The story of Christianity's rise is an extraordinary one a small Near Eastern sect of followers of the religious belief and practice of Jesus Christ, a Jewish Galilean teacher and healer living in Roman-occupied Palestine, which developed over the ensuing centuries into a religion of global reach and influence. Growing out of the Jewish faith as transformed by the worship of Jesus Christ after the Resurrection, Christianity went on to convert the greater part of the Roman Empire, and thereby to make a massive historical impact on the political, cultural and social development of Europe, and through the imperial expansion of the latter on the entire world. Christianity treats the seminal events of this history with exemplary clarity, from its early history as a church of persecuted martyrs to its adoption by Rome, from the East-West Schism to 1054 to the Protestant Reformation, from its clash with Islam in the medieval Crusades to the confessional wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, from the rise of denominationalism in the 18th century to the emergence of Christian fundamentalism in the 20th.
