About this map
Christianity began in Jerusalem about AD 30, among the followers of Jesus (Acts 2). This map follows it outward one century at a time, and we drew it only from records you can check for yourself. Each kind of record has its own mark.
- Named in the New Testament. These are the places where Acts, Paul’s letters or Revelation name believers or a church, and each card quotes the verse in the King James Version.
- Named in writings from the 100s. Letters and records from that century name more places. They come from Ignatius of Antioch’s letters (about 107–110), the letters of Dionysius of Corinth as Eusebius lists them (about 170), the letter from the churches of Lyon and Vienne (177), the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs (Carthage, 180) and Eusebius on the school at Alexandria (about 180).
- Baptisteries. These are rooms and pools built for baptism between the 200s and the 1100s that scholars rate “certain or very probable”. We took them from the catalogue of early Christian baptisteries by Sebastian Ristow, Hana Hořínková and David Zbíral.
What the map cannot show
- Each place appears in the century of the earliest record we use for it, and that is not always when the faith arrived there. The church in Alexandria, for one, is older than its first mark.
- Christians met in houses long before they built baptisteries (Romans 16:5), and only some of their buildings survive and have been excavated. Where the map is empty, we have no record from there, which does not mean there were no Christians.
- The baptistery catalogue covers Europe, North Africa, the Near East, the Caucasus, Nubia and Ethiopia. It leaves out Persia, Arabia, India and Central Asia, where Christians also lived.
- Many baptisteries are dated only to a span of years, such as 400 to 599, and the catalogue files each one under the middle of its span. That piles some of them into the 500s: of the baptisteries shown in the 500s, could be older.
- The baptisteries thin out after the 500s, and that should not be read as a count of Christians. The catalogue stops at the 1100s, so we draw no later centuries. One record in Rome is from the 1200s, and it appears with the 1100s.
- The catalogue gives only a rough position for baptisteries, and their cards say so. We left out two baptisteries that have no date, and the that the catalogue rates as only “possibly” a baptistery.
Bronnen
- Baptisteries: Sebastian Ristow, Hana Hořínková and David Zbíral, “Early Christian baptisteries, 3rd–12th centuries: A geocoded dataset”, Zenodo, 2022, licensed CC BY 4.0. It builds on Ristow’s Frühchristliche Baptisterien (1998); each card gives the catalogue and Ristow numbers and Ristow’s date. The places and dates are theirs, and we keep only the records they rate “certain or very probable” that have a date.
- Places named in Scripture and in the 100s: located with the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places, licensed CC BY 3.0; each card links to its Pleiades entry.
- Bible text: King James Version (public domain), from bible-api.com. Early writings: the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translations at New Advent, and J. Armitage Robinson’s translation of the Scillitan Acts at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
- Land: Natural Earth, public domain. We drew the map with d3-geo on an equal-area projection, so that latitude does not stretch a region and inflate its number of marks.
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