THE CHRISTIANS - Their First 2000 Years - The Christian History Project

A series of fascinating books on those remarkable people called Christians, who say they have been born anew through the power of a man called Jesus Christ, and who have shaped the course of human history for the last two thousand years.

They include emperors and peasants, kings and transients, extraordinary women and challenging men, people of great wealth and people sworn to a lifetime of poverty, scientists, poets, politicians and musicians, but all holding one captivating thing in common, a deep faith in, and commitment to, the man called Jesus, who regards them all as his brothers and sisters.

Here is their story, told as it has never been told before, an epic like Lord of the Rings, but soundly historical, factual and true, with people so vibrant, so real that they will make you question the depth of your own commitments, and examine your own life in the light that shines from theirs across the ages.

See how they met the horrendous difficulties that so often beset them, how they regarded death as a triviality and life as an eternal phenomenon. But see also how they were far from infallible, frequently went astray and erred seriously. Yet they were always called back, and step by painful step laid the very foundations of the society we live in today–a society we could delude ourselves into thinking we cannot lose.

If you are a Christian, then you are one of these people, and this is your story, the story of your family, your brothers and sisters. Meet them. For you too have wars to win and souls to save, and they may show you how.

“Sometime in the opening years of the fourteenth century, the eldest son of the Alighieri family of Florence, Italy, reached the inescapable conclusion that he was a failure…” So begins the eight volume in our series, The Renaissance: God in Man. The man in question was the great poet Dante and by the end of the fourteenth century it was clear to Italy and the rest of western Christian world that the creator of the Divine Comedy, far from being a failure, had described and defined the uneasy relationship between man and God that would inform the ages to come.

And what a turbulent age was beginning! This volume tells the story of Christendom between the mid-1300s and the early 1500s, a time period that spans what are known as the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It begins with the Black Death, the most terrible pestilence ever recorded, and it ends with the Italian Renaissance, the most beautiful effusion of art ever seen. It marks the discovery of some tropical islands in the West Indies by the fearless – if conflicted - Genoese navigator Columbus, and it recounts the carnage and rapine of the Hundred Years War, a French tragedy that would not end until the brave teenager Joan of Arc rallied her country to arms.

Through most of the period, the church was in crisis and schism, its factions jostling for power, and its leaders all too often falling prey to the worldly corruptions that were the dark side of the Renaissance. The reaction to this lack of godly leadership erupted in the first convulsions of Protestantism – from the Englishman John Wyclif and the Czech martyr and hero John Hus. Degraded and preoccupied, the church was poorly prepared to ward off its enemies both from within and without. In 1453, the Turkish sultan’s forces captured and occupied Constantinople; and in 1527 the cruelest blow to Christendom came when one of its own armies sacked the holy city of Rome.

The lavishly illustrated chapter on the Renaissance, however, provides a glimmer of the things of which man, for all his imperfections, was still capable. “We climbed up,” writes Dante, “until finally we saw through a round opening the beauteous things which heaven holds. And there we came out to see, once more, the stars.” For amid all the hell of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, there was, in the Renaissance that divine glint of heaven.