The Gospels and Early Christian Timeline

all right so last week we talked about Jesus of Nazareth the man who despite living only a very short life about a year and a half or so of his ministry and then meeting an untimely death nevertheless spawned inspired the most influential religion of Western civilization and arguably of global history Jesus is obviously the founder of Christianity but in there's also another founder we're gonna have talked about tonight as well and that is st. Paul before we get to st. Paul's contribution to this though I want to give you a little timeline of the first few centuries of the Common Era so that when we talk about different books you'll know where they fit in and their relationships and stuff historians just like timelines that's all so it's a very long timeline our timeline will begin with the birth of Jesus and it's gonna end somewhere here in the fourth century the legalization of Christianity let's put some dates on this what year was Jesus born run zero or something okay so that's the first thing we had talked about is how we actually measure time all ancient civilizations at different means a measuring time usually from the some great founding event or from the reign of some king something like that the Romans who were the rulers of the Western world at the time he was born had their own system they don't know anything about Jesus of course they began their calendar in what we would call 753 BC for them this is the year 1 au C if I take Latin and learn what au c stands for it's Latin for AB urbe condita urbe condita from the founding of the city this was the year what they believed the city of Rome had been founded so they counted from those years anybody know where the Greeks began their calendars from we would call it 776 BC for them this is the year of the first Olympiad this was their founding moment when they managed to become civilized enough that every four years they could set aside their differences for a couple of months and compete athletically in a non-lethal way for glory and fame so memorable founding events like this are how you create a calendar now for the Christian world that follows it's not going to occur to anybody until about the fifth century BC so we're way down here at the end of our timeline I'm sorry fifth century AD to come up with a different means of measuring time by the fifth century Rome is in steady decline the Christian world is starting to more and more take over and our calendar is at first created by a little monk named Dionysius exiguous which means dying easy is the little dude this is a little monk and he is working on a calendar for something that the Catholic world will call the moveable feast anybody know what the moveable feast is Easter because what date is Easter on it's on a different Sun it's on a different date exactly it moves through the calendar it's always on a Sunday but it moves through the calendar so Easter is always tricky nowadays Christmas might be the big Christian holiday for you but Easter was the big holiday in the early centuries of Christianity and it's very important that you celebrated Easter on the proper day so there is a very complex means of figuring out what the appropriate Sunday for Easter is using these lunar tables that the Catholic Church still uses today goes back to something called the metonic cycle Wheaton was an ancient Greek astronomer whose group one great discovery was that 235 months almost exactly equals 19 years so in the broad scale that's a way of correlating lunar and solar calendars together and the church still uses a version of this to figure it out in case what they typically did because it might take like over a year to go from Rome to the far end of the Christian world you can't just do this once a year you need to do it for decades or so in advance and set up your calendars so that you'll know for the next 19 years essentially when Easter is going to be celebrated then you can send that out and you've got time to get it to everybody before you need to do it again so in the 5th century our little monk is figured out his Easter tables he's got the dates for Easter figured out for the next couple of decades and just as he's about to slap on some Roman dates as to what year goes to which day it occurred to him why are we still counting time from the birth of the city of Rome that's not the most important event in human history where the Jesus is the most important event we ought to count from that and so he's the first one to innovate this idea of measuring time from the birth of Jesus it's going to be a few centuries later when monks in the early Middle Ages begin using it for histories that they write and as we get to later in the course we'll find that the venerable an anglo-saxon monk who lived in the early 8th century will be the one to use it in a work that became very popular and started getting people in the habit of counting the years in this way so it's gonna be many centuries after the time of Jesus before this actually happens nowadays we're used to using this table so he's got to figure out when Jesus was born he lives five centuries after the fact record-keeping being what it wasn't in the ancient world he was probably off by a few years so was he born in the Year Zero well he couldn't have been born in the year zero because the concept of zero has not been invented yet when you learned Roman numerals in grade school there was no way to write a zero was there zero will be invented by Hindu mathematicians in the Middle Ages it'll be picked up by Arabs who will then bring it to Spain and we will acquire it from them along with the digits that we still use for our numbers today that's why we call them Arabic numerals because we learn them from the Arabs so there's no such thing as the year zero the way we count time now the years count down backwards till you get to one BC and then the next year is one AD as for those terms BC and AD I'm sure you know what those mean BC before Christ and AD no not after death I don't know why they teach that to kids people always say that no ad is for the Latin phrase anno domini which means in the year of our Lord I don't know why that's such a common confusion because we don't count from his death we count from his birth right that's not after his death in any case these are both very Christian Laden terms measuring everything from before or after the time of Christ and since Western social systems have become so common used throughout the world and other parts of the world might be Buddhist or Muslim or something else we nowadays in the modern world use a more religiously neutral pair of terms we call it BCE and Cee Cee stands for the Common Era than being the thing that we all generally use it just takes the Christian language out of it BCE is before the Common Era the numbers don't change if you were born in 1985 ad now you're born in 1985 see alright Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC now he was assassinated in 44 BCE so you don't have to remember any kind of numbers or anything these are just the modern sort of politically correct terms to use I'm being I'm sort of old school I usually just habitually still say that but in modern history boats you'll find the change any case record-keeping being what it wasn't back then he was off by a few years and scholars are divided over whether the few clues that we have pinned his birth at two BC for BC or possibly 7 BC with most scholars thinking 4 BC has got to be the the closest we can pin it down to so he's warned about 4 BC ironically enough Jesus Christ was born four years before credit we got thank you for coughing over my punchline ok now according to tradition how long did Jesus live 33 years according to tradition so adding from- for skipping 0 up to 33 years later what do we get to about 29 or 30 ad or C so this is the life of Jesus now when Jesus died what were all the Apostles doing were they all excited that yes now the new religion begins they went into hiding they were terrified they were looking for the back door out of town they thought it was all over but something happened that turned them around one of the great mysteries of Christian history is what was it that triggered this this change they went from being terrified and running too excited about founding a new religion their story was that Jesus was resurrected from the grave appeared to them talk to them that he had conquered death something got him excited anyway and with the resurrection appearances the religion of Christianity is born during his actual physical lifetime on earth Jesus of Nazareth was understood by his audience as a Jewish prophet he was somebody that was a wisdom teacher that was a miracle healer there were lots of those people in the ancient world his ministry was about helping you understand the true meaning of the laws of Moses which is what he talks about in all of his sermons but afterwards it's going to become something new for the next 20 years we don't actually have any written documents from the early church the Apostles did not think that they would be around for a whole lot longer you have to remember that the early church lived in the expectation of the end of days coming very soon they had an apocalyptic fervor Jesus said in his sermons that some of you will be here when the day of judgement comes some of you will still be alive so if you're a little kid in the audience you live 60 years 70 years or so basically a couple of generations tops and then it was all gonna int the kingdom of God would be established so that's why they didn't really bother getting organized as a religion from the get-go they didn't bother writing down and making official text they didn't set up an ecclesiastical structure or get matching uniforms for everybody or anything like that they went out and kind of an excited frenzy pairs are alone too spreading the good news of Jesus repeating the parables that he told repeating telling his story and expecting that they've got you know a few decades or so to gather as many people as they can and then that's going to be the end so for the next couple of decades everything turns back into being in oral tradition unlike in the Hebrew Bible where we have centuries and centuries a millennium or so of oral tradition that then gets codified we only have a couple of decades that pass between the death of Jesus and when they start writing stuff down so there's a lot less time for variation to happen well just why the Gospels are are pretty similar to each other the the historically based ones anyway about 50 ad we start to get the earliest Christian writings most people when they look at their New Testament there's 27 books in there what's the first book Matthew is the first book of your New Testament so most people assume that Matthew would be the oldest book in fact Matthew is not the oldest gospel and all of the Gospels are in fact not the oldest Christian writings despite the order that they come in in your New Testament the oldest writings are actually the letters of Paul the Latin word for letters is epistle so these are the epistles of Paul or sometimes called the Epis taluk literature yes when he talks about the church he doesn't mean a really well organized structure his word if he's writing in Latin would be ecclesia which means are calling out a gathering so the early church are just simply places where gatherings of Christians are happening gatherings and people that have responded to the message of Jesus there is no official church structure for the most part they just meet in people's homes okay saying then they're kind of underground meetings as well these are the the downtrodden members of society for the most part so that's who he's addressing the letters of Paul run from about 50 to about 64 and then they stopped because about that time is when we get the first persecution of Christians under the emperor Nero why he does so we'll talk about later but Paul along with st. Peter were caught up in this persecution they were jailed and that's they're gonna be executed soon and so that's gonna be the end of pulse time of writing it is just after this time that the Gospels begin to appear and again typically we would assume that Matthew is the first one but in fact modern scholars are pretty much agreement that the first gospel written down was the Gospel of Mark and Mark's Gospel is written between 66 and 70 AD a little C in front of a date is for the Latin weird word cerca meaning as in the word circle meaning around the state okay and that's a pretty tight little bracket and specific dates to put it in the others are not so carefully defined the reason is is that we have a couple events mentioned in there that help us narrow it down and we know for example that mark makes a reference to the troubles going on in Jerusalem and that means that the Jewish wars have begun you remember before we left off with the zealots who are wanting to have a violent uprising well they finally get their uprising in 66 AD and in this four-year period we have something that are called the Jewish Wars and the Romans utterly crushed them Jerusalem is destroyed the Jews are taken into slavery or killed the Temple of Solomon is burned down for the second time Babylonians did the first time it's burned down again and it's still mostly burned down there's one wall of it left called the Wailing Wall today but the Jews are still waiting to rebuild the Temple of Solomon the problem of course is what's sitting on that site right now I know no MEC is a different city but you're on the right track because with sitting there now is the Dome of the rock which is the third holiest mosque in all of Islam so they're not going to be wanting to move their mosque anytime soon I'm pretty sure so that's the problem people have been fighting over that tiny little piece of territory for thousands of years now and the fight still goes on as you all know from the news well I don't think they would want to compare the third holiest mosque to a skating rink well one argument is that the more ancient it is the more important it is from the Muslim point of view Muhammad was the last of the prophets who got the final most clear declaration from God of what he wants us to do and so he basically supersedes all the previous ones you can look at it either way in any case the people that have the power make the decisions so basically it comes down to that okay so anyway mark we know because he mentions the troubles in Jerusalem must be writing after 66 but he also refers to the temple as if it's still standing and in 70 AD is when the Romans destroyed the Temple of Solomon they took its treasures out of there if you're ever in Rome when you go see the Colosseum turn around and you're gonna see a triumphal arch the arch of Titus and one of the things depicted there are the Roman soldiers sacking the city of Jerusalem carrying one of those Jewish menorahs out of the temple Titus was the son of the Emperor at the time and he was the general in charge of the of the suppression of what they considered the Jewish rebels against the state so this was a glorious victory for the Romans this is the beginning of a very sad period for the Jews because the Jews lose their homeland at this time and this is the beginning of what we call the Jewish Diaspora meaning a diaspora is a scattering of people out of their traditional homeland so they lose their nation in 70 AD but I know when they got it back right after World War two exact and I think 1948 is the official year that modern Israel is reconstituted in the aftermath of World War two in the Holocaust so all through medieval history and most of European history the Jews were a wandering people they lived in other people's nations other people's countries in the Jewish quarters of Christian cities etc Sartre in 66 and is mostly wrapped up in 70 when they destroyed the temple in the city although there are a few holdouts you might have heard of the last group of these Jewish rebels that holed up in a mountaintop fortress for several years against a besieging Roman army but he know where that final stand was held it's at a place called Masada occasion you see something on History Channel about Masada they still excavate there you can still see the ruins of the Roman ramp that they built to take their siege towers up Masada was a palace built by King Herod in a very fortified palace there in such a good position that it took a long time for Roman engineers to lay the groundwork to finally take the city the night before they took it the Jews realized they were all gonna be either slaughtered or tortured or you know dragged through you know triumphal parades and crucified afterwards so the night before they all committed suicide and deprived the Romans of their glorious victory suicide is not something you're supposed to do as a good Jew but in dire circumstances it's forgiven and according to Josephus our story and who tells us about it later the essential it to ten people to slit the throats of everybody else then one of them slit the other nine throats that way only one person actually had to commit suicide important concern inspected okay so mark is actually the oldest gospel following very quickly thereafter we'll have the Gospel of Matthew written between maybe roughly seventy and eighty or so ad a little bit fuzzier timelines here soon after the Gospel of Luke written between about seventy five and maybe eighty five ad and then the last one is the Gospel of John which is written right around the Year ninety-three ad during the second persecution of Christians revelations is also written at about this time and the other books of the Bible are composed also in the latter part of the first century so all of the books that will end up as part of the New Testament are mostly probably written by the year 100 AD but they do not have a New Testament put together yet and this is a very important consideration when you're studying the history of the first centuries of Christianity there is no central organized church there is no Pope there is no Bible for Christians there's no recognized central authority to make decisions on these matters the nature of the thing is that we have these scattered groups of Christians and it spreads very quickly throughout Rome in every city of Rome within 50 years the death of Jesus seems to have a small group of people that have gathered around this message and spread quickly but the numbers were very small and they basically reached out to those that were on the bottom rungs of society and so they met in small groups and they stayed small and they might have this or that writing it might have only been a couple of them in their group of 40 or 50 people that even knew how to read and write but the couple literate ones that would have been among them would simply have copies of whatever writings have come their way so one church might have the Matthew Gospel and this letter appalled another church might have the mark gospel and a different letter of Paul another Church you know might be reading the Shepherd of hermas and things you've never heard of before because when they did finally make the decision of what's gonna go in the New Testament they didn't make the final cut there are lots of early Christian writings that are created in the first say of Christianity but it's not going to be until the 4th century that we're going to have some decisions made over what's going to be official our timeline will speed up after this tonight this is the second century the 3rd century the 4th century in the 5th century Christianity becomes a legal religion for reasons we'll discuss later in 313 ad when Emperor Constantine changes course in roman policy and decides to legitimize to legalize and himself even embrace the Christian religion from that point on is there's going to be a rapid process of the religion becoming official and organized and worthy to be an imperial ii favored religion and one thing you got to do is decide what your writings are going to be so over the course of the 4th century they're going to be debating this and there's a very important council that happens in 325 in which they make a lot of these organizational decisions and begin to figure out what's going to end up in what we now call the new testament and we know for sure that they've decided what goes in there by 367 ad and the reason we know this is that we have a document an original document not a copy but an original in the hands of a bishop named Athanasius whose name you will hear again that is a table of contents it's not an actual Bible but it's a table of contents that has a list of the same 27 books that we still have in the New Testament today and in the same order that we still have them in today so we know that by this date they've made the de-facto decision this is the list that st. jerome uses when he makes his translation of the New Testament writings from their original coin a Greek into Latin and once he's made this official Latin translation that is now disseminated through all the churches it becomes the final decision at that point so the 4th century we call the Golden Age of Christianity and it is when it becomes official and legal and organized and they get matching uniforms for everybody and stuff like that the period between the death of Jesus and the legalization and organization of Christianity this roughly 300 year period is the period that we call primitive Christianity which is not in any way meant as a derogatory term primitive used by academics and historians means before there's an official codified teaching to organize things a similar phrase is used when you look at early Flemish art they're called the Flemish primitives and it means that they were painting under their own inspired methods before the rules of the Italian Renaissance got to them so that's what we mean what we have during the period of primitive Christianity are hundreds of these little scattered churches that are all basically inventing Christianity as they go along they're freewheeling this stuff they're innovating and making decisions on how we're going to worship what our rituals will be what we're gonna focus on and the teachings of Jesus what writings you know we happen to have in our collection and there is a huge variety of belief that can be rediscovered in the early churches of Christianity in the 4th century one of these schools of thought will ally itself with imperial power declare all the other schools of thought and interpretation arete achill and proclaim that they're the way that it things were always meant to be but these early Christian churches ought not to be dismissed so easily these are people that lived a lot closer to the time of Jesus than we do they were among the first generations of people to respond to this message and their innovations and their developments are fascinating documents of history of nothing else but also part of how Christianity evolved into what it became and as we'll see in a future lecture that a lot of the official decisions on what is going to be believed by Christians are written as reactions to other interpretations that they've decided to reject so other schools of thought about the nature of Jesus kind of push and shape in a negative way then finally what the final answer is going to be in outlawing these other groups they codify what in fact Christians will believe and that begins to go far beyond what's actually in any of these biblical texts okay so here are the four Gospels I want to look at right now incidentally anybody named the fifth book of the New Testament Bible trivia for 500 Acts of the Apostles Acts of the Apostles is actually written by one of our four Gospel writers for double or nothing which gospel writer wrote Acts of the Apostles Luke very good Stephen for the wind Luke and acts are the third and fifth book of the New Testament but they have the same author and it's obvious when you read the opening of them because they have the same dedication to the same person that they're being addressed to someone named Theophilus so essentially Luke and acts is a two-part gospel what we call Luke today is what Jesus did in his ministry Acts is about what the Apostles did after the crucifixion when they organized the New Testament in the fourth century they decided to separate these so that the first part of it which is more similar to the other Gospels and just being about Jesus will be with that collection but Luke and acts is really a two-part gospel you should know now as for who wrote these Gospels we don't really know for historical certainty who wrote any of them all the Gospels really are anonymous but certain traditions have attached certain names to them we've become familiar with using them so we still refer to them as the Gospel according to Matthew or the Gospel according to John and for our purposes it's not really going to concern us about these debates we don't have autographed copies of the originals with the writers names on them right that's what I mean well well those people we know were yes those people we know but you're not going to find in the Gospels references to these people it's it's a tradition that attaches the names to them but we don't have evidence we definitely know who Mary Magdalene was and who John the Baptist was but the names of the Gospel writers ultimately are anonymous they were probably people that knew Jesus and were followers of him and now in their old age are thinking how to write this down before it gets forgotten at the most they might be a disciple of someone who had known Jesus they seemed very close to the tradition of Jesus now there's also a fascinating relationship between these Gospels everything that is in the Gospel of Mark with the exception of two sentences and not even important sentences everything is found in either Matthew or Luke Matthew and Luke have other stuff in them but you could lose the Gospel of Mark and reconstruct it like mining its materials out of Matthew and Luke 99% of it so what does that tell you was sitting on Matthew and Luke's desk when they were writing their Gospels mark so the mark gospel and this is how we put them in this order the mark gospel seems to have been the first one written because Matthew and Luke are both drawing upon it and they both seem to have felt that you know this is a good idea we probably ought to write this down and this is a really good start but there's other stuff I remember Jesus saying that you've not included so they both seem to have felt the need to write a supplement it revised an expanded version of their memories of the Ministry of Jesus Mark's Gospel is the shortest it has no Nativity story at the beginning there's no childhood stories of Jesus and there are no resurrection appearances at the end Mark's Gospel ends with Mary and two women finding the empty tomb and running away because they were afraid and it stops there now if you have an old-fashioned Bible you might have some resurrection appearances they're actually taken from Matthew and put on me in there to make them look more consistent but in fact Mark's Gospel is simply a memory of the Ministry of Jesus and what he talked about and it's probably our most reliable direct memory so Matthew and Luke both derive from that but Matthew and Luke also had other things that they remembered Jesus saying so essentially what happens is that this oral tradition finds its way into a written version called mark but then other parts of this oral tradition that he had omitted find their way into Matthew and into Luke and we called this unique material special Matthew and special Luke now the really interesting thing is that Matthew and Luke also have material that is identical between them word for word verbatim but it's not in mark so how do we account for that well we believe that they were in different parts of the Empire they weren't working side by side and we don't think that one of them got ahold of the other one because they were written too close together but they have material that is word for word identical that didn't come out of mark so where to come from there's some other source some other perhaps lost gospel and this was discovered by a 19th century German biblical scholar who reconstructs that there must have been an early written source that has since been lost but was known to Matthew and Luke when they wrote but the original is now gone so it's another piece of this oral tradition so it's the lost source gospel the German word for source is Kella and this is where we get the idea of the gospel of Q the Q gospel which seems to have been also something that informed both Matthew and Luke we have no direct evidence of the Q gospel there is no physical tangible piece of this thing that is survived it is entirely a theoretical reconstruction based on the exact parallels between these two that had not been found in mark but it's likely that no other people had written stuff down and it's hard for things to survive for 2,000 years so so we have this now the first three Gospels mark Matthew and Luke are all fundamentally different than the Gospel of John mark Matthew and Luke we refer to as the synoptic Gospels if you look at the root words here sin and optic what is a synthesis or a synonym what is sy in mean means like means the same the synonym is a word that means the same thing and optic implies seeing things exactly so these are literally the same view Gospels or the similar eye Gospels they are so called because Mark Matthew and Luke all tell the story of Jesus in a very similar way it's very historical it works in chronological order Matthew and Luke both added Nativity birth account genealogy stories to them which are not real historically reliable remember that the ancients when they read the biographies of great men sort of expected that there was miraculous signs at their birth in the idea of a star and important from the heavens showing the birth of a divine child they tell the same kind of stories about Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus and lots of other people too so this is literary decoration that's expected and the only other early story of Jesus is Luke's tale that when he was 12 years old he got lost and he's found lecturing all the temple priests which probably is not all that realistic we don't think these arrogant Pharisees would sit let some twelve-year-old boy lecture them so setting aside those little bits what they tell about the Ministry of Jesus the reliable historical memories are all pretty similar to each other they vary in fairly small details so these are the synoptic Gospels then there's John which is a completely fundamentally different creature altogether because we can't compare it directly we just call it the a synoptic gospel but not the say my gospel in John's Gospel is essentially a theological rendering of what Christians believed about Jesus by the end of the first century it's not a memory of what he actually said and talked about the synoptic Gospels all began with Jesus coming out of the wilderness getting baptized and beginning a ministry in John's Gospel Jesus is descending from heaven as the logos of God and all kinds of surreal things happen and there are stories in John's Gospel that are not in any of the other ones the most important of the differences between the synoptic Gospels and John's is this nowhere in the synoptic Gospels does Jesus ever overtly claim that he is divine he never calls himself God or son of God except in the sense that were all the children of God John's Gospel he does so in John's Gospel Jesus will say things like I in the father are one only through me does one get to the Father and he will talk about himself in this exalted way and the synoptic Gospels when his followers start a Jew lating him a little bit too much he kind of defers and reminds him to pay attention to God and the laws of Moses and he he he comes out much more humble in these Gospels so essentially what we have is a collection of three Gospels that preserve as closely as we're ever going to get in historical documents the memory of the Ministry of Jesus who walked among us and had things to say it's the Jesus of history we get in the synoptic Gospels John gives us the Christ of faith and is what Christians believed by the end of the first century and as a theological rendering that suits this developing religious idea of what Jesus was about and where did the ideas and John come from what we'll find is that the letters of Paul which have begun this theological evolution and what Jesus was all about are the major thing that is feeding into how John tells the story of Jesus basically it's through the lens of st. Paul's theology all right so that is the first century that's as complicated as it gets make sure you have that diagrammed in your notes and you now know enough to watch any history or Discovery Channel special on the New Testament early Christianity and followed the discussion of what's going on okay if you go to graduate school and study this there's a whole lot more detail to look at but for a popular understanding you're now in in good shape now to quickly finish out our timeline of what happens the first two centuries of Christianity there are small numbers scattered all throughout the empire but small little groups the 3rd centuries when the numbers of Christians really start to increase and demographically they're capturing more and more of the population and then in the 4th century Emperor Constantine kind of sees the handwriting on the wall and decides to go and legalize this growing and powerful minority within the Empire and so the Christians become legal organized allied with imperial power become powerful themselves just in time so that when Rome declines in the 5th century and falls apart the Christian Church is left kind of in charge of society they're the only people left that know how to read and write and shuffle paperwork and do bureaucratic things and more and more governmental and legal sorts of functions are falling to church men who are now going to have to allied themselves with these conquering Northern Europeans in order to maintain their positions and continue to legislate it into to hold power the growth and fortunes of Christians seems to mirror in Reverse the fortunes of Rome in terms of the wealth and power and prosperity of the Roman Empire 1st century was awesome empires expanding the conquer in the world 2nd century continues to be awesome but by the middle of the second century new conquest has come to an end and there's no more new provinces being brought in which means no more new slaves and new booty and new wealth coming into Imperial coffers the 3rd century as we will see the Romans start to kind of hit the skids and have some bad times and the worst things get in Roman society the better Christian Church seems to be doing as if when this world looks less and less inviting a religion promising you a better life to come becomes more and more inviting things kind of stabilized for a bit I'll give them a just a slight smile for the fourth century and the church stabilizes it becomes legal itself in the fifth century everything goes downhill and the church ends up being triumphant it is one of the great ironies of history that one of the few religions that the Romans ever bothered to persecute because for the most part they didn't really care who you worshiped as long as you obeyed the law and paid your taxes and didn't cause trouble I don't care what temple you go to ancient paganism wasn't concerned with religious orthodoxy there are reasons that the early Christians were singled out for persecution that we will get to but it's an irony that the one religious group that was singled out for persecution that the Romans actively tried to destroy by the end of the Roman Empire becomes the only surviving religion and the one that's going to take the reigns of culture and society and direct history in Western civilization for the next thousand years in the period that we call the Middle Ages

Channel: George Brooks

Views: 17,010

Keywords: Brooks, Valencia, Humanities, Christianity, Gospels

Id: FPdUywHSbOE

Length: 42min 33sec (2553 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2016