The birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem. It is placed a few years before the AD reckoning because Herod the Great, who was still reigning at the time, died in 4 BC.

By early tradition the last surviving apostle, who died at Ephesus near the end of the first century. His death closes the apostolic age, so everything after this point is post-apostolic testimony about what the apostles taught rather than apostolic teaching itself.

Flavius Josephus was a first-century Jewish historian, a priest of the line of Aaron who fought in the Jewish revolt against Rome and then wrote under Roman patronage. He was not a Christian, which is what makes his testimony valuable: writing for a hostile Roman audience, he independently confirms much of the biblical record. His Antiquities and Jewish War name Herod the Great and his sons, Pontius Pilate, Quirinius, the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, Felix, Festus, Agrippa I and II, and the Herodian temple that Christ foretold would be thrown down. He reports the execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas in terms close to the Gospels, and the stoning of “James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” under the high priest Ananus in AD 62. The famous Testimonium Flavianum, which speaks of Jesus as a wise man and worker of surprising deeds who was condemned by Pilate, survives in a form most scholars take to be an authentic core with later embellishment. His eyewitness account of the fall of Jerusalem and the burning of the temple in AD 70 stands as extrabiblical confirmation of the judgment Christ prophesied about in Matthew 24.

One of the earliest post-apostolic witnesses, known for 1 Clement.

“The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” an early church manual covering the two ways, baptism, fasting, the Lord’s Supper, and how to test traveling teachers. Its dating is debated, with estimates running from the first century into the late second. It is a useful test case for the four criteria the early church used to recognize scripture: 1) date, how early the writing is; 2) apostolicity, whether it comes from an apostle or a close associate; 3) consistency, whether it agrees with the rule of faith already received; and 4) usage, whether the churches broadly read and received it. The Didache is early and orthodox, but it is anonymous and was never universally received, so it was valued without being counted as scripture.

He reports that Mark wrote down accurately, though not in order, what he heard from Peter, and that Matthew compiled the sayings. He also appeals to what he learned from “the elder” John, whom many take to be the apostle himself.

Bishop of Antioch and, by early tradition, a disciple of the apostle John. On the road to martyrdom in Rome under Trajan he wrote seven letters that already assume Christ’s full deity and real humanity.

Bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostle John, remembered for his Letter to the Philippians, which is saturated with New Testament language.

Cornelius Tacitus is regarded as the greatest of the Roman historians, a senator and consul with access to imperial records, and no friend of Christianity. His Annals, written in Latin, records that after the fire of Rome in AD 64 Nero blamed the group the people called Christians, “whose founder, Christus, had been executed during the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate.” That single sentence, written by a hostile pagan, confirms the Gospel accounts on the name, the manner of death, the ruler, the governor, and the timeframe, and adds that the movement was not stopped by the execution but broke out again in Judea and spread as far as Rome. He also describes the Christians there in large numbers within about thirty years of the crucifixion.

His First Apology gives the earliest full description of Christian worship, including the reading of the “memoirs of the apostles,” which he identifies as the Gospels.

North African lawyer and theologian, the first major Christian writer in Latin. He coined the term trinitas (Trinity).

Bishop of Sardis whose Paschal homily “On Pascha” preaches Christ as both God and man. After traveling east to verify the matter for himself, he also produced the earliest known Christian list of Old Testament books.

Presbyter (elder) and writer who opposed the modalism of Noetus and Sabellius and set out the economic Trinity: one God made known through the distinct work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation, without the persons collapsing into one another.

Bishop of Lyons (c. 130-202) who heard Polycarp as a boy, giving him a short chain of testimony back to the apostle John. Against Heresies answers Gnosticism from scripture and the rule of faith, and argues that there are four Gospels and only four, comparing them to the four zones of the world and the four winds.

Pupil of Clement of Alexandria and the most prolific biblical scholar of the early church. He produced the Hexapla, a six-column parallel edition of the Old Testament, along with commentaries and homilies on most of the Bible. Some of his speculative views were later condemned, but his textual work shaped Christian exegesis for centuries.

A silver amulet buried with a man in a Roman grave near Frankfurt, Germany, and read in 2024 by CT scanning the rolled foil rather than unrolling it. The eighteen-line Latin text is entirely Christian with no pagan elements: it addresses “Jesus Christ, Son of God,” applies Isaiah’s thrice-holy to him, and quotes Philippians 2:10-11 that every knee bows before him. It is the oldest known evidence of Christianity north of the Alps and witnesses to the diety of Christ decades before Nicaea.

The first ecumenical (globally represented) council, called by Constantine to settle the Arian controversy over whether the Son was a creature or equal with God the Father. Not if the Son was God, but how. In the end, it confessed the Son as “of the same substance” (homoousios) with the Father, producing the creed that was expanded at Constantinople in 381 into the form still recited today. It was not about which books were suppose to be in the Holy Bible.

Highly influential theologian whose defense of grace against Pelagius set the terms for debates that ran through the Reformation. He wrote Confessions, the one of the first autobiographical or memoirs of Western civilization.

Jerome’s Latin Bible, begun at the request of Damasus of Rome. He translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Greek Septuagint, which drew criticism at the time, and the result became the standard Bible of the West for over a thousand years.

Stephen Langton, later Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Latin Vulgate into the chapters still used today. The scheme spread through the Paris Bibles of the 1200s and was carried over into Hebrew and Greek editions and into every later translation.

Robert Estienne (Stephanus), whose 1550 Editio Regia became the standard Textus Receptus text, printed the first Greek New Testament divided into numbered verses in his 1551 Geneva edition. The numbering passed into English through the Geneva Bible and has been standard ever since.

Produced by Protestant exiles in Geneva during the Marian persecution, it was the first English Bible with numbered verses and extensive study notes. It was the Bible of Shakespeare, the Puritans, and the Plymouth pilgrims, who carried it over on the Mayflower to North America.