The Emergence of Christianity in the Early Roman Empire

Christianity began as what scholars call “the Jesus movement,” a Jewish splinter group in Judaea (today Israel and the Palestinian Territories). There, as elsewhere under Roman rule, Jews were allowed to worship in their ancestral religion. The emergence of the new religion was gradual: three centuries after the death of Jesus, Christians were still a minority in the Roman Empire. Moreover, Roman officials suspected that Christians’ beliefs made them disloyal. Christianity grew because of the attraction of Jesus’s charismatic career, its message of individual spiritual salvation, its early members’ sense of mission, and the strong bonds of community it inspired. Ultimately, Christianity’s emergence proved the most significant development in Roman history.