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Cluniac Reforms
[History]The Cluniac Reforms were a monastic renewal movement that spread across Western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries, centered on the Abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 in Burgundy, France. The movement emphasized independence from secular power and strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Cathars
[History]The Cathars were a dualist Christian sect that spread through southern France and northern Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They are also called Albigensians, after the southern French city of Albi. The Catholic Church condemned them as heretics and suppressed them through a crusade and the Inquisition.
Talmud
[History]The Talmud is a body of Jewish literature that combines the Mishnah, a compilation of the oral law of Judaism, with its commentary, the Gemara. Compiled between the third and sixth centuries, it continues to serve as a standard for Jewish faith and life today.
Tertullian
[People]Tertullian was a Christian writer and apologist active in Carthage, North Africa, in the second and third centuries. He refined theological terminology in Latin and is called the "Father of Latin Theology."
Adolf von Harnack
[People]Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) was a German Protestant theologian and church historian. The author of the *History of Dogma* and *What Is Christianity?*, he is regarded as a leading representative of liberal theology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Monasticism
[History]Monasticism is the movement, beginning in the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries, through which a life of prayer, labor, and asceticism lived apart from the world became established in communities and institutions. It stood at the center of the medieval church, and since the Reformation the various Christian traditions have assessed it differently.
Nag Hammadi Library
[History]The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of Coptic manuscripts from around the fourth century, discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Containing some fifty works, including the Gospel of Thomas, it has become a key source for the study of Gnosticism in the early Christian era.
Hillel
[People]Hillel was a Jewish teacher of the Law, active from the late first century BC to the early first century AD, and the founder of the School of Hillel. He is known for the prosbul, a legal instrument connected with the release of debts in the sabbatical year, and for a teaching that resembles the Golden Rule.
Epistle of Barnabas
[History]The Epistle of Barnabas is an early Christian writing composed in Greek between the late first and early second centuries. It interprets the laws and institutions of the Old Testament as symbols pointing to Christ. It was not included in the New Testament canon.
Mendicant Orders
[History]The mendicant orders are a type of Catholic religious order that arose in thirteenth-century Western Europe. The term refers to orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, which held no corporate property, lived on the offerings and alms of the faithful, and preached as they traveled from town to town.
Adad-guppi
[People]Adad-guppi (7th–6th centuries BC) was the mother of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. She is said to have served the moon god Sîn at Harran and is known from the Harran inscription, which recounts her life in the first person.
Contemplative Prayer
[Controversies]Contemplative prayer is a form of prayer that uses few words and rests silently in the presence of God. Some embrace it as a spiritual discipline, while others regard it as a departure from biblical prayer.
Rule of Saint Benedict
[History]The Rule of Saint Benedict is a rule for monastic life written in the sixth century by Benedict of Nursia at the monastery of Monte Cassino. It addresses prayer and work, obedience, and communal life, and from the Middle Ages onward it became the foundational rule of Western monasticism.
Vulgate
[Bible]The Vulgate is the Latin Bible that took shape chiefly through Jerome's translation and revision work in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. It served as the standard text of the Western church from the Middle Ages into the modern era.
Puritans
[History]The Puritans were Protestants active in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Regarding the reformation of the established church (the Church of England) as incomplete, they sought to "purify" its worship, church polity, and daily life more thoroughly in accordance with Scripture.
Counter-Reformation
[History]The Counter-Reformation was the movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the Roman Catholic Church responded to the Protestant Reformation and renewed itself from within. The Council of Trent and the work of the Jesuits were central to it.
Jewish–Roman Wars
[History]The Jewish–Roman Wars were the revolts launched in the first and second centuries by Jews living under Roman rule, together with the Roman campaigns that suppressed them. The term most often refers to the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73/74), which led to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70.
2 Chronicles 3:1
[Bible Verses]This verse states that Solomon began building the temple in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, at the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite that David had prepared. It is frequently cited as a key text linking the temple site to Abraham's offering of Isaac on Moriah and to David's altar.
Antiochene School
[Doctrine & Theology]The Antiochene School was an early church theological tradition centered in Antioch in Syria during the fourth and fifth centuries that emphasized the literal and historical meaning of Scripture and the true humanity of Christ.
1 Samuel
[Bible]First Samuel is one of the historical books of the Old Testament. It records the transition from the period of the judges to the establishment of the monarchy in Israel, centering on three figures: Samuel, Saul, and David.