A Complex, Vibrant Movement
Many Christians might be surprised to learn that the birth of Christianity was anything but smooth. The polytheistic Romans ruled the world into which Christianity was born. They held political, cultural, and religious beliefs different from those of the Jews living in ancient Palestine. The Hebrew people would have had contact with myriad ideas from Roman and non-Roman influences from around the Mediterranean region and eastward into Africa and even India. Hellenistic philosophers, magicians, prophets, charismatic teachers of various belief systems, itinerant preachers, and self-proclaimed messiah figures of the Jewish tradition populated the lands around the Mediterranean. Some established schools, movements, and offshoots of existing religions. In fact, the world of Jesus was a hotbed of complex religious ideology, and the Romans enabled the spread of all the radical new ideas by making travel easier through their engineering of a vast network of roads and bridges throughout the empire.
Jesus did not found Christianity, per se. He was a Jew and his twelve disciples were all Jews, so the earliest Jesus movement was seen as a Jewish sect, albeit a reformed one. The first few centuries bore witness to the embryonic Christian religion redefining itself, not as a variant Jewish religion, but as a new movement with roots in the older faith.
As Christianity evolved, it grew increasingly diverse in both converts and various branches that soon developed. The branch of the church that remained close to the traditional Apostolic teachings and was patriarchal in its view toward women emerged as the dominant arm of the church. Eventually, its ecclesiastical hierarchy gained imperial power and authority to safeguard its doctrine. But like a vibrantly healthy plant, the church developed new branches that espoused different interpretations of the life and death of Jesus and the core teachings of the Apostles. The leaders in the dominant branch of the faith had to vigorously defend their beliefs against these new ideas and interpretations of Christianity.
