The Jewish religion started up four thousand years ago. The Christian faith started up two thousand years ago. The Islam religion started fourteen hundred years ago—three monotheistic Abrahamic faiths.
ALL THREE FAITHS CLAIM JERUSALEM AS HOME.
Christianity developed in Judea in the mid-first century A.D., based first on the teachings of Jesus and later on the writings and missionary work of Paul of Tarsus. Initially, Christianity was a small, unorganized sect that promised personal salvation after death.
Before the spread of Christianity, Historical polytheism and paganism prevailed throughout Europe and Asia. (The New World was unknown at that time). Monotheistic Judaism has been around for two thousand years.
Jews were the first Christians. According to Catholic history, the Apostle Peter formed the Catholic Church. There is no non-Catholic verification of that claim.
Christianity began in Judea in the present-day Middle East. Jews there told prophecies about a Messiah who would remove the Romans and restore the kingdom of David.
Six BC, Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, a Roman-appointed King of the Jews Matthew 1 and Luke 2.
30 AD, Jesus was crucified during the rule of Pontius Pilate, the Roman-appointed governor of Syria-Palestine. The Jews rejected Jesus as their true Messiah; they are still awaiting their Promised One.
The symbolic birth of the Christian church is marked on Pentecost.
46–64 AD, The apostle Paul’s missionary journeys and letter writing (Acts 13–28 and Pauline Epistles).
70 A.D., Jerusalem is besieged and captured by Rome; the Second Temple is destroyed.
The church spread with astonishing rapidity. Christianity found a springboard in Jewish synagogues. It then opened the church to Gentiles, thanks to Paul. The Roman roads and the comparative security they offered also facilitated missionary work.
The Roman Empire soon converted to Christianity. In 313, Constantine and Licinius agreed upon a policy of tolerating Christianity with the proclamation of the Edict of Milan.
Early Christian doctrine helped the articulation of Greek thought and had to maintain its biblical character against other elements in its Hellenistic environment.
Armenia adopted Christianity at the beginning of the 4th century.
Christianity was the dominant religion of Europe in the Middle Ages, which stretched from the fall of Rome in 476 AD until 1517. While the Catholic Church of Rome was most influential in Western Europe, the Eastern Orthodox Church of Constantinople was most effective in Eastern Europe. There were growing tensions between East and West. The cracks and fissures in Christian unity that led to the East-West Schism became evident as early as the fourth century. Cultural, political, and linguistic differences were often mixed with the theological, leading to schism. In Europe in the Middle Ages, religion combined Christian and pagan beliefs and practices. Many Christians still relied on divination, astrology, and other mystical practices condemned by official Church doctrine. Jews and Muslims also made up the European population. Christianity collapsed in the Middle East. Christians in the Fertile Crescent are now in the minority as a result of conversion and settlement activities. Christians in the early Middle Ages contributed to the development of traditional Islamic civilization thanks to their faith in the tolerance of Muslim nations of the time. The Crusades permanently damaged this bond in the area. As Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf wrote, after the Crusades, Eastern Christians were stuck between “two fires”: Western coreligionists, thinking that they sympathized with Muslims but treated them as second-class subjects. At the same time, Christianity in the West accepted the Muslims.
