Church History in Plain Language

Era 0 · c. 1000 BC – 4 BC

Background: Greece, Rome and Israel

Christianity did not drop from the sky. It grew from two ancient roots, the faith of Israel and the culture of Greece, inside the political world of Rome.

Most histories of Christianity begin with Jesus. Diarmaid MacCulloch's begins a thousand years earlier. He calls his book The First Three Thousand Years for a reason: you cannot understand the faith without the two older worlds it came from.

The first is Israel. Its people believed in one God who made the world, chose them, gave them a law, and promised to set things right one day. Christianity's God, its Bible (the Old Testament), its hope for a Messiah, and many of its prayers come straight from Judaism.

The second is Greece. Greek thinkers asked big questions about truth, the soul and the nature of the divine. The Greek language became the common tongue of the eastern Mediterranean. The New Testament was written in Greek, and early Christian thinkers used Greek philosophy to explain their faith.

Holding both worlds together was Rome. Its empire gave the first Christians roads, peace and a single political world in which to travel and preach. It also gave them their first persecutors.

The four chapters in this era set the stage. If you are in a hurry, you can skip ahead to Jesus and the Apostles. But many later debates, from the Trinity to the role of the law, make far more sense once you know where the ideas came from.

Timeline: Background: Greece, Rome and Israel (c. 1000 BC – 4 BC)

1000 BC900 BC800 BC700 BC600 BC500 BC400 BC300 BC200 BC100 BC1000 BC King David makes Jerusalem his capital930 BC Kingdom splits into Israel (north) and Judah…753 BC Traditional date of Rome's founding750 BC Homer's epics take shape587 BC Babylon destroys Jerusalem and the Temple; e…515 BC Second Temple completed387 BC Plato founds the Academy333 BC Alexander the Great begins conquering the Pe…332 BC Alexander the Great takes control of Judea250 BC Septuagint translation begun in Alexandria164 BC Temple rededicated (origin of Hanukkah)150 BC Qumran community (likely Essenes) founded ne…146 BC Rome destroys Carthage and Corinth, dominati…44 BC Julius Caesar assassinated27 BC Augustus becomes the first emperor20 BC Herod begins rebuilding the Temple
Selected key dates from each chapter of this era. Click an event to read its chapter, or see every date in this era on the master timeline.

Chapters in this era

  1. 1The Greek MindGreek philosophy and language, and why they mattered so much to the early church.
  2. 2Rome and Its EmpireHow the Roman Empire made the spread of Christianity possible, and why Romans found the new faith so strange.
  3. 3Ancient IsraelThe story of Israel, covenant, kings, prophets and exile, that Christianity inherited as its "Old Testament."
  4. 4Judaism in the Time of JesusPharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and the hopes of ordinary Jews when Jesus appeared.