A Series
The Church Rome Could Not Kill
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.
- 01
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 - 02
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 - 03
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 - 04
Polycarp: The Old Man Who Would Not Burn Incense
The old man had eighty-six years behind him and a fire in front of him, and all he had to do to walk away was say a few words. He would not say them.
2 min read - 05
The Heartlands That Fell
For six hundred years the center of the Christian world sat on the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean. In under a century, most of it fell. Here is the map you were never shown.
5 min read - 06
Augustine's Church Is Gone
The homeland of Augustine, Cyprian, and Perpetua did not just lose power. It disappeared. Why that church, of all of them, died completely, and what it says to a comfortable Western church.
6 min read - 07
The Crusades Didn't Come Out of Nowhere
Almost everyone carries a one-sentence version of the Crusades. It is missing the first four hundred years. Here is 1095 in its real context, told honestly, both sides.
6 min read