Search Results: Christianity

The Roman imperial cult was the practice of venerating Roman emperors and their families as having divine attributes, honoring their contributions to the spread of Roman religion and culture. It was instituted by the first Roman emperor Augustus...

The Picts were a people of northern Scotland who are defined as a "confederation of tribal units whose political motivations derived from a need to ally against common enemies" (McHardy, 176). They were not a single tribe, nor necessarily...

The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon's six-volume work is that the fall of the Roman Empire...

The Garden of Eden is the biblical earthly paradise created by God to be inhabited by his first human creation - Adam and Eve. Some claim that the name “Eden” derives from the Akkadian term edinu, which means 'plain'. In the biblical tradition...

Saint Peter the Apostle was a well-known figure in early Christianity. Although there is no information on the life of Peter outside the Bible, in the Christian tradition, he is often depicted as the first on many occasions: the first to...

The Unam Sanctam (1302) was a papal bull issued by Pope Boniface VIII (served 1294-1303) requiring the complete submission of all people, including kings, to the authority and dictates of the pope. As the Church was understood as holding...

In the book of Genesis in the pre-flood period, Enoch was the son of Jared and the father of Methuselah. There are few details about Enoch. We learn that he lived 365 years, and then Enoch "walked faithfully with God; then he was no more...

All too often, the Eastern perspective on the Trinity is mistakenly overlooked by Western society in the study of Church History. This is unfortunate, for men like Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390 CE) and John of Damascus (676–749 CE) offered...

The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew (chapters 5, 6, and 7) became a foundational element of the religion of Christianity. The sermon is based on the traditions of Judaism and the Law of Moses, but with added interpretations of...

Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus Christ, is one of the most venerated women from the ancient world. Her most common epithet is "the virgin Mary." She is celebrated by Eastern Orthodox Churches, Catholicism, and various Protestant denominations...