Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion which was founded in the 1st century CE as an offshoot of Judaism. It follows the teachings of Jesus Christ as revealed in the New Testament of the Bible. Over the course of centuries, it spread throughout the rest of the Roman Empire, later rising to global prominence with the rise of European imperialism and colonialism. In the modern day, it is the world's most followed religion, with the estimated number of Christians being 2.6 billion.[1]
Origins
The Jesus Movement as a Peasant-Revolutionary Sect
The movement initiated by Jesus of Nazareth emerged from the same material conditions that produced the Great Jewish Revolt: intense Roman imperial oppression, a imperial-collaborationist Temple aristocracy, and widespread peasant debt and displacement. Its core teachings condemned the acquisition of wealth, and proclaimed a new "Kingdom of God" that inverted Roman and Jewish social hierarchies, representing a radical critique of existing patriarchal power structures. Early communities practiced common ownership of goods [2][3], constituting what we today would consider proto-communistic cells within the Roman Empire.