The rise of christianity

The Rise of Christianity

The rise of Christianity during the Roman time was owed to all kinds of events and people. The Romans had conquered Judah and the Jews around 63 B.C. Jesus Christ, also known as the Messiah, was a savior believed to come to restore the kingdom of the Jews. Jesus didn’t begin teaching his beliefs when he was a child, in fact he started when he was about 30 years old. Jesus’ teachings are known as Christianity. His teachings were to love everyone, including your enemies, hoping that they would be loved by God and to pray for them so God would forgive them. Jesus believed that there was only one God that controlled everything. His teachings included rules about respect for others and Gods Laws, called the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments told people not to steal, not to kill, or do things that hurt others. In fact, some of the Ten Commandments were parts of Hammurabi’s Code, which made them very familiar to His followers. He taught that God cared for each human as a friend and that each was as special as the other. This meant that slaves and their masters were equal to each other in the eyes of God. Jesus taught that God was an element that you could actually talk to without making a sacrifice in a Temple. You could pray or wish without a sacrifice, and you could do it anywhere. Jesus told that God promised an afterlife, known as Heaven, for people that followed God’s will and asked for forgiveness from God for all their sins. Christianity’s spread also owed to the twelve followers of Jesus, called disciples, or Apostles, who spread the word of Jesus Christ all over the nation. Jesus proved to many observers that he was the Messiah. The proof was the miracles that he did, like multiplying the bread and fish, and walking on water. Another reason that Christianity spread was that the poor were not judged by their wealth. The poor and the rich were blessed all the same.

After sometime, Jesus Christ was a concern to the Roman government because he was defying the authority of Rome by attracting large crowds to hear his messages. Even though Jesus was Jewish, Jewish priests didn’t believe that he was the Messiah, and so they did not support him either. Then the Romans decided to crucify Jesus, putting him on a cross with nails in the palms of his hands, to punish Him for breaking laws. After seven hours of pain on the cross, Jesus died. Three days after He was placed in a tomb, He rose from the dead and talked to the disciples, telling them to continue spreading the word of God, then rose to Heaven. Because of this miracle of rising from the dead, more and more people began to believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah and in His teachings. Still the Roman rulers did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. After His death, some of the disciples wrote about and talked about Jesus’ miracles in life. Years after His death, a new follower came along whose name was Paul. Paul communicated the word of God by writing letters called Epistles, for followers and believers to learn about how Jesus died for others sins. One more thing that helped Christianity spread was Pax Romana, which let people travel all over the Roman Empire, and so they could spread their beliefs in new places. Translating their beliefs into other languages that were used, like Latin and Greek meant that their message was spread all over the Roman Empire.

Roman rulers had a problem with other religions because other religions were attracting masses of people to not obey Roman ideas. After a few centuries they started to persecute people of Christianity. Some were killed by burning, by crucifying, or by wild animals and gladiators in Roman coliseums. It did not stop Christianity from growing because people still believed in God and in Heaven as a reward for being good. In some time, a Roman emperor named Constantine declared Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. This meant that Christianity was spreading with the growth of the Empire, into new places where it had not been heard of before.

From humble beginnings as the message of one person to the official religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity grew during Roman expansion. From Jesus and his followers spreading the word of God and beyond his crucifixion, Christianity continued to gain popularity and spread even though the punishments were so dangerous that people lost their lives for their beliefs.