A Series

The Church Rome Could Not Kill

A small group sharing bread and a clay cup by lamplight, seen from a dark alley through a partly open door, in the dark cinematic style of the series, with the words "Cannibals and Atheists: Why Rome Really Persecuted the Church" set across the graphic.

Rome had a word for the first Christians. Cannibals. It had another one. Atheists. Both were a true thing seen wrong, and both got men killed.

That church should not have lasted. No army, no money, no standing, and a founder the empire had already executed. What it had was a set of habits the world could not make sense of. When plague emptied a city, they walked back into it. When the empire left the babies it did not want out on the roadside, they went and picked them up. When an old man in Smyrna was told to burn one pinch of incense and go home to his bed, he would not do it.

Then comes the part nobody tells you. That church outlived Rome, and then most of it disappeared. The heartlands of the faith were never Europe. They sat on the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean, and they are gone. Augustine's own country is gone. Four hundred years of that loss is the missing first half of the Crusades, and most men carrying a one sentence opinion about the Crusades have never heard a word of it.

Seven posts. What the church was when it had nothing, and what became of it once it had everything. Read them in order.

  1. 01
    A small group sharing bread and a clay cup by lamplight, seen from a dark alley through a partly open door, in the dark cinematic style of the series, with the words "Cannibals and Atheists: Why Rome Really Persecuted the Church" set across the graphic.

    Cannibals and Atheists: Why Rome Really Persecuted the Church

    Rome called the first Christians cannibals, atheists, and worse. Every charge was a true thing seen through a keyhole. Here is where the rumors came from, how the earliest believers actually worshipped, and the one thing Rome could not forgive.

    9 min read
  2. 02
    A man in a rough tunic walking down an emptied Roman street toward the one open lit doorway, carrying a clay water jar, in the dark cinematic style of the series, with the words "Christians Ran Toward the Plague" set across the graphic.

    Christians Ran Toward the Plague

    When plague emptied Rome's cities and everyone else ran, the Christians walked the other way, into the sick houses, and it cost them their lives. Here is why they did it, and the quieter version of the same test you get handed every week.

    7 min read
  3. 03
    A kneeling man in a wool cloak at a Roman roadside at sunrise, lifting a linen-wrapped bundle against his chest, in the dark cinematic style of the series, with the words "The Church That Raised the Empire's Throwaway Babies" set across the graphic.

    The Church That Raised the Empire's Throwaway Babies

    The Roman world threw away the babies it did not want, and said so without shame. A stubborn minority refused, and went out to pick the discarded ones up. Here is why they saw a throwaway infant as the image of God, and who your own age has left on the roadside.

    10 min read
← All posts