Why Study Church History?

🎯 Objectives

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

• explain what Church history is and why a believer should know it;
• find your way through the four great eras into which it is usually divided;
• recognize some ancient sources, including non-Christian ones, that speak about Jesus and the first Christians, and understand how they help us date the events of the New Testament.

📖 Receive

Read Deuteronomy 32:7 slowly, where Moses invites the people to remember the days of old and to ask their fathers and elders. Then read Hebrews 12:1-2 and Hebrews 13:7-8.

“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” — Hebrews 13:8 (KJV)

Notice the movement of these passages: looking back at those who went before us, and then running forward with our eyes fixed on Jesus. That is the spirit in which we will take this course.

🔍 Examine

A story that is also ours

Church history is the story of God’s people after Pentecost: how the Gospel went out from Jerusalem, crossed the Roman Empire, reached distant peoples and came all the way to us. It is a story of martyrs and missionaries, of councils and reformers, but also of compromises with power, divisions and violence carried out in the name of Christ.

An elderly believer once summed it up like this: God did wonderful things, then people came along and spoiled everything. It is a bitter remark, but it contains a truth: Church history shows both God’s faithfulness and the frailty of his people. Studying it makes us more humble, because we see how easy it is to drift away from Scripture, and more grateful, because we see how the Lord has guarded his Word and his Church, according to Jesus’ promise: “upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18).

There is also a very practical reason. Many things we take for granted, such as the canon of the Bible, the way we speak about the Trinity, Sunday worship or the differences between denominations, have a history. Knowing it helps us distinguish what comes from Scripture from what comes from human traditions. That is exactly the work of the Bereans.

How history is studied

The historian works with sources: written documents, inscriptions, coins, papyri, archaeological remains. Sources must be collected, compared and interpreted, and every historian reads them from a certain perspective. This does not mean that historical truth is out of reach, but that we must read carefully and honestly, always asking: who is writing, when, why, and with what information?

Let us try a concrete example: the letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan, which we will look at shortly.

• Who is writing? A Roman governor, not a Christian: he has no interest in praising the new faith.
• When? Around 112, less than a century after Jesus’ death.
• Why? He asks the emperor how to handle trials against Christians: it is an administrative document, not a religious treatise.
• With what information? He questioned some Christians, even under torture, and reports what he heard.

Precisely because it comes from an outside and suspicious observer, his testimony about worship offered “to Christ as to a god” has particular value.

A believer adds a conviction of faith to this work: behind human events there is a Lord who guides history toward its fulfilment (Ephesians 1:10). We do not claim to read every event as a divine sign, but we believe that history has meaning.

The great eras

To find our way, a map is useful. Many textbooks, evangelical ones included, divide Church history like this:

Era	Period	What characterizes it
Ancient	from the birth of Jesus to 590	the apostles, the persecutions, the councils, the alliance with the empire
Medieval	590-1517	the papacy, the empire, the schism between East and West, the first reform movements
Modern	from 1517	the Reformation, the revivals, missions
Contemporary	from the 19th century to today	secularization, Pentecostalism, the global Church

The same scheme, seen as a timeline:

timeline
  title The great eras of Church history
  Ancient : From Pentecost to 590 : Apostles, martyrs and councils
  Medieval : 590-1517 : Papacy, empire and schism
  Modern : From 1517 : Reformation, revivals and missions
  Contemporary : From the 19th century to today : The global Church

The dividing dates are symbolic: 590 is the start of Gregory the Great’s pontificate, 1517 the year of Martin Luther’s 95 theses. We will use them as reference points.

What non-Christian sources say about Jesus

The New Testament is our main and most reliable source about Jesus. But it is interesting that some non-Christian authors, living between the end of the 1st and the beginning of the 2nd century, also speak about him or his disciples.

• Tacitus, a Roman historian, in the Annals (15.44) recounts the fire of Rome in 64 and the persecution of Christians ordered by Nero. He explains that their name comes from Christ, who under the emperor Tiberius had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate.
• Josephus, a Jewish historian, speaks of Jesus twice in the Antiquities of the Jews. In book 20 he records the death of James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ. In book 18 there is a longer passage, the so-called Testimonium Flavianum. Many scholars think Josephus really did speak about Jesus there, but that some very “Christian” phrases were added later by copyists.
• Pliny the Younger, governor in Asia Minor, writes to the emperor Trajan around 112 (letter 10.96). He reports that Christians gather before dawn on a fixed day and sing a hymn to Christ as to a god.
• Suetonius, in his Life of Claudius, mentions disturbances among the Jews of Rome caused by a certain “Chrestus”, probably an echo of the tensions sparked by preaching about Christ.

📌 Sources and faith These testimonies do not “prove” the Gospel, but they confirm that Jesus is a historical figure, crucified under Pilate, and that a few decades later his followers were already worshipping him as Lord. The Christian faith does not arise from a timeless myth, but from events that happened in history.

Dating Paul’s life

History also helps us read the Bible better. Historians distinguish an internal chronology, drawn from the biblical texts themselves, and an external chronology, drawn from documents and finds. When the two meet, we get fixed points.

A famous example concerns Paul in Corinth. Acts 18:2 says that Aquila and Priscilla had recently arrived from Italy, because the emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from Rome: a measure usually placed around 49. Acts 18:12 says that Paul was brought before Gallio, proconsul of Achaia. An inscription found at Delphi allows Gallio’s proconsulship to be dated around 51-52. Thanks to these two facts we can place Paul’s stay in Corinth quite precisely, and from there reconstruct much of his life.

🔗 Connect

The Bible itself teaches us to remember. Israel was to tell their children the works of the Lord (Psalm 78:4-7). Luke writes his Gospel after careful research (Luke 1:1-4), and in Acts he tells the story of the newborn Church. Hebrews 11 is a long gallery of believers from the past, presented as examples of faith.

Church history continues that story. But with an important difference: Scripture is inspired, later history is not. That is why we read it with discernment, testing every development by the Word, as the Bereans did (Acts 17:11). In the BereaWay Method this means receiving events in their context, examining them honestly and connecting them to what the Bible teaches.

🙏 Apply

Take a few minutes to reflect, on your own or in a group:

1. What do you know about the history of your local church or your denomination? Where does it come from?
2. Which habit or conviction in your community do you think comes directly from the Bible, and which one from a tradition? How could you check?
3. Hebrews 13:7 invites us to remember the leaders who spoke the Word to us. Who have these people been in your life? Thank God for them.
4. Why is it important for faith to know that Jesus is a historical figure and not just a symbol?

📚 Go Deeper

• Read Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1-8: Luke presents himself as a careful historian, and the history of the Church begins with the promise of the Spirit.
• Read Acts 18:1-17 with a map of Paul’s journeys and locate Corinth, Rome and Delphi.
• Start building your own timeline: mark around 33 (Jesus’ death and resurrection), 64 (Nero’s persecution), 590 and 1517. We will complete it lesson by lesson.

In the next lesson we will enter the world in which the Church was born: “the fulness of the time”.