Christianity

Christianity is a religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, who lived in the Middle East about 2,000 years ago. It is the largest religion in the world today. About 2.4 billion people, or roughly one out of every three people on Earth, are Christians. Christians live in nearly every country, and the religion has many different branches, languages, and styles of worship.

What Christians believe

Christians believe in one God. They also believe that God came to Earth as a human being named Jesus. Jesus was born to a Jewish woman named Mary, in a town called Bethlehem, around the year 4 BCE. He grew up in a small village called Nazareth and worked as a carpenter before he began teaching.

Jesus taught people to love God and to love their neighbors. He told them to forgive others, help the poor, and care for the sick. He often taught using short stories called parables. After about three years of teaching, Roman officials arrested him. They put him to death by nailing him to a wooden cross. This was a common Roman punishment.

Christians believe that three days later, Jesus came back to life. This event is called the Resurrection. They believe his death and return opened a way for people to be forgiven by God and to live forever after they die. This belief is the heart of the religion.

The Bible

The Christian holy book is called the Bible. It has two main parts. The Old Testament is shared with the Jewish faith and tells the story of God and the Jewish people. The New Testament tells the story of Jesus and the early Christian church. Together the two parts contain 66 books, written by many different authors over more than a thousand years.

The first four books of the New Testament are called the Gospels. They tell the story of Jesus from four different points of view. The word "gospel" means "good news."

How Christianity spread

After Jesus died, his followers, called disciples, began to share his teachings. At first, only a few hundred people in the region followed him. The Roman Empire treated early Christians harshly. Some were thrown to lions in arenas, and others were killed for refusing to worship Roman gods.

This changed in the year 313, when the Roman emperor Constantine made Christianity legal. Within about 70 years, it became the official religion of the entire Roman Empire. From there, it spread across Europe, into Africa, and eventually around the world. Missionaries, traders, and settlers carried the religion with them.

The main branches

Christianity is not one single group. Over the centuries, it has split into three main branches.

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest. It has about 1.3 billion members and is led by a bishop called the Pope, who lives in Vatican City in Rome. The Eastern Orthodox Church split from the Catholic Church in the year 1054 over disagreements about leadership and beliefs. It is strong in Greece, Russia, and parts of Eastern Europe.

The third branch is called Protestantism. It began in 1517, when a German monk named Martin Luther disagreed with some practices of the Catholic Church. He nailed a list of complaints to a church door in Germany. This sparked a movement called the Protestant Reformation. Today there are thousands of Protestant groups, including Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Pentecostals.

Worship and holidays

Most Christians gather in buildings called churches. Services usually include prayer, singing, readings from the Bible, and a talk by a leader called a priest, pastor, or minister. Many Christians also share bread and wine or grape juice in a ceremony called Communion. This ceremony remembers the last meal Jesus ate with his disciples.

The two biggest Christian holidays are Christmas and Easter. Christmas, on December 25, celebrates the birth of Jesus. Easter, in spring, celebrates the Resurrection. Easter is actually the older and more important of the two holidays, even though Christmas is more famous in many countries today.

Christianity around the world

Christianity is no longer mostly a European religion. Today, the country with the most Christians is the United States. But the religion is growing fastest in Africa and parts of Asia. In Nigeria, Brazil, the Philippines, and South Korea, large numbers of people attend church each week. Less than half of Christians today live in Europe.

Christianity has shaped much of human history. It has inspired great works of art, music, and architecture, from the songs of Bach to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It has also been used to start wars and to fight against them, to support slavery and to end it. Like the people who follow it, the religion has done both great harm and great good.