In this week of the course, you will be studying the origins and growth of early Christianity, the second of the West's three major monotheistic religions along with Judaism and Islam. Christianity, unlike Judaism, was a revealed religion--by the way it is also an evangelical religion, unlike Judaism, in that it members seek to spread the faith to non-believers--connected with the teachings of a single individual, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was born a Jew, and his work closely resembled the work of the earlier prophets who had sought to make the religion more ethically and less ritually and ceremonially focused. The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, during his short ministry of little over three years, proved to be of profound influence. Christianity developed within the context of the Roman Empire and bore the empire's profound mark. St. Augustine, one of the most influential figures of the early church, believed that the Roman Empire had come into existence purely to act as an incubator for Christianity. The Empire's roads and communication network proved to be a major means for spreading word of Christianity throughout the empire. Over time, the number of adherents to Christianity grew in size. Roman authorities originally dismissed the new religion as a meaningless Near Eastern cult, similar to the thousands of other cults that existed within the Roman Empire. As Christianity grew in popularity, Roman emperors became more alarmed, particularly in the third century when a series of epidemic, economic and military disasters befell the empire. As emperors attempted to figure out what was the cause of the calamities, they increasingly tended to blame Christians. Meanwhile, more and more people were adopting Christianity as it provided meaningful solutions and a spiritual message that they could no longer find in their roles as Roman citizens. By the fourth century, Christianity had become so widespread within the empire, that it was first legalized and then made the official religion of the empire. And so Christianity become inexorably linked with the future of Western civilization. Please also remember that Christianity evolved (in the process copying much of the governmental, bureaucratic and legal--not to mention military--traditions of the Roman Empire) as a religion over time, especially as a formal church came into existence and with the subsequent elaboration of church doctrine (theology) and ceremony. There is actually very little of what came to develop as Christianity in the surviving record (the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles) of the work of Jesus of Nazareth.