Christianity

One crucified teacher in a Roman province, and two thousand years of the world reorganizing itself around what his followers said happened next.

Origins and History

Christianity began as a movement within Second-Temple Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean Jew executed by Roman authority around 30 CE, preached the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, taught in parables, and gathered disciples who came to believe — against every expectation their tradition had prepared them for — that he had risen from the dead. That conviction, not the teachings alone, is the ignition point. Paul of Tarsus carried the message beyond the Jewish world, arguing that Gentiles could enter the covenant without taking on the Mosaic law, and within a generation the movement was more Greek than Aramaic.

Three centuries of intermittent persecution ended abruptly when Constantine legalized the faith in 313 CE; by 380 it was the official religion of the empire that had crucified its founder. The ecumenical councils — Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Chalcedon (451) — hammered out the doctrines of Christ's divinity and the Trinity against rival interpretations, including the Gnostic currents that read Jesus as a revealer of secret knowledge rather than an incarnate redeemer. The Great Schism of 1054 divided East from West; the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century divided the West against itself. Today Christianity is the world's largest religion, with roughly 2.4 billion adherents, its demographic center of gravity shifting steadily toward the Global South.

Core Beliefs

At the center is the claim that God became human. The doctrine of the Incarnation holds that Jesus is fully God and fully man, and the doctrine of the Trinity — one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is the grammar Christians developed to speak of a God who is simultaneously the transcendent creator, the crucified Galilean, and the present Spirit. The vault's study guide on The Trinity works through the biblical texts behind the doctrine.

Human beings are created in God's image but estranged from God through sin, and cannot repair the estrangement themselves. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are understood as God's own act of reconciliation — atonement — though the traditions differ considerably on the mechanics. Salvation is received through faith; whether faith is a free human response or itself a gift of sovereign grace is the fault line that Calvinism answers in the strongest possible terms for grace. Christian hope is finally eschatological: resurrection of the dead, final judgment, and a renewed creation — a vision whose deep roots run back through Jewish apocalyptic into, many scholars argue, Persian soil (Zoroastrianism).

Practices

Christian life is organized around word and sacrament. Weekly worship on Sunday, the day of resurrection, typically includes scripture reading, preaching, prayer, and song. Baptism marks entry into the church, and the Eucharist — Communion, the Lord's Supper, the Mass — reenacts the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples; the traditions disagree, sometimes fiercely, about what happens in the bread and wine. The liturgical year cycles through Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost, giving time itself a narrative shape. Personal prayer, fasting, confession, and works of mercy round out the devotional life, and the contemplative stream — desert monasticism, lectio divina, the mystics — has run alongside the institutional church from the beginning. Catholic and Orthodox Christians also cultivate the communion of saints, asking the holy dead for intercession; the vault's Catholic Saints & Figures surveys that crowded and vivid company.

Sacred Texts

The Christian Bible joins the Hebrew scriptures — rechristened the Old Testament — to the twenty-seven books of the New Testament: four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul and others, and the Apocalypse of John. Catholics and Orthodox include the deuterocanonical books that Protestants set aside. The King James Version of 1611 remains the most influential English translation ever made, and the vault's KJV Study library is devoted to it — including its treatment of the angelic beings who move through both testaments, catalogued in Biblical Angels. Interpretation is its own battlefield: literal, allegorical, historical-critical, and devotional readings have coexisted and collided since Origen.

Major Branches

Protestantism subdivides endlessly — Lutheran, Reformed and Presbyterian (the heirs of Calvinism), Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, and the Pentecostal movement, which is the fastest-growing wing of the faith worldwide. What unites nearly all of them is the Nicene core: one God, incarnate in Christ, crucified and risen.

Related

• Judaism — The parent tradition
• Islam — The younger sibling that honors Jesus as prophet
• Zoroastrianism — Probable influence on Christian eschatology
• Catholicism — The largest communion, in depth
• Protestantism — The Reformation and its heirs
• Calvinism — Reformed theology in depth
• Gnosticism — The great early rival interpretation
• KJV Study — The vault's biblical study library
• Catholic Saints & Figures — The communion of saints
• Biblical Angels — The angelic hierarchy of scripture
• Bahá'í Faith — A later tradition that counts Christ among its messengers

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son." — John 3:16, KJV