First Council of Nicaea

A Baptism in Late Antiquity This letter tells of a decently educated young woman and her conversion to Christianity. Written records of baptism in the Late Antiquity era can vary greatly, especially before the First Council of Nicaea and Constantine’s standardization of the religion. Due to its position and the fact that there was likely only one house church in Dura Europos, the baptismal rituals situated there could differ greatly from the recorded rituals of ancient Rome; even in the same…

The era that rests between the collapse of the Western Roman Empires and the established beginning of early modern European history is known as the Middle Ages because it appears to sit between two superior periods of human history. Often over looked or generalized when looking at the larger spectrum of written history, this millennia contains two of the most important developments in the history of the Europe and the development of the modern world. The history of Medieval Europe is one of two…

and were promised forgiveness of all their sins. King Louis IX of France also known as the “Crusader King” spent his life doing crusades to spread the Catholic religion and beliefs. Peter the Hermit was a priest/preacher and a key individual for the First Crusade. Both, King Louis IX and Peter the Hermit,…

Christianity altered the direction of human events. At the point when Christianity initially began, the entire Roman Empire attempted to kill it off and Nero accused the fall of Rome on Christians. When Constantine made the Edict of Milan, legalized Christianity in Rome, it changed everything, and Christian impact spread quickly all throughout the realm, and the Christian philosophy of peace made individuals withdraw from fighting, which was huge income in the Empire. The stopping of wars…

Of all the big picture questions we examined throughout this semester, the one that consistently stuck out to me was this: “Who is God in this work?” It is all at once such a vast and and confining question, the answer to which is both revelatory of almost all other aspects of a culture and yet still too intricate to grasp. To understand what a culture worships supremely is to understand its motivations for all other decisions, and sometimes vice versa. Some of the cultures we studied worshipped…

series of on and off religious wars fought between the years from 1096 to 1487 under the authority of various Popes. The Crusades were basically fought for the recovery of the Holy Land. They were ordered by Pope Urban II in 1095, and within months the first Europeans had arrived in the Middle East to rid the Holy Land of Muslims. One story particularly boosted the flames of morale and added to the religious zeal and zest of the crusaders. It was the story of Jakelin de Mailly, a knight who…

Even within itself the Christian church was experiencing a plethora of schism’s it was during the First Council of Nicaea that Nicene Christianity was developed by the bishops at the time, this was an effort to unify Christians and in many ways it worked solidifying the doctrine of Christianity that the clergy could get behind and a message they believed their…

established imperial religion until the birth of Christianity. When Christianity took over the empire, the church needed to establish its own doctrines urgently. It also decided who Christ was although the official definition gradually came. At the Council of Nicaea it was agreed that Christ was both man and God. Modern scholars agreed that the 25th of December was decided as the date of Christmas as it represented a symbolic time for the pagan calendar. The Christmas feast was then celebrated…

was in the lives of people at the time, but also in how it set the stage for the divisions; between people and their beliefs, between the West and the East and between Christianity and all other faiths. In the year 1095 Pope Urban II addressed the Council of Clermont in response to a letter he had received from Alexios I Komnenos, the Byzantine Emperor, requesting aid to fight the Seljuq Turks who had conquered most of Asia Minor . In his speech, Urban II, in front of a great crowd, urged all…

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church is the most well-known religious leader in the world today. The office of the Pope was instituted early in the history of the Church. The Papacy was established much later. The leader of the church in Rome was a Bishop as was customary in the early church. In its origin the office of the Pope was not unlike any other office in church leadership, the term was not used exclusively at the church in Rome nor did it convey any special authority not available to…