Collections
The Early Church, Grouped
Ten ways into the same 1,152 people — for when you know the kind of person you are looking for but not the name.
The ten collections
The Martyrs of the Early Church
222 figures
Every person in this archive whose record says they were killed for the faith — bishops and slaves, a girl of…
Bishops of the Early Church Beyond the Great Sees
282 figures
Smyrna, Lyon, Hierapolis, Nisibis, Milan, Cordova, Carthage’s neighbours and the Cretan towns — the bishops…
The Non-Christian Witnesses to the Early Church
157 figures
Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus, Suetonius, Celsus, Porphyry, and the magistrates who tried Christians and wrote it…
The Women of the Early Church
103 figures
Deacons, patrons, prophetesses, martyrs, desert mothers, empresses and slaves — every woman the sources name…
The Heretics and Schismatics of the Early Church
75 figures
Marcion, Valentinus, Arius, Montanus, Donatus, Sabellius and the teachers around them — the losing side of…
The Roman Emperors and the Early Church
64 figures
From Claudius, under whom the church first crossed imperial paperwork, to Theodosius, who made its faith the…
The Desert Fathers and Mothers
46 figures
Anthony, Pachomius, Macarius, Syncletica, Evagrius and the ammas and abbas of Nitria, Scetis and the Thebaid…
Martyrs of the Great Persecution, AD 303–313
45 figures · part of the martyrs
The last and longest imperial assault on the church: ten years, four edicts, and the deaths that finally…
Martyrs under Marcus Aurelius, AD 161–180
32 figures · part of the martyrs
Justin at Rome, the slave Blandina and the ninety-year-old bishop Pothinus at Lyon, and the twelve of…
Martyrs of the Decian Persecution, AD 249–251
28 figures · part of the martyrs
The first persecution that reached everyone: an edict requiring every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice…
How these are built
Each collection is a rule applied to the archive’s own records, not a hand-picked selection: everyone the rule catches appears, and the page states what the rule excludes. Where a grouping would have duplicated another it was not made, and where the evidence is too thin to support a page — the bishops recorded at Nicaea, for instance, of whom the archive holds twelve of three hundred — no page exists rather than a misleading one.
The six succession lists → · All 1,152 figures → · The chronology →