Interactive map of every city and region covered in the series. Click any pin for details.
Early Christianity did not develop in a single center. It formed in many cities, each with its own language, politics, and inherited religious culture. These are the places that matter most in the first centuries, and the episodes that examine them.
The origin of the Jesus movement. Early Christianity here remained Jewish, law-observant, and Temple-centered until the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The home of James, the brother of Jesus, and the first site of conflict over Gentile inclusion. Episode 3 →
The first major mixed Jewish-Gentile Christian center. Where the term Christianoi first appears, and where identity moved beyond purely Jewish categories. Peter and Paul clashed here over table fellowship. Episode 4 →
The theological and literary centers of Syriac Christianity on the eastern frontier. Home to Tatian’s Diatessaron, Bardaisan’s cosmic poetry, and Ephrem the Syrian’s hymns - a Christianity expressed in a Semitic voice rather than Greek metaphysics. Episode 4 →
A commercial and religious marketplace on the Aegean coast and the setting of Christianity’s first major internal crisis: the dispute over whether Christ had truly come in the flesh. The home of the Johannine community and, symbolically, the seven churches of Revelation. Episode 5 →
The intellectual engine of early Christianity. The catechetical school, the Hexapla, Origen’s systematic theology, and the Valentinian schools all formed here. The city where Christianity learned to think, and where the tools of doctrine were first forged. Episode 6 →
The landscape of Christian diversity - gospels, revelations, cosmologies, and ascetic communities that produced the Nag Hammadi codices. The place where imagination flourished and where, after Pachomius and Athanasius, that diversity was quietly buried. Episode 7 · Episode 8 →
The center of Latin Christianity in the Roman West. Shaped by Roman law, rhetoric, and public discipline. Home of Perpetua and Felicitas, Tertullian, and Cyprian - the martyr, the legal theologian, and the architect of ecclesial unity. Episode 9 →
Peripheral to early Christian thought for two centuries, but decisive for institutional practice: household networks, burial-based memory, succession claims, and the administrative instinct that later let Rome execute a bottleneck it did not originally design. Episode 10 →
A late Roman city at the northern edge of the empire. Beneath its fourth-century basilica lies one of the oldest Christian mosaic floors in the world. The image underfoot does not match the later story told about it - the starting point of the series. Episode 1 →
The strongest Christian center in ancient Arabia, on the caravan route connecting Yemen to Syria. Syriac-linked, with a martyr tradition that shaped Arabian Christian memory. Episode 12 →
The Lakhmid Arab capital on the Euphrates. A center of pre-Islamic Arab Christianity on the frontier between the Roman and Persian empires. Episode 12 →
Oasis towns on the Arabian peninsula, long home to established Jewish tribes whose prophetic and scriptural memory shaped the religious environment into which Islam emerged. Episode 12 →
A sanctuary city and caravan stop in the western Arabian peninsula. Home to the Ka‘bah and, in the sixth century, to the ḥanīfs - monotheist seekers who drew on older Abrahamic traditions. Episode 12 →