When we look too closely at “church” history, it is easy to forget that there was other history going on at the same time. That other history

In ancient Rome, that is, in the Empire, not the city, almost everybody who had any education at all spoke Greek. Greek was the language of the

Most of the New Testament was first written in Koine Greek.  “Koine” Greek was very different from formal, or attic Greek, the “proper”

As we’re told in the Book of Acts, there were Persians, probably Persian Jews, there in Jerusalem when the tongues of flame ignited the fire that

In some ways, the Church, as we know it, got its real start as a result of Nero’s decision to persecute its members for starting the great fire

By the mid-sixties, AD, downtown Rome was pretty much a dump. Most of the buildings were very old, and many of them were built of wood. There had

Herod was not a Hasmonean. The Hasmonean dynasty ended with a fellow named John Hyrcanus. That’s where the Roman politics came in. Rome was

Before we leave completely the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire between the time of Nero, in the mid-sixties AD and the rise of

Remember Peter and John, preaching in the Temple in the first years after the Ascension? Peter and John were Jews. Remember Stephen? The first

We often think of the early Church as being pretty constantly persecuted by the Emperors in Rome and of that persecution as being pretty much

What does it take to make a Christian?  That was a question that was widely debated in the very early Church.  That is to say, before the Roman

Like many of the later Roman Emperors, Constantine was not Italian.  In fact, he wasn’t even “Roman” except technically.  He was arguably

Beginning very early in the history of the Church, it’s leadership, variously called “apostles”, “bishops”, “presbyters” and

This series of columns is titled: “The History of the Christian Church.” That’s not to say “the history of Christianity,”

In a standard work on “Church History”, which is to say in a textbook on the subject, we will often read that the Christian Church started in

As we discussed in the last article in this series, there was never an “undivided” Church. That idea was promulgated by some very early western

As strange as it may seem to some of us, a great deal of secular research has been done on the subject of religion, including the Christian

Last week we defined our terms and went to work on understanding some of the words that we all use to discuss the goings-on within the Christian

This is designed to be the first in a series of articles on the subject of the Church in History. That’s not at all the same thing as “church