Month: October 2026

The first great doctrinal war of the imperial church began as a quarrel among the clergy of Alexandria. It was taken up by an emperor who called it a trifle, and it was settled, in the short term, by a…

Between the battle at the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 and his death in May 337, Constantine moved Christianity from a persecuted minority cult to the patronised religion of the emperor. The sources for this change are uneven. The…

While magistrates questioned Christians and mobs attacked them, a small number of educated converts took the faith’s case to the empire in writing. In the second and third centuries the “apologists” and the first great Fathers argued that Christianity was…

Between the fire of Rome in 64 and the Edict of Serdica in 311, the Roman state and the Christian communities went through cycles of indifference, local violence, legal procedure and, at three points, empire-wide coercion. How this history is…

The New Testament did not arrive as a finished book. For roughly three centuries after Jesus’ death, Christian communities read, copied, revised and argued over a large and growing body of writings: the four gospels that later became canonical, sayings…

If the Jerusalem community of James was a messianic sect inside Judaism, Paul of Tarsus is the figure most often credited, or blamed, with turning it into a universal religion. He was a zealous Pharisee who persecuted the new sect,…

The first followers of Jesus after his death did not see themselves as founders of a new religion. They formed a group in Jerusalem that kept the Temple, the Torah and the hope of Israel’s restoration. Peter led it at…

No figure in the religious history of the West has been studied as intensely as Jesus of Nazareth, and no figure has given rise to so many incompatible portraits. The library holds the whole range of them. At one end…

Part 5 has followed the Greco-Roman world through its civic cults, mysteries, philosophical schools and gnostic sects. This last chapter of the part deals with paganism’s final synthesis and how it ended. Neoplatonism, begun by Plotinus, became the intellectual core…

For about sixteen centuries the Gnostics were known mainly through the books written to refute them. That changed in December 1945, when a find in Upper Egypt returned their own texts. This chapter reconstructs the main Gnostic movements of the…