The First Thousand Years

by Robert Louis Wilken

This work is a narrative account of the history of Christianity from its beginning to the end of the first millennium. The principal theme is the slow drama of the building of a Christian civilization. A major theme is the mission of Christians among different peoples in many regions of the ancient world: Ethiopia, Nubia, Armenia, Georgia, Persia, central Asia, India, China as well as among the Germanic peoples of northern Europe and the Slavic peoples in the Balkans and Russia. The rise and spread of Islam is integral to the story. How did a community that was largely invisible in the first two centuries of its existence go on to remake the civilizations it inhabited, culturally, politically, and intellectually? Beginning with the life of Jesus, the author narrates the dramatic spread and development of Christianity over the first thousand years of its history. Moving through the formation of early institutions, practices, and beliefs to the transformations of the Roman world after th