Chronology

The eras are the archive’s own divisions, cut at the deaths that end one generation of witnesses and the crises that open the next. Each band opens onto its figures; each event has its own page with the sources that record it.

Eyewitnesses of Jesus carry the message from Jerusalem to Rome.

1. AD 30Crucifixion, Resurrection & PentecostThe execution of Jesus under Pontius Pilate at Passover, the empty tomb, and the descent of the…
2. AD 44Persecution under Herod Agrippa I — James beheaded, Peter imprisonedAgrippa I killed James son of Zebedee with the sword and imprisoned Peter, and died at Caesarea…
3. AD 49Council of JerusalemThe assembly that decided Gentile converts need not keep the whole Law, and sent its decree to…
4. AD 57Paul writes Romans — 35+ believers of Rome greeted by nameThe letter that names more ordinary Christians than any other document of the first century…
5. AD 62Ananus has James the Just stoned in the interregnumThe death of the Lord’s brother in the gap between two Roman governors, reported by a Jewish…
6. AD 64Great Fire of Rome — Nero’s persecutionThe fire Nero blamed on the Christians, described by a Roman senator who despised them, and the…

All 149 figures of the Apostolic Age →

The generation taught by the apostles — and the last of the apostles themselves — pass from the scene.

1. AD 70Fall of JerusalemThe destruction of the Temple, recorded by a Jewish general who watched it from the Roman side…
2. AD 95Domitian’s reprisals — John exiled to Patmos (trad.)A persecution that reached the emperor’s own household, and the island exile from which the…
3. AD 96Rome’s letter to Corinth (1 Clement) — envoys Ephebus, Bito, FortunatusThe earliest Christian document outside the New Testament, sent by named envoys, and the…
4. AD 112Pliny writes Trajan about the ChristiansThe earliest surviving administrative account of how Rome dealt with Christians, written by a…
5. AD 117Martyrdom of Symeon of Jerusalem & Ignatius under TrajanThe last man with a claimed blood tie to Jesus dies at a hundred and twenty, and a bishop…

All 113 figures of the Apostolic Fathers →

Philosophers defend the faith before emperors and mobs.

1. AD 135Bar Kokhba revolt crushed — Aelia Capitolina; end of the Hebrew bishops of JerusalemThe revolt that ended Jewish Jerusalem, and with it the Jewish-Christian church of the city — a…
2. AD 144Marcion expelled at Rome — founds a rival church and canonThe first man to publish a fixed list of Christian scriptures, and the reason the church had to…
3. AD 156The New Prophecy (Montanism) erupts in PhrygiaA prophetic movement led in part by two women, and the first controversy the church settled by…
4. AD 177Persecution at Lyon & Vienne under Marcus AureliusA persecution described in a letter written by the surviving congregation, naming its own dead…

All 85 figures of the Apologists →

Persecution, scholarship, and the first great theologians.

1. AD 180The Scillitan Martyrs at Carthage — earliest dated Latin Christian textThe earliest dated document of the Latin church: a court record of six people sentenced in…
2. AD 190The Quartodeciman (Paschal) controversy — Victor of Rome vs. the churches of AsiaThe first time a bishop of Rome tried to excommunicate whole provinces, and was told by another…
3. AD 202Severan edict (trad.) — Perpetua & Felicity martyred at CarthageThe only substantial first-person writing by a Christian woman to survive from the ancient…
4. AD 235Maximinus Thrax targets the clergy — Pontian & Hippolytus exiled to SardiniaA persecution aimed at bishops rather than congregations, which sent a pope and the rival who…
5. AD 250The Decian persecution — the first universal edict of sacrifice (libelli)The first empire-wide order to sacrifice, and the only persecution for which the archive holds…
6. AD 251The Novatianist schism at Rome — over readmitting the lapsedA schism over whether the church could forgive those who had sacrificed, which lasted longer…
7. AD 257The Valerian persecution — Cyprian, Sixtus II, and Lawrence martyredA persecution aimed at bishops and at the property of the church, and the only martyrdom in the…
8. AD 260Gallienus’ edict of toleration — the ‘Little Peace of the Church’The first imperial order restoring church property, and the beginning of forty years in which…
9. AD 268The Synod of Antioch deposes Paul of SamosataA bishop tried and deposed by his fellow bishops, whose letter of judgement complains less…
10. AD 272Aurelian awards the Antioch church to the bishop in communion with RomeA pagan emperor deciding which claimant owned a church building, by asking who was in communion…
11. AD 301The martyrdom of Hripsimē and her company at Vagharshapat — the event Agathangelos makes the hinge of Armenia’s conversionThe martyrdoms that Armenian tradition places immediately before the conversion of the first…
12. AD 303The Great Persecution begins — Diocletian’s edicts (churches razed, Scriptures burned)Four edicts in two years, beginning with churches razed and the scriptures burned — and…
13. AD 303The search of the church of Cirta — Munatius Felix inventories the plate and seizes the codicesA Roman official’s inventory of everything one congregation owned, down to forty-seven pairs of…
14. AD 306The Council of Elvira — the earliest conciliar legislation of the West (date disputed, c. 300–324)Eighty-one canons that describe Spanish Christian life in the act of forbidding it, from pagan…
15. AD 311Galerius’ Edict of Serdica — the persecution’s deathbed tolerationThe emperor who began the persecution ending it from his deathbed, and admitting in the text…

All 374 figures of the Ante-Nicene Church →

From the Edict of Milan to the councils that defined the creed.

1. AD 313Edict of Milan — Christianity legalizedThe agreement that made Christianity lawful and ordered confiscated property restored…
2. AD 314The Council of Arles — the first council of the whole Western church, called by ConstantineThe first council of the western church summoned by an emperor, and the earliest conciliar…
3. AD 320Silvanus of Cirta tried before Zenophilus — the documentary origin of the Donatist schismA Donatist bishop prosecuted for the surrender of scripture seventeen years earlier, with the…
4. AD 325The Council of Nicaea — homoousios and the CreedThe first council of the whole church, whose creed, canons and signature list the archive can…
5. AD 339The great persecution of Shapur II begins in Persia — the double tax on the ChristiansThe longest persecution of the fourth century opened not with an edict against belief but with…
6. AD 343The Council of Serdica reaffirms Nicaea in the WestThe council that gave Rome an appellate canon in writing and then split in two, leaving rival…
7. AD 361Julian the Apostate’s pagan restorationA pagan emperor who persecuted by policy rather than execution: exiles recalled to divide the…
8. AD 366Damasus begins the epigram programme — the Roman catacombs opened, restored and inscribed for pilgrimsThe Roman martyr cult brought under the bishop’s authority in carved verse, by a pope whose own…
9. AD 367Athanasius lists the 27 NT booksThe first list in history to name exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament — and it…
10. AD 372The martyrdom of Sabbas the Goth — the only account of a Gothic martyrdom written by Goths, sent to Cappadocia with the relicsThe only account of a Gothic martyrdom written by Goths, sent to Cappadocia with the relics…
11. AD 378Queen Mavia’s revolt — the Tanukhid Saracens defeat Rome and demand a bishop as the price of peaceA federate queen beat the Roman army in the field and dictated a peace whose price was a bishop…
12. AD 380Edict of ThessalonicaThe law that made the Nicene faith the religion of the Roman state, and defined it by naming…
13. AD 381The Council of Constantinople — the Spirit’s divinity affirmedThe council that finished the creed and lost its own acts: an eastern assembly of 150 bishops…
14. AD 381The Council of Aquileia — Palladius and Secundianus deposed, the acts preserved as verbatim minutesThe only fourth-century council whose verbatim minutes survive: two bishops cross-examined line…
15. AD 384Symmachus petitions for the Altar of Victory — Ambrose answers, and the Senate’s last pagan appeal failsThe Senate's last formal plea for the old religion, answered by a bishop — and the archive…
16. AD 390The Thessalonica massacre and the penance of Theodosius — Butheric lynched, seven thousand killed in reprisalA garrison commander lynched, a city punished in its own circus, and an emperor kept from…
17. AD 397Council of Carthage confirms the canonThe African bishops list the canonical books and refer the list overseas for confirmation — the…
18. AD 405Mesrop Mashtots devises the Armenian alphabet — the Scriptures translated and a literature begunA script made so a church could read in its own language, and the account of it is the first…
19. AD 410The Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon — the Persian church receives Nicaea under Isaac and MaruthaThe Persian church receives Nicaea by permission of a Persian king, and is organised into…

All 431 figures of the Nicene Age →

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