History of Christianity

"Christian history" redirects here. For the magazine, see Christian History.

For a chronological guide, see Timeline of Christianity.

Funerary stele of Licinia Amias on marble, in the National Roman Museum. One of the earliest Christian inscriptions found, it comes from the early 3rd century Vatican necropolis area in Rome. It contains the text ΙΧΘΥϹ ΖΩΝΤΩΝ ("fish of the living"), a predecessor of the Ichthys symbol.

The history of Christianity follows the Christian religion from the first century to the twenty-first as it developed from its earliest beliefs and practices, spread geographically, and changed into its contemporary global forms.

Christianity originated with the ministry of Jesus, a Jewish teacher and healer who proclaimed the imminent Kingdom of God and was crucified c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem in the Roman province of Judea. The earliest followers of Jesus were apocalyptic Jewish Christians. Christianity remained a Jewish sect, for centuries in some locations, diverging gradually from Judaism over doctrinal, social and historical differences.

In spite of occasional persecution in the Roman Empire, the religious movement spread as a grassroots movement that became established by the third century both in and outside the empire. New Testament texts were written, and church government was loosely organized, in its first centuries, though the biblical canon did not become official until 382. The Roman Emperor Constantine I became the first Christian emperor in 313. He issued the Edict of Milan, expressing tolerance for all religions and thereby legalizing Christian worship. He did not make Christianity the state religion, but did provide crucial support. Constantine called the first of seven ecumenical councils needed to resolve disagreements over defining Jesus' divinity.

Christianity played a prominent role in the development of Western civilization in Europe. In the Early Middle Ages, missionary activities spread Christianity west and north. During the High Middle Ages, Eastern and Western Christianity grew apart, leading to the East–West Schism of 1054. Western Christianity reached a kind of peak, influencing every aspect of medieval life in the 1200s, then it began a decline. Growing criticism of the Roman Catholic church and its corruption in the 1300–1500s led to the Protestant Reformation and its related reform movements, which concluded with the European wars of religion, the return of tolerance as a theological and political option, and the Age of Enlightenment. Christianity also heavily influenced the New World through its connection to colonialism, its part in the American revolution, the dissolution of slavery in the west, and the long term impact of Protestant missions.

In the twenty-first century, traditional Christianity has declined in the West, while new forms have developed and expanded throughout the world. Today, there are more than two billion Christians worldwide and Christianity has become the world's largest, and most widespread religion. Within the last century, the center of growth has shifted from West to East and from the North to the global South.

Origins to 312

See also: Jesus, Chronology of Jesus, Life of Jesus in the New Testament, Historical background of the New Testament, and Roman Empire

Further information: Historical Jesus, Historicity of Jesus, Quest for the historical Jesus, Hellenistic Judaism, Second Temple Judaism, and Second Temple Period

Little is fully known of Christianity in its first 150 years. Sources are few. This and other complications have limited scholars to probable rather than provable conclusions, based largely on the biblical book of Acts, whose historicity is debated as much as it is accepted.

According to the Gospels, Christianity began with the itinerant preaching and teaching of a deeply pious young Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth. His followers came to believe Jesus was the Son of God, the Christ, a title in Greek for the Hebrew term meshiah (Messiah) meaning “the anointed one.” Jesus was crucified c. AD 30–33 in Jerusalem, and after his death and burial, his disciples proclaimed they had seen him alive and raised from the dead. He was thereafter proclaimed exalted by God heralding the future Kingdom of God.

Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure. However, in the twenty-first century, tensions surround the figure of Jesus and the supernatural features of the gospels, creating, for many, a distinction between the 'Jesus of history' and the 'Christ of faith'. In early Christianity, this was not yet a question. The belief that Christ had two natures, one divine and one human, provided the foundation for Christianity.

It was amongst a small group of Second Temple Jews, looking for an "anointed" leader (messiah or king) from the ancestral line of King David, that Christianity first formed in relative obscurity. Led by James the Just, brother of Jesus, they described themselves as "disciples of the Lord" and followers "of the Way". According to Acts 9 and 11, a settled community of disciples at Antioch were the first to be called "Christians".

While there is evidence in the New Testament (Acts 10) suggesting the presence of Gentile Christians from the beginning, most early Christians were actively Jewish. Jewish Christianity was influential in the beginning, and it remained so in Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor into the second and third centuries. Judaism and Christianity eventually diverged over disagreements about Jewish law, Jewish insurrections against Rome which Christians did not support, and the development of Rabbinic Judaism by the Pharisees, the sect which had rejected Jesus from the start.

St. Lawrence (martyred 258) standing before Emperor Valerianus

Geographically, Christianity began in Jerusalem in first-century Judea, a province of the Roman Empire. The religious, social, and political climate of the area was diverse and often characterized by turmoil. The Roman Empire had only recently emerged from a long series of civil wars, and would experience two more major periods of civil war over the next centuries. Romans of this era feared civil disorder, giving their highest regard to peace, harmony and order. Piety equaled loyalty to family, class, city and emperor, and it was demonstrated by loyalty to the practices and rituals of the old religious ways.

Christianity was largely tolerated, but some also saw it as a threat to "Romanness" which produced localized persecution by mobs and governors. The first reference to persecution by a Roman Emperor is under Nero, probably in 64 AD, in the city of Rome. Scholars conjecture that Peter and Paul were killed then. In 250, the emperor Decius made it a capital offence to refuse to make sacrifices to Roman gods, resulting in widespread persecution of Christians. Valerian pursued similar policies later that decade. The last and most severe official persecution, the Diocletianic Persecution, took place in 303–311. During these early centuries, Christianity spread into the Jewish diaspora communities, establishing itself beyond the Empire's borders as well as within it.

Mission in primitive Christianity

Main article: Christian mission

The Oxford and Cambridge Acts of the Apostles – Paul the Apostle's missionary journeys

From its beginnings, the Christian church has seen itself as having a double mission: first, to fully live out its faith, and second, to pass it on, making Christianity a 'missionary' religion from its inception. Driven by a universalist logic, missions are a multi-cultural, often complex, historical process.

Evangelism began immediately through the twelve Apostles, and the Apostle Paul making multiple trips to found new churches. Christianity quickly spread geographically and numerically, with interaction sometimes producing conflict, and other times producing converts and accommodation.

Early geographical spread

See also: Christianization of the Roman Empire as diffusion of innovation, Christianity in Asia, Christianity in Egypt, Christianity in Gaul, Christianity in the Roman Africa province, and Christianity in Syria

Further information: Chronicle of Arbela, Religion in Rome, and Christianity in Africa

Map of the Roman empire with distribution of Christian congregations of the first three centuries displayed for each century

Beginning with less than 1000 people, by the year 100, Christianity had grown to perhaps one hundred small household churches consisting of an average of around seventy (12–200) members each. It achieved critical mass in the hundred years between 150 and 250 when it moved from fewer than 50,000 adherents to over a million. This provided enough adopters for its growth rate to be self-sustaining.

It was in Asia Minor, in what Christine Trevett calls the "nurseries" of Christianity (Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Pergamum) that conflicts over the nature of Christ's divinity first emerged in the second century, and were resolved by referencing apostolic teaching.

There is no archaeological evidence of Christianity in Egypt before the fourth century, though the literary evidence for it is immense. Egyptian Christianity probably began in the first century in Alexandria. Both Gnosticism and Marcionite Christianity appeared in the second century. Egyptian Christians produced religious literature more abundantly than any other region during the second and third centuries making the church in Alexandria as influential as the church in Rome.

Christianity in Antioch is mentioned in Paul's epistles written before AD 60, and scholars generally see Antioch as a primary center of early Christianity.

Early Christianity was also present in Gaul, however, most of what is known comes from a letter, most likely written by Irenaeus, which theologically interprets the detailed suffering and martyrdom of Christians from Vienne and Lyons during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. There is no other evidence of Christianity in Gaul, beyond one inscription on a gravestone, until the beginning of the fourth century.

The origins of Christianity in North Africa are unknown, but most scholars connect it to the Jewish communities of Carthage. Christians were persecuted in Africa intermittently from 180 until 305. Persecution under Emperors Decius and Valerian created long-lasting problems for the African church when those who had recanted tried to rejoin the Church.

It is likely the Christian message arrived in the city of Rome very early, though it is unknown how or by whom. Tradition, and some evidence, supports Peter as the organizer and founder of the Church in Rome which already existed by 57 AD when Paul arrived there. The city was a melting pot of ideas, and according to Markus Vinzent, the Church in Rome was "fragmented and subject to repeated internal upheavals ... [from] controversies imported by immigrants from around the empire". Walter Bauer's thesis that heretical forms of Christianity were brought into line by a powerful, united, Roman church forcing its will on others is not supportable, writes Vinzent, since such unity and power did not exist in Rome before the eighth century.

Christianity spread in the Germanic world during the latter part of the third century, beginning among the Goths, it did not originate among the ruling classes. Christianity probably reached Roman Britain by the third century at the latest.

From the earliest days of Christianity, there was a Christian presence in Edessa (ancient and modern Urfa). It developed in Adiabene, Armenia, Georgia, Persia (modern Iran), Ethiopia, Central Asia, India, Nubia, South Arabia, Soqotra, Central Asia and China. Christianity's development followed the trade routes as it was spread by merchants and soldiers. By the sixth century, there is evidence for Christian communities in Sri Lanka and Tibet.

Early beliefs and practices

Further information: History of Christian theology

One of the oldest representation of Jesus as the Good Shepherd from the catacombs of Rome, made around 300 AD

Early Christianity's system of beliefs and morality have been cited as a major factor in its growth from relative obscurity.

Early Christian communities were highly inclusive in terms of social categories, being open to men and women, rich and poor, slave and free, in contrast to traditional Roman social stratification. In groups formed by Paul the Apostle, the role of women was greater than in other religious movements. Intellectual egalitarianism made philosophy and ethics available to ordinary people otherwise deemed incapable of ethical reflection. Conceptions of sin and free will led to an increasing focus on the spiritual ethics of sexual behavior over the established social construct determined by social status.

Family had previously determined where and how the dead could be buried, but Christians gathered those not related by blood into a common burial space, used the same memorials, and expanded the audience to include others of their community, thereby redefining the meaning of family. Christians distributed bread to the hungry, nurtured the sick, and showed the poor great generosity.

Christianity in its first 300 years was also highly exclusive, as believing was the crucial and defining characteristic that set a "high boundary" that strongly excluded non-believers. The exclusivity of Christian monotheism has been cited as a crucial factor in maintaining independence in the syncretizing Roman religious culture.

In the mid-second century, Christian writers in Asia Minor, along with Gentile believers such as Justin Martyr, began using the term "heresy" to describe doctrinal deviance from the apostolic tradition. The concept developed as a means of defining theological error, ensuring correct belief and establishing identity. Tension between universality and diversity in Christianity made the establishment of boundaries through opposition to heresy necessary. In the early centuries, doctrinal variations were gradually regulated by literature that established a consensus of common beliefs and boundaries thereby creating a kind of "unified diversity" within Christianity.

Church hierarchy

See also: Christianity in the ante-Nicene period

The Church as an institution began its formation quickly and with some flexibility. The New Testament mentions bishops (or episkopoi), as overseers and presbyters as elders or priests, with deacons as 'servants', sometimes using the terms interchangeably. According to Gerd Theissen, institutionalization began when itinerant preaching transformed into resident leadership (those living in a particular community over which they exercised leadership). A fully organized church system had evolved prior to Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in 325.

New Testament

Main article: Bible

Further information: Development of the Christian biblical canon and Development of the New Testament canon

A folio from Papyrus 46, an early-3rd-century collection of Pauline epistles

In the first century, new scriptures were written in Koine Greek. For Christians, these became the "New Testament", and the Hebrew Scriptures became the "Old Testament". Even in the formative period, these texts had considerable authority, and those seen as "scriptural" were generally agreed upon.

When discussion of canonization began, there were disputes over whether or not to include some books. A list of accepted books was established by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397. Spanning two millennia, the Bible has become one of the most influential works ever written, having contributed to the formation of Western law, art, literature, literacy and education.

Church fathers

Main article: Church Fathers

See also: Apostolic Fathers

The earliest orthodox writers of the first and second centuries, outside the writers of the New Testament itself, were first called the Apostolic Fathers in the sixth century. The title is used by the Church to describe the intellectual and spiritual teachers, leaders and philosophers of early Christianity. Writing from the first century to the close of the eighth, they defended their faith, wrote commentaries and sermons, recorded the Creeds and church history, and lived lives that were exemplars of their faith.

Late Antiquity to Early Middle Ages (313–600)

See also: Christianity in late antiquity, Christianity in the 4th century, and Christianity in the 5th century

From Constantine to the close of the sixth century, Christianity increasingly expanded. It experienced political transformation that sometimes created a difficult interplay between state and church, and sometimes led to its adoption as a state church. Armenia adopted Christianity as their state religion, as did Georgia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Increasing diversity led to the formation of competing orthodoxies. This period also saw the Christianization of aristocracies. Barbarians sacked Rome, invaded Britain, France, and Spain, seized land, and disrupted economies. After the political fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Christian church became society's unifying influence as it shifted to the European continent.

Influence of Constantine in Late Antiquity

Main article: Constantine the Great and Christianity

Further information: Historiography of Christianization of the Roman Empire and Religious policies of Constantine the Great

Icon depicting the Emperor Constantine (centre) and the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea (325) holding the Niceno–Constantinopolitan Creed of 381

The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great became the emperor in the West and the first Christian emperor in 313. He became sole emperor when he defeated Licinius, the emperor in the East, in 324. In 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, expressing tolerance for all religions, thereby legalizing Christian worship. Christianity did not become the official religion of the empire under Constantine, but the steps he took to support and protect it were vitally important in the history of Christianity.

Constantine established equal footing for Christian clergy by granting them the same immunities pagan priests had long enjoyed. He gave bishops judicial power. By intervening in church disputes, he initiated a precedent. He wrote laws that favored Christianity, and he personally endowed Christians with gifts of money, land and government positions. Instead of rejecting state authority, bishops were grateful, and this change in attitude proved to be critical to the further growth of the Church.

Constantine's church building was influential in the spread of Christianity. He devoted imperial and public funds, endowed his churches with wealth and lands, and provided revenue for their clergy and upkeep. This led to similar efforts on a local level, leading to the presence of churches in essentially all Roman cities by the late fourth century.

Regional developments (300–600)

See also: Christianization, Byzantine Empire, Justinian I, and Byzantine Papacy

Christianity had no central government, and differences developed in different locations. Donatism developed in North Africa. Some Germanic people adopted Arian Christianity while others, such as the Frankish King Clovis I, (who was the first to unite the Frankish tribes under one ruler), converted to catholicism.

Pope Celestine I sent Patrick, a former slave, back to the Irish who had enslaved him, to be a missionary to them in the early fifth century. Irish Christianity embraced syncretization with prior beliefs, and spread dramatically without the use of force.

Pope Gregory the Great sent a long-distance mission, an action without precedent in the history of late antique Christianities, to Anglo-Saxon England. The Gregorian mission landed in 596, and converted the Kingdom of Kent and the court of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. However, archaeology indicates Christianity had become an established minority faith in some parts of Britain before Irish missionaries went to Iona (from 563) and converted many Picts.

A "seismic moment" in Christian history took place in 612 when the Visigothic King Sisebut declared the obligatory conversion of all Jews in Spain, overriding Pope Gregory who had reiterated the traditional ban against forced conversion of the Jews in 591.

The extent of the Byzantine Empire under Justin I is shown in the darker color. The lighter color shows the conquests of Justinian I

Intense missionary activity between the fifth and eighth centuries led to eastern Iran, Arabia, central Asia, China, the coasts of India and Indonesia adopting Nestorian Christianity. Syrian Nestorians also settled in the Persian Empire. The Church of the East within the Persian/Sasanian Empire spread over modern Iraq, Iran, and parts of Central Asia. The shattering of the Sassanian Empire in the early 600s led upper-class refugees to move further east to China, entering Hsian-fu in 635.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 had little direct impact on the Eastern Roman Empire. By the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (527–565), Constantinople was the largest, most prosperous and powerful city in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Justinian attempted to reunite the empire by taking over both territory and the Church. From 537 to 752, this resulted in Roman Popes having to be approved by the Eastern emperor before they could be installed. This required consistency with Eastern policies, such as forcing conversion of pagans, that had not previously been policies in the west.

Heresy and the Ecumenical councils (325–681)

Main article: First seven ecumenical councils

See also: Arianism, Arian controversy, Nestorian schism, and Monophysitism

Further information: Diversity in early Christian theology, Germanic Christianity, and Gothic Christianity

Imagined portrait of Arius; detail of a Cretan School icon, c. 1591, depicting the First Council of Nicaea

From the fourth century on, theological controversies were public and often lengthy, and lasting consensus was slow to achieve. Seven ecumenical councils were convened to resolve these often heated disagreements. The first major disagreement was between Arianism, which said the divine nature of Jesus was not equal to the Father's, and orthodox trinitarianism which says it is equal. Arianism spread throughout most of the Roman Empire from the fourth century onwards. The First Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine in (325) to address it and other disagreements. Representatives of some 150 episcopal sees in Asia Minor attended along with many others. Nicaea and the First Council of Constantinople (381) resulted in a condemnation of Arian teachings and produced the Nicene Creed.

The Church of the East during the Middle Ages

The Third (431), Fourth (451), Fifth (583) and Sixth ecumenical councils (680–681) are characterized by attempts to explain Jesus' human and divine natures. By the late Roman period, Germanic tribes had migrated into the Western Empire, and were contributing to straining relations with the East, since many were Arian. The Church centered on Constantinople was "Chalcedonian". The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had attempted to define Jesus as human and divine without preferencing one nature over the other or dividing him in two. It was called in response to Nestorianism, which divided Christ's nature into two natures, while Monophysitism saw Christ as solely divine. Christians in Egypt and western Syria were largely monophysite and opposed to the Council, and the church of East Syria increasingly distanced itself from all of it.

The category of ‘schism’ developed as a middle ground, so as not to exclude 'the other' as ‘heretic’. Schisms within the churches of the Nicene tradition broke out after Chalcedon. The Armenian, Assyrian, and Egyptian churches combined into what is today known as Oriental Orthodoxy, one of three major branches of Eastern Christianity these controversies produced, along with the Church of the East in Persia and Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium.

Late Antique cultural synthesis

See also: Christianity as the Roman state religion, Christianity and Judaism, and Supersessionism

Further information: Christianity and paganism, Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire, Theodosius I, Religious policies of Constantius II, Christian monasticism, and Chronology of early Christian monasticism

Late Roman culture accommodated both Christian and Greco-Roman heritage. Christian intellectuals adapted Greek philosophy and Roman traditions to Christian use. Substantial growth in the third and fourth centuries, had made Christianity the majority religion by the mid-fourth century, and all Roman emperors after Constantine, except Julian, were Christian. Christian Emperors wanted the empire to become a Christian empire. Whether or not the Roman Empire of this period officially made Christianity its state religion continues to be debated. No legislation forcing the conversion of pagans existed until the reign of Justinian in A.D. 529.

Relationship with Grecro-Roman polytheism

Christians of the fourth century believed Constantine's conversion was evidence the Christian God had conquered the pagan gods in Heaven. This "triumph of Christianity" became the primary Christian narrative in writings of the late antique age in spite of the fact that Christians represented only ten to fifteen percent of the population in 313. As a minority, triumph did not generally involve an increase in violence aimed at polytheists - with some exceptions. In general, there was more violent rhetoric than actual violence. Christians responded to pagan polemic against Christianity by writing defenses and virulent anti-pagan counter-attacks of their own. Within the Church, the first choice of weapons were words.

Constantine wrote the first laws against sacrifice which, thereafter, largely disappeared by the mid fourth century. Peter Brown notes that the language of these anti-sacrifice laws "was uniformly vehement", and the "penalties they proposed were frequently horrifying", evidencing the intent of "terrorizing" the populace into accepting removal of this tradition. Even so, polytheistic religions continued. The fourth century historian Eusebius also attributes to Constantine widespread temple destruction, however, while the destruction of temples is in 43 written sources, only four have been confirmed archaeologically.

What is known with some certainty is that Constantine was vigorous in reclaiming confiscated properties for the Church, and he used reclamation to justify the destruction of some Greco-Roman temples such as Aphrodite's temple in Jerusalem. For the most part, Constantine simply neglected them. With some exceptions, only in the eighth century were temples in Rome converted into churches.

Relations with Jews

In the fourth century, Augustine of Hippo argued against the persecution of the Jewish people. A relative peace existed between Jews and Christians until the thirteenth century. Jews and Christians were both religious minorities claiming the same inheritance, and competing in a direct and sometimes violent clash. Significant Jewish communities existed throughout the Christian Roman empire, and attitudes varied in different areas. Although anti-Semitic violence erupted occasionally, attacks on Jews by mobs, local leaders and lower level clergy were carried out without the support of church leaders who generally followed Augustine's teachings.

Sometime before the fifth century, the theology of supersessionism emerged, claiming that Christianity had displaced Judaism as God's chosen people. Supersessionism was not an official or universally held doctrine, but replacement theology has been part of Christian thought through much of history. Many attribute the emergence of antisemitism to this doctrine while others make a distinction between supersessionism and modern anti-Semitism.

Coptic icon of St. Anthony the Great, father of Christian monasticism and early anchorite. The Coptic inscription reads Ⲡⲓⲛⲓϣϯ Ⲁⲃⲃⲁ Ⲁⲛⲧⲱⲛⲓ ('the Great Father Anthony')

Monasticism and public hospitals

Christian monasticism emerged in the third century, and by the fifth century, was a dominant force in all areas of late antique culture. Monastics developed a health care system which allowed the sick to remain within the monastery as a special class afforded special benefits and care. This destigmatized illness and formed the basis for future public health care. The first public hospital (the Basiliad) was founded by Basil the Great in 369.

Basil was the central figure in the development of monasticism in the East. In the West, it was Benedict, who created the Rule of Saint Benedict, which would become the most common rule throughout the Middle Ages and the starting point for other monastic rules.

Early to High Middle Ages (600–1100)

Main article: Christianity in the Middle Ages

See also: Christianization of Europe, Christianity in the 7th century, and Christianity in the 8th century

Further information: Syriac Christianity, Church of the East, Carolingian Renaissance, Carolingian church, Donation of Pepin, Frankish Papacy, Celtic Christianity, and Germanic Christianity

In this era, classical Graeco-Roman thinking, Germanic culture and Christian ethos merged into a new civilization centered in Europe. After the fall of Rome, the Church provided what little security there was. Within this uncertain environment, the Church was like an early version of a welfare state sponsoring public hospitals, orphanages, hospices, and hostels (inns). The increasing number of monasteries and convents supplied food for all during famine and regularly distributed food to the poor.

Monasteries actively preserved ancient texts, classical craft and artistic skills, while maintaining an intellectual and spiritual culture. They supported literacy within their schools, scriptoria and libraries. They were models of productivity and economic resourcefulness, teaching their local communities animal husbandry, cheese making, wine making, and various other skills. Medical practice was highly important and medieval monasteries are best known for their contributions to medical tradition. They also made advances in sciences such as astronomy, and St. Benedict's Rule (480–543) impacted politics and law. The formation of these organized bodies of believers gradually carved out a series of social spaces with some amount of independence, distinct from political and familial authority, thereby revolutionizing social history.

Palatine Chapel in Aachen was part of Charlemagne's palace. It remains a central monument of the Carolingian Renaissance.

Regional developments (600-1000)

See also: History of European universities, Eastern Christianity, Christianity in the Middle Ages, Christianization of Serbs, Christianization of Bohemia, and Christianization of Moravia

Further information: Eastern Orthodox opposition to papal supremacy

By the end of the first millennium, a rich and varied culture, characterized by ethnic diversity, had fully developed in Byzantium centered around its greatest city. Constantinople had become famous for its prosperity and power, its numerous market places, massive walls, magnificent monuments, and the religious devotion of its inhabitants, which was thought to have won it the blessing and protection of God.

The rise of Islam (600 to 1517) unleashed a series of Arab military campaigns that conquered Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia by 650, and added North Africa and most of Spain by 740. The Franks and Constantinople were able to withstand this medieval juggernaut, but Spain and Sicily and some of Eastern Europe experienced Islamic conquest.

Andalusi Christians, from the Iberian Peninsula lived under Muslim rule from 711 to 1492. The martyrdoms of forty-eight Christians took place in the Córdoba between 850 and 859 AD for defending their Christian faith. Executed under Abd al-Rahman II and Muhammad I, the record shows the executions were for capital violations of Islamic law, including apostasy and blasphemy. In Spain from the eighth century onward, Muslim, Christian and Jewish blended, leaving a profound cultural imprint.

In the 720s, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian banned the pictorial representation of Christ, saints, and biblical scenes, destroying much early artistic history. The West condemned Leo's iconoclasm.

Charlemagne began the Carolingian Renaissance in the 800s. Sometimes called a Christian renaissance, it was a period of intellectual and cultural revival of literature, arts, and scriptural studies, a renovation of law and the courts, and the promotion of literacy.

Modern western universities have their origins directly in the Medieval Church. The earliest were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Oxford (1096), and the University of Paris where the faculty was of international renown (c. 1150). These became the first institutes of higher education in Europe since the sixth century. They began as cathedral schools, then formed into self-governing corporations with charters. Divided into faculties which specialized in law, medicine, theology or liberal arts, each held quodlibeta (free-for-all) theological debates amongst faculty and students, and awarded degrees.

After 1071, when the Seljuk Turks closed access for Christian pilgrimages and defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert, the Eastern Emperor Alexius I asked for aid from Pope Urban II. Historian Jaroslav Folda writes that Urban II responded by calling upon the knights of Christendom at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, to "go to the aid of their brethren in the Holy Land and to liberate the Christian Holy sites from the heathen", an appeal aimed at those with sufficient wealth and position to subsidize their own journey. The first crusade began.

Christianization creates East Central Europe (700–900)

St. Cyril and St. Methodius monument on Mt. Radhošť

Christianization and political centralization went hand in hand in creating the nation-states of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Hungary, and Russia. Local elites wanted to convert because they gained prestige and power through matrimonial alliances and participation in imperial rituals.

Saints Cyril and Methodius played the key missionary roles in spreading Christianity to the Slavic people beginning in 863. For three and a half years, they translated the Gospels into the Old Church Slavonic language, developing the first Slavic alphabet, and with their disciples, the Cyrillic script. It became the first literary language of the Slavs and, eventually, the educational foundation for all Slavic nations.

Eastern crusade begins in 1095

Main articles: Crusades and Northern Crusades

The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Crusader states with their strongholds in the Holy Land at their height, between the First and the Second Crusade (1135)

After 1071, when the Seljuk Turks closed access for Christian pilgrimages and defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert, the Emperor Alexius I asked for aid from Pope Urban II. Historian Jaroslav Folda writes that Urban II responded by calling upon the knights of Christendom at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, to "go to the aid of their brethren in the Holy Land and to liberate the Christian Holy sites from the heathen", an appeal aimed at those with sufficient wealth and position to subsidize their own journey. The First Crusade captured Antioch in 1099, then Jerusalem, establishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The Second Crusade began after Edessa was taken by Islamic forces in 1144. Christians lost Jerusalem in 1187 through the catastrophic defeat of the Franks at the Horns of Hattin. The Third Crusade did not regain the major Holy sites even though Richard the Lionheart defeated the significantly larger army of the Ayyubid Sultanate led by Saladin in 1191.

The Fourth Crusade, begun by Innocent III in 1202 was subverted by the Venetians. They funded it, then ran out of money and instructed the crusaders to go to Constantinople and get money there. Crusaders sacked the city and other parts of Asia Minor, established the Latin Empire of Constantinople in Greece and Asia Minor, and contributed to the downfall of the Byzantine Empire. Five numbered crusades to the Holy Land culminated in the siege of Acre in 1291, essentially ending Western presence in the Holy Land. Crusades led to the development of national identities in European nations, increased division with the East, and produced cultural change for all involved.

Late Middle Ages and Christendom (1100–1500)

Further information: History of the Eastern Orthodox Church, History of Oriental Orthodoxy, Photian schism, East–West Schism, Degrees of Eastern Orthodox monasticism, Middle Ages, Cluniac Reforms, English Benedictine Reform, and Gregorian Reform

Before there was a political Europe, western societies worked toward creating Christendom: a loosely interdependent community of Christian kingdoms and peoples with a shared religious tradition. Between 1000 and 1300, the Church became the leading institution of this world. Under Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085), the Roman Church had become what John Witte Jr. calls "an autonomous legal and political corporation" that contributed to both church and society becoming increasingly refined, educated and secular. After 1300, the Church entered into a decline that ended in the division of the Church. The intense and rapid changes of this period are considered some of the most significant in the history of Christianity.

Moral power (1100–1200)

The spread of Cistercians from their original sites in Western-Central Europe during the Middle Ages

In both the East and West, the Church of 1100–1200 had immense authority. The key to its moral power in Europe was three monastic reformation movements that swept the continent. Owing to its stricter adherence to the reformed Benedictine rule, the Abbey of Cluny, first established in 910, became the leading center of Western monasticism into the early twelfth century. The Cistercian movement was the second wave of reform after 1098, when they became a primary force of technological advancement and diffusion in medieval Europe.

Clerks studying astronomy and geometry. Early 15th century painting, France.

Beginning in the twelfth century, the pastoral Franciscan Order was instituted by the followers of Francis of Assisi; later, the Dominican Order was begun by St. Dominic. Called Mendicant orders, they represented a change in understanding a monk's calling as contemplative, instead seeing it as a call to actively reform the world through preaching, missionary activity, and education.

This new calling to reform the world led the Dominicans to dominate the new universities, travel about preaching against heresy, and to participate in the Medieval Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade and the Northern Crusades. Christian policy denying the existence of witches and witchcraft would later be challenged by the Dominicans allowing them to participate in witch trials.

Age of synthesis (1150–1300)

Between 1150 and 1200, intrepid Christian scholars traveled to formerly Muslim locations in Sicily and Spain. Fleeing Muslims had abandoned their libraries, and among the treasure trove of books, the searchers found the works of Aristotle and Euclid and more. What had been lost to the West after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, was found, and its rediscovery created a paradigm shift in the history of Christianity.

Insights gained from Aristotle dramatically impacted the Church, contributing to the Renaissance of the 12th century. Innovations of this renaissance included High Scholasticism and the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

It also included a revival of the scientific study of natural phenomena. Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) devised a step-by-step scientific method that used math and the testing of hypotheses; William of Ockham (1300–1349) developed a principle of economy to remove the irrelevant; Roger Bacon (1220–1292) advocated for an experimental method that he used in his study of optics. Historians of science credit these and other medieval Christians with the beginnings of what, in time, became modern science and led to the scientific revolution in the West.

The reconciliation of reason and faith, produced through Aristotle by Aquinas and the scholastics, made the late 1100s and the 1200s into an age of synthesis of the secular and Christian. This synthesis formed a new foundation for society with the ability to support what would become the future societies of Western Europe.

Beliefs and practices of the Middle Ages

See also: Christian mysticism; Christianity in the Middle Ages; Italian Renaissance; Mary, mother of Jesus; and Gregorian Reform

Matthews and Platt have written that the Church owed its influence in every facet of medieval life to the "tireless work of the clergy and the powerful effect of the Christian belief system". Most medieval people believed that access to Heaven was available only through participating in the Church's sacraments (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, marriage, last rights, and ordination for priests), and living morally. Confession and penance had become widespread from the eleventh century, and by 1300, were an integral part of both ritual and belief.

The Virgin in Prayer, 17th century by Sassoferrato

The Gregorian Reform (1050–1080) had established new law requiring the consent of both parties before a marriage could be performed, a minimum age for marriage, and codified marriage as a sacrament. Thirteenth century theologians made the union a binding contract, making abandonment prosecutable with dissolution of marriage overseen by Church authorities. Although the Church abandoned tradition to allow women the same rights as men to dissolve a marriage, in practice men were granted dissolutions more frequently than women.

Throughout the Middle Ages, abbesses and female superiors of monastic houses were powerful figures whose influence could rival that of male bishops and abbots. The veneration of Mary developed within the monasteries in western medieval Europe; Medieval European Christians praised Mary for making God tangible.

Michelangelo's Pietà (1498–99) in St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City

Having begun in Christianity's first 500 years, Christian mysticism came to its full flowering in the Middle Ages.

People equated the purpose of Scripture with that of the Church. As scholars of the Renaissance created textual criticism, forgeries such as the Donation of Constantine were revealed. Popes of the Middle Ages had depended upon the document to prove their political authority.

The Church became a leading patron of art and architecture and commissioned and supported such artists as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, Fra Angelico, Donatello, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation leading to the development of classical music and all its derivatives.

Centralization, persecution and decline (1100–1450)

See also: Centralisation, History of Christian thought on persecution and tolerance, Inquisition, Spanish Inquisition, Portuguese Inquisition, and Goa Inquisition

Further information: Bohemian Reformation, English Reformation, Proto-Protestantism, Papal supremacy, Avignon Papacy, and Western Schism

In the pivotal twelfth century, Europe began laying the foundation for its gradual transformation from the medieval to the modern. As polities became increasingly secular, they began focusing on building their own kingdoms, rather than Christendom, by centralizing power into the State. To accomplish this, they attacked the older, local, kinship-based systems by defining minorities as a threat to the social order, then using stereotyping, propaganda and the new courts of inquisition to prosecute them. Persecution became a core element and a functional tool of power in the political development of Western society. By the 1300s, segregation and discrimination in law, politics, and the economy, had become established in all European states.

Centralization and secularization began in the church as well. Popes of the fourteenth century became focused on power and politics. Elite Italian families used their wealth to secure episcopal offices while popes worked to centralize power into the papal position and build a papal monarchy. The Church became a large, multilevel organization with the Pope at the peak of a strict hierarchy. Supporting him were layers of staff, administrators and advisers: the papal curia. An entire system of courts formed the judicial branch.

Canon law of the Catholic Church (Latin: jus canonicum) was the first modern Western legal system, and is the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West, predating European common law and civil law traditions. Civil and canon law became a major aspect of church culture in the 1300s forming a complex system that generally omitted Christianity's principles of equity and universality. Most bishops and Popes of the Late Middle Ages were trained lawyers rather than theologians.

Popes of the 1300s were caught up in politics, and no longer focused on meeting the moral and spiritual needs of the Church or the people. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, people experienced plague, famine and war that ravaged most of the continent. There was social unrest, urban riots, peasant revolts and renegade feudal armies. People faced all of this with a church unable to provide much moral leadership because of its own internal conflict and corruption.

Portrait of Pope John XXII (1316-1334) (by Giuseppe Franchi) who was referred to as "the banker of Avignon"

Devoted and virtuous nuns and monks became increasingly rare, and monastic reform, which had been a major force, was largely absent. Popes began losing prestige and power. Pope Boniface VII (1294-1303) wrote a papal bull in 1302 claiming papal superiority over all secular rulers. Philip IV, king of France, answered by sending an army to arrest him. Boniface fled for his life.

In 1309, Pope Clement V moved to Avignon in southern France in search of relief from Rome's factional politics. Seven popes resided there in the Avignon Papacy, developing a reputation for corruption and greed, until Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377. After Gregory's death, the papal conclave met in 1378, in Rome, and elected an Italian Urban VI to succeed Gregory. The French cardinals did not approve, so they held a second conclave electing Robert of Geneva instead. This began the Western Schism.

In 1409, the Pisan council called for the resignation of both popes, electing a third to replace them. Both Popes refused to resign, giving the Church three popes. The pious became disgusted. Five years later, the Holy Roman Emperor called the Council of Constance (1414–1418), deposed all three popes, and in 1417, elected Pope Martin V in their place.

Jan Hus defending his theses at the Council of Constance (1415), painting by the Czech artist Václav Brožík

John Wycliffe (1320–1384), an English scholastic philosopher and theologian, attended the Council of Constance and urged the Church to give up its property (which produced much of the Church's wealth), and to once again embrace poverty and simplicity, to stop being subservient to the state and its politics, and to deny papal authority. He was accused of heresy, convicted and sentenced to death, but died before implementation. The Lollards followed his teachings, played a role in the English Reformation, and were persecuted for heresy after Wycliffe's death.

Jan Hus (1369–1415), a Czech based in Prague, was influenced by Wycliffe and spoke out against the abuses and corruption he saw in the Catholic Church there. He was also accused of heresy and condemned to death. After his death, Hus became a powerful symbol of Czech nationalism and the impetus for the Bohemian/Czech and German Reformations.

Heresy and inquisition

By the end of the eleventh century, charges of heresy, which had previously applied to bishops and church leaders who understood theology and doctrine, began being applied to ordinary people. Heresy was seen as a religious, political, and social issue affecting the stability of society, so prosecuting it included both church and state. Inquisition was the court that dealt with it. The Medieval Inquisition included the Episcopal Inquisition (1184–1230) and the later Papal Inquisition (1230s–1240s). Neither was a unified institution.

The increase in heresy in the Middle Ages led to the founding of the Dominican order. Dominicans evolved a theology of earthly justice and penance which combined the belief that bodily pain and affliction, including self-flagellation, was a kind of reimbursement for sins with the belief that this standard applied to all people. Execution was infrequent and a secular responsibility before 1230, but there is little evidence that inquisitors distanced themselves from it. Violence was inflicted by their fellow Dominicans upon Dominicans who resisted inquisition as intrusive and unjust. The belief held by Dominicans that only they could correctly discern good and evil has been cited as a contributing factor to the riots and public opposition that formed against them. The Medieval Inquisition was contested stridently as "unchristian" and "a destroyer of [the] gospel legacy", both in and outside the Church. After 1250, jurisdiction became local and limited, and lack of support and open opposition often obstructed it.

The history of the Inquisition divides into two major parts: its Papal creation in the early twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and its transformation into permanent secular governmental bureaucracies between 1478 and 1542. Historian Helen Rawlings says, "the Spanish Inquisition was different [from earlier inquisitions] in one fundamental respect: it was responsible to the crown rather than the Pope and was used to consolidate state interest.

The Portuguese Inquisition, in close relationship with the Church, was also controlled by the crown who established a government board, known as the General Council, to oversee it. The Grand Inquisitor, chosen by the king, was nearly always a member of the royal family.

T. F. Mayer, historian, writes that "the Roman Inquisition operated to serve the papacy's long standing political aims in Naples, Venice and Florence". Its activity was primarily bureaucratic. The Roman Inquisition is probably best known for its condemnation of Galileo.

Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229)

Main article: Albigensian Crusade

Pope Innocent III and the king of France, Philip Augustus, joined in 1209 in a military campaign that was promulgated as necessary for eliminating the Albigensian heresy. Once begun, the campaign quickly took a political turn.

Throughout the campaign, Innocent vacillated, sometimes taking the side favoring crusade, then siding against it and calling for its end. In 1229, when the crusade finally did end, the campaign no longer had crusade status. The king's army had seized and occupied the lands of nobles who had not sponsored Cathars, but had been in the good graces of the Church, which had been unable to protect them. Thereafter, the entire region came under the rule of the French king and became southern France. Catharism continued for another hundred years (until 1350).

Baltic wars (1147–1316)

When the Second Crusade was called to protect Edessa, the nobles in Eastern Europe refused to go. These rulers saw crusade as a tool for territorial expansion, alliance building, and the empowerment of their own church and state. The Balts, the last major polytheistic population in Europe, had raided surrounding countries for several centuries. Subduing them was therefore more important to the Eastern nobles.

In 1147, Eugenius' Divina dispensatione gave eastern nobility indulgences for crusades in the Baltic area. The Northern Crusades followed intermittently, at times with and without papal support, from 1147 to 1316. There was a general acceptance of forced conversion during the Baltic crusades, despite a continued theological emphasis on voluntary conversion.

Spain (1469–1492)

Main articles: Reconquista and Spanish Inquisition

San Pedro de la Nave, one of the oldest churches in Spain.

Between 711 and 718, the Iberian peninsula had been conquered by Muslims in the Umayyad conquest. The military struggle to reclaim the peninsula from Muslim rule took place for centuries until the Christian Kingdoms reconquered the Moorish state of Al-Ándalus in 1492.

Depiction of the Battle of Navas de Tolosa by 19th-century painter Francisco de Paula Van Halen.

Isabel and Ferdinand married in 1469, united Spain with themselves as the first king and queen, fought the Muslims in the Reconquista and soon after established the Spanish Inquisition.

The Spanish inquisition was originally authorized by the Pope in answer to royal fears that Conversos or Marranos (Jewish converts) were spying and conspiring with the Muslims to sabotage the new state. "New Christians" had begun to appear as a socio-religious designation and legal distinction. Muslim converts were known as Moriscos.

Early inquisitors proved so severe that the Pope soon opposed the Spanish Inquisition and attempted to shut it down. Ferdinand declined, and is said to have pressured the Pope so that, in October 1483, a papal bull conceded control of the inquisition to the Spanish crown. The inquisition became the first truly national, unified and centralized institution of the nascent Spanish state.

In the East (1000–1500)

See also: Chalcedonian Christianity and East–West Schism

Further information: Christianity in the Ottoman Empire, Persecution of Christians § Ottoman Empire, and History of the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Ottoman Empire

The Copts, Melkites, Nestorians, and the Monophysites sometimes called Jacobites in Syria, continued to exist in lands that came under Muslim rule. Islam set the social norm as Christians were dhimma. This cultural status guaranteed Christians rights of protection, but discriminated against them through legal inferiority. Christianity declined demographically, culturally and socially. By the end of the eleventh century, Christianity was in full retreat in Mesopotamia and inner Iran, but the Christian communities further to the east continued to exist.

Hagia Sophia was the religious and spiritual centre of the Eastern Orthodox Church for nearly one thousand years. The Hagia Sophia and the Parthenon were converted into mosques. Violent persecutions of Christians were common and reached their climax in the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides.

Many differences between East and West had existed since Antiquity. There were disagreements over whether Pope or Patriarch should lead the Church, whether mass should be conducted in Latin or Greek, whether priests must remain celibate, and other points of doctrine such as the Filioque Clause which was added to the Nicene creed by the west. These were intensified by cultural, geographical, geopolitical, and linguistic differences. Eventually, this produced the East–West Schism, also known as the "Great Schism" of 1054, which separated the Church into Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

The Byzantine Empire had reached its greatest territorial extension in the sixth century under Justinian I. For the next 800 years, it steadily contracted under the onslaught of its hostile neighbors in both East and West. After 1302, the Ottoman Empire was built upon the ruins of what had once been the great Byzantine Empire.

By 1330, the Ottomans had largely conquered Anatolia, conquering much of the Balkans by the end of the century. The Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, destroying the last vestige of the Roman Empire. The flight of Eastern Christians from Constantinople, and the manuscripts they carried with them, is one of the factors that prompted the literary renaissance in the West.

The Russian church

A coalition of Russian polities headed by the Principality of Moscow defeated the Turkic and Mongol Golden Horde at the Battle of Kulikovo. This began a period of transformation fusing state power and religious mission, transforming the Kievan Rus from a series of small statelets into a unified Russian state.

Early modern upheaval (1500–1750)

See also: Early modern period, Christianity in the modern era, Christianity in the 16th century, Christianity in the 17th century, Christianity in the 18th century, European colonization of the Americas, and Catholic Church and the Age of Discovery

Following the geographic discoveries of the 1400s and 1500s, increasing population and inflation led the emerging nation-states of Portugal, Spain, and France, the Dutch Republic, and England to explore, conquer, colonize and exploit the newly discovered territories and their indigenous peoples. Different state actors created colonies that varied widely. Some colonies had institutions that allowed native populations to reap some benefits. Others became extractive colonies with predatory rule that produced an autocracy with a dismal record.

Colonialism opened the door for Christian missionaries who accompanied the early explorers, or soon followed them. Although most missionaries avoided politics, they also generally identified themselves with the indigenous people amongst whom they worked and lived. According to Dana L. Robert, for 500 years, vocal missionaries have challenged colonial oppression and defended human rights, even opposing their own governments in matters of social justice.

Historians and political scientists see the establishment of unified, sovereign, nation-states, which led directly to the development of modern Europe, as a singularly important political development of the sixteenth century. However, while sovereign states were unifying, Christendom was coming apart.

Reformation and response (1517–1700)

Main articles: Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Further information: Lutheranism, Anglican, Dutch Reformed Church, Reformed churches, History of Calvinism, Protestantism, History of Protestantism, Radical Reformation, and European wars of religion

See also: Council of Trent and Age of Enlightenment

Martin Luther initiated the Reformation with his Ninety-five Theses in 1517.

The break up of Christendom culminates in the Protestant Reformation (1517–1648). Beginning with Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the church door in Wittenburg in 1517, there was no actual schism until 1521 when edicts handed down by the Diet of Worms condemned Luther and officially banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from defending or propagating his ideas.

Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and many others protested against corruptions such as simony (the buying and selling of church offices), the holding of multiple church offices by one person at the same time, and the sale of indulgences. The Protestant position later included the Five solae (sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria), the priesthood of all believers, Law and Gospel, and the two kingdoms doctrine.

Three important traditions to emerge directly from the Reformation were the Lutheran, Reformed, and the Anglican traditions. Beginning in 1519, Huldrych Zwingli spread John Calvin's teachings in Switzerland leading to the Swiss Reformation.

At the same time, a collection of loosely related groups that included Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Evangelical Rationalists, began the Radical Reformation in Germany and Switzerland. They opposed Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican church-state theories, supporting instead a full separation from the state.

Counter-reformation

The Roman Catholic Church soon struck back, launching its own Counter-Reformation beginning with Pope Paul III (1534–1549), the first in a series of 10 reforming popes from 1534 to 1605. In an effort to reclaim the moral high ground, a list of books detrimental to faith or morals was established, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which included the works of Luther, Calvin and other Protestants along with writings condemned as obscene.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books forbidden by the Catholic Church.

New monastic orders arose including the Jesuits. Resembling a military company in its hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, their vow of loyalty to the Pope set them apart from other monastic orders, leading them to be called "the shock troops of the papacy". Jesuits soon became the Church's chief weapon against Protestantism.

Monastic reform also led to the development of new, yet orthodox forms of spirituality, such as that of the Spanish mystics and the French school of spirituality.

The Council of Trent (1545–1563) denied each Protestant claim, and laid the foundation of Roman Catholic policies up to the twenty-first century.

War

Reforming zeal and Catholic denial spread through much of Europe and became entangled with local politics. Already involved in dynastic wars, the quarreling royal houses became polarized into the two religious camps. "Religious" wars resulted ranging from international wars to internal conflicts. War began in the Holy Roman Empire with the minor Knights' Revolt in 1522, then intensified in the First Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) and the Second Schmalkaldic War (1552–1555). Seven years after the Peace of Augsburg, France became the centre of religious wars which lasted 36 years. The final wave was the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). The involvement of foreign powers made it the largest and most disastrous.

The causes of these wars were mixed. Many scholars see them as fought to obtain security and freedom for differing religious confessions, however, scholars have largely interpreted these wars as struggles for political independence that coincided with the break up of medieval empires into the modern nation states.

Tolerance

War had been fueled by the "unquestioning assumption that a single religion should exist within each community" say Matthews and Platt. However, debate on toleration now occupied the attention of every version of the Christian faith. Debate centered on whether peace required allowing only one faith and punishing heretics, or if ancient opinions defending leniency, based on the parable of the tares, should be revived.

Radical Protestants steadfastly sought toleration for heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. Anglicans and other Christian moderates also wrote and argued for toleration. Deism emerged, and in the 1690s, following debates that started in the 1640s, a non-Christian third group also advocated for religious toleration. It became necessary to rethink on a political level, all of the State's reasons for persecution. Over the next two and a half centuries, many treaties and political declarations of tolerance followed, until concepts of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of thought became established in most western countries.

Science and the Galileo Affair (1610)

Main articles: Galileo Galilei and Christianity and science

Galileo before the Holy Office, a 19th-century painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

The condemnation of Galileo Galilei for his vocal defense of Heliocentrism caused an internal uproar in scientific circles on whether the judges were condemning Galileo alone, or the "new science" and anyone who attempted to displace Aristotle. This lead to significant tensions between the scientific community and the church, which have waxed and waned into the modern day.

Witch trials (c. 1450–1750)

See also: Christian views on magic, Witch-hunt, Witch trials in the early modern period, Salem witch trials, and Little ice age

Until the 1300s, the official position of the Roman Catholic Church was that witches did not exist. While historians have been unable to pinpoint a single cause of what became known as the "witch frenzy", scholars have noted that, without changing church doctrine, a new but common stream of thought developed at every level of society that witches were both real and malevolent. Records show the belief in magic had remained so widespread among the rural people, it has convinced some historians that Christianization had not been as successful as previously supposed. The main pressure to prosecute witches came from the common people, and trials were mostly civil trials. There is broad agreement that approximately 100,000 people were prosecuted, of which 80% were women, and 40,000 to 50,000 people were executed between 1561 and 1670.

The Enlightenment

There is a historiographical consensus that the Enlightenment was anti-Christian, anti-Church and anti-religious. However, twenty-first century scholars tend to see the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment as complex with many regional and national variations. The Enlightenment was not merely a war with Christianity, since many changes to the Church were advocated by Christian moderates.

Critique of Christianity began among the more extreme Protestant reformers who were enraged by fear, tyranny and persecution. Abuses inherent in political absolutism, practiced by kings and supported by Catholicism, gave rise to a virulent anti-clerical, anti-Catholic, and anti-Christian sentiment that emerged in the 1680s.

Revolution and modernity (1750–1945)

Further information: Abolitionism, Late modern period, Christianity in the 18th century, Christianity in the 19th century, Christianity in the 20th century, Restorationism, and Restoration Movement

After 1750, secularization at every level of European society can be observed. Enlightenment had shifted the paradigm, and various ground-breaking discoveries such as Galileo's, led to the Scientific revolution (1600-1750) and an upsurge in skepticism. Virtually everything in western culture was subjected to systematic doubt including religious beliefs. Biblical criticism emerged using scientific historical and literary criteria, and human reason, to understand the Bible. This new approach made study of the Bible secularized and scholarly, and more democratic, as scholars began writing in their native languages making their works available to a larger public. During the Age of Revolution, the cultural center of Christianity shifted to the New World. The American Revolution and its aftermath included legal assurances of religious freedom, beginning a general turn to religious plurality.

Awakenings (1730s–1850s)

Revival, known as the First Great Awakening, swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s. Both religious and political in nature, it had roots in German Pietism and British Evangelicalism, and was a response to the extreme rationalism of biblical criticism, the anti-Christian tenets of the Enlightenment, and its threat of assimilation by the modern state.

Beginning among the Presbyterians, revival quickly spread to Congregationalists (Puritans) and Baptists, creating American Evangelicalism and Wesleyan Methodism. Battles over the movement and its dramatic style raged at both the congregational and denominational levels. This caused the division of American Protestantism into political 'Parties', for the first time, which eventually led to critical support for the American Revolution.

In places like Connecticut and Massachusetts, where one denomination received state funding, churches now began to lobby local legislatures to end that inequity by applying the Reformation principle separating church and state. Theological pluralism became the new norm.

The Second Great Awakening (1800–1830s) extolled moral reform as the Christian alternative to armed revolution. They established societies, separate from any church, to begin social reform movements concerning abolition, women's rights, temperance and to "teach the poor to read". These were pioneers in developing nationally integrated forms of organization, a practice which businesses adopted that led to the consolidations and mergers that reshaped the American economy. Here lie the beginnings of the Latter Day Saint movement, the Restoration Movement and the Holiness movement. The Third Great Awakening began from 1857 and was most notable for taking the movement throughout the world, especially in English speaking countries.

Restorationists were prevalent in America, but they have not described themselves as a reform movement but have, instead, described themselves as restoring the Church to its original form as found in the book of Acts. It gave rise to the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, Adventism, and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

An example of an anti-slavery tract

Born into slavery, Sojourner Truth escaped with her infant daughter in 1826, became an abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. This photograph was taken in Swartekill, New York, 1870 (cropped, restored)

For over 300 years, Christians in Europe and North America participated in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Moral objections had surfaced very soon after the establishment of the trade. In the earliest instances, denunciations came from Catholic priests. Next, emerging in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and followed by Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists, abolitionists campaigned, wrote, and spread pamphlets against the Atlantic slave trade. Quakers helped guide these tracts into print and organized the first anti-slavery societies. The Second Great Awakening continued the call.

In the years after the American Revolution, black congregations sprang up around the English speaking world led by black preachers who brought revival, promoted communal and cultural autonomy, and provided the institutional base for keeping abolitionism alive.

Abolitionism did not flourish in absolutist states. It was the Protestant revivalists who followed the Quaker example, African Americans themselves, and the new American republic, that led to the "gradual but comprehensive abolition of slavery" in the West.

Church, state and society

Revolution broke the power of the Old World aristocracy, offered hope to the disenfranchised, and enabled the middle class to reap the economic benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Scholars have since identified a positive correlation between the rise of Protestantism and human capital formation, work ethic, economic development, and the development of the state system. Weber says this contributed to economic growth and the development of banking across Northern Europe.

Protestant Missions (1800s–1945)

While the sixteenth century is generally seen as the "great age of Catholic expansion", the nineteenth century was that for Protestantism. Missionaries had a significant role in shaping multiple nations, cultures and societies. A missionary's first job was to get to know the indigenous people and work with them to translate the Bible into their local language. Approximately 90% were completed, and the process also generated a written grammar, a lexicon of native traditions, and a dictionary of the local language. This was used to teach in missionary schools resulting in the spread of literacy.

Lamin Sanneh writes that native cultures responded with "movements of indigenization and cultural liberation" that developed national literatures, mass printing, and voluntary organizations which have been instrumental in generating a democratic legacy. On the one hand, the political legacies of colonialism include political instability, violence and ethnic exclusion, which is also linked to civil strife and civil war. On the other hand, the legacy of Protestant missions is one of beneficial long-term effects on human capital, political participation, and democratization.

In America, missionaries played a crucial role in the acculturation of the American Indians. The history of boarding schools for the indigenous populations in Canada and the US shows a continuum of experiences ranging from happiness and refuge to suffering, forced assimilation, and abuse. The majority of native children did not attend boarding school at all. Of those that did, many did so in response to requests sent by native families to the Federal government, while many others were forcibly taken from their homes. Over time, missionaries came to respect the virtues of native culture, and spoke against national policies.

Twentieth century

Liberal Christianity, sometimes called liberal theology, is an umbrella term for religious movements within late 18th, 19th and 20th-century Christianity. According to theologian Theo Hobson, liberal Christianity has two traditions. Before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, liberalism was synonymous with Christian Idealism in that it imagined a liberal State with political and cultural liberty.

The second tradition was from seventeenth century rationalism's efforts to wean Christianity from its "irrational cultic" roots. Lacking any grounding in Christian "practice, ritual, sacramentalism, church and worship", liberal Christianity lost touch with the fundamental necessity of faith and ritual in maintaining Christianity. This led to the birth of fundamentalism and liberalism's decline.

Fundamentalist Christianity is a movement that arose mainly within British and American Protestantism in the late 19th century and early 20th century in reaction to modernism. Before 1919, fundamentalism was loosely organized and undisciplined. Its most significant early movements were the holiness movement and the millenarian movement with its premillennial expectations of the second coming.

In 1925, fundamentalists participated in the Scopes trial, and by 1930, the movement appeared to be dying. Then in the 1930s, Neo-orthodoxy, a theology against liberalism combined with a reevaluation of Reformation teachings, began uniting moderates of both sides. In the 1940s, "new-evangelicalism" established itself as separate from fundamentalism. Today, fundamentalism is less about doctrine than political activism.

Christianity and Nazism

Pope Pius XI

See also: Persecution of Christians in Nazi Germany and Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

Further information: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany, Confessing Church, Kirchenkampf, German Christians (movement), and Positive Christianity

Pope Pius XI declared in Mit brennender Sorge (English: "With rising anxiety") that fascist governments had hidden "pagan intentions" and expressed the irreconcilability of the Catholic position with totalitarian fascist state worship which placed the nation above God, fundamental human rights, and dignity.

Catholic priests were executed in concentration camps alongside Jews; 2,600 Catholic priests were imprisoned in Dachau, and 2,000 of them were executed (cf. Priesterblock). A further 2,700 Polish priests were executed (a quarter of all Polish priests), and 5,350 Polish nuns were either displaced, imprisoned, or executed. Many Catholic laymen and clergy played notable roles in sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, including Pope Pius XII. The head rabbi of Rome became a Catholic in 1945 and, in honour of the actions the pope undertook to save Jewish lives, he took the name Eugenio (the pope's first name).

Most leaders and members of the largest Protestant church in Germany, the German Evangelical Church, which had a long tradition of nationalism and support of the state, supported the Nazis when they came to power. A smaller contingent, about a third of German Protestants, formed the Confessing Church which opposed Nazism. In a study of sermon content, William Skiles says "Confessing Church pastors opposed the Nazi regime on three fronts... first, they expressed harsh criticism of Nazi persecution of Christians and the German churches; second, they condemned National Socialism as a false ideology that worships false gods; and third, they challenged Nazi anti-Semitic ideology by supporting Jews as the chosen people of God and Judaism as a historic foundation of Christianity".

Nazis interfered in The Confessing Church's affairs, harassed its members, executed mass arrests and targeted well known pastors like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, a pacifist, was arrested, found guilty in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and executed.

Russian Orthodoxy

Further information: Religion in the Soviet Union

The Russian Orthodox Church held a privileged position in the Russian Empire, expressed in the motto of the late empire from 1833: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Populism. Nevertheless, the Church reform of Peter I in the early 18th century had placed the Orthodox authorities under the control of the tsar. An ober-procurator appointed by the tsar ran the committee which governed the Church between 1721 and 1918: the Most Holy Synod. The Church became involved in the various campaigns of russification and contributed to antisemitism.

Demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow on the orders of Joseph Stalin, 5 December 1931, consistent with the doctrine of state atheism in the USSR

The Bolsheviks and other Russian revolutionaries saw the Church, like the tsarist state, as an enemy of the people. Criticism of atheism was strictly forbidden and sometimes led to imprisonment. Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals, as well as execution.

In the first five years after the October Revolution, one journalist reported 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed. This included former nobility like the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, at this point a nun, the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, the Princes Ioann Konstantinvich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, Grand Duke Sergei's secretary, Fyodor Remez; and Varvara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand Duchess Elizabeth's convent. Other scholarship reports that 8,000 were killed in 1922 during the conflict over church valuables. Under the state atheism of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the League of Militant Atheists aided in the persecution of many Christian denominations, with many churches and monasteries being destroyed, as well as clergy being executed.

Christianity since 1945

Main articles: History of Christianity of the Late Modern era and World Christianity

See also: Christianity in the 20th century and Christianity in the 21st century

Beginning in the late twentieth century, the traditional church has been declining in the West. Characterized by Roman Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, a church functions within society, engaging it directly through preaching, teaching ministries and service programs like local food banks. Theologically, churches seek to embrace secular method and rationality while refusing the secular worldview.

Christian sects, such as the Amish and Mennonites, traditionally withdraw from, and minimize interaction with, society at large; however, the Old Order Amish have become the fastest growing subpopulation in the U.S..

The 1960s saw the rise of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity, emphasizing the inward experience of personal piety and spirituality. In 2000, approximately one quarter of all Christians worldwide were part of Pentecostalism and its associated movements. By 2025, Pentecostals are expected to comprise one-third of the nearly three billion Christians worldwide. Deininger writes that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in global Christianity.

Christianity has been challenged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by modern secularism. New forms of religion which embrace the sacred as a deeper understanding of the self have begun. This spirituality is private and individualistic, and differs radically from Christian tradition, dogma and ritual, taking various separate directions in its implementation.

New forms

Laying on of hands during a service in a neo-charismatic church in Ghana

In the early twentieth century, the study of two highly influential religious movements, the social gospel movement (1870s–1920s) and the global ecumenical movement (beginning in 1910), provided the context for the development of American sociology as an academic discipline. Later, the Social Gospel and liberation theology, which tend to be highly critical of traditional Christian ethics, made the "kingdom ideals" of Jesus their goal. First focusing on the community's sins, rather than the individual's failings, they sought to foster social justice, expose institutionalized sin, and redeem the institutions of society. Ethicist Philip Wogaman says the social gospel and liberation theology redefined justice in the process.

Originating in America in 1966, Black theology developed a combined social gospel and liberation theology that mixes Christianity with questions of civil rights, aspects of the Black Power movement, and responses to black Muslims claiming Christianity was a "white man's" religion. Spreading to the United Kingdom, then parts of Africa, confronting apartheid in South Africa, Black theology explains Christianity as liberation for this life not just the next.

Racial violence around the world over the last several decades demonstrates how troubled issues of race remain in the twenty-first century. The historian of race and religion, Paul Harvey, says that, in 1960s America, "The religious power of the civil rights movement transformed the American conception of race." Then the social power of the religious right responded in the 1970s by recasting evangelical concepts in political terms that included racial separation. The Prosperity Gospel promotes racial reconciliation and has become a powerful force in American religious life.

The Prosperity gospel is an inherently flexible adaptation of the ‘Neo-Pentecostalism’ that began in the twentieth century’s last decades. While globally, Prosperity discourse may represent a cultural invasion of American-ism, and may even muddy the waters between the religious, and the economic and political, but it has become a trans-national movement. Prosperity ideas have diffused in countries such as Brazil and other parts of South America, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and other parts of West Africa, China, India, South Korea, and the Philippines. It represents a shift in authority from Bible to charisma, and has suffered from accusations of financial fraud and sex scandals around the world, but it is critiqued most heavily by Christian evangelicals who question how genuinely Christian the Prosperity Gospel is.

Feminist theology began in 1960. In the last years of the twentieth century, the re-examination of old religious texts through diversity, otherness, and difference developed womanist theology of African-American women, the "mujerista" theology of Hispanic women, and insights from Asian feminist theology.

Post-colonial decolonization after 1945

After World War II, Christian missionaries played a transformative role for many colonial societies moving them toward independence through the development of decolonization. In the mid to late 1990s, postcolonial theology emerged globally from multiple sources. Biblical scholars Fernando F. Segovia and Stephen D. Moore write that it analyzes structures of power and ideology in order to recover what colonialism erased or suppressed in indigenous cultures.

The missionary movement of the twenty-first century has transformed into a multi-cultural, multi-faceted global network of NGO's, short term amateurs, and traditional long-term bi-lingual, bi-cultural professionals who focus on evangelism and local development and not on 'civilizing' native people.

Second Vatican Council (1962–1965)

Main article: Second Vatican Council

Pope Francis

On 11 October 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, the 21st ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. The council was "pastoral" in nature, interpreting dogma in terms of its scriptural roots, revising liturgical practices, and providing guidance for articulating traditional Church teachings in contemporary times. The council is perhaps best known for its instructions that the Mass may be celebrated in the vernacular as well as in Latin.

Ecumenism (1964)

Main article: Ecumenism

On 21 November 1964, the Second Vatican Council published Unitatis Redintegratio, stating that Roman Catholic ecumenical goals are to establish full communion amongst all the various Christian churches. Amongst Evangelicals, there is no agreed upon definition, strategy or goal. Different theologies on the nature of the Church have produced some hostility toward the formalism of the World Council of Churches. In the twenty-first century, sentiment is widespread that ecumenism has stalled.

Christianity in the Global South and East

Africa (19th–21st centuries)

Countries by percentage of Protestants, 1938

Christian distribution globally based on PEW research in 2011

Western missionaries began the "largest, most diverse and most vigorous movement of cultural renewal in [the] history" of Africa. In 1900 under colonial rule there were just under 9 million Christians in Africa. By 1960, and the end of colonialism there were about 60 million. By 2005, African Christians had increased to 393 million, about half of the continent's total population at that time. Population in Africa has continued to grow with the percentage of Christians remaining at about half in 2022. This expansion has been labeled a "fourth age of Christian expansion"

Asia

Christianity is growing rapidly in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. A rapid expansion of charismatic Christianity began in the 1980s, leading Asia to rival Latin America in the population of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians.

Increasing numbers of young people in China are becoming Christians. Council on Foreign Relations data shows a 10% yearly growth in Chinese Christian populations since 1979.

According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, Christianity has grown in India in recent years.

Persecution

Main article: Persecution of Christians in the post–Cold War era

Anti-Christian persecution has become a consistent human rights concern. In 2013, 17 Middle Eastern Muslim majority states reported 28 of the 29 types of religious discrimination against 45 of the 47 religious minorities, including Christianity.

See also

• Christianization
• Criticism of Christianity
• History of Christian theology
• History of Christian universalism
• History of the Eastern Orthodox Church
• History of Oriental Orthodoxy
• History of Protestantism
• History of the Catholic Church
• Rise of Christianity during the Fall of Rome
• Role of the Christian Church in civilization
• Timeline of Christian missions
• Timeline of Christianity
• Timeline of the Roman Catholic Church

Sources

Books & periodicals

• Abulafia, Anna Sapir (2002). "Introduction". In Abulafia, Anna Sapir (ed.). Religious Violence Between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives. UK: Palgrave. pp. xi–xviii. ISBN 978-1-34942-499-3.
• Adams, Robert Merrihew (2021). "Nestorius and Nestorianism". The Monist. 104 (3): 366–375. doi:10.1093/monist/onab005.
• Aechtner, Thomas (March 2015). "Galileo Still Goes to Jail: Conflict Model Persistence within Introductory Anthropology Materials". Zygon. 50 (1): 209–226. doi:10.1111/zygo.12149.
• Aguzzi, Steven D. (2017). Israel, the Church, and Millenarianism: A Way beyond Replacement Theology. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-11190-0.
• Akanji, Israel (2010). "Black Theology". In Irele, Abiola (ed.). The Oxford encyclopedia of African thought. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-533473-9.
• Albert, Eleanor (2018). "Christianity in China". Council on Foreign Relations.
• Allen Jr., John L. (2016). The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution. Crown Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-770-43737-4.
• Ames, Christine Caldwell (2005). "Does inquisition belong to religious history?". The American Historical Review. 110 (1): 11–37. doi:10.1086/531119. JSTOR 10.1086/531119.
• Ames, Christine Caldwell (2009). Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4133-4.
• Anderson, Allan (2006). "The Pentecostal and Charismatic movements". In McLeod, Hugh (ed.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 9. Cambridge University Press. pp. 89–106. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521815000. ISBN 978-1-139-05485-0.
• Anderson, Allan; Tang, Edmund (2005). Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia. Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. ISBN 978-1-870345-43-9.
• Angold, Michael (2006). "The Russian Church". In Angold, Michael (ed.). The Cambridge History of Christianity Eastern Christianity. Vol. 5. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811132.018.
• Ankarloo, Bengt [in Swedish]; Clark, Stuart; Monter, E. William, eds. (2002). Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Vol. 4: The Period of the Witch Trials. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-3617-0.
• Aguilera-Barchet, Bruno (2015). "Popes vs. Emperors: The Rise and Fall of Papal Power". A History of Western Public Law. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-11803-1. ISBN 978-3-319-11802-4.
• Arnold, John (2009). "Repression and power". In Rubin, Miri; Simons, Walter (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 353–371. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811064. ISBN 9781139056021.
• Arnold, John H. (2018). "Persecution and Power in Medieval Europe: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, by R. I. Moore". The American Historical Review. 123 (1). Academic OUP.
• Arnold, John (2009). "Repression and Power". In Rubin, Miri; Simons, Walter (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 353–371. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811064. ISBN 9781139056021.
• Asprey, Christopher (2008). Murphy, Francesca Aran (ed.). Ecumenism Today: The Universal Church in the 21st Century (first ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7546-5961-7.
• Aston, Nigel (2006). "Continental Catholic Europe". In Brown, S.; Tackett, T. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press. pp. 13–32. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521816052.003. ISBN 978-1-139-05412-6.
• Bachrach, Bernard S. (1977). Early medieval Jewish policy in Western Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-0814-0.
• Baird, William (1992). History of New Testament Research, Volume One: From Deism to Tübingen. Fortress Press. ISBN 978-1-4514-2017-3.
• Barbero, Alessandro (2004). Charlemagne: Father of a Continent. Translated by Alan Cameron. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23943-2.
• Barnett, Victoria (1992). For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-512118-6.
• Barnett, S. J. (1999). "Where Was Your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined". Church History. 68 (1): 14–41. doi:10.2307/3170108. JSTOR 3170108. S2CID 154764488.
• Barton, John (1998a). Holy Writings, Sacred Text: The Canon in Early Christianity (reprint ed.). Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0-664-25778-1.
• Barton, James Levi (1998b). Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917. Armenian Genocide Documentation Series. Vol. 2. Gomidas Institute. ISBN 978-1-884630-04-0.
• Barton, Simon (2009). A History of Spain (2nd, rev. ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-137-01347-7.
• Baskin, Judith R.; Seeskin, Kenneth (2010). The Cambridge Guide to Jewish History, Religion, and Culture. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86960-7.
• Bauer, Susan Wise (2013). The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-05976-2.
• Bayliss, Richard (2004). Provincial Cilicia and the Archaeology of Temple Conversion. Oxford: Archaeopress. ISBN 978-1-84171-634-3.
• Becker, Sascha O.; Pfaff, Steven; Rubin, Jared (2016). "Causes and Consequences of the Protestant Reformation". ESI Working Paper 16–13. ISSN 2572-1496.
• Behr, John (2006). "Gaul". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 366–379. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.021.
• Ben-Yehuda, Nachman (1980). "The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist's Perspective". American Journal of Sociology. 86 (1): 1–31. doi:10.1086/227200. ISSN 0002-9602. JSTOR 2778849. S2CID 143650714.
• Bennison, Amira K. (1 August 2016). The Almoravid and Almohad Empires. The Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires. Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.1515/9780748646821. ISBN 978-0-7486-4682-1. S2CID 189477556.
• Berman, Harold J. (2009). Law and Revolution, the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02085-6.
• Bernardini, Paolo; Fiering, Norman (2001). The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-57181-430-2.
• Berndt, Guido M. [in German]; Steinacher, Roland (2014). Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed (1st ed.). London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-4094-4659-0.
• Blainey, Geoffrey (2011). A Short History of Christianity. Penguin Group Australia. ISBN 978-0-670-07524-9.
• Blevins, James L. (1990). "Revelation 1–3". Review & Expositor. 87 (4): 615–621. doi:10.1177/003463739008700411. S2CID 144517864.
• Bokenkotter, Thomas (2007). A Concise History of the Catholic Church (Rev. ed.). New York: Crown Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-42348-1.
• Bonner, Michael David; Ener, Mine; Singer, Amy (2003). Poverty and charity in Middle Eastern contexts. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-5737-5.
• Boppart, Timo; Falkinger, Josef; Grossmann, Volker (1 April 2014). "Protestantism and Education: Reading (the Bible) and Other Skills" (PDF). Economic Inquiry. 52 (2): 874–895. doi:10.1111/ecin.12058. ISSN 1465-7295. S2CID 10220106. Archived (PDF) from the original on 7 March 2020.
• Father Arseny, 1893–1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father: Being the Narratives Compiled by the Servant of God Alexander Concerning His Spiritual Father. Translated by Vera Bouteneff. St. Vladmir's Seminary Press. 1998. pp. vi–1. ISBN 978-0-88141-180-5.
• Boyd, William Kenneth (2005). The Ecclesiastical Edicts of the Theodosian Code (reprint ed.). The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 978-1-58477-531-7.
• Bradbury, Scott (1995). "Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice". Phoenix. 49 (4): 331–356. doi:10.2307/1088885. JSTOR 1088885.
• Brague, Rémi (2009). The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-07080-3.
• Bremmer, Jan N. (2020). "2: Priestesses, Pogroms and Persecutions: Religious Violence in Antiquity in a Diachronic Perspective". In Raschle, Christian R.; Dijkstra, Jitse H. F. (eds.). Religious Violence in the Ancient World From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-84921-0.
• Brita, Antonella (2020). "Genres of Ethiopian-Eritrean Christian Literature with a Focus on Hagiography". In Kelly, Samantha (ed.). A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea. Brill. pp. 252–281. ISBN 978-90-04-41943-8.
• Brown, Alan (2007). "The intellectual debate between Christians and pagans". In Casiday, Augustine; Norris, Frederick W. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 248–278. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812443. ISBN 9781139054133.
• Brown, Christopher (2006). "Christianity and the campaign against slavery and the slave trade". In Brown, Stewart; Tackett, Timothy (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press. pp. 517–535. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521816052.028. ISBN 978-1-139-05412-6.
• Brown, Peter (1993). "The Problem of Christianization" (PDF). Proceedings of the British Academy. 84. Oxford University Press: 89–103. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2022.
• Brown, Peter (1998). "Christianization and religious conflict". In Cameron, Averil; Garnsey, Peter (eds.). The Cambridge Ancient History XIII: The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-30200-5.
• Brown, Peter (2003). The rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. 200–1000 (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 978-0-631-22137-1.
• Brown, Peter (2008). "Introduction: Christendom, c. 600". In Noble, T.; Smith, J. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–18. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521817752.002. ISBN 978-0-521-81775-2.
• Brown, Raymond E. (2010) [1997]. An Introduction to the New Testament. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-14016-3. OCLC 762279536.
• Bruce, Frederick Fyvie (1978). "St John at Ephesus". Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 60 (2): 339–361. doi:10.7227/BJRL.60.2.4.
• Bundy, David (2007). "Early Asian and East African Christianities". In Casiday, Augustine; Norris, Frederick W. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 118–148. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812443. ISBN 9781139054133.
• Burgess, Stanley M. (2006). "Introduction". In Burgess, Stanley M. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Religion and Society. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-96966-6.
• Burnside, Jonathan (2011). God, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-975921-7.
• Bussell, Frederick William [in German] (1910). The Roman Empire: Essays on the Constitutional History from the Accession of Domitian (81 A.D.) to the Retirement of Nicephorus III (1081 A.D.). Longmans, Green.
• Burrow, William R. (2009). Redemption And Dialogue. Wipf and Stock Publishers. p. 201. ISBN 978-1-60899-116-7.
• Butler, Cuthbert (1919). Benedictine Monachism: Studies in Benedictine Life and Rule. New York: Longmans, Green and Company. pp. 3–8.
• Cairns, Earle E. (2015). An Endless Line of Splendor: Revivals and Their Leaders from the Great Awakening to the Present. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4982-2340-9.
• Calciu-Dumitreasa, George (May 1983). "Sermons to young people by Father George Calciu-Dumitreasa. Given at the Chapel of the Romanian Orthodox Church Seminary". Word Magazine. Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. pp. 5–8 – via Orthodox Research Institute.
• Cameron, Alan (2011). The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-974727-6.
• Cameron, Averil (1993). The Later Roman Empire, AD 284–430 (illustrated ed.). Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-51194-1.
• Cameron, Averil (2006b). "Constantine and the 'peace of the church'". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 538–551. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.032. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Cameron, Averil (2015). The Mediterranean world in late Antiquity: AD 395–700. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-67306-1.
• Canning, Joseph (2011). Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296–1417. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139504959.
• Carrington, Philip (1957). The Early Christian Church: Volume 1, The First Christian Church (illustrated, reprint ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-16641-6.
• Casanova, José (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-09535-6.
• Cassidy, Edward Idris (2005). Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue: Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra Aetate. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-4338-2.
• Catlos, Brian A. (2014). Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-88939-1.
• Chamberlin, Eric Russell (1986). The Bad Popes. Dorset Press. ISBN 978-0-88029-116-3.
• Champion, Matthew (2011). "Crushing the Canon: Nicolas Jacquier's Response to the Canon Episcopi in the Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum" (PDF). Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. 6 (2): 183–211. doi:10.1353/mrw.2011.0022. S2CID 73545212.
• Châtellier, Louis [in French] (2006). "Christianity and the rise of science, 1660–1815". In Brown, S.; Tackett, T. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press. pp. 249–264. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521816052.015. ISBN 978-1-139-05412-6.
• Chinnici, Joseph P. (2012). "Ecumenism, Civil Rights, and the Second Vatican Council: The American Experience". U.S. Catholic Historian. 30 (3): 21–49. ISSN 0735-8318. JSTOR 23362900.
• Christiansen, Eric (1997). The Northern Crusades. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-026653-5.
• Clark, Gillian (2011). "Augustine and the merciful Barbarians". In Mathisen, Ralph W.; Shanzer, Danuta [in German] (eds.). Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World: Cultural Interaction and the Creation of Identity in Late Antiquity (illustrated ed.). Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. pp. 1–4. ISBN 978-0-7546-6814-5.
• Clifton, Shane (2012). "Ecumenism from the bottom up: A Pentecostal perspective". Journal of Ecumenical Studies. 47 (4): 576–592.
• Coffey, John (December 1998). "Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution". The Historical Journal. 41 (4): 961–985. doi:10.1017/S0018246X98008103. S2CID 159485109.
• Coffey, John (2014). Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-88442-2.
• Cohan, Sara (2005). "A brief history of the Armenian Genocide" (PDF). Social Education. 69 (6): 333–337.
• Cohen, Jeremy (1 January 1998). "'Slay Them Not': Augustine and the Jews in Modern Scholarship". Medieval Encounters. 4 (1). E.J. Brill: 78–92. doi:10.1163/157006798X00043.
• Coleman, Simon (2016). "Chapter 12 The Prosperity Gospel: Debating Charisma, Controversy and Capitalism". In Hunt, Stephen J. (ed.). Handbook of global Contemporary Christianity. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-31078-0.
• Collins, Roger (1998). Charlemagne. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-8218-3.
• Conlin, W. E. (2021). "Ethical Considerations for Treating the Old Order Amish". Ethics & Behavior. 31 (6): 419–432. doi:10.1080/10508422.2020.1805614. PMC 8411892. PMID 34483634.
• Constable, Giles (1998). The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (illustrated, revised, reprint ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-63871-5.
• Cooper, Michael T. (2005). "Colonialism, neo-colonialism and forgotten missiological lessons". Global Missiology. 2 (2): 1–14..
• Cotts, John (2012). Europe's Long Twelfth Century: Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095–1229. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-137-29608-5.
• Cowe, S. (2006). "The Armenians in the era of the crusades 1050–1350". In Angold, Michael (ed.). The Cambridge History of Christianity Eastern Christianity. Vol. 5. Cambridge University Press. pp. 404–429. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811132.018. ISBN 978-1-139-05408-9.
• Crislip, Andrew Todd (2005). From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism & the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-11474-0.
• Croix, G. E. M. de Sainte (2006). Whitby, Michael (ed.). Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-927812-1.
• Cropp, Glynnis M. (2007). "Nero, emperor and tyrant, in the medieval French tradition". Florilegium. 24 (1): 21–36. doi:10.3138/flor.24.006.
• Cunningham, Mary B.; Theokritoff, Elizabeth (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86484-8.
• Daub, Edward E. (1 December 1978). "Demythologizing White's Warfare of Science with Theology". The American Biology Teacher. 40 (9): 553–556. doi:10.2307/4446412. JSTOR 4446412.
• Dawson, Christopher (2009). The Dividing of Christendom (reprint ed.). Ignatius Press. ISBN 978-1-58617-238-1.
• Dawson, Patricia (2015). First Peoples of the Americas and the European Age of Exploration. Cavendish Square Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5026-0685-3.
• Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff (2011). A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. ISBN 978-0-7425-5575-4.
• de Juan, Alexander; Pierskalla, Jan Henryk (2017). "The Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies: An Introduction". Politics & Society. 45 (2 Special Issue): 159–172. doi:10.1177/0032329217704434. S2CID 54971921.
• De Jonge, H. J. (2003). "The New Testament Canon". In Auwers, Jean-Marie; De Jonge, H. J. bibliques de (eds.). The Biblical Canons. Leuven University Press. pp. 309–319. ISBN 978-2-87723-651-5.
• de Pressensé, Edmond (1870). The Early Years of Christianity: The Apostolic Era. Christian Classics Ethereal.
• Dean, Sidney E. (2015). "Felling the Irminsul: Charlemagne's Saxon wars". Medieval Warfare. 5 (2): 15–20. ISSN 2211-5129. JSTOR 48578430.
• Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff (2022). A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-5381-5295-9.
• Deininger, Matthias (2014). Global Pentecostalism: An Inquiry into the Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Anchor Academic Publishing. ISBN 978-3-95489-570-0.
• Den Heijer, Alexandra (2011). Managing the University Campus: Information to Support Real Estate Decisions. Academische Uitgeverij Eburon. ISBN 978-90-5972-487-7.
• Drake, H. A. (1995). "Constantine and Consensus". Church History. 64 (1): 1–15. doi:10.2307/3168653. JSTOR 3168653. S2CID 163129848.
• Dunbabin, Jean (2003). "The Council of Bourges, 1225: a Documentary History". The English Historical Review. 118 (475): 178–179. doi:10.1093/ehr/118.475.178.
• Duncan, G. A. (March 2008). "Book Reviews – Drobner, H R 2007 – The fathers of the church: A comprehensive introduction". HTS Theological Studies. 64 (1): 669.
• Duni, Matteo (June 2016). "Doubting Witchcraft: Theologians, Jurists, Inquisitors during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries". Studies in Church History. 52: 203–231. doi:10.1017/stc.2015.12. S2CID 164173947.
• Dunn, Marilyn (2003). The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-0641-2.
• Dunn, Dennis J. (2016). A History of Orthodox, Islamic, and Western Christian Political Values. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-319-32566-8.
• Dunning, Benjamin H. (2015). "Book review Reviewed Work(s): From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity by Kyle". The Journal of Religion. 95 (3). The University of Chicago Press: 396–98. doi:10.1086/681145.
• Eddy, Paul Rhodes; Boyd, Gregory A. (2007). The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic. ISBN 978-0-8010-3114-4.
• Eder, Jeanne; Reyhner, Jon (2017). American Indian Education: A History (2nd ed.). University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-5991-1.
• Edmundson, George (2008). The Church in Rome in the First Century: An Examination of Various Controverted Questions Relating to its History, Chronology, Literature and Traditions (reprint ed.). Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-55635-846-3.
• Ehrman, Bart D. (1999). Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-512473-6.
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2005) [2003]. "At Polar Ends of the Spectrum: Early Christian Ebionites and Marcionites". Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 95–112. doi:10.1017/s0009640700110273. ISBN 978-0-19-518249-1. LCCN 2003053097. S2CID 152458823.
• Ehrman, Bart D. (2018). The triumph of Christianity: How a forbidden religion swept the world. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-3672-6.
• Eidintas, Alfonsas (2001). President of Lithuania: Prisoner of the Gulag: a Biography of Aleksandras Stulginskis. Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania. ISBN 978-9986-757-41-2.
• Ekonomou, Andrew J. (2007). Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, A.D. 590–752. Washington: Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-3386-6.
• Engels, Frederick (1978). "The Peasant War in Germany". Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Vol. 10. Lawrence & Wishart. ISBN 978-0-85315-355-9.
• Errington, R. Malcolm (2006). Roman Imperial Policy from Julian to Theodosius. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-3038-3.
• Errington, R. Malcolm (1997). "Christian Accounts of the Religious Legislation of Theodosius I". Klio. 79 (2): 398–443. doi:10.1524/klio.1997.79.2.398. S2CID 159619838.
• Esler, Philip Francis (1994). The First Christians in Their Social Worlds Social-scientific Approaches to New Testament Interpretation. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-11122-5.
• Estep, William R. (1986). "Attempts at Reform: Wycliffe and Huss". Renaissance and Reformation. Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge, U.K.: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 58–77. ISBN 978-0-8028-0050-3.
• Fahlbusch, Erwin; Bromiley, Geoffrey William, eds. (2003). The Encyclopedia of Christianity. Vol. 3. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-90-04-12654-1.
• Ferguson, Kitty (2011). Pythagoras: His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe. Icon Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-84831-250-0.
• Fernandez, James W. (1979). "Africanization, Europeanization, Christianization". History of Religions. 18 (3): 284–292. doi:10.1086/462823. S2CID 162935593.
• Fierro, Maribel (January 2008). "Decapitation of Christians and Muslims in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula: Narratives, Images, Contemporary Perceptions". Comparative Literature Studies. 45 (2: Al-Andalus and Its Legacies). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press: 137–164. doi:10.2307/complitstudies.45.2.0137. ISSN 1528-4212. JSTOR 25659647. S2CID 161217907.
• Firlej, Dominik (2021–2022). "Why did Polish Kings not go on Crusade in the Levant?" (PDF). The Cupola. 16: 120–135.
• Folda, Jaroslav (1995). "7". In Riley-Smith, Jonathan (ed.). The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades. OUP. ISBN 978-0-19-820435-0.
• Fonnesberg-Schmidt, Iben (2007). The popes and the Baltic crusades, 1147–1254. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-15502-2.
• Fonnesberg-Schmidt, Iben (2009). "Pope Honorius III and Mission and Crusades in the Baltic Region". In Murray, Alan V. (ed.). The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. pp. 103–122. ISBN 978-0-7546-6483-3.
• Fontaine, Darcie (2016). Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-11817-1.
• Foss, Jeffrey (2014). Science and the World: Philosophical Approaches (illustrated ed.). Broadview Press. pp. 285–286. ISBN 978-1-55111-624-2.
• Fox, Jonathan (2013). "Religious discrimination against religious minorities in Middle Eastern Muslim states". Civil Wars. 15 (4): 454–470. doi:10.1080/13698249.2013.853413. S2CID 144353518.
• Fox, Robin Lane (1987). Pagans and Christians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-55495-2.
• Franck, Thomas M. (1997). "Is Personal Freedom a Western Value?". American Journal of International Law. 91 (4): 593–627. doi:10.2307/2998096. JSTOR 2998096. S2CID 144328175.
• Frassetto, Michael (2007). Heretic Lives: Medieval Heresy from Bogomil and the Cathars to Wyclif and Hus. London: Profile Books. pp. 7–198. ISBN 978-1-86197-744-1. OCLC 666953429.
• Fredriksen, Paula (October 2009). "Review: Revisiting Augustine's Doctrine of Jewish Witness". The Journal of Religion. 89 (4): 564–578. doi:10.1086/600873. JSTOR 10.1086/600873. S2CID 170403439.
• Freston, Paul (2008). "The Changing Face of Christian Proselytization: New Actors from the Global South". In Hackett, Rosalind I. J. (ed.). Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets, and Culture Wars (1st ed.). New York & London: Routledge. pp. 109–138. ISBN 978-1-84553-228-4. LCCN 2007046731.
• Frykenberg, Robert Eric; Low, Alaine M. (2003). Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-cultural Communication Since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-3956-5.
• Fulton, Rachel (2009). "Mary". In Rubin, M.; Simons, W. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 4. Cambridge University Press. pp. 283–296. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811064.020. ISBN 978-1-139-05602-1.
• Gaddis, Michael (2005). There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24104-6.
• García-Arenal, Mercedes; Glazer-Eytan, Yonatan (2019). Forced conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: coercion and faith in premodern Iberia and beyond. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-41682-6.
• Gasper, Louis (2020). The Fundamentalist Movement (reprint ed.). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 978-3-11-231758-7.
• Gavroglu, Kostas [in Greek] (2015). Sciences in the Universities of Europe, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Academic Landscapes. Springer Dordrecht. ISBN 978-94-017-9636-1.
• Gerberding, R.; Moran Cruz, J. H. (2004). Medieval Worlds. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 978-0-395-56087-7.
• Gerdmar, Anders (2009). Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-16851-0.
• Gilley, Sheridan (2006). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 8, World Christianities c. 1815 – c. 1914. Brian Stanley. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81456-0.
• Given, James Buchanan (2001). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (illustrated ed.). Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801487590.
• Gonzalez, Justo L. (2010). The Story of Christianity. Vol. 2: The Reformation to the Present Day. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-185589-4.
• Goswami, Anita (2005–2006). "Hermit to Cenobitic: A Study in Early Christian Monasticism". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 66: 1329–1335. JSTOR 44145947.
• Graham-Leigh, Elaine (2005). The Southern French Nobility and the Albigensian Crusade. Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-129-7.
• Grant, Robert M. (2020). The Apostolic Fathers, A New Translation and Commentary. Vol. I: An Introduction. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-7252-7423-5.
• Graves, Coburn V. (November 1964). "The Martyrs of Cordoba, 850–859. A Study of the Sources (review)". The Hispanic American Historical Review. 44 (4). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press on behalf of the Conference on Latin American History. doi:10.1215/00182168-44.4.644. ISSN 1527-1900. S2CID 227325750.
• Green, Clifford (January 2015). "Peace Ethic or "Pacifism"?: An Assessment of Bonhoeffer the Assassin?". Modern Theology. 31 (1): 201–208. doi:10.1111/moth.12144.
• Greenslade, S. L. (1972). "Heresy and schism in the later Roman empire". Studies in Church History. 9: 1–20. doi:10.1017/S0424208400005696. S2CID 163529931.
• Haberkern, Phillip N. (2016). Patron Saint and Prophet: Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-028074-1.
• Haight, Roger D. (2004). Christian Community in History. Vol. 1: Historical Ecclesiology. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8264-1630-8.
• Hall, John R.; Battani, Marshall; Neitz, Mary Jo (2004). Sociology On Culture. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-134-45237-8.
• Hanson, Paul D. (2003) [1989]. "The Matrix of Apocalyptic". In Davies, W. D.; Finkelstein, Louis (eds.). The Cambridge History of Judaism. Vol. 2: The Hellenistic Age. Cambridge aNew York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 524–533. ISBN 978-0-521-21929-7. OCLC 872998103.
• Harnett, Benjamin (2017). "The Diffusion of the Codex". Classical Antiquity. 36 (2). University of California Press: 183–235. doi:10.1525/ca.2017.36.2.183. JSTOR 26362608.
• Harney, Lorcan (2017). "Christianising Pagan Worlds in Conversion-Era Ireland: Archaeological Evidence for the Origins of Irish Ecclesiastical Sites". Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature. 117C: 103–130. doi:10.3318/priac.2017.117.07. S2CID 165970409.
• Harper, Kyle [in Russian] (2013). From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-07277-0.
• Harris, Harriet A. (1998). Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (illustrated, reprint ed.). Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-826960-1.
• Hartog, Paul A. (2015). Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christian Contexts: Reconsidering the Bauer Thesis. James Clarke & Company Limited. ISBN 978-0-227-90494-7.
• Harvey, Paul (2016). Christianity and Race in the American South A History. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-41549-9.
• Harvey, Susan Ashbrook (2006). "Syria and Mesopotamia". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 351–365. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.021. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Hastings, Adrian (2000). "Law". In Hastings, Adrian; Mason, Alistair; Pyper, Hugh S. (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. Oxford University Press, US. ISBN 978-0-19-860024-4.
• Haykin, Michael A. G. (2011). Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church. Crossway. ISBN 978-1-4335-2357-1.
• Hebblewhite, Mark (2020). Theodosius and the Limits of Empire. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315103334. ISBN 978-1-138-10298-9. S2CID 213344890.
• Héclo, Hugh (1996). "The Sixties' False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policy-making". Journal of Policy History. 8 (1). Cambridge University Press: 34–63. doi:10.1017/S0898030600005029. S2CID 154104649.
• Heimert, Alan (2006). Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (reprint ed.). Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-59752-614-2.
• Heller, Henry (1996). "Putting History Back into the Religious Wars: A Reply to Mack P. Holt". French Historical Studies. 19 (3): 853–861. doi:10.2307/286649. JSTOR 286649.
• Hellerman, Joseph H. (2009). When the Church Was a Family: Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community. Nashville: B&H Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-4336-6843-2.
• Hengel, Martin (2003). Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity (reprint ed.). Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-59244-190-7.
• Hilkert, Mary Catherine (1995). "Feminist theology: a review of literature". Theological Studies. 56 (2): 327–341. doi:10.1177/004056399505600206. S2CID 171166197.
• Hill, Donald Routledge (1993). Islamic Science and Engineering. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-0455-5.
• Hilliam, Rachel (2004). Galileo Galilei: Father of Modern Science. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4042-0314-3.
• Hobson, Theo (2013). Reinventing Liberal Christianity. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0-8028-6840-4.
• Hoehner, Harold W (1978). Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. Zondervan. ISBN 978-0-310-26211-4.
• Hoehner, Harold W. (1983). Herod Antipas. Contemporary evangelical perspectives. Vol. 17. Zondervan. ISBN 978-0-310-42251-8.
• Hollywood, A. (2009). "Mysticism and transcendence". In Rubin, M.; Simons, W. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 4. Cambridge University Press. pp. 283–296. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811064.021. ISBN 978-1-139-05602-1.
• Holmes, J. Derek (1981). The Papacy in the Modern World, 1914–1978. Crossroad. ISBN 978-0-8245-0047-4.
• Hopkins, Keith (1998). "Christian Number and Its Implications". Journal of Early Christian Studies. 6 (2): 185–226. doi:10.1353/earl.1998.0035. S2CID 170769034.
• Horrell, David (1997). "Leadership Patterns and the Development of Ideology in Early Christianity". Sociology of Religion. 58 (4): 323–341. doi:10.2307/3711919. ISSN 1069-4404. JSTOR 3711919.
• Houtman, Dick; Aupers, Stef (2007). "The Spiritual Turn and the Decline of Tradition:The Spread of Post-Christian Spirituality in 14 Western Countries, 1981–2000". Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 46 (3): 287–434. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5906.2007.00360.x.
• Humfress, Caroline (2013). "5: Laws' Empire: Roman Universalism and Legal Practice". New Frontiers: Law and Society in the Roman World. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-6817-5.
• Hunyadi, Zsolt; Laszlovszky, József [in Hungarian] (2001). The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity. Budapest: Central European University Press. ISBN 978-963-9241-42-8.
• Hyman, Arthur; Walsh, James Jerome (1973). Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions. Hackett Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-915144-05-1.
• Isichei, Elizabeth (1995). A history of Christianity in Africa: From antiquity to the present. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-0843-1.
• Ivanič, Peter (2016). "The origins of Christianity in the territory of Czech and Slovak republics within the contexts of written sources". European Journal of Science and Theology. 12 (6): 123–130.
• Jacob, Margaret (2006). "The Enlightenment critique of Christianity". In S. J. Brown; T. Tackett (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 265–282. ISBN 978-0-521-81605-2.
• Jenkins, Philip (2011). "The Rise of the New Christianity". The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 101–133. ISBN 978-0-19-976746-5. LCCN 2010046058.
• Jestice, Phyllis G. (1997). Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-10722-9.
• Johnson, Noel D.; Koyama, Mark (2019). Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom. UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-42502-5.
• Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-027753-6.
• Jones, David Ceri; White, Eryn Mant (2012). The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735–1811. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-2502-5.
• Jordan, William Chester (2011). "Judaizing the Passion: The Case of the Crown of Thorns in the Middle Ages". In Carlebach, Elisheva; Schacter, Jacob J. (eds.). New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger. Leiden: Brill. pp. 51–63. ISBN 978-9-00422-118-5.
• Judge, E.A. (2010). Alanna Nobbs (ed.). Jerusalem and Athens: Cultural Transformation in Late Antiquity. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 978-3-16-150572-0.
• Kahlos, Maijastina (2019). Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity, 350–450. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-006725-0.
• Kamen, Henry (2014). The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (unabridged ed.). Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-18051-0.
• Kaplan, Benjamin J. (2009). Divided by Faith Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Harvard University Press. p. 191. ISBN 978-0-674-03930-8.
• Kaser, Karl (2011). The Balkans and the Near East: Introduction to a Shared History. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 978-3-643-50190-5.
• Kelly, Joseph Francis (2009). The Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church: A History. Liturgical Press. ISBN 978-0-8146-5376-0.
• Kienzle, Beverly Mayne (2001). Cistercians, Heresy, and Crusade in Occitania, 1145–1229: Preaching in the Lord's Vineyard. UK: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-903153-00-0.
• Kim, Lloyd (2006). Polemic in the Book of Hebrews: Anti-Judaism, Anti-Semitism, Supersessionism?. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-498-27636-8.
• King, Ursula (2001). Christian Mystics: Their Lives and Legacies Throughout the Ages. Paulist Press. ISBN 1-58768-012-2.
• Klier, John Doyle; Lambroza, Shlomo (2004). Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-52851-1.
• Klutz, Todd (2002) [2000]. "Part II: Christian Origins and Development – Paul and the Development of Gentile Christianity". In Esler, Philip F. (ed.). The Early Christian World. Routledge Worlds (1st ed.). New York & London: Routledge. pp. 178–190. ISBN 978-1-032-19934-4.
• Koenig, Harold G. (2009). Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-88952-0.
• Koenig, Harold G.; King, Dana E.; Carson, Verna Benner (2012). "Background". Handbook of Religion and Health (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-533595-8.
• Kolp, Alan (1982). "The Biblical Basis for Evangelism and Outreach". Quaker Religious Thought. 53 (1).
• Kors, Alan Charles; Peters, Edward, eds. (2001). "Regino of Prüm: a Warning to Bishops, the Canon Episcopi". Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700 A Documentary History. University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated. pp. 60–63. ISBN 978-0-8122-1751-3.
• Köstenberger, Andreas J.; Kellum, Leonard Scott; Quarles, Charles Leland (2009). The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament. B&H Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8054-4365-3.
• Köstenberger, Andreas J.; Kellum, Leonard Scott; Quarles, Charles Leland (2012). The Lion and the Lamb. B&H Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-4336-7708-3.
• Kostick, Conor (2010). "Inctroduction". In Kostick, Conor (ed.). The Crusades and the Near East: Cultural Histories. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-90247-5.
• Kwiatkowska, Theresa (2010). "The Light Was Retreating Before Darkness: tales of the Witchhunt and Climate change". Medievalia (42). Mexico city: Ciudad Universitaria: 30–37.
• Laale, Hans Willer (2011). Ephesus (Ephesos): An Abbreviated History from Androclus to Constantine Xi. WestBow Press. ISBN 978-1-4497-1618-9.
• Lavan, Luke; Mulryan, Michael (2011). "Preliminary Material". In Lavan, Luke; Mulryan, Michael (eds.). The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism'. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004192379.i-643. ISBN 978-90-04-19237-9.
• Law, David R. (2012). The Historical-Critical Method: A Guide for the Perplexed. T&T Clark. ISBN 978-0-56740-012-3.
• Law, Stephen (2011). "Evidence, Miracles, and the Existence of Jesus". Faith and Philosophy. 28 (2): 129. doi:10.5840/faithphil20112821.
• LeGoff, Jacques (2000). Medieval Civilization 400–1500. Translated by Julia Barrow (Reprint ed.). Blackwell Publishers Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7607-1652-6.
• Leithart, Peter J. (2010). Defending Constantine The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. InterVarsity Press. ISBN 978-0-8308-2722-0.
• Leone, Anna (2013). The End of the Pagan City: Religion, Economy, and Urbanism in Late Antique North Africa (illustrated ed.). OUP. ISBN 978-0-19-957092-8.
• Lettinck, P. (2006). "Greek". In Meri, Josef W.; Bacharach, Jere L. (eds.). Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia. Routledge. pp. 303–304. ISBN 978-0-415-96690-0.
• Levack, Brian P. (2013). "Indtroduction". In Levack, Brian P. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America. OUP. pp. 1–10. ISBN 978-0-19-957816-0.
• Levine, Amy-Jill (2006). The Historical Jesus in Context. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-00992-6.
• Lieu, Judith M. (1999). "The 'Attraction of Women' in/to Early Judaism and Christianity: Gender and the Politics of Conversion". Journal for the Study of the New Testament. 21 (72): 5–22. doi:10.1177/0142064X9902107202. S2CID 144475695.
• Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986). "Introduction". In Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.). God & Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-05538-4.
• Lloyd, Humphrey (5 November 2013). Quaker Lloyds in the Industrial Revolution. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-60575-8.
• Löhr, Winrich (2007). "Western Christianities". In Casiday, Augustine; Norris, Frederick W. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 7–51. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812443. ISBN 9781139054133.
• Lund, James (2022). "Religion and Thought". In Johnson, Wendell G.; Barbe, Katharina (eds.). Modern Germany. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-4408-6454-4.
• Lyman, J. Rebecca (2007). "Heresiology: The invention of 'heresy' and 'schism'". In Augustine Casiday; Frederick W. Norris (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 2, Constantine to C.600. Cambridge University Press. pp. 296–314.
• MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2004). The Reformation: A History. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-03296-9.
• MacMullen, Ramsay (1986). "What Difference Did Christianity Make?". Historia. 35 (3): 322–343.
• Maier, Paul L. (1989). "The Date of the Nativity and Chronology of Jesus". In Jerry Vardaman; Edwin M. Yamauchi (eds.). Chronos, Kairos, Christos. Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-0-931464-50-8.
• Mannion, Gerard; Mudge, Lewis Seymour (2008). The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-37420-0.
• Marabello, Thomas Quinn (2021). "The 500th Anniversary of the Swiss Reformation: How Zwingli changed and continues to impact Switzerland today". Swiss American Historical Society Review. 57 (1): 3.
• Marcocci, Giuseppe (2013). Paiva, José Pedro [in Portuguese] (ed.). "From start to finish: the history of the Portuguese Inquisition revisited". História da Inquisição Portuguesa (1536–1821). 20. Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros.
• Marcus, Joel (2006). "Jewish Christianity". In Mitchell, Margaret M.; Young, Francis M. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 85–102. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Marshall, Christopher (1994). Warfare in the Latin East, 1192-1291 (illustrated, reprint, revised ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47742-0.
• Marty, Martin (2006). "The American Revolution and religion, 1765–1815". In Brown, Stewart; Tackett, Timothy (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press. pp. 495–516. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521816052.027. ISBN 978-1-139-05412-6.
• Marvin, Laurence W. (2008). The Occitan War: A Military and Political History of the Albigensian Crusade, 1209–1218. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-47014-8.
• Masters, Ryan K.; Young, Michael P. (2022). "The Power of Religious Activism in Tocqueville's America: The Second Great Awakening and the Rise of Temperance and Abolitionism in New York State". Social Science History. 46 (3): 473–504. doi:10.1017/ssh.2022.6. S2CID 247830382.
• Mathew, Arnold Harris (2018). The Life and Times of Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI (Reprinted ed.). Creative Media Partners, LLC. ISBN 978-0-342-68601-8.
• Matthews, Roy T.; Platt, F. DeWitt (1992). The Western Humanities. Mayfield Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-87484-785-7.
• Mayer, T. F. (2014). The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy, c. 1590–1640. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4573-8.
• McKinnon, A. M. (2010). "Elective affinities of the Protestant ethic: Weber and the chemistry of capitalism" (PDF). Sociological Theory. 28 (1): 108–126. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01367.x. hdl:2164/3035. S2CID 144579790.
• McLoughlin, William Gerald (1984). Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-03075-4.
• Meeks, Wayne A. (2003). The First Urban Christians (second ed.). Yale University. ISBN 978-0-300-09861-7.
• Meyendorff, John [in Russian] (1979). Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (illustrated, reprint, revised ed.). Fordham University Press. ISBN 978-0-8232-0967-5.
• Meyer, William J. (2010). Metaphysics and the Future of Theology The Voice of Theology in Public Life. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-63087-805-4.
• Micheau, Françoise (2006). "Eastern Christianities (eleventh to fourteenth century): Copts, Melkites, Nestorians and Jacobites". In Angold, Michael (ed.). The Cambridge History of Christianity Eastern Christianity. Vol. 5. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-05408-9.
• Mintz, Steven (1995). Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers. JHU Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5081-3.
• Mitton, C. Leslie (2002). The Epistle to the Ephesians: Its Authorship, Origin and Purpose. Wipf and Stock. ISBN 978-1-59244-041-2.
• Moore, R. I. (2007). The Formation of a Persecuting Society (second ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4051-2964-0.
• Morris, Benny; Ze'evi, Dror (2019). The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-24008-7.
• Moss, Candida (2012). "Current Trends in the Study of Early Christian Martyrdom". Bulletin for the Study of Religion. 41 (3): 22–29. doi:10.1558/bsor.v41i3.22. Archived from the original on 25 February 2014.
• Mout, Nicolette [in Dutch] (2007). "Peace without concord: Religious toleration in theory and practice". In Hsia, R. (ed.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 6. Cambridge University Press. pp. 225–243. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811620.014. ISBN 978-1-139-05484-3.
• Muir, Steven C. (2006). "10: "Look how they love one another" Early Christian and Pagan Care for the sick and other charity". Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 978-0-88920-536-9.
• Murphy, James Bernard (2014b). "Religious Violence: Myth or Reality? A Symposium on William T. Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence". Political Theology. 15 (6): 479–485. doi:10.1179/1462317X14Z.00000000093. S2CID 147458599.
• Neely, Alan (2020). Christian Mission. Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 978-1-7252-8819-5.
• Nelson, Janet L. (1 January 1996). The Frankish World, 750–900. A&C Black. ISBN 978-1-85285-105-7.
• Noll, Mark A. (1997). Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. Baker Books. ISBN 978-0-8010-5778-6.
• Noll, Mark A. (2001). The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4674-3165-1.
• Novak, Ralph Martin (2001). Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-56338-347-2.
• Numbers, Ronald L. (8 November 2010). Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-05741-8.
• O'Collins, Gerald (2014). The Second Vatican Council: Message and Meaning (reprint ed.). Liturgical Press. ISBN 978-0-8146-8336-1.
• O'Shea, S. (2001). The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars (illustrated, reprint ed.). United Kingdom: Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-86197-350-4.
• Ocker, C. (2009). "The Bible in the fifteenth century". In Rubin, M.; Simons, W. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 4. Cambridge University Press. pp. 283–296. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811064.033. ISBN 978-1-139-05602-1.
• Olson, Roger E. (1999). The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform. Downer's Grove, In.: InterVarsity Press. p. 172. ISBN 978-0-8308-1505-0.
• Onnekink, David (2016). War and Religion after Westphalia, 1648–1713 (reprint ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-00052-5.
• Palmer-Fernandes, Gabriel (1991). "Modern christian ethics". In Carman, John; Jürgensmeyer, Mark; Darrow, William (eds.). A Bibliographic Guide to the Comparative Study of Ethics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-34448-7.
• Patterson, Annabel (1997). Early modern liberalism (illustrated ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-59260-4.
• Paul, Marcus (2016). The Evil That Men Do: Faith, Injustice and the Church. Sacristy Press. ISBN 978-1-908381-97-2.
• Pearson, Birger A. (2006). "Egypt". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 330–350. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.020. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Pennington, Kenneth (2016). "Introduction to the Courts". In Pennington, Kenneth; Hartmann, W. (eds.). The History of Courts and Procedure in Medieval Canon Law. History of Medieval Canon Law. Vol. 5. The Catholic University of America. pp. 3–29. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1j0pt7h. ISBN 978-0-813-22904-1. JSTOR j.ctt1j0pt7h.
• Peters, Edward, ed. (1980). Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-1103-0.
• Phillips, Thomas E. (2006). "The Genre of Acts: moving toward a consensus?". Currents in Biblical Research. 4 (3): 365–396. doi:10.1177/1476993X06064629. S2CID 145271094.
• Pintarić, Damir (16 November 2014). "Ecumenism – yes and/or no?". Kairos: Evangelical Journal of Theology. 8 (2): 175–186. ISSN 1846-4599.
• Pipes, Richard (1995). Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-679-76184-6.
• Piron, Sylvain [in French] (2006). "Franciscan Quodlibeta in Southern Studia and at Paris, 1280–1300". In Schabel, Christopher (ed.). Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages. Brill. pp. 403–438. ISBN 978-90-04-12333-5.
• Ponce Herrero, Gabino; Martí Ciriquián, Pablo (2019). "El complejo urbano transfronterizo Melilla-Nador" (PDF). Investigaciones Geográficas (72). Alicante: San Vicente del Raspeig: 101–124. doi:10.14198/INGEO2019.72.05. hdl:10045/99969. ISSN 1989-9890. S2CID 213966829. Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 December 2022. Retrieved 26 June 2023.
• Porter, Stanley E. (2011). "Early Apocryphal Non-Gospel Literature and the New Testament Text" (PDF). Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism. 8: 192–198.
• Praet, Danny (1992). "Explaining the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Older theories and recent developments". Sacris Erudiri. Jaarboek voor Godsdienstgeschiedenis. A Journal on the Inheritance of Early and Medieval Christianity. 23: 5–119.
• Rajak, Tessa (2006). "The Jewish diaspora". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 53–68. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.004. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Rankin, David Ivan (2016). From Clement to Origen: The Social and Historical Context of the Church Fathers (reprint ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-13243-1.
• Rapp, Stephen H. Jr (2007). "Chapter 7 – Georgian Christianity". In Parry, Ken (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-3361-9.
• Rappaport, Helen (13 December 1999). Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion. ABC-Clio. ISBN 978-1-57607-084-0.
• Rauschenbusch, Walter (1917). Theology for the Social Gospel. Macmillan and Company. LCCN 17031090. OCLC 1085604908.
• Rawlings, Helen (2006). The Spanish Inquisition. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-0-631-20599-9.
• Riché, Pierre (1993). The Carolingians: a Family Who Forged Europe. Translated by Michael Idomir Allen. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-3062-8.
• Rives, J. B. (1999). "The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire". The Journal of Roman Studies. 89: 135–154. doi:10.2307/300738. JSTOR 300738. S2CID 159942854.
• Robbins, Joel (October 2004). Brenneis, Don; Strier, Karen B. (eds.). "The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity". Annual Review of Anthropology. 33: 117–143. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093421. ISSN 1545-4290. JSTOR 25064848. S2CID 145722188.
• Robert, Dana L. (April 2000). Hastings, Thomas J. (ed.). "Shifting Southward: Global Christianity Since 1945" (PDF). International Bulletin of Missionary Research. 24 (2). Sage Publications on behalf of the Overseas Ministries Study Center: 50–58. doi:10.1177/239693930002400201. ISSN 0272-6122. S2CID 152096915. Archived (PDF) from the original on 30 January 2022.
• Robert, Dana L. (2009). Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (illustrated ed.). John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-631-23619-1.
• Robinson, Thomas A. (1988). The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Christian Church. Studies in the Bible & Early Christianity. Vol. 11. E. Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-889-46611-1.
• Robinson, W. Stitt (May 1952). "Indian Education and Missions in Colonial Virginia". The Journal of Southern History. 18 (2): 152–168. doi:10.2307/2954270. JSTOR 2954270.
• Rosenblatt, Helena (2006). "The Christian Enlightenment". In Brown, S.; Tackett, T. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press. pp. 283–301. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521816052.017. ISBN 978-1-139-05412-6.
• Rosenthal, Judah M. (1956). "The Talmud on Trial: The Disputation at Paris in the Year 1240". The Jewish Quarterly Review. 47 (1): 58–76. doi:10.2307/1453186. JSTOR 1453186.
• Rosser, John (1997). "Untitled Book Review of Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World by Peter Brown". Speculum. 72 (3): 793–795. doi:10.2307/3040773. JSTOR 3040773.
• Roth, Norman (January 1994). "Bishops and Jews in the Middle Ages". The Catholic Historical Review. 80 (1). Catholic University of America Press: 1–17. JSTOR 25024201.
• Royalty, Robert M. (2013). The Origin of Heresy: A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-53694-3.
• Rousseau, Philip (2010). "Late Roman Christianities". In Noble, Thomas F. X.; Smith, Julia M. H. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity Volume 3. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521817752. ISBN 9781139054225.
• Rüegg, Walter [in German] (1992). "Foreword. The University as a European Institution". In de Ridder-Symoens, Hilde (ed.). A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press. pp. xix–xx. ISBN 978-0-521-54113-8.
• Rummel, Eric O. (2006). "The Albigensian Crusade: A Historiographical Essay" (PDF). Perspectives on History. XXI: 45–57.
• Runciman, Steven (1987) [1951]. "The Reign of Antichrist". A History of the Crusades. Vol. 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-34770-9.
• Sabo, Theodore (2018). From Monophysitism to Nestorianism: AD 431–681. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-5275-0959-7.
• Sahner, Christian C. (2020) [2018]. "Introduction: Christian Martyrs under Islam". Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World. Princeton, New Jersey and Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-17910-0. LCCN 2017956010.
• Salzman, Michele Renee (1993). "The Evidence for the Conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in Book 16 of the 'Theodosian Code". Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte. 42 (3). Franz Steiner Verlag: 362–378. JSTOR 4436297.
• Salzman, Michele Renee (2006). "Rethinking Pagan-Christian Violence". In Drake, H.A. (ed.). Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp. 265–286. ISBN 978-0-7546-5498-8.
• Sanmark, Alexandra (2004). Power and Conversion. A Comparative Study of Christianization in Scandinavia. The University of Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-506-1739-9.
• Sanneh, Lamin O. (2007). Disciples of all nations: Pillars of world Christianity. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-1980-4084-2.
• Sanneh, Lamin O. (2016). "Bible Translation, Culture, and Religion". In Sanneh, Lamin; McClymond, Michael (eds.). The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 263–281. ISBN 978-1-118-55604-7.
• Sáry, Pál (2019). "Remarks on the Edict of Thessalonica of 380". In Vojtech Vladár (ed.). Perpauca Terrena Blande Honori dedicata pocta Petrovi Blahovi K Nedožitým 80. Narodeninám. Trnava: Trnavská Univerzity. pp. 67–80. ISBN 978-80-568-0313-4.
• Schacter, Jacob J.; Carlebach, Elisheva (2011). "Introduction". In Carlebach, Elisheva; Schacter, Jacob J. (eds.). New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger. Leiden: Brill. pp. 1–10. ISBN 978-9-00422-118-5.
• Schaff, Philip (1953). History of the Christian Church. Vol. IV: Mediaeval Christianity. A.D. 590–1073. CCEL. pp. 161–162. ISBN 978-1-61025-043-6.
• Schäferdiek, Knut (2007). "Germanic and Celtic Christianities". In Casiday, Augustine; Norris, Frederick W. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 52–69. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812443. ISBN 9781139054133.
• Schaff, Philip (1960). History of the Christian Church, Volume VII. Modern Christianity. The German Reformation. CCEL. ISBN 978-1-61025-046-7.
• Schaltegger, Christoph A.; Torgler, Benno (1 May 2010). "Work ethic, Protestantism, and human capital" (PDF). Economics Letters. 107 (2): 99–101. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2009.12.037. Archived (PDF) from the original on 22 May 2023.
• Scholz, Bernhard Walter; Rogers, Barbara (1970). Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard's Histories (illustrated, reprint ed.). University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-06186-0.
• Schott, Jeremy M. (2008). Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4092-4.
• Schrader, Charles E. (1936). "The Historical Development of the Papal Monarchy". The Catholic Historical Review. 22 (3): 259–282. JSTOR 25013503.
• Schumpeter, Joseph (1954). History of Economic Analysis. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-0-415-10888-1.
• Schuddeboom, Feyo L. (2017). "The Conversion of Temples in Rome". Journal of Late Antiquity. 10 (1). Johns Hopkins University Press: 166–186. doi:10.1353/jla.2017.0005. S2CID 165142999.
• Schwartz, Seth (9 February 2009). Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-2485-4.
• Segovia, Fernando F.; Moore, Stephen D. (2007). "Introduction". In Segovia, Fernando F.; Moore, Stephen D. (eds.). Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections (reprint, revised ed.). A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-567-04530-0.
• Seifrid, Mark A. (1992). "'Justification by Faith' and The Disposition of Paul's Argument". Justification by Faith: The Origin and Development of a Central Pauline Theme. Novum Testamentum, Supplements. Leiden: Brill Publishers. pp. 210–211, 246–247. ISBN 978-90-04-09521-2. ISSN 0167-9732.
• Shahar, Shulamith (2003). The Fourth Estate A History of Women in the Middle Ages. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-134-39420-3.
• Sharpe, Richard (1995). Life of St Columba. Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0-140-44462-9.
• Shatzmiller, Joseph [in German] (1974). "Review of 'Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History', by Robert Chazan". Jewish Social Studies. 36 (3).
• Shepard, J. (2006). "The Byzantine Commonwealth 1000–1550". In Angold, Michael (ed.). The Cambridge History of Christianity Eastern Christianity. Vol. 5. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–52. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521811132.002. ISBN 978-1-139-05408-9.
• Shlikhta, Natalia [in Ukrainian] (September 2004). "'Greek Catholic'–'Orthodox'–'Soviet': a symbiosis or a conflict of identitites?" (PDF). Religion, State and Society. 32 (3): 261–273. doi:10.1080/0963749042000252214. S2CID 144374454.
• Skiles, William S. (2017). "Protests from the Pulpit: The Confessing Church and the Sermons of World War II". Sermon Studies. 1 (1): 1–23. ISSN 2689-5625.
• Smith, John Howard (2014). The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725–1775 (reprint ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-61147-715-3.
• Southern, Patricia (2015). The Roman Empire from Severus to Constantine (second, revised ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-49694-6.
• Spater, Jeremy; Tranvik, Isak (1 November 2019). "The Protestant Ethic Reexamined: Calvinism and Industrialization". Comparative Political Studies. 52 (13–14): 1963–1994. doi:10.1177/0010414019830721. ISSN 0010-4140. S2CID 204438351.
• Stannard, David E. (1992). "Pestilence and Genocide". American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 57–146. ISBN 978-0-19-508557-0.
• Stark, Rodney (1996). The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02749-4.
• Štefan, Ivo (2022). "6". In Curta, Florin (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of East, Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500–1300. Routledge. pp. 101–120. ISBN 978-0-367-22655-8.
• Stillman, Norman A. (1998) [1979]. "Under the New Order". The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. ISBN 978-0-8276-0198-7.
• Stroumsa, Guy (2007). "Religious dynamics between Christians and Jews in late antiquity (312–640)". In Casiday, Augustine; Norris, Frederick W. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 149–172. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812443. ISBN 9781139054133.
• Sumption, Jonathan (2011). The Albigensian Crusade. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-26657-9.
• Táíwò, Olúfémi (2010). How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press. ISBN 978-0-253-35374-0.
• Tapie, Matthew (2017). "Christ, Torah, and the Faithfulness of God: The Concept of Supersessionism in "The Gifts and the Calling"". Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations. 12 (1). doi:10.6017/scjr.v12i1.9802.
• Tarver, Micheal; Slape, Emily (2016). "Christianos Nuevos". In Tarver, Micheal; Slape, Emily (eds.). The Spanish Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio. pp. 210–212. ISBN 978-1-4408-4570-3.
• Taylor, Molly E. (2021). "Eschatology and Exile: The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century". Bishop Street: Student Journal of Theological Studies. 109.
• Thiessen, Matthew (September 2014). Breytenbach, Cilliers [in German]; Thom, Johan (eds.). "Paul's Argument against Gentile Circumcision in Romans 2:17–29". Novum Testamentum. 56 (4). Leiden: Brill Publishers: 373–391. doi:10.1163/15685365-12341488. eISSN 1568-5365. ISSN 0048-1009. JSTOR 24735868.
• Thomas, Charles (1997). "Evidence for Christianity in Roman Britain. The Small Finds. By CF Mawer. BAR British Series 243. Tempus Reparatum, Oxford, 1995. Pp. vi+ 178, illus. ISBN 0-8605-4789-2". Britannia. 28: 506–507. doi:10.2307/526801. JSTOR 526801. S2CID 191997942.
• Thompson, Glen L. (1999). "Trouble in the Kingdom: Church and State in the Fourth Century". Essay Life.
• Thornton, Russell (1987). "Overview of Decline: 1492 to 1890–1900". American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. The Civilization of the American Indian Series. Vol. 186. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 42–158. ISBN 978-0-8061-2074-4.
• Tilley, Maureen (2006). "North Africa". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 380–396. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.021.
• Trebilco, Paul Raymond (2017). Outsider Designations and Boundary Construction in the New Testament: Early Christian Communities and the Formation of Group Identity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-31132-8.
• Trevett, Christine (2006). "Asia Minor and Achaea". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. pp. 314–329. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.019. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Troianos, Spyros [in German]; Velissaropoulou-Karakosta, Ioulia (1997). Ιστορία Δικαίου [Legal History: From Ancient to Modern Greece] (in Greek). Vol. 2. Athens: Sakkoulas. ISBN 978-9-602-72735-5.
• Trombley, Frank R. (1985). "Paganism in the Greek World at the End of Antiquity: The Case of Rural Anatolia and Greece". The Harvard Theological Review. 78 (3/4): 327–352. doi:10.1017/S0017816000012426. JSTOR 1509694. S2CID 162986189.
• Trombley, Frank R. (Winter 1996). "The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (review)". Journal of Early Christian Studies. 4 (4). Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press: 581–582. doi:10.1353/earl.1996.0079. ISSN 1086-3184. S2CID 170001371.
• Trombley, Frank R. (2001). Hellenic Religion and Christianization c. 370–529 (2nd ed.). Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-0-391-04121-9.
• Trombley, Frank (2007). "Christianity and paganism, II: Asia Minor". In Casiday, Augustine; Norris, Frederick W. (eds.). Cambridge History of Christianity. Cambridge University press. pp. 189–209. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812443. ISBN 9781139054133.
• Tyerman, Christopher (1992). "Who went on Crusades to the Holy Land?". In Ḳedar, B. Z. (ed.). The Horns of Hattin Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Jerusalem and Haifa, 2-6 July, 1987. University of Michigan. pp. 13–26.
• Ullmann, Walter (2005). A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-34952-6.
• Religious Persecution in the Soviet Union. United States Congress House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East. 1985. p. 129. OCLC 09342826.
• Vaage, Leif E. (2006). Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 978-0-88920-536-9.
• Verger, Jacques [in French] (1995). "The Universities and Scholasticism". In McKitterick, Rosamond; Abulafia, David (eds.). The New Cambridge Medieval History. Vol. 5, c.1198–c.1300. Cambridge University Press. pp. 256–276. ISBN 978-0-521-36289-4.
• Veszprémy, László [in Hungarian] (2001). "Hungary's Conversion to Christianity. The Establishment of Hungarian Statehood and its Consequences to the Thirteenth Century". Hungarian Studies Review. 28 (1–2): 73–92.
• Vidmar, John (2005). The Catholic Church Through the Ages: A History. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-4234-7.
• Vinzent, Markus (2006). "Rome". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 397–412. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.024. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Vlach, Michael J. (2010). Has the Church Replaced Israel? A Theological Evaluation. B&H Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8054-4972-3.
• Walters, Philip (10 November 2005). "A survey of Soviet religious policy". In Ramet, Sabrina (ed.). Religious Policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–30. ISBN 978-0-511-59827-2.
• Ward, W. (2006). "Evangelical awakenings in the North Atlantic world". In Brown, Stewart; Tackett, Timothy (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 7. Cambridge University Press. pp. 329–347. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521816052.019. ISBN 978-1-139-05412-6.
• Waugh, Scott L.; Diehl, Peter (2002). Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-52509-1.
• Weber, Max; Kalberg, Stephen (2012) [First published 1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-57958-338-5.
• Whalen, Brett Edward (2015). "The Papacy". In Swanson, R. N. (ed.). The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity: 1050-1500 (illustrated ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-66014-3.
• Whitt, Laurelyn; Clarke, Alan W., eds. (2019). "Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Nations". North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 44–70, 71–100. ISBN 978-1-108-42550-6. LCCN 2019008004.
• Wiemer, Hans-Ulrich [in German] (1994). "Libanius on Constantine". The Classical Quarterly. 44 (2): 511–524. doi:10.1017/S0009838800043962. JSTOR 639654. S2CID 170876695.
• Wilken, Robert Louis (2013). The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11884-1. JSTOR j.ctt32bd7m.5. LCCN 2012021755. S2CID 160590164.
• Wilkins, Steve (2017). Christian Ethics: Four Views. IVP Academic. ISBN 978-0-8308-4023-6.
• Williams, George Huntston (1995). The Radical Reformation (Third ed.). Penn State Press. ISBN 978-0-271-09134-1.
• Witte, John Jr. (1997). From Sacrament to Contract Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0-664-25543-5.
• Wogaman, J. Philip (2011). Christian Ethics A Historical Introduction. Westminster John Knox Press. ISBN 978-0-664-23409-6.
• Wood, Ian N. (2007). "Some historical re-identifications and the Christianization of Kent". In Wood, Ian N.; Guyda, Armstrong (eds.). Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals. Brepols. pp. 27–35. ISBN 978-2-503-51087-3.
• Woods, Thomas Jr.; Canizares, Antonio (2012). How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 978-1-59698-328-1.
• Worthen, Molly (12 May 2008). "The Chalcedon Problem: Rousas John Rushdoony and the Origins of Christian Reconstructionism". Church History. 77 (2): 399–437. doi:10.1017/s0009640708000590. ISSN 0009-6407. S2CID 153625926.
• Wylen, Stephen M. (1995). The Jews in the Time of Jesus: An Introduction. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-3610-0.
• Yakovlev, Alexander N. (2002). A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Translated by Anthony Austin, Paul Hollander. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10322-9.
• Yang, Fenggang (20 January 2017). "Chinese Conversion to Evangelical Christianity: The Importance of Social and Cultural Contexts". Sociology of Religion. 59 (3). Oxford University Press: 237–257. doi:10.2307/3711910. JSTOR 3711910.
• Yasin, Ann Marie (2005). "Funerary Monuments and Collective Identity: From Roman Family to Christian Community". The Art Bulletin. 87 (3): 433–457. doi:10.1080/00043079.2005.10786254. S2CID 162331640.
• Young, Frances M. (2006). "Prelude: Jesus Christ, foundation of Christianity". In Mitchell, M.; Young, F. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–34. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521812399.002. ISBN 978-1-139-05483-6.
• Zurlo, Gina A. (2020). "1 A Demographic Profile of Christianity in East and Southeast Asia". In Ross, Kenneth R.; Alvarez, Francis D.; Johnson, Todd M. (eds.). Christianity in East and Southeast Asia (illustrated ed.). Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-4744-5162-8.
• Zurlo, Gina A. (2015). "The Social Gospel, Ecumenical Movement, and Christian Sociology: The Institute of Social and Religious Research". American Sociology. 46 (2): 177–193. doi:10.1007/s12108-014-9231-z. S2CID 255516488.

Encyclopedia & web sources

• "Why the Chinese government is targeting young Christians in its latest crackdown". America magazine. 14 May 2018.
• Black, Henry Campbell (2016). "Jus canonicum". In Garner, Bryan A. (ed.). Black's Law Dictionary (5th ed.). Thomson Reuters. ISBN 978-0-314-84489-7.
• Fousek, Jan; Kaše, Vojtěch; Mertel, Adam; Výtvarová, Eva; Chalupa, Aleš (26 December 2018). "Spatial constraints on the diffusion of religious innovations: The case of early Christianity in the Roman Empire". PLOS One. 13 (12): e0208744. Bibcode:2018PLoSO..1308744F. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0208744. PMC 6306252. PMID 30586375.
• Halsall, Paul (2021) [1996]. "Medieval Sourcebook: Iconoclastic Council, 754 – Epitome of the definition of the iconoclastic Conciliabulum, held in Constantinople, A.D. 754". Internet History Sourcebooks Project. New York: Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies at the Fordham University. Archived from the original on 21 March 2022. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
• Herlihy, David (6 June 2023). "The emergence of modern Europe, 1500–1648/Aspects of early modern society". Britannica. Retrieved 30 July 2023.
• Heyrman, Christine Leigh (n.d.). "The First Great Awakening". Teacher Serve Divining America Religion in America. National Humanities Center. Retrieved 19 July 2023.
• "Meeting of His Holiness Pope Francis with His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia". w2.vatican.va. Rome: The Holy See. 12 February 2016. Archived from the original on 15 February 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
• Hudson, Miles (22 May 2023). "Fall of Constantinople". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 25 June 2023. Retrieved 3 August 2023.
• Hughes, Richard T. (2004). "Restoration, Historical Models of". In Foster, Douglas A.; Dunnavant, Anthony L. (eds.). The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. pp. 635–638. ISBN 978-0-8028-3898-8.
• Hunt, Julie (21 July 2020). "Nuns: powerful women of the Middle Ages". Swissinfo.ch. SWI. Retrieved 16 July 2023.
• Jan Pelikan, Jaroslav (13 August 2022). Christianity. Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Johnston, William M., ed. (2013). Encyclopedia of Monasticism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-78716-4.
• Kohler, Kaufmann; Krauss, Samuel (1906). "Arianism". The Jewish Encyclopedia. Kopelman Foundation. Archived from the original on 10 January 2012. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
• Lorenzetti, Jennifer (19 January 2023). "Filioque History & Controversy What is the Filioque Clause?". Study.com. Retrieved 21 June 2023.
• McGrath, James F. (October 2011). "Fringe view: The world of Jesus mythicism..." The Christian Century. Christian Century. Retrieved 21 September 2018.
• Monter, William (2005). "Inquisition, The: The Inquisition in the Old World". Encyclopedia of Religion. Retrieved 28 April 2020 – via Encyclopedia.com.
• Monter, William (2023). "Witch Trials, Europe". Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Culture Society History. Retrieved 14 July 2023 – via Encyclopedia.com.
• Morgan, Phillip (15 November 2022). "A Difference in Kind: The First and Second Great Awakenings". Helwys Society Forum. the HSF.com. Retrieved 4 December 2023.
• Noll, Mark (2009). "Science, Religion, and A.D. White: Seeking Peace in the "Warfare Between Science and Theology"" (PDF). The Biologos Foundation. Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 March 2015. Retrieved 14 January 2015.
• Nowell, Charles E.; Magdoff, Harry; Webster, Richard A. (13 November 2022). "Western colonialism". Western colonialism | Definition, History, Examples, & Effects | Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 15 January 2023.
• O'Connell, Erin (12 April 2006). "The New Face of Global Christianity: The Emergence of 'Progressive Pentecostalism'". Pew Research Center religion. Pew Research Center. Retrieved 30 July 2023.
• Oestereich, Thomas (1907). "Abbess". Catholic Encyclopedia. Retrieved 1 November 2019.
• Ostler, Jeffrey (2 March 2015). "Genocide and American Indian History". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.3. ISBN 978-0-19-932917-5. Archived from the original on 10 August 2021. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
• Ostling, Richard (24 June 2001). "Cross meets Kremlin". Time. Archived from the original on 13 August 2007.
• Parker, N. Geoffrey (2023). "The emergence of modern Europe, 1500-1648". The Wars of Religion. Britannica. Retrieved 17 July 2023.
• Peters, Edward N. (n.d.). "CanonLaw.info Home Page". Retrieved 11 June 2013.
• "Global Christianity – A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population". Pew Research Center religion. 19 December 2011. Retrieved 3 August 2023.
• "Religion in Africa 2022". Find Easy population & more. 26 October 2022. Retrieved 4 February 2023.
• Sahgal, Neha; Evans, Jonathan; Salazar, Ariana Monique; Starr, Kelsey Jo; Corichi, Manolo (2021). "Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation". Pew Research Center. Indians say it is important to respect all religions, but major religious groups see little in common and want to live separately
• "Understanding the rapid rise of Charismatic Christianity in Southeast Asia". cmp.smu.edu.sg. Singapore Management University. 27 October 2017.
• Sullivan, Patricia (26 November 2006). "Anti-Communist Priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa". The Washington Post. p. C09.
• "Weber, Calvinism and the Spirit of Modern…". tutor2u. 17 July 2018. Retrieved 22 March 2020.
• "The German churches and the Nazi state". Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 24 July 2023.
• Valkenburgh, Sarah (1994). "A Dramatic Revival: The first great awakening in Connecticut" (PDF). schoolinfosystem.org. The Concord Review. Retrieved 19 July 2023.

External links

Media related to History of Christianity at Wikimedia Commons The following links give an overview of the history of Christianity:

• Historical Christianity: The Ancient Communal Faith: Print, ebook, and audiobook
• Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010). A History of Christianity (Television production). BBC Four. Retrieved 7 April 2022.
• History of Christianity Reading Room: Extensive online resources for the study of global church history (Tyndale Seminary).
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Christianity in History
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Church as an Institution
• Sketches of Church History From AD 33 to the Reformation by Rev. J. C Robertson, M.A., Canon of Canterbury
• "Church History" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). 1911. pp. 330–45.
• A History of Christianity in 15 Objects online series in association with Faculty of Theology, Uni. of Oxford from September 2011

The following links provide quantitative data related to Christianity and other major religions, including rates of adherence at different points in time:

• American Religion Data Archive
• Historical Christianity, A timeline with references to the descendants of the early church.
• Reformation Timeline, A short timeline of the Protestant Reformation.
• Fourth-Century Christianity