How did Christianity spread to become the biggest religion on earth? To me and Derrick Qu, who are not familiar with the Christian culture in our upbringing, it is amazing that more than two billion people choose to put their faith in this one book called “the Bible” and the Prophet Jesus Christ. For this final project, we wanted to explore how Christianity came to be what it is today, and find out how the Bible was the foundation of it all. 

After preliminary research, we found three critical eras in Christianity’s development. The first era is Christianity’s initial establishment during 300-500 AD; the second era is the Great Schism between Western and Eastern Churches, with Western Papal power rapidly increasing; the third era is the 1500s when Martin Luther led the reformation. We then decided to focus on these three eras in our project. We created a timeline analyzing the defining historical events in these eras and drew connections between history and the text we read. For each era, we have a section of “Text Connection” to highlight the link between the historical events and their corresponding text source in the Bible. Additionally, these sections act as our endorsement to keep the Bible as one of the required texts in Core 151, as our project illustrates the great value of the Bible in finding connections in history.