Christian culture developed—blossomed—during the first century of Christian teaching and conversion, arcing from Palestine around the Eastern Mediterranean to the north and south, including Egypt. [figure 1] I will focus on Egypt, which was very much part of the first wave of conversion.  During the second century, Christian teaching continued to spread in all directions, including west into northern Europe and northwest Africa. I begin in the first centuries after Christ, with the core beliefs and ritual practices of a faith far less institutionalized than modern Christianity.
     For my purposes today, the term “Christianity,” which was not coined until the third century, refers to the church of Jesus Christ, founded on the Word of God and the salvation derived from knowledge of the Word of God. Christianity encompasses the Word of God as comprehended through divine manifestations, as recorded in what we now call the Scriptures, and as taught or preached in a variety of local traditions in Palestine and Syria, Anatolia, the Aegean, and Italy, and along the northeastern Mediterranean coast of Africa. Local cultures, moreover, were important for reinforcing rather than diffusing core beliefs—core beliefs in God the father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ the Son of God, who was born of the Virgin Mary, who was crucified, died, and resurrected to atone for the sins of humankind.

     The church of Jesus Christ emerged from Judea, when Judea was a province of Rome, under the very first Roman emperors. The map on the left represents the extent of the empire at the time of the death of Augustus. Judea is shown in the detailed map on the right. Indeed, many of the earliest Christians were Jews, and in their new faith they found continuity with Judaic traditions. The earliest Judeo-Christians followed the Jewish scriptures, the Pentateuch and the books now termed by Christians as the Old Testament, and they followed Jewish practices for worship and behavior. This small population in Palestine and among the Jewish diaspora soon became part of a larger community. Christ’s students, who were known as his disciples, “went global” to borrow a phrase from contemporary life. An ancient corollary to global would be “universal.”  After Christ’s death, the disciples became apostles, or messengers, of the good news that Christ’s death was part of an economy of salvation, that he was, indeed, the Messiah who had been foretold. This, then, was the faith of a Word that was traveling and was in formation as it journeyed.
     Peter, for example—most prominent of the disciples, then leader of the apostles—preached in Jerusalem and throughout Palestine and parts of Syria and Asia Minor, as did Paul, and like Paul, spent the last years of his life in Rome, where, Christians believe, he was martyred: the bishops of Rome, and later the popes of the Vatican in Rome, traced their apostolic authority back to Saint Peter. We find another example in the apostle Mark, who traveled and taught widely as well before he went to Alexandria in Egypt. He was, apparently, martyred there in about 68 A.D. The Coptic Church in Egypt traces its origins and apostolic authority back to Saint Mark. It is this Egyptian thread that I’ll follow, for the most part, now when I speak not so much of the arrival of Christianity in Africa—it arrived with Mark—but of the subsequent development of Christian traditions in Africa.