Portal:Christianity

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The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, the holiest Christian site

Christianity (/krɪstʃiˈænɪti/ or /krɪstiˈænɪti/) is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.4 billion followers, comprising around 31.2% of the world population. Its adherents, known as Christians, are estimated to make up a majority of the population in 157 countries and territories. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, whose coming as the Messiah was prophesied in the Hebrew Bible (called the Old Testament in Christianity) and chronicled in the New Testament.

Christianity remains culturally diverse in its Western and Eastern branches, and doctrinally diverse concerning justification and the nature of salvation, ecclesiology, ordination, and Christology. The creeds of various Christian denominations generally hold in common Jesus as the Son of God—the Logos incarnated—who ministered, suffered, and died on a cross, but rose from the dead for the salvation of humankind; and referred to as the gospel, meaning the "good news". The four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John describe Jesus's life and teachings, with the Old Testament as the gospels' respected background.

The six major branches of Christianity are Roman Catholicism (1.3 billion people), Protestantism (900 million), Eastern Orthodoxy (220 million), Oriental Orthodoxy (60 million), Restorationism (35 million), and the Church of the East (600 thousand). Smaller church communities number in the thousands despite efforts toward unity (ecumenism). In the West, Christianity remains the dominant religion even with a decline in adherence, with about 70% of that population identifying as Christian. Christianity is growing in Africa and Asia, the world's most populous continents. Christians remain greatly persecuted in many regions of the world, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. (Full article...)

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George Went Hensley (May 2, 1881 – July 25, 1955) was an American Pentecostal minister best known for popularizing the practice of snake handling. A native of rural Appalachia, Hensley experienced a religious conversion around 1910: on the basis of his interpretation of scripture, he came to believe that the New Testament commanded all Christians to handle venomous snakes.

Hensley was part of a large family that had moved between Tennessee and Virginia, before settling in Tennessee shortly after his birth. Following his conversion, he traveled through the Southeastern United States, teaching a form of Pentecostalism that emphasized strict personal holiness and frequent contact with venomous snakes. Although illiterate, he became a licensed minister of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) in 1915. After traveling through Tennessee for several years conducting Church of God-sanctioned services, he resigned from the denomination in 1922. Hensley was married four times and fathered thirteen children. He had many conflicts with his family members because of his drunkenness, frequent travels, and inability to earn steady income, factors cited by his first three wives as reasons for their divorces. (Full article...)

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The following are images from various Christianity-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1The Father, The Holy Spirit, and Christ crucified, depicted in a Welsh manuscript c. 1390–1400 (from Trinity)
Image 2Representation of the Trinity in the form of the mercy seat (epitaph from 1549) (from Trinity)
Image 3Russian icon of the Old Testament Trinity by Andrei Rublev, between 1408 and 1425 (from Trinity)
Image 4Jesus healing the paralytic in The Pool by Palma il Giovane, 1592 (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 5The Communion of the Apostles, by Luca Signorelli, 1512 (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 6A Greek fresco of Athanasius of Alexandria, the chief architect of the Nicene Creed, formulated at Nicaea (from Trinity)
Image 7Depiction of Trinity from Saint Denis Basilica in Paris (12th century) (from Trinity)
Image 8The "Heavenly Trinity" joined to the "Earthly Trinity" through the Incarnation of the Son–The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities by Murillo (c. 1677) (from Trinity)
Image 9God in the person of the Son confronts Adam and Eve, by Master Bertram (d. c. 1415) (from Trinity)
Image 10Nativity at Night, by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, c. 1490 (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 11A Gospel of John, 1056 (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 12Depictions of the Resurrection of Jesus are central to Christian art (Resurrection of Christ by Raphael, 1499–1502). (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 13The Adoration of the Trinity by Albrecht Dürer (1511)
From top to bottom: Holy Spirit (dove), God the Father and Christ on the cross (from Trinity)
Image 14Renaissance painting by Jerónimo Cosida depicting Jesus as a triple deity Inner text: The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spirit is God (from Trinity)
Image 15A 'Jesus Saves' neon cross sign outside of a Protestant church in New York City (from Salvation in Christianity)
Image 16The Baptism of Christ, by Piero della Francesca, 15th century (from Trinity)
Image 17Atypical depiction The Son is identified by a lamb, the Father an Eye of Providence, and the Spirit a dove; the painting is by Fridolin Leiber (d. 1912). (from Trinity)
Image 18The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a holy site in Jerusalem believed by most Christians to encompass the tomb of Jesus and the site of his crucifixion and resurrection. (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 19Jesus' Farewell Discourse to his eleven remaining disciples after the Last Supper, from the Maestà by Duccio (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 20First page of Mark, by Sargis Pitsak (14th century): "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God". (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 21The Glory of Saint Nicholas, by António Manuel da Fonseca; Nicholas of Myra, a participant in the First Council of Nicaea, achieves the beatific vision in the shape of the Holy Trinity. (from Trinity)
Image 22A depiction of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, at which the Deity of Christ was declared orthodox and Arianism condemned (from Trinity)
Image 23Pope Clement I prays to the Trinity, in a typical post-Renaissance depiction by Gianbattista Tiepolo (d. 1770) (from Trinity)
Image 24Detail of the earliest known artwork of the Trinity, the Dogmatic or Trinity Sarcophagus, c. 350 (Vatican Museums)
Three similar figures, representing the Trinity, are involved in the creation of Eve, whose much smaller figure is cut off at lower right; to her right, Adam lies on the ground (from Trinity)
Image 25The Holy Trinity in an angelic glory over a landscape, by Lucas Cranach the Elder (d. 1553) (from Trinity)
Image 26The Good Samaritan is a painting by James Tissot. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the parables of Jesus. (from Jesus in Christianity)
Image 27God the Father (top), and the Holy Spirit (represented by a dove) depicted above Jesus Painting by Francesco Albani (d. 1660) (from Trinity)
Image 28A compact diagram of the Trinity, known as the "Shield of Trinity". The Shield is generally not intended to be a schematic diagram of the structure of God, but it presents a series of statements about the correlation between the persons of the Trinity. (from Trinity)
Image 29God the Father (top), the Holy Spirit (a dove), and the child Jesus, painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (d. 1682) (from Trinity)
Image 3013th-century depiction of the Trinity from a Roman de la Rose manuscript (from Trinity)

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The Benjaminville Friends Meeting House and Burial Ground is a Friends Meeting House of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), located north of the rural village of Holder in McLean County, Illinois. It was once the site of a now-defunct village called Benjaminville, founded in 1856 after Quakers settled the area. More Quakers followed, and the burial ground, then the current meeting house in 1874, were constructed. This site, listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places since 1983, is all that remains of that village.

The burial ground preceded the meeting house, as the site was home to another meeting house that was constructed in 1859. The Benjaminville Meeting House represents a well-constructed example of Quaker meeting house architecture and contains within its design many of the major elements associated with the style. It is unique in that it allowed both male and female friends to worship together in the same room. The burial ground, however, maintains a strict separation, not by gender but by religious affiliation; there are three sections, one for Quakers, one for non-Quakers, and one for distant relatives of both. (Full article...)

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The Siege of Belgrade (1456) or Battle of Belgrade or Siege of Nándorfehérvár occurred from July 4–22, 1456. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II rallied his resources in order to subjugate the Kingdom of Hungary. His immediate objective was the border fort of the town of Belgrade (in old Hungarian Nándorfehérvár). John Hunyadi, the Voivode of Transylvania, who had fought many battles against the Turks in the previous two decades, prepared the defenses of the fortress. Since 22 July 2011, the date when Christian forces led by John Hunyadi and John of Capistrano defeated the Ottoman Turks besieging Belgrade in 1456, has been a national memorial day in Hungary.

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... that in the Book of Mormon, the city of Ammonihah kills Christians by fire as a deliberately twisted reference to a warning that spiritual death is like a "lake of fire and brimstone"?
... that interfaith greetings in Indonesia include phrases from Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism?
... that the earliest representation of the devil might be a mosaic in San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna from the 6th century, in the form of a blue angel?
... that the Global Methodist Church is part of a proposed divorce over marriage?
... that the Kitab al-wadih bi-l-haqq is a critique of Islam written by a convert to Coptic Christianity during a period of persecution?
... that 19th-century American evangelist Dwight L. Moody was converted to Christianity in the stock room of a shoe store by his Sunday School teacher Edward Kimball?

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I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

— Ten Commandments, Book of Exodus Chapter 20:2-17, King James Version

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