Life and death of Jesus

This history of Christianity is focussed on the life, death and resurrection

of one person, Jesus Christ, the son of God.

Early painting of Jesus ©

Background to the life and death of Jesus Christ
The traditional story of Jesus tells of his birth in a stable in Bethlehem in
the Holy Land, to a young virgin called Mary who had become pregnant
with the son of God through the action of the Holy Spirit.

The story of Jesus' birth is told in the writings of Matthew and Luke in the
New Testament of the Bible.

His birth is believed by Christians to be the fulfilment of prophecies in the

Jewish Old Testament, which claimed that a Messiah would deliver the
Jewish people from captivity.
Jesus' ministry
After the story of his birth, little is known about Jesus until he began his
ministry at the age of about 30.

He then spent three years teaching, healing and working miracles.

He taught in parables - everyday stories which had divine messages for

those who would hear it.

He had twelve disciples whom he called to follow him and help him in his

work.

Persecution and death

Jesus stated publicly that he spoke with the authority of God.

This claim angered the religious authorities in Palestine and they handed
Jesus over to the Roman authorities as a revolutionary.

He was tried for heresy, condemned and put to death by means

of crucifixion.

Resurrection

On the Sunday following his execution, some of his women followers

discovered that the tomb into which his body had been placed was
empty.

Jesus then appeared to them, alive, as the Jesus they had known prior to
his death. His followers realised that God had raised Jesus from the dead.

Jesus was seen by many of his disciples and followers over the next few
days before, according to the Gospel accounts, he was taken up into
heaven.
Paul and the early church

Saint Paul ©
It has been suggested that the work of Jesus Christ and the impact of his
death and resurrection would not have made any lasting impact on the
world were it not for the missionary work of Paul.

The account of Paul's conversion to Christianity is contained in the New

Testament book, the Acts of the Apostles.

Before his conversion Paul had been known as Saul and had been
violently opposed to the Christian faith as taught by Jesus and after his
death, by his disciples.

Saul experienced a dramatic conversion, known as the Damascus Road

conversion, when he was temporarily blinded.

He found himself filled with the Holy Spirit and immediately began
preaching the Christian gospel.

Paul's concept of Christianity

Paul's teaching centred on understanding the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ as a central turning point in history.

He understood the resurrection to signal the end of the need to live under
Jewish law.

Instead Paul taught of living in the Spirit in which the power of God was
made to work through human flesh.

Some of his letters to fledgling churches throughout the Roman Empire

are contained in the New Testament and outline Paul's theology.
He insisted that Gentiles had as much access to the faith as Jews and
that freedom from the Law set everyone free.

It was this teaching which was essential for the development and success
of the early church which would otherwise have remained nothing more
than another Jewish sect.
Roman Empire
Paul established Christian churches throughout the Roman Empire,
including Europe, and beyond - even into Africa.

Persecution

However, in all cases, the church remained small and was persecuted,
particularly under tyrannical Roman emperors like Nero (54-68),
Domitian (81-96), under whom being a Christian was an illegal act, and
Diocletian (284-305).

Many Christian believers died for their faith and became martyrs for the
church (Bishop Polycarp and St Alban amongst others).

Emperor Constantine ©
Constantine turns the tide

When a Roman soldier, Constantine, won victory over his rival in battle to
become the Roman emperor, he attributed his success to the Christian
God and immediately proclaimed his conversion to Christianity.

Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Constantine then needed to establish exactly what the Christian faith was
and called the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD which formulated and
codified the faith.
Formulating the faith
Over the next few centuries, there were debates and controversies about
the precise interpretation of the faith, as ideas were formulated and
discussed.

The Council of Chalcedon held in 451 was the last council held whilst the
Roman Empire was intact. It gave rise to the Nicene Creed which
Christians still say today to affirm their belief in God, Christ and his
church.

When Rome fell in 476, it meant that Western and Eastern Christians
were no longer under the same political rule and differences in belief and
practice arose between them.

The Great Schism

The differences between Eastern and Western Christianity culminated in
what has been called the Great Schism, in 1054, when the patriarchs of
the Eastern and Western division (of Constantinople and Rome
respectively) were unable to resolve their differences.

The split led to the Orthodox church and the Roman Catholicchurch.

The Orthodox church does not recognise the authority of the

Roman papacy and claims a Christian heritage in direct descent from the
Christian church of Christ's believers.1

1
The basics of Christian history. (2009, June 08). Retrieved April 11, 2019, from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/history/history_1.shtml
Variants and its descriptions (Christianity)

Anglicanism

Act of Supremacy 1534 gave King Henry VIII authority as the head of the
Church of England and separate from Rome.

The Anglican Church is evangelical and highlights the importance of;

personal conversion, authority of scripture, atonement through Christ's
death for salvation. 

Catholicism 

The Church of Rome is the most commonly known as the Catholic Church
(Roman Catholic Church).

The disciple Peter was the First Bishop of Rome (Pope).

Teaches that the real presence of Christ is in the bread and wine after the
consecration at Mass. 

Orthodoxy

Originated from the early church and remained a single institution under
Papal authority until the Great Schism in 1054.

Some of the reasons for the split include difference in language,

difference in the celebration of mass, the inserting of 'and the Son'
without the proper consultation with the Eastern Patriarch. 
Pentecostalism

They originated back in Kansas and California in the early 20th Century.

They emphasise Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the powerfully the
effective and the charismatic side of Christianity.

Central to the Church worship are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, speaking in
the tongues, prophecy, healing and the ecstatic experience

Protestantism

The Protestant reformation revolved around who had the authority to

interpret the Bible.

The key founder was Martin Luther who was a German Augustinian Monk.

Protestantism has a strong focus on scripture.

Luter taught that the only way to heaven was belief in Christ - not works
of penances, pilgrimages and Masses. 2

2
Variants of christianity. (n.d.). Retrieved April 11, 2019, from https://christianity111.weebly.com/variants.html
Why would Christianity succeed from being a cult?

The Roman empire became Christian during the fourth century CE.

At the century’s start, Christians were – at most – a substantial minority
of the population. By its end, Christians (or nominal Christians)
indisputably constituted a majority in the empire. Tellingly, at the
beginning of the century, the imperial government launched the only
sustained and concerted effort to suppress Christianity in ancient history
– and yet by the century’s end, the emperors themselves were
Christians, Christianity enjoyed exclusive support from the state and was,
in principle, the only religion the state permitted.

Apart from the small and ethnically circumscribed exception of the Jews,
the ancient world had never known an exclusivist faith, so the rapid
success of early Christianity is a historical anomaly. Moreover, because
some form of Christianity is a foundational part of so many peoples’ lives
and identities, the Christianisation of the Roman empire feels perennially
relevant – something that is ‘about us’ in a way a lot of ancient history
simply is not. Of course, this apparent relevance also obscures as much
as it reveals, especially just how strange Rome’s Christianisation really
was.

That a world religion should have emerged from an oriental cult in a

tiny and peculiar corner of Roman Palestine is nothing short of
extraordinary. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, though an eccentric one, and
here the concern is not what the historical Jesus did or did not believe.
We know that he was executed for disturbing the Roman peace during
the reign of the emperor Tiberius, and that some of his followers then
decided that Jesus was not merely another regular prophet, common in
the region. Rather, he was the son of the one true god, and he had died
to bring salvation to those who would follow him.

Jesus’s disciples began to preach the virtues of their wonderworker.

Quite a few people believed them, including Saul of Tarsus, who took the
message on the road, changing his name to Paul as a token of his
conversion. Paul ignored the hardscrabble villages of the Galilee region,
looking instead to the cities full of Greeks and Greek-speaking Jews all
around the eastern Mediterranean littoral. He travelled to the Levant,
Asia Minor and mainland Greece, where he delivered his famous address
to the Corinthians.
 Some scholars now believe that Paul might have gone to Spain, not
just talked about wanting to go. What matters is not whether Paul went
there, or if he really was executed at Rome during the reign of the
emperor Nero, but rather the person of Paul himself. When he was
arrested as a threat to public order, his Jewish enemies having
complained to the Romans, Paul needed only two words to change the
balance of power – cives sum, ‘I am a citizen’ – a Roman citizen. The fact
that he was a Roman citizen meant that, unlike Jesus, he could neither be
handed over to the Jewish authorities for judgment nor summarily
executed by an angry Roman governor. A Roman citizen could appeal to
the emperor’s justice, and that is what Paul did.

Paul was a Christian, perhaps indeed the first Christian, but he was
also a Roman. That was new. Even if the occasional Jew gained Roman
citizenship, Jews weren’t Romans. As a religion, Judaism was ethnic,
which gave Jews some privileged exemptions unavailable to any other
Roman subjects, but it also meant they were perpetually aliens. In
contrast, Christianity was not ethnic. Although Christian leaders were
intent on separating themselves physically and ideologically from the
Jewish communities out of which they’d grown, they also accepted
newcomers to their congregations without regard for ethnic origin or
social class. In the socially stratified world of antiquity, the egalitarianism
of Christianity was unusual and, to many, appealing.

The promise of salvation, vouchsafed in the miracles of Jesus

and/or his divine father also drew in followers. Miracles and the
immanence of the supernatural abounded in the Roman world. Powerful
miracles were powerfully persuasive. Stories circulated about the
Christian god (or the son of god – theology was a work in progress for a
very long time), far more stories than today’s canon acknowledges. It
used to be said that women, slaves and the working classes took to
Christianity first but, in fact, the miracle stories and the promises of
salvation attracted a wide cross-section of society. Christianity offered
eternal life in exchange for belief – no complex initiation rituals, no
hieratic pyramid of occult revelation.

While theologians have always been able to render Christianity subtle to

the point of incomprehensibility, to many it has always appeared
breathtakingly simple: ‘Believe exclusively in the Christian god, who is
the one and only god, and you will find eternal life.’ On earth, Christianity
offered community, and it offered support – dining, celebrating, working
and playing together, people who would bury you if you died. In a
cosmopolitan Roman empire, where cities sucked in expendable labour
from the countryside, and where artisans and craftsmen had to travel a
very long way from home, that kind of community could not be taken for
granted or created casually. Christians would and did look after one
another, sometimes exclusively so. Stricter Christians didn’t mix with
non-Christians. More importantly, they didn’t worship other gods along
with their one god. Much of ancient civic life – the holidays and public
festivities which were many people’s only opportunity to eat any quantity
of meat – was wrapped up in sacrifice to the various deities of a flexible
and syncretic Greco-Roman pantheon. Good Christians were expected to
shun these celebrations, the festivals and ceremonies their fellow
townsfolk kept at the centre of their social lives. That made Christians
very strange.

Technically, for a time, Christianity was illegal (its god had been
nailed to a cross like a common bandit after all)

The Jews had kept themselves separate for as long as anyone could
remember, but Greeks and Romans were used to that. Jewish
communities were concentrated, nowhere large, and they were exempt
from mandatory participation in a public cult. Around the Mediterranean,
people could look at Jews with a sort of tolerant, if uncomprehending,
disdain. But Greeks and Romans sitting out the traditional cult of their
own cities made no sense. Were these monotheist Christians pretty much
the same as atheists, refusing to give the divine its due? What exactly did
they get up to in their exclusive meetings? What was this business about
eating their lord’s body? Were they cannibals? Probably it was all just
another eccentric. The world of ancient Rome, after all, was one in which
initiates of one cult bathed in the spurting blood of a freshly slaughtered
bull. Those of another passed the night in temples awaiting divine
revelation and sleeping with the sacred priestesses.

Of course, the eccentricity of neighbours begins to look more

sinister when life gets difficult and livelihoods grow tenuous. A Christian
exclusivity that was also status-blind could look suspicious – so there
were occasional pogroms, though surprisingly few: the pornographic
violence of martyrologies, the tormented saints of a million works of
Catholic art, were the loving harvest of later centuries, not any ancient
reality. Like all empires, the Roman state hated disorder more than
anything, and violence that disturbed the public peace was not
encouraged. Technically, for a time, Christianity was illegal (its god had
been nailed to a cross like a common bandit after all). But a ‘don’t ask,
don’t tell’ policy was easier on everyone, not least the emperors. As the
letters of the emperor Trajan make crystal clear, Christians were not to
be sought out or persecuted unless they made themselves a conspicuous
nuisance, at which point they had no one but themselves to blame for
their fates.

By the third century, Christian communities had grown. One would

have been hard-pressed to find even a modest town without a Christian
household or three. From a fringe movement, Christianity had become a
central fact of urban life. Yet the religion’s normalisation made it suddenly
vulnerable in the middle of the third century, when – thanks to dynastic
instability, epidemic disease and military incompetence – imperial
government went into a potentially terminal decline.

The last dynasty to have any real claim to legitimacy was that of
Septimius Severus (who reigned 193-211). Its last scion was murdered in
a mutiny in 235. For 50 years thereafter, no emperor could make any
lasting claim to the throne. Combined with devastating military failure on
the empire’s eastern front with Persia, and a plague (probably an Ebola-
like haemorrhagic fever) that cut densely packed urban populations to
ribbons, it seemed to many that the divine order of the universe had
come undone.

The emperor Decius, with a shaky claim to a throne he’d won in an

officers’ putsch, thought it prudent to assure himself of divine favour. In
249, he ordered every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice to the gods of
the state, and to prove it by producing the same sort of certificate that
local magistrates issued to document the payment of annual taxes.
Decius might not have actually meant to target Christians specifically, but
his edict could not help but have that effect. Forbidden to worship any
god but their own, many Christians refused to sacrifice. For their
obduracy, some were executed. When Decius was killed on the battlefield
in 251, Christians rejoiced that their god had protected them.

Imperial fortunes did not improve. A decade after Decius’s death,

the emperor Valerian renewed religious persecution, this time targeting
Christians explicitly. Many wondered why Valerian singled them out: the
Roman senate went so far as to query whether the emperor really meant
what he appeared to mean with his edict. He did. More martyrdoms
followed, but then, in 260, Valerian was taken prisoner on the battlefield
by the Persian king, going on to die in captivity. His son and successor
Gallienus immediately ended persecution and restored the legal rights of
Christian churches. That legal measure demonstrates something
significant. Churches had become prosperous, socially integrated
corporate entities, able to possess and dispose of property. Christianity
was no longer a clandestine and minority religion.

The policing of what did and did not constitute true belief has
always preoccupied Christian theologians and been a central dynamic in
Christian politics

The years between 260 and 300 offered little reprieve to those who
wanted to become emperor and govern, but they did amount to the first
golden age for Roman Christians. Although it is likely that we’ll never
have sufficient evidence to tell just how many Christians there were at
any one time, or just how fast the religion spread, we can say for certain
that Christian numbers grew dramatically. By the 290s, there were
Christians in the senate, at court, and even in the families of emperors.

The middle and late third century also witnessed the first dramatic
outpouring of Christian theological works. Some of these theological
works focus on detailing heresies – wrong beliefs – of which there was
already a rich variety. Because Christianity centred so much on beliefs
rather than ritual behaviours, the policing of what did and did not
constitute true and acceptable belief has always preoccupied Christian
theologians and been a central dynamic in Christian politics.

The rulings (‘canons’) of the first council of Christian leaders to

survive provide more insight into the Christianity of this period. Held in
the obscure Andalusian town of Elvira, the council shows us a world in
which the gathered church leaders found it necessary to legislate against
a large number of mundane activities that they determined were
prejudicial to Christian wellbeing. The council decided, for instance, to
forbid the holding of certain kinds of public office (such as the office
of duumvir, effectively the local mayor, as the role might require inflicting
punishment or abusing other Christians). What this tells us is that
Christians were integrated into the fabric of social and political life,
serving in public office, and so forth. Clearly, both Christians and non-
Christians found that integration quite normal – Christians had come a
long way since the days of the last persecution.

Then, ironically, within just a couple of years of Elvira, the imperial

government launched the most virulent anti-Christian persecution in the
history of the ancient world. The causes were multiple. As Christianity’s
appeal spread among the more educated sort of Greek and Roman, non-
Christian intellectuals began to find the upstart religion more threatening.
Though the third century saw a trend towards monotheism among
intellectuals, the philosophical and theosophical varieties embraced by
Neoplatonists and other philosophers were clearly incompatible with
Christian exclusivity. So these pagans crafted sophisticated anti-Christian
arguments, and their criticisms gained ground among the political class.
Then, rivalry over an imperial succession provided the occasion for anti-
Christian polemic to gain new political life.

Towards the end of the third century, an emperor named Diocletian

(r. 284-305) had finally proved able to stabilise imperial government
after 50 years of regime change and violence. In 293, he established a
college of four emperors, all senior generals unrelated to one another
except by marriage. The idea was to ensure that one emperor would
always be on hand to deal with any outbreak of violence and to prevent
rebellion or civil war. Diocletian intended for himself and his senior
colleague to retire, after which their junior partners would bring two new
emperors into the imperial college to replace them. The goal was to
ensure a handover of power at a convenient and peaceful moment so that
the framework of government would remain undisturbed. But Diocletian’s
intentions were thwarted by rivalries, in which Christianity played an
important role.

That is where things foundered: only two of Diocletian’s emperors

had adult sons, and everyone expected them to join the college of four
emperors when the two senior emperors retired. But the childless
emperor Galerius was a ferocious anti-Christian, while his colleague
Constantius – who had a son – was known to be sympathetic to
Christians. In fact, Constantius even had Christians among his family and
household, and that fact gave Galerius an opening to revise the
succession plans in his own favour. By targeting Christians for renewed
persecution, Galerius would damage Constantius and exclude his son
from the succession. He could enhance his own power, and also gratify
his hatred of Christianity.

Galerius convinced Diocletian that Christians were to blame for a

series of calamities, including a mysterious fire in the palace and the
silencing of famous oracles. Thus, in the year 303, the emperors began
what we call the Great Persecution. The campaign against the Christians
was bitterly violent in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, more benign
in the lands that Constantius controlled in the West. But it produced
many heroic martyrdoms and appalling suffering among Christian
communities, and left scars that would linger for centuries. The Great
Persecution ultimately failed to expunge Christianity from the face of the
earth. Christians were simply too numerous, and many were too stubborn
to be turned away from their beliefs. Even Galerius, the most committed
of persecutors, came to accept the failure of his plans, and in 311 issued
an edict of toleration. By 313, persecution had ceased.

In the meantime, in 306, Constantius’s son Constantine had

succeeded his father in the imperial college. Within five years,
Constantine had made himself master of the western Roman empire and
openly embraced Christianity. Always sympathetic to Christians, he
claimed to have had a divine vision that helped lead his troops, flying
Christian symbols on their standards, to victory in civil war in 312. The
most reductionist reading of the evidence would say that, in 310,
Constantine saw a solar halo, a rare but well-documented celestial
phenomenon, in the south of France and in the company of his army, but
Constantine’s account of events changed over the years and we can’t be
sure. We can say with greater certainty that for several years he wavered
between Christian and non-Christian interpretations of the sign. He
eventually decided, to the delight of the Christian leaders in his
entourage, that he had been sent a sign by the Christian God. He became
a Christian, as a matter of belief and perhaps policy too.

We will never know for sure what Constantine’s true motives were
in converting to Christianity. What is certain, however, is that from the
moment he had sole power in the West, he ruled as a Christian. He
restored Christian property seized during the Great Persecution and
enacted legislation that favoured Christians. When he became sole ruler
of the empire in 324, he extended similarly pro-Christian policies to the
eastern empire, where he not only favoured Christians, but actively
discriminated against non-Christians, restricting their ability to worship or
fund their temples.

Patronage, factionalism, political advantage, social cliquishness can

all play a role in the formation of intellectual positions and in continuing
attachments to them

Even more momentously, though, Constantine intervened

personally in conflicts among Christians over questions of discipline and
right belief. In North Africa, Egypt and other parts of the Greek East,
problems arose over such things as how to treat Christians who had
cooperated with the authorities during persecution (the traditores,
‘handers-over’ of Christian holy books), or the correct relationship
between God the Father and God the Son. Such disputes mattered, not
least because Christians who believed the wrong thing would forfeit
eternal life – or worse, ensure their own eternal damnation. Right belief,
by contrast, opened the path to eternal salvation.

By placing the authority of the Roman state and the imperial office
to police and enforce right belief, Constantine created a model that would
have a long and ambiguous history. Councils of bishops, ostensibly
informed by the Holy Spirit, would henceforth define what was orthodox.
Those who chose to believe otherwise would find themselves branded
heretics, and excluded from the communion of orthodox Christians.
Bishops and theologians would find an almost limitless number of
problems to debate – over the relationship of God the Father and God the
Son, over the divine nature of Jesus, over what that meant for the status
of his mother, and so on. Each solution opened up a whole new set of
problems.

As most people know from their own experience, intellectual

differences can harden into intractable convictions for all sorts of non-
intellectual reasons. Patronage, factionalism, political advantage, social
cliquishness can all play a role in the formation of intellectual positions
and in continuing attachments to them. From the fourth century onwards,
Roman history is filled with bitter religious conflicts, state persecution of
heretics, and the perpetual alienation of communities whose Christian
beliefs pitted them against official orthodoxy. Since the time of
Constantine, in fact, Western history has been plagued by the
impossibility of policing belief rather than practice. After all, how do you
decide what someone really believes, or does not believe?

That problem would not have come to have its historic, and tragic,
consequences had Constantine’s conversion not rapidly brought much of
the imperial population with him. As social advancement came to depend
on being a Christian, and as the civic calendar of non-Christian beliefs
was increasingly dismantled, the majority of urban Romans actively
thought of themselves as Christians by the end of the fourth century.
Rejecting Christianity now stood as the marked and unusual choice that
embracing it had been 200 years before. How Christianity went on to
become not just a state religion, but the central fact of political life, and
how Christian institutions of the Middle Ages both maintained and
distorted the legacy of the ancient world, is another, different story. 3
3
Kulikowski, M. (2017, January 30). Christians were strangers (S. Haselby, Ed.). Retrieved April 11, 2019, from
https://aeon.co/essays/how-an-obscure-oriental-cult-converted-a-vast-pagan-roman-empire
 What is the great schism?

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

 Identify the consequences of the East-West Schism

KEY POINTS

 By the turn of the millennium, the Eastern and Western Roman

Empires had been gradually separating along religious fault lines for
centuries. A separation in the Roman world can be marked with the
construction of Constantine The Great’s New Rome in Byzantium.
 The Byzantine Iconoclasm, in particular, widened the growing
divergence and tension between east and west—the Western Church
remained firmly in support of the use of religious images—though
the church was still unified at this time.
 In response, the pope in the west declared a new emperor in
Charlemagne, solidifying the rift and causing outrage in the east.
The empire in the west became known as the Holy Roman Empire.
 Finally, 1054 CE saw the East-West Schism: the formal declaration
of institutional separation between east, into the Orthodox Church
(now Eastern Orthodox Church), and west, into the Catholic Church
(now Roman Catholic Church).
TERMS

East-West Schism

The formal institutional separation in 1054 CE between the Eastern

Church of the Byzantine Empire (into the Orthodox Church, now called
the Eastern Orthodox Church) and the Western Church of the Holy
Roman Empire (into the Catholic Church, now called the Roman Catholic
Church).

Iconoclasm

The destruction or prohibition of religious icons and other images or

monuments for religious or political motives.
 The East-West Schism, also called the Great Schism and the Schism
of 1054, was the break of communion between what are now the Eastern
Orthodox and Catholic churches, which has lasted since the 11th century.

The ecclesiastical differences and theological disputes between the

Greek east and Latin west pre-existed the formal rupture that occurred in
1054. Prominent among these were the issues of the source of the Holy
Spirit, whether leavened or unleavened bread should be used in the
Eucharist, the Bishop of Rome’s claim to universal jurisdiction, and the
place of the See of Constantinople in relation to the Pentarchy.

Tensions Between East And West

By the turn of the millennium, the Eastern and Western Roman

Empires had been gradually separating along religious fault lines for
centuries, beginning with Emperor Leo III’s pioneering of the Byzantine
Iconoclasm in 730 CE, in which he declared the worship of religious
images to be heretical. The Western Church remained firmly in support of
the use of religious images. Leo tried to use military force to compel Pope
Gregory III, but he failed, and the pope condemned Leo’s actions. In
response, Leo confiscated papal estates and placed them under the
governance of Constantinople.

Therefore, the Iconoclasm widened the growing divergence and

tension between east and west, though the church was still unified at this
time. It also decisively ended the so-called Byzantine Papacy, under
which, since the reign of Justinian I a century before, the popes in Rome
had been nominated or confirmed by the emperor in Constantinople. The
deference of the Western Church to Constantinople dissolved, and Rome
would maintain a consistently iconodule position (meaning it supports or
is in favor of religious images or icons and their veneration).

A New Emperor In The West

Regent Irene convened the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 CE,

which temporarily restored image worship, in an attempt to soothe the
strained relations between Constantinople and Rome—but it was too late.
After Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, saved Rome from a Lombard
attack, Pope Leo III (not to be confused with the Byzantine Leo III)
declared him the new Roman emperor in 800 CE, since a woman (Irene)
could not be emperor. It was also a message that the popes were now
loyal to the Franks, who could protect them, instead of the Byzantines,
who had only caused trouble. To the Byzantines, this was an outrage,
attacking their claim to be the true successors of Rome.

From this point on, the Frankish Empire is usually known as the
Holy Roman Empire. With two Roman empires, the Byzantines and the
Franks, the authority of the Byzantine Empire was weakened. In the west
they were no longer called “Romans,” but “Greeks” (and eventually
“Byzantines”). The Byzantines, however, continued to consider
themselves Romans, and looked to the patriarch of Constantinople, not
the pope, as the most important religious figure of the church.

Crisis And Permanent Schism

The differences in practice and worship between the Church of

Rome in the west and the Church of Constantinople in the east only
increased over time.

In 1053, the first step was taken in the process that led to formal
schism; the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael I Cerularius,
ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople, in response to
the Greek churches in southern Italy having been forced to either close or
conform to Latin practices. According to the historian J. B. Bury,
Cerularius’ purpose in closing the Latin churches was “to cut short any
attempt at conciliation.”

Finally, in 1054 CE, relations between the Eastern and Western

traditions within the Christian Church reached a terminal crisis. The papal
legate sent by Leo IX traveled to Constantinople for purposes that
included refusing to Cerularius the title of “Ecumenical Patriarch,” and
insisting that he recognize the Pope’s claim to be the head of all the
churches. The main purpose of the papal legation was to seek help from
the Byzantine emperor in view of the Norman conquest of southern Italy,
and to deal with recent attacks by Leo of Ohrid against the use of
unleavened bread and other Western customs, attacks that had the
support of Cerularius. Historian Axel Bayer contends that the legation was
sent in response to two letters, one from the emperor seeking assistance
in arranging a common military campaign by the Eastern and Western
Empires against the Normans, and the other from Cerularius. On the
refusal of Cerularius to accept the demand, the leader of the legation,
Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, excommunicated him, and in return
Cerularius excommunicated Humbert and the other legates. This was only
the first act in a centuries-long process that eventually became a
complete schism.
 The gradual separation of the last several centuries culminated in a
formal declaration of institutional separation between east, into the
Orthodox Church (now Eastern Orthodox Church), and west, into the
Catholic Church (now Roman Catholic Church). This was known as the
East-West Schism.
 The East-West Schism. The religious distribution after the East-
West Schism between the churches of the Byzantine Empire and the Holy
Roman Empire in 1054 CE.

The church split along doctrinal, theological, linguistic, political, and

geographical lines, and the fundamental breach has never been healed,
with each side sometimes accusing the other of having fallen into heresy
and of having initiated the division. Conflicts over the next several
centuries (such as the Crusades, the Massacre of the Latins in 1182 CE,
the west’s retaliation in the Sacking of Thessalonica in 1185 CE, the
capture and sack of Constantinople in 1204 CE, and the imposition of
Latin patriarchs) would only make reconciliation more difficult. 4

4
Western Civilization. (n.d.). Retrieved April 11, 2019, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-
worldhistory/chapter/the-great-schism-of-1054/