that the church and state weren’t separated,
except the church was the state.

Now, baby Christianity was very much the opposite, in that instead of trying to blend in to the
Roman Pantheon and the politics thereof, Christianity insisted that it remain separate, distinct,
and unique. To put it simply, the premise of holding on to their unified identity above all else is
single-handedly the reason for Christianity’s staggering success as well as the reason for nearly
all of the problems it would have throughout history, and even today.

Now Rome was no slouch when it came to religious toleration, believe it or not. Most Romans
partook in what we can call “Mystery Religions”: groups that met to practice quasi-secret rites
in order to worship particular gods, and there were tons of them. Think of any pagan god. There
was probably a mystery cult specifically for them. And Rome eventually was more or less on
board with it, because the Romans knew that no matter what a citizen did or which god a
citizen worships the most in private, when it came to them as a collective of citizens, they were
always on board with the full Roman Pantheon or right there helping Rome keep its precious
Pax Deorum.

Here’s the trick: Christianity’s desire to be kept separate and do their own religious thing apart
from the Roman State helps explain why Christians were so fiercely persecuted. If Christians
didn’t conform to the Roman Religion or at least except it in addition to their own personal
devotion to Christ, Rome saw itself being robbed of Pax Deorum and as a result, doomed to fail.
Most of us today will agree that persecuting a religion or its people simply for their beliefs is
totally wrong, but if you look at it through Rome’s perspective it does make sense why they saw
Christianity as such a threat to their state. From their perspective, just by holding on to their
beliefs, Christianity was disrespecting the very gods that let Rome maintain its empire at all.

This led to a slew of persecutions throughout the next few centuries, but no matter how hard
Rome tried, Christianity didn’t stop. In fact it even made Christianity even stronger. It’s that
whole martyrdom thing at the core of their religion. Think of it as “if Jesus died for our sins, we
need to hold fast on our belief in him, despite how badly we’re being persecuted. He suffered
through it, and so can we.” There is certainly a multitude of things about Christianity that were
appealing, and the afterlife for sure on that list, but Christianity may have struck where other
religions failed: its emphasis on overcoming challenges through unity and the strength of faith
in the face of overwhelming persecution.

Christianity, Hellenism and Judaism

All of this was going on for a few hundred years. The New Testament is slowly getting codified
as Christianity was trying to figure out what it is. The main conflict was between the influences
of Judaism and Hellenism. Jesus was Jewish and so were most of his early followers. Christianity
was originally very much an offshoot of Judaism, and that’s no surprise since there were a
whole bunch of them running around at the time, like the guys who made the Dead Sea
Scrolls. It’s the reason why the Hebrew Bible ended up being the Old Testament. Christianity
was, at least way back then, fundamentally Jewish and was building on a solid framework of
Jewish beliefs.

The problem was that there was also a heavy push to be more Greek. If you look at the places
Paul sends his letters about how great Jesus was, you’ll notice that half of them are Greek
places. Of course, Greek was the common language of the eastern half of the Mediterranean
world, thanks to our old friend Alexander the Great, but’s that’s another story entirely. To solve
this vexing problem about where to go and what to do, the early church took the bold stance of
por que no los dos (why don’t we have both) and made itself both Greek and Jewish. That’s
probably one reason why the final codified version of the New Testament has four Gospels,
each written as to appeal to a somewhat different group of people. The Gospels are almost a
“choose your own adventure” of religious teaching:
Matthew spoke to the Jews by relating everything back to Hebrew scripture showing how Jesus
fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy and laws; Mark spoke to the Romans by emphasizing
Jesus’ action as a leader to appeal to their whole imperialistic thing; Luke spoke to the Greeks
by playing to their culture’s desire to live a happy and erudite life; and the Gospel of John from
earlier speaks to all audiences but takes a hard right turn into serious Platonic philosophy to
show how Jesus was the Divine Reason itself incarnate.

In fact, in Christianity’s first 500 years, the vast majority of theology we see is profoundly
influenced by Greek philosophy, specifically Plato, and the importance he plays on the word,
otherwise, speech, or Logos in the Greek Reason. According to John, Jesus is the physical
manifestation of this Divine Reason.

Trinitarian or Unitary
But to get back to one of the questions in the beginning, how was the word both God and with
God? That’s where the second big conflict begins. Is the Church going to be Trinitarian or not?
That is, Are God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, the same thing, or is Jesus just a prophet sent by a
God who was not actually his father? Here we see another geographical split. While the fight
towards leaning Jewish or Greek was more or less East vs. West, this Trinitarian split was more
North vs. South. It’s all because of an early theologian by the name of Arius, whose advocacy of
Non Trinitarian theology inspired the Gothic Christian Missionary named Ulfilas to spread non
Trinitarian Christianity around the Germanic Tribes. Most of Southern Europe remained firmly
Trinitarian. Non Trinitarian Christianity, however, was a homerun in the north, brushing over a
number of historical hiccups for the sake of brevity; a decent number of people were converted
from both paganism and Non-Trinitarianism into Trinitarian Catholicism in a few centuries.
Speaking of which, side note: the word Catholic comes from the greek words meaning
universal. With that, let’s jump back in time back to Rome.

The State Religion

While these philosophical debates were going on, Christianity was gaining ground in the Roman
Empire. The first big example of this was Constantine, who was born a pagan, but raised by a
Christian mother. Now Constantine wasn’t born as the heir to the Roman Empire, he had to
earn that title by fighting in one of Rome’s very peculiar 4-way civil wars which happened every
now and again throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries. The night before with the ruler of one such
4th of the empire which contained Italy and Africa, Constantine had a dream in which he was
instructed to paint the Christian “chi-rho” symbol (the first 2 greek letters of Christ) on to his
army’s shields. So he did and they won, and in 313 AD he delivered the Edict of Milan, which
legalized Christianity within the empire.

At this point, Paganism was still in charge, but Constantine effectively said that Christianity can
contribute to securing Pax Deorum too. And this makes sense. From Constantine’s point of
view, Christianity certainly did deliver Pax Deorum by helping him win his battle and unite the
empire. The important distinction to note here is that this decree only indicated Rome’s
tolerance for Christianity. It didn’t become the official state religion until the Emperor
Theodosius made it so in 380 AD. From this point on, my historical command becomes foggier
as events don’t happen as fast as they did, so the rest of this article will be in the form of a
vignette style.

Since Christianity is now the official religion of the empire, it needed a new Roman Makeover so
it would fit. This is the part where Christmas probably gets co-opted to one of at least 2 pre-
existing Roman festivals. The evidence isn’t all there, but the season and thematic
correspondences are hard to miss. Since historians actually have no original evidence at all that
Jesus was born on December 25th or any date for that matter, the Saturnalia and Sol Invictus
festivals are our best bets for which got looped in. Our friend Theodosius made the brilliant
decision to split up the empire between his two sons, which have only been the cause of, I
don’t know, 5 civil wars in the past century alone. It’s not been a winning strategy so far by any
stretch, but since it didn’t immediately blow up in everyone’s face, I’m giving him the benefit of
the doubt on this one.

The Church Splits

While the empire was being irrevocably cleaved between east and west, the church has slowly
but surely drifting farther apart along those same lines for centuries. There is really no proper
way to simplify this, but I also don’t want to get on too much of a tangent here. Suffice to say
that any ideology will tend to conform to the culture it inhabits with time. In the case of
Christianity, the Roman west ended up taking it in a different direction than the predominantly
Greek east. Differences ultimately involved issues like how monks should cut their hair, how to
calculate when Easter should be celebrated, and the more complex question of Jesus’ nature:
was it all divine, or both human and divine, that is was it in Jesus’ very nature to be able to sin.

On one side, the Monophosites – Greek for “one nature” – they said no, only divine, it was
impossible for Jesus to sin. The other side said that Jesus’ nature was both human and divine,
so he could sin, but didn’t. Debates like this were all the rage in the 1 st millennium of
Christianity and most of them ended up with one brand of Christianity being deemed
unorthodox. Which means they were anathematized, expelled from the church and in effect,
condemned to burn in the eternal fires of Hell. This reminds me of elementary school.

And remember, this is all just for having a different point of view than the central church did.
The church took maintaining a uniform orthodoxy very seriously. But I mean “hey, whatever
floats your ark, eh?”

The spoke between eastern and western churches grew and grew and grew until they were so
separate that both sides stopped responding to each other’s messages entirely. This mutually
assured silent treatment is known as the Great Schism of 1054 AD, the point where the Roman
Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches split up for good. You know the old saying, if you can’t
beat them, pretend they don’t exist. When this split happened, a young boy named Odo was 12
years old. Fast forward 14 years and our boy Odo is now Pope Urban II. Three years into his
papacy, he saw a golden opportunity to end this recently formed schism.

The Byzantine Empire – the wet rotting corpse of the Eastern Roman Empire – had recently lost
a major battle along with a sizable portion of Anatolia. It’s important to note here that the
church in the west formed what’s called the Papal States in central Italy in 754 which was really
just a formal recognition of the political power the pope had enjoyed in the region for over a
century already. What this means is that just like our old Roman government that saw church
and state as one entity, the Papacy in the 7th Century had become as much a political position
as it was a religious one. The pope was running the civic business at Rome for some time at this
point in history and it also has picked up a nice swath of territory. I really think it’s neat to see
the Catholic church emulating Rome in this way. But I digress.

Pope Urban II saw a brilliant opportunity to help out the Byzantines get their land back for them
in the hope that the Byzantines would recognize the benefits of sticking with the Papacy and
Catholicism and all that business of splitting up was just a phase. Basically, Urban wanted to do
the Byzantines a solid favor and have the Orthodox Church repay it by running back into the
Pope’s loving arms. This favor lasted for a few hundred years and we today call it the Crusades.

And another split: Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation

You may recall that Dante’s Inferno devotes several passages solely bemoaning the state of the
church (for those keeping score, that’s a handful of popes and one major city that Dante’s
blaming for the sorry state of the church). Well, tellingly, another 200 years later, we have the
Borgias, the holiest of all holy families. Given that that little tangle of a family can be considered
devout, it’s no surprise that at this point enough people are bothered by not just the church’s
debauchery, but the heavy politicking to do something drastic. Queue Martin Luther.

Our pal Martin’s main objection to the church was the common practice of selling indulgences.
Indulgences are basically a get out of hell card. The idea is that if you sinned, you can pay the
church to cut down the amount of time your soul has to spend on purgatory before ascending
to heaven. Essentially, give the church money and your sins won’t count. Martin Luther thought
that this and a bunch of other stuff was way wrong, but after he got no traction inside the
church, he set about creating his own offshoot branch of Christianity that abstained from
priestly hierarchies entirely and believed that everyone should read the Bible.

Since a lot in Europe were thinking exactly the same thing as Martin Luther was, and since the
invention of the Guttenberg Press made large scale communication a breeze, Protest-antism or
Protestantism as it was called, spread rapidly in northern Europe. Soon enough you had entire
communities, towns and cities rejecting hierarchies and basking in their ability to read the bible
and come to their own conclusions. This was all well and good, until there were so many people
coming up with their own interpretations that each person believed was totally right and that
everyone else, especially Catholics, were obviously dead wrong. That’s how you get fighting. A
lot of fighting.

Eventually smaller revolts here and there gave way to entire nations breaking away from the
Pope going on to do their own thing. That means, now proper armies are killing each other over
religion. Whoa! Hold on there! Aren’t we all here because we all love Jesus? No? You mean we
have to make sure that our super niche version of following, praising and worshiping the same
Diety as you is the right one? And to prove it we will literally kill you? Or just kill you because
we have political beef with you and see if this is a good enough time as any to take out our
otherwise secular aggressions? Seems legit. Folks we have the 30 Years War.

In all seriousness, the absurd scene I presented above is the byproduct of the very thing that let
Christianity become so powerful and widespread in the first place: The determination to hold to
one’s own beliefs in the face of persecution and any external force that seeks to invalidate it.
It’s an admirable concept and probably the reason it survived its early history, but like anything
ruder than stubbornness, it leads to tension. The 30 Years war was functionally a Christian Civil
War that broke out because all sides were dead set on their own interpretation. What you got
was a collision between multiple immovable objects and the end result was a lot of collateral
damage.

It is also interesting to note that Christianity didn’t inherit this trait from Judaism. You see, an
intrinsic part of the Jewish belief system is that the Torah was meant to be debated over. It was
almost its own form of worship for Rabbis to just convene and argue for hours at a time over
the meaning of these texts. I will go over more details on this if and when I do decide to write
an article about this, but basically it was an accepted and fundamental part of culture to
present individual interpretations of sacred texts and debate their merits with the
understanding that there was unlikely to be one right answer.

Now to be fair, what Christianity did have was a system of Ecumenical Councils, councils where
bishops could gather to debate on matters of doctrine. However, at the end of each council, the
bishops would vote on which side would be adopted as the official belief, so the proud tradition
of debate lives on, sort of, because at the end of the day, Christianity is still pretty solidly rooted
on the idea that there is only one interpretation of the texts, even if that one interpretation
takes some discussion to get to. That said, the verdicts of the councils get overturned now and
then, but it is tradition at ecumenical councils nevertheless institutionalized the pursuit of one
doctrine. This is another iffy consequence of that same strength of belief that carried
Christianity through centuries of conflict, albeit sometimes self-induced.

It’s the trade-off between strength and flexibility, and Christianity is nothing if not strong.
Fortunately though, when you do get big huge multinational wars propping up over the issue,
eventually everyone gets it out of their system. By the turn of the 18 th century, there was a
huge outpouring of religious toleration from governments and between people, because,
everyone just got kinda tired of killing each other over this. Pretty much everyone walked away
from the 30 Years War with the conclusion that “yeah, that was pretty terrible! I’m just gonna
let those guys do their thing, and I’m going to do my own thing in my own church. Good Deal?
Good Deal, now get off my lawn!”

It’s thanks to the fact that everyone calmed down and got on that whole diversity of thought
bandwagon that we ever got the Enlightenment in the following century at all, which is almost
universally thought of as a very good thing. People just stopped caring about everyone else’s
religion and the public discourse and popular culture turned toward matters of politics,
economics, sociology, science, and philosophy. This is why the Enlightenment was the
intellectual powerhouse that it was. It was because of all of this that the world returned to the
good old days, when wars were fought for sensible reasons like politics, territorial disputes, and
centuries old grudges between countries that should probably just make up and kiss already (I
have my eye on you Denmark and Sweden).

Conclusion
To recap our trip down history, Christianity survived the harshest possible circumstances under
Roman persecution, tailored their beliefs toward multiple cultural demographics, reconciled
one doctrinal dispute but split the church over another, and capped it off with one big Civil War
of sorts. After which, everyone got along and lived happily ever after, or maybe I just stopped
caring after 1800, but who’s keeping track?

Christianity had a hard time figuring itself out for one key reason: you never see religions with
belief systems as disparate as say Judaism and Buddhism arguing with each other because
there’s so little overlap between the two to argue about in the first place. It’s compare and
contrast instead of I’m right, you’re wrong. With 2 competing sects of one religion though,
there are specific things to disagree on and you get a much more pointed argument as we saw
with Christianity. And as we touched on in Judaism, it’s much less of a right-wrong binary there
but that’s for its own reason. I’d like to think of it as an uncanny valley of religion. It looks
similar to ours, it acts similar to ours, but it’s not. It’s somehow wrong. And we like to fix those
tiny things so they can be right like us and we can be happy together. But they want to do the
same thing to us because to them, we’re in the uncanny valley and we need to be fixed.

This is the fundamental unfortunate side effect of one of Christianity’s greatest strength. For all
the good it’s done, and please don’t think I am underselling the importance of the orphanages,
schools and hospitals and medical missions Christianity has constantly been a huge proponent
of for centuries, heck I even work for one. I think if we start from the platform that we all have
a lot to learn from each other, we can do way more good that if we just we assume we already
know everything about everything. No one is completely right. Sometimes, the only option is to
agree to disagree on certain things and respect the other person’s opinion. It’s not going to
make everyone happy because being disagreed with feels kinda…. Ugh! But being happy all the
time is less important than being good to people. Wasn’t Jesus’ big lesson all about occasionally
turning the other cheek? Love thy neighbor? It’s all right there in the Gospels people, come on!

Christianity has done a lot of amazing things for civilization in the past 2,000 years, but to
understand why, and to make the most out of it, we need to learn how it succeeded and where
it failed if we’re to make progress now.