How did a once small, marginal, and largely invisible community in the first two centuries of its existence go on to remake the cultural, intellectual and political characteristics of the civilizations it encountered and inhabited? Beginning with the life of Jesus, Professor Wilken tells the underappreciated story of Christianity's global development over its first thousand years. This is not simply the Roman imperial coattails story of Constantine's conversion, but a much needed, fuller account that includes the early formation of Christianity's beliefs, practices and institutions, as well as Christianity's most remarkable embrace of and appeals to the Latin West, the Byzantine and Slavic East, the Middle East, Ethiopia, Nubia, Armenia, Georgia, Persia, Central Asia, India, and China.