Christianity

node · earth · Mediterranean, Near East, and subsequently global

A monotheistic tradition originating among Jewish communities of Roman Judaea in the first century CE. Adherents hold that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ and that he was raised from the dead; historians treat that as the tradition's foundational claim rather than as a datable event, and reconstruct the movement's early spread from letters, martyr accounts, and later imperial legislation. Christianity travelled first along Roman roads, sea lanes and Jewish diaspora networks in the eastern Mediterranean, and later became an instrument and a beneficiary of state power — in Armenia and Aksum in the fourth century, in the Roman Empire from the same period, and in European colonial expansion from the sixteenth century onward. Eastward, a separate branch travelled the Silk Road as far as Tang China.