Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament. Christians believe Jesus to be the Son of God and the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament.

For specific forms of Christianity, see:


 * Catholicism
 * Eastern Orthodox
 * Mormon
 * Protestantism
 * Puritanism
 * The Second Revelation

Christianity in Gunpowder Empire
In its early centuries, the Roman Empire tried to destroy Christianity by executing many of its followers, while Christians were adamantly opposed to all other religions of the Empire, refusing to take part in any religious ceremony even when paying for such defiance with their lives. Christians remained a minority in the Empire, never reaching a position of power to enforce spread their religion as in the home timeline.

After several centuries, a modus vivendi was achieved whereby those who became known as "Imperial Christians" agreed to make an offering of incence (rather than an animal sacrifice) and make this offering for "The Spirit of the Emperor" without recognizing the Emperor's divinity or refering to any other deity.

An Imperial Christian moving to a new city was requiered by law to make such an offering, and had to pay for the handfull of incense the full price of a sacrifical animal. Officials harboring anti-Christian prejudice often provided Imperial Christians performing this duty with an inferior quality incense, to punish them for their insincereity.

A more intransigent faction, calling themselves "Hard Christians", refused to take part in such ceremonies and scorned the Imperial Christians for their willingness to compromise. The Imperial authorities did not actively persecute the Hard Christians, either, but such definace could entail various disablities in daily life.

The difference between the two kinds of Christians often overlapped with class differences: The Imperial Christians tended to be well-to-do merchants and artisans, whose business interests requiered being on reasonably good terms with the authorities, while the Hard Christians were often from the lower classes, in many cases slaves or former slaves.

For their part, the Imperial authorities persisted in regarding Jesus as one among the Empire's many gods, giving him a statue and a niche in official temples on an equal footing with the other deities. Christians of all kinds resented this representation of Jesus, but were powerless to change it.

In the rival Empire of Lieutva, Christianity was not tolerated, the Lietuvan authorities greatly resenting the Christians' refusal to recognise Perkunas and proclaming him a "false god". Lietuva was known among Christians as "the place where one can still become a martyr". Exactly that was its special attraction to a specific kind of Christian.

Crosstime travelers who visited Agrippan Rome and studied its culture became interested in the differences between the Bible used by its Christians and the Bible of the home timeline. For example, in the Bible of Agrippan Rome there were only three Gospels, the Book of John had never been written (and John the Apostle himself possibly never born); the Acts of the Apostles had the same name, but recorded quite different acts; and the Epistles of Paul included several addressed to churches in locations to which the Paul the Apostle in the Home timeline never wrote. St. Jerome never lived in this alternate, and so others had translated the Bible into Latin.Such differences provided scholars in the Home timeline with material to embark on the new field of Comaprative Cross-Time Bible Studies-of which the Christians in Agrippan Rome were completely unaware.