History of christianity slide 2

• Constantine ‘s conversion (312 A.D)

• Constantine, a Roman emperior in 312 , is said to have a vision of a
cross in the sky, which led to his conversion. Constantine started
favouring church.
• Although his vision may have occurred, it is likely that Constantine’s
favour to the church may have been a diplomatic act.
• He even killed a young man who made a claim to the throne.
• He delayed his baptism till towards the end of his life and kept his
position of pontifex maximus, chief priest of the pagan state religion.
• In 313, he granted the christians right to worship by edict of Milan.
• He, during the next few years, issued rules that brought about the
restoration of confiscated property to the church, the subsidization of
the church by the state, the exemption of the clergy from public
service, a ban on soothsaying and the setting apart of Sunday as a day
of rest and worship. He even assumed a position of theological
leadership time to time.
• He made Constantinople (Byzantine) a capital of Roman empire and it
became a strong centre for christian church.
• 312- 500 AD
• The sons of Constantine continued his policy of
favouring the church.
• Pagan sacrifices and attending pagan temples were
banned.
• It continued till Christianity became the state
religion. Christianity became the exclusive religion
of the state.
• Christianity changed the moral tone of the society.
For example, women dignity was more recognized,
slaves were given milder treatment, gladiatorial
shows were eliminated etc.
• But it also caused many disadvantages.
 East and West Christianity
• Rome christianity and Eastern Christianity
• East christianity with Constantinople as centre
and West Christianity with Rome as centre.
• Use of latin and greek as official language
• Difference in doctrines, but more differences
of culture and politics
• Rome christianity under papalcy.
• East christianity got freedom from Roman
christianity 1054.
 Some important developments during this era
(100-1000 A.D)
• Development of theology
Theology comes from 2 greek words, “theos” and “logos” which means
rational thought. So, theology is rational thought about God. It is not
identical with religion.
Theology and heresy: when we err in our thinking we call it heresy.
“orthodox”: good theology came to be known as “orthodox”. It is the
form of christianity that won the support of the overwhelming
majority of christians and is expressed by most of the official
proclamations or creeds of the church.
Orthodoxy can simply mean right belief or practice. But it also refers to
the right belief that is officially embraced by the church.
One must remember that there was a functional orthodoxy held by
consensus among the earliest Christians.
Sometimes, orthodoxy and heresy refer to affirming or rejecting
officially sanctioned doctrine.
• Some false teachings also arise during this time. for example,
Docetism or “seemism” which suggests that Jesus was not really a
man; he was a spectral appearances. He only seemed to suffer for
man’s sins since we all know divine phantoms are incapable of
dying.
• Gnostisms: gnostics created their own versions of Christian literary
works. Generally Gnostics took Jesus to be one of the many lesser
deities lacking the purity and potency of the supreme reality or
god.
• Orthodox christians found the Gnostics very difficult to combat.
Gnostics claimed that they had some secret information. Jesus,
they said, had passed on this information to the gnostic teachers of
his time and had hidden it from the materially blinded Jews who
founded the church.
• Yet christians rose up to cast out the gnostic heresy, and in doing
so, they clarified their own orthodox convictions. The best
summary of early christian beliefs is what we call the Apostle’s
 The beginning of papacy
• According to Bruce Shelley,
• The tradition began when Bishop Leo negotiated with Attila
the Hun (who was planning to invade Rome) and convinced
him to withdraw from Italy. The bishop of Rome had assumed
a new role and had a fresh claim on the future.
• Claims of Roman Catholic:
• 1) According to the official teaching of Roman Catholic defined
in the 1st Vatican Council, Jesus established papacy with Peter.
• 2) roman congregation quickly grew in number and
significance.
• 3) early christian writers, like Irenaeus, referred to Peter and
Paul as founders of the church in Rome. These roots in
apostolic age were important in a day when gnostic teachers
appealed to a secret tradition arising from Christ.
• Bishop Leo claimed that Peter and Paul were martyred in
Rome and from Rome would the papacy continue and
hence, claimed papal supremacy.
• After The Huns, Leo had to face the invasion of the Vandals.
The Emperor was murdered. He requested them and they
proceeded with 14 days loot. After that, Leo assumed the
heathen title of “pontifex maximus.”
• Rome became the “Holy City.”
• The bishop of Rome soared to major importance on the
wings of these developments. The council of Nicea (325)
recognized the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch and Rome.
• However, Constantine made Constantinople the new Rome
and Rome’s power decreased.
• Church of Constantinople and church of West were headed
towards different directions.
The fall of Roman Empire and dark ages 500-1000 A.D)
- The pressure continued until the old civilization of the
western Roman Empire had been almost completely
destroyed and the long period of movement and counter-
movement, destruction and chaos, commonly known as
the Dark Ages, followed.
- For 500 years, the major task of the Western church was
that of wrestling with the “barbarians.”
- In 622 A.D, Mohammad founded Islam religion among the
Arabs and gave them out on a mission to conquer the
world. Persian, Jerusalem, Alexandria (Egypt), they all
came under muslim dominion.
- Constantinople, was constantly under threat from muslim
invasion, but it was only in in 1453 that the Turks invaded
it.
 Early European Expansion (1000-1500 A.D)
• This was the age of travel, trade, military adventure, art and
architecture, development of great new vernacular languages,
and development of theological thought.
• Europe extended the christian world to its own limits:
Scandinavia, England, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway,
Iceland, Greenland
• The rise of papacy:
According to Shelley, “The papacy ascended high above European
society, mounting upon the fading glory of the empire.”
• In 12th and 13th century, emperors continued to go to Rome for
their coronations, but they were actually merely the sovereigns
of the cluster of kingdoms.
• The papacy, however, under reforms of pope Gregory VII,
emerged as the most powerful office in Europe.
• Pope Gregory, however, was a monk.
• The popes who came after him, like pope Innocent III and
other popes who came in later 12th and 13th century were
trained as canon lawyers, experts in church government.
• Innocent III told the princes of Europe that the papacy was
like the sun, while kings were like the moon.
• The pope had the right to excommunicate people from church
by pronouncing “anathema.”
“While under excommunication, persons could not act as judge,
juror, witness or attorney. They could be no guardians,
executors or parties to contract. After death, they received no
Christian burial and if, by chance, they were buried in
consecrated ground, the church had their bodies disinterred
and destroyed.” Shelley
Hence, Innocent and his successors in the papal office during
the 13th century led Christianity to its peak of political and
cultural influence.
 Crusades
• Brief background of Muslims:
• Muhammad who was born in A.D 570, at the age of 40
began to retire into a cave for meditation. He got a vision
by an angel who ordered him, “to recite” and from that
command, came the Koran, which literally means to
recite.
• Within the 1st one hundred years of this Arabic
movement, numerous capitals such as Jerusalem,
Damascus and Cairo fell to Islam.
• When Mohammad suddenly died in 632 A.D, there was
problem about his sucessorship. Some muslims said the
first Caliph should be elected. They were the Sunnis.
• The other sect insist that Muhammed’s own bloodline
• For centuries, peaceful pilgrims had been possible. The
rise and spread of Islam in the Near East during 7th
century did not interrupt this.
• However, during 11th century, christian pilgrims began
to encounter persecution, especially when the Turks
became christians who were new and fanatical.
• The turks attacked the eastern emperor and scattered
his army.
• In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade to
regain the Holy Land.
• The word “crusade” came from “taking the cross” after
the example of Christ, often termed as “Holy war.”
• From the end of 11th century to the end of 13th century,
there were around 7 crusades led by the popes.
• In 1st crusade, they overcame the Turks and captured the Holy
City, Jerusalem. A contemporary account of the Christian
entrance into Jerusalem reads, “some of our men...cut off
their heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows,
so that they feel from the towers; others tortured them longer
by casting them into the flames...it was necessary to pick
one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were
small compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon
(where)...men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.
Indeed it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this
place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since
it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.”
• Another account records that at nightfall, the crusader’s
hands were still bloody when they folded them in prayer and
knelt at the church of the Holy Sepulchre, sobbing for excess
of joy.
Apparent motives of the crusades:
- To win the Holy Land
- To check the advance of Islam
- To (as Christians) stand united against muslims and other outsiders.
- To check schism between eastern and western christianity.
Actual consequence of the crusade (According to Neill)
- They permanently injured the relations between Western and Eastern
branches of Christendom. The crusaders, westerners were guests in
eastern world, which still lay under the jurisdiction of eastern
patriarchates. But the crusaders set up latin bishopry in east which
spoiled the relationship more.
- The crusaders left a trail of bitterness across the relations between
christians and muslims that remain till today. Their response of the Holy
War is “jihad.”
- It lowered the whole moral temperature of Christendom. Most of the
crusaders seem to have held the view that nothing could be done with
infidels except to exterminate them, or to reduce them to permanent
slavery.
Other consequences are:
• It brought added slpendour to papacy.
• The restoration of the Holy Land opened a way for
years and years of war between Jews and Arabs
 scholasticism
• A style of architecture that gained popularity in the 12th-
16th century is the Gothic architecture. The works were
seen in the Gothic Cathedrals, with the “pillars, arches,
aligned like row of rockets ready to ascend to heaven, point
skyward.”
• Schools in these cathedrals give birth to medieval universities, for the
supreme task of the university was to understand and explain the light
of God’s revealed truth. The Universities reveal an intense hunger to
understand the truth of God received from any land.
• The best chance for learning among laymen came from cathedral
schools. Since Cathedrals, churches of the bishops were located in
towns, their schools for learning among laymen came from cathedral
schools.
• All these activities proceeded, however, under the watchful eye of
papacy.
• Some debates continued for generations, but the popes worked to make
sure that the net result was a new philosophical framework that
supported the papal monarchy.
• On one hand was a new formulation of “canon law” and on the other
hand, a systematic statement of Christian theology.
• Thus, we come to the peak of ecclesiastical aspiration- and arrogance.
The pope and his priest not only mediate the grace of God to sinners on
earth by the miracle of the Blessed Sacrifice and by their prayers for the
 Translation Principle in Christian history.
From Jewish scripture to Greek scripture (Andrew Walls)
• Exact transmission of meaning from one linguistic medium to another
is continually hampered not only by structural and cultural
difference; In the end the translator has simply to do his best and
take risks in a high risk business.
• In the light of this, it is more astonishing that God chose translation
as his mode of action for the salvation of humanity. Christian faith
rests on a divine act of translation: “The Word became flesh, and
dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Any confidence we have in the
translatability of the Bible rests on that prior act of translation.
• There is a history of translation of the Bible because there was a
translation of the Word into flesh.
• In the other faiths of the world, salvation does not depend on
translation in this way.
• Meaning is not actually transferred from divine to human sphere, for
the human sphere has no permanent significance.
• Even Judaism and Islam, which share the christian characterisation
of God’s manward activity as speech, do not represent it as
translated speech. In Islamic faith God speaks to mankind and the
sign of that speech is the Quran, the direct speech of God,
delivered in Arabic at the chosen time through God’ chosen
Apostle, unaltered and unalterably fixed in heaven for ever.
• Though the earliest Church was Jewish and retained the Jewish
scriptures, the Christian approach to the Bible is not identical with
the historic understanding of the Torah. The Christian Scriptures
are not Torah with an updating supplement.
• The true christian analogy with the Quran is not the Bible, but
Christ. Christ for Christians, the Quran for Muslims in the eternal
word of God; Christ is word translated.
• Incarnation is translation. When God in Christ became man,
divinity was translated into humanity.
• He became a person in a particular locality and in a particular
ethnic group, at a particular place and time.
• With Paul’s concern for Christ to be formed in the newly founded
Gentile churches, it appears that Christ, God’s translated speech, is re-
translated from the Palestinian Jewish original.
• In other words, national distinctives, the things that mark out each
nation, the shared consciousness and shared traditions, and shared
mental processes and patterns of relationship are within the scope of
discipleship.
• The first divine act of translation into humanity thus gives rise to a
constant succession of new translations.
• The translations of Christ that take place as believers within different
cultures respond to him are retranslations. Similarly, Biblical
translations can always be compared not only with the original, but
with other translations made from the same original.
• Perhaps a comparative history of translation would be an illuminating
way of approaching the history of Christian mission and expansion,
especially the dynamic expansion of the influence of Christ within the
Church that comes from the attempts at the radical application of his
mind within particular cultures.
• The translation principle was at work even before the Christian era. The Jewish
scriptures were being translated into Greek.
• The earliest translations, as Alexandrine Philo, who was a translator in the 1st
century pointed out, were word to word translation, as “though dictated to
each…”
• The Greek speaking Jews find themselves with a contribution to the Platonic and
Stoic debates on the nature of law, which could never have arisen without the
translation of the Scriptures.
• Philo’s Hellenistic surroundings told him that Greeks stumble at questions about
the nature of reality because they were unaware of what every Jewish child
knew from infancy, the activity of the sovereign God in creation.
• According to Philo, the Logos thus becomes the point at which human contact is
possible with the sovereign Lord in Greek understanding. “By the use of the
Jewish scriptures in essentially Greek philosophic discourse, the transcendent
God, the God of Israel, is introduced into the heart of thoroughly Greek
questions.”
• “Greek thinkers using only Greek resources would have left the God-factor on the
periphery of those questions; devout Jews using only untranslated scriptures
would have dismissed the questions themselves as so much Gentile profanity.”
• The cultural translation of Christianity gave the scriptures a new status and
 Kyrios
• Acts
• a daring piece of translation is recorded in encounter between the word about
Christ and Gree-speaking pagans. According to Acts, unnamed believers
orginating from Cyprus and Cyrene spoke to Greeks in Antioch about “The Lord
Jesus”(Acts 11:20).
• In all previous proclamations, Jesus had been presented as the Messiah, the
Saviour of Israel. In this new, Hellenistic-pagan context, he is given the title
“Kyrios”, the title Hellenistic pagans gave to their cult divinites.
• One might have expected that the result would be the recognition of the Lord
Jesus as one more cult divinity alongside the Lord Serapis or the Lord Osiris.
• The major reason this did not happen was ubdoubtedly that those pagans who
responded were brought into a community where the Septuagint was
constantly read, and the biblical associations of Kyrios penetrated their minds
and attached themselves to the cult divinity title.
• But in the first encounter, the loading of kyrios with the cult divinity idea was
vital.
• Once implanted, however, this understanding of the word received a set of
control from its new biblical frame of reference. In time much of the original
• Another feature of septuagint took on a new significance was
the divine name represented by tetragrammaton.
• In the OT, God had a personal name, but centuries of Jewish
reverence did not allow that name to be pronounced, and in
the Septuagint that reverence is given concrete form. The
tetragrammaton is replaced by Kyrios. God in the Septuagint
has no name.
• This sharpened the confrontation of early Christianity with the
popular religion of Greco-Roman world. God was not
Zeus/Jupiter or Saturn/Kronos or any amalgam of the gods. He
was “ho theos”, the God, Lord, over against them all.
• Altogether the effect of that first pre-christian translation was
crucial for the development of an indigenous Helleneistic
Christianity. Hellenistic people could not be converted without
the conversion of the whole universe of Greek thought. But it
was also exemplary for the whole history of Gentile
 Age of discovery 1500-1600
• In 1492 Christopher Columbus crossed Atlantic and reached Bahamas,
thinking he had reached coast of India and since then the they have been
wrongly named West Indies or the Indians.
• Portugal rose in prominence in the the middle of 15 th century. In 1456 the
Portuguese church became the spiritual overseer over all the existing
dominions of the crown of Portugal, and over any that might in the future be
added to them. In 1497, Vasco Da Gama, from Portugal, reached India, along
with number of priests (as their usual).
• At last, the back door into Asia had been found, behind the muslims
• Stephen Neil
“It is clear from all the early records that the bold and hardy men who made
the great voyages, and the rulers and others who stood behind them, had two
great purposes in view:”
First, to bring the light of the true gospel to hitherto unknown nations who had
lived in darkness,
Second, even more importantly, to enter into contact with the Christian
churches, which were believed to be in existence in those lands, and so to
make a great alliance of the faithful, through which at last, the power of the
 Arrival of Portuguese in south India
• At first the Portuguese were impressed by the already existing St. Thomas
Christians in the south.
• But slowly the differences started creeping in. The Indian Christians were
Syrian Nestorian christians who have never even heard of pope. For a
Portuguese, it was inconceivable that any christian should exist in
independence of the Bishop of Rome, whom they regarded as the sole vicar
of Christ on earth.
• The Portuguese slowly tried to bring the Syrian Christians under the crown of
Portugal.
• The Jesuits (a missionary of fanatic beliefs, formed in 1540) entered Kerala
and founded at Vaipicotta a seminary for the training of the clergy. In past
training for the ministry had been minimal in the Syrian church. Many young
Indians got trained in this instruction, which was given in Syriac as well as in
Latin.
• Mar Abraham was the last patriach sent from Mesopotamia in response to
the request sent by Indian Christians.
• His death, gave the new bishop in Goa, Menezes an opportunity to bring the
• Under Menezes, Synod of Diamper took place in June 1599.
• There were set of instructions, which was read out in Portuguese, no care was
taken to translate to the Syrians. Everyone present there were expected to sign
the decrees.
• The result of the synod of Diamper was:
• The Syrians will not have an independent archbishop but a suffragan of Goa.
• Syria was not replaced by Latin as a liturgucal language, and some harmless
local customs were permitted, but in almost every detail Roman order and
Roman practice prevailed.
• For most contemporaries, the synod of diamper seemed to be a glorious
achievement. Others had felt that Menezes had no business to rob an ancient
Church of its independence in the name of an allegiance which they had never
known and which they were not much interested to recognise.
• There are signs that Rome itself is today prepared to take a somewhat critical
attitude to this.
A book published at Rome in 1958, takes a view that Menezes had no canonical
right to hold a Synod and that his actions were a characteristic piece of western
arrogance and that the harm done by them began to be remedied only when
Leo XIII in 1896 provided the ancient church with its own independent
hierarchy.
 Portuguese in northern parts of India
• The arrival of Portuguese in India coincided with the development
of the Mogul (Mughal power) in the battle of Panipat (1526).
• India had been a hindu region. Babur defeated the Lodis but had
no high view of Hindus, whom he had come to rule.
• The Moguls never forgot their alien origin and their connection
with Persian culture. But they managed to make themselves at
home than the British.
• Akbar, who ruled from 1556 till 1605 was one of the greatest
monarchs. He was the only muslim who had the respect of both
the hindus and muslims.
• He extended invitations to different religious groups at his court.
Invitation was sent to the Jesuits fathers too. An opportunity hence
was opened up to the Jesuits to propagate christianity even in
North India, since they continued to reside at the court of the
Moguls till the dissolution of the Jesuit Order two centuries later.
 Francis Xavier (1506-52)
• A passionate but disciplined nature, a profound devotion and an eager longing for the
salvation of souls
• He came to India (Goa) in 1542, not as an ordinary missionary but as the representative
of the king of Portugal, with powers and right to correspond directly with the king.
• The moral condition of the people in Goa was terrible. The Europeans, coming without
women, had formed alliances with Indian women, the children, though nominally
christians were left without any care or instruction and manifest the worst
characteristics of both races.
• Pressure had been brought to the hindu population to at least outwardly conform to
Christianity, especially to remove idolatory. But not much progress was made. Xavier
spent some months in reforming it.
• In Coromandel coast, some 10,000 fishermen were suffering because of muslim raiders
and had requested protection from Portuguese and the price was to be baptised. So,
they had been baptised without any pastoral care. Xavier’s new work was to train these
baptised. He, with the help of very imperfect interpreters, made a rough translation of
the Lord’s prayer, the Creed, and the ten commandments (though was highly defective)
• “Xavier had to suffer from the incompetence of his assistants, from the evil lives and
violence of the Portuguese on the coast, from the ignorance of the paravas an their
unwillingness to change
 Mission to Japan
• Xavier then went to Japan and it changed his ways of thinking.
• He realized that the people in Japan are “entirely guided by the law of
reason.” to accept christianity, “they would first ask questions and see how i
answered and how much i knew. Above all, they would want to observe if i
lived in conformity with what i said and believed.”
• “ the people whom we have met so far are the best who have as yet been
discovered, and it seems to me that we shall never find among heathens
another race to equal the Japanese...they are very fond of hearing about the
things of God, chiefly when they understand them...they like to hear things
propounded according to reason, and granted that there are sins and vices
among them, when one reasons with them, pointing out that what they do is
evil, they are convinced by this reasoning.”
• This contact with Japanese changed his attitude in many ways:
• He realised the folly of “tabula-rasa” and saw that, while the Gospel must
transform and refine and recreate, it need not necessarily reject as worthless
everything that has come before.
• Xavier left three groups of converts. How much they had understood the
gospel is questionable. It however opened a way for mission to Japan.