CHAPTER 1 THE WORLD OF THE EARLY CHURCH The Christian church was born in a world that was already old. Great empires had risen and fallen. The glories of Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and Greece lay centuries in the past. Now it was Rome, the greatest of the ancient empires, that governed the civilized world. It was almost exclusively in that empire that the Christian church lived the first five centuries of its life. Before beginning a discussion of the history of the church, it is important