the origins of Christianity

Christianity was born at a precise time in the history of the Mediterranean world and the Near East, Antiquity, in a country, Judea, which was then part of the Roman Empire; with roots in Jewish faith and culture, it then developed rapidly in the Greco-Roman culture.

Christianity arose from the preaching of the Jew Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God incarnate, died and risen for the salvation of men. The Christian faith is founded on the testimony of the first disciples who recognized Jesus as the Messiah or Christ (hence the name Christians) announced by the prophets. These proclaimed that God had resurrected the one who had been put to death at the hands of men. They touched his body - the foundation of Christian belief in the resurrection of the body -, and as this later disappeared from their eyes, God had sent the Holy Spirit to give them the strength to announce that Good News (Gospel) "To the ends of the earth", just as he prescribed the mission entrusted to them by Jesus.

In Palestine they formed among Jews and non-Jews (the gentili) small community of believers, which then spread to the eastern part of the Roman Empire and to Rome, and later in its western part, but also in external regions - Mesopotamia and perhaps India in the apostolic age, Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia - e, in the 4th and 5th centuries, among the barbarian peoples: Visigoth, ostrogoti, vandals.

The Christians of the first centuries lived and practiced their faith in the real conditions of the world of their time. The Good News of Jesus Christ and the other texts that make up the New Testament were put in writing in Greek, although in some cases Aramaic was used simultaneously, Hebrew and Syriac. the Bible (Old and New Testament - the former already had a Greek version, that of the Seventy) it was translated into various languages: latino, Gothic, syrian, Coptic, Armenian, slavone. The first articles of faith were also conceptualized and formulated in Greek. The Christians of antiquity made use of ways of Jewish thought, of philosophical categories of Greek thought, of discursive techniques of Greek and Latin rhetoric, in order to articulate a theology that has been perfected over time. Those who did - bishops gathered in councils, apologists, Fathers of the Church - were moved by the certainty of expressing themselves under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Communities organized and structured themselves, united by a bond of communion. If spiritually the Church defines itself as the mystical body of Christ which is its head and of which all the baptized are members, in reality the Church has been constituting itself starting from the local Churches united by a common patrimony of fundamental beliefs and rites (baptism and eucharist). With the help of the concepts of heresy and orthodoxy, processed a little at a time, and is constituted a doctrine that, marginalizing some currents, led to the construction of the "Great Church".

Initially persecuted by the Jewish authorities, the Christians, once identified as such, they were also by the Roman authorities, who punished their refusal to worship the gods common to all. While subjected to the state and to power, for which they had to pray, Christians were distinguished by their faith and attachment to values ​​and customs that gave them a way of living with their contemporaries, «In the world but not [being] of the world". For this reason, they were subject to popular hostility and the contempt of the educated. To that and to these the Christian intellectuals replied, while in times of persecution men and women testified to their faith and claimed their faith in Christ until death; these martyrs they became models to be worshiped, but the priests were willing to rededicate, after adequate penance, those who had succumbed and collapsed. Stop the persecutions, asceticism replaced martyrdom as a means to achieve holiness through identification with Christ.

The recognition of religious freedom in the face of the failure of persecutions, the personal adhesion of the emperor Costantino to the Christian faith (from 312) and then that of his successors, except for Julian the Apostate, they created entirely new conditions. By now the emperor granted Christians such favors as to allow a certain Christianization of space and time. He also intervened in Church affairs, even in the definition of faith, something that during the fourth century was a source of conflicts. Little by little, he repressed traditional cults, until they were banned at the end of the 4th century, making Christianity the state religion. It was an evolution supported by a Christian theology of political power and history. Christians had to imagine the Christian ruler and his place in the Church, but also the role of the Roman Empire in God's providential plan, to then understand, when Rome was threatened, that the fate of the Church was not tied to any state, however Christian he was.

Bibliographic sources

History of Christianity curated by A. Corbin

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