paragraph_text: In 380, under Theodosius I, Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Christian heretics as well as non-Christians were subject to exclusion from public life or persecution, though Rome's original religious hierarchy and many aspects of its ritual influenced Christian forms, and many pre-Christian beliefs and practices survived in Christian festivals and local traditions.

paragraph_text: During the Hellenistic period, Judea became a frontier region between the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt and therefore was often the frontline of the Syrian wars, changing hands several times during these conflicts. Under the Hellenistic kingdoms, Judea was ruled by the hereditary office of the High Priest of Israel as a Hellenistic vassal. This period also saw the rise of a Hellenistic Judaism, which first developed in the Jewish diaspora of Alexandria and Antioch, and then spread to Judea. The major literary product of this cultural syncretism is the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible from Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic to Koiné Greek. The reason for the production of this translation seems to be that many of the Alexandrian Jews had lost the ability to speak Hebrew and Aramaic.

paragraph_text: Early Christians continued to pray and rest on the seventh day. By the 2nd century AD some Christians also observed Sunday, the day of the week on which Jesus had risen from the dead and on which the Holy Spirit had come to the apostles. Paul and the Christians of Troas, for example, gathered on Sunday ``to break bread, ''Soon Christians were observing only Sunday and not the Sabbath. Patristic writings attest that by the second century, it had become commonplace to celebrate the Eucharist in a corporate day of worship on the first day. A Church Father, Eusebius, stated that for Christians,`` the sabbath had been transferred to Sunday''.

paragraph_text: Vasilopita (, "Vasilópita", lit. '(St.) Basil-pie' or 'king pie', see below) is a New Year's Day bread or cake in Greece and many other areas in eastern Europe and the Balkans which contains a hidden coin or trinket which gives good luck to the receiver, like the Western European king cake. It is associated with Saint Basil's day, January 1, in most of Greece, but in some regions, the traditions surrounding a cake with a hidden coin are attached to Epiphany or to Christmas. It is made of a variety of dough, depending on regional and family tradition, including tsoureki. In some families, instead of dough, it is made from a custard base called galatopita (literally milk-pita). The pie is also known as Chronópita (Χρονόπιτα  χρόνος: "chrónos ⇨ time/year" + πίτα: "píta ⇨ pie"), meaning New Year's Pie.

paragraph_text: With the decline of Herodians, Judea, transformed into a Roman province, became the site of a violent struggle of Jews against Greco-Romans, culminating in the Jewish-Roman Wars, ending in wide-scale destruction, expulsions, and genocide. Jewish presence in the region significantly dwindled after the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire in 132 CE. Nevertheless, there was a continuous small Jewish presence and Galilee became its religious center. The Mishnah and part of the Talmud, central Jewish texts, were composed during the 2nd to 4th centuries CE in Tiberias and Jerusalem. The region came to be populated predominantly by Greco-Romans on the coast and Samaritans in the hill-country. Christianity was gradually evolving over Roman paganism, when the area stood under Byzantine rule. Through the 5th and 6th centuries, the dramatic events of the repeated Samaritan revolts reshaped the land, with massive destruction to Byzantine Christian and Samaritan societies and a resulting decrease of the population. After the Persian conquest and the installation of a short-lived Jewish Commonwealth in 614 CE, the Byzantine Empire reconquered the country in 628.

paragraph_text: Religious beliefs in the Eastern Empire and Iran were in flux during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Judaism was an active proselytising faith, and at least one Arab political leader converted to it. Christianity had active missions competing with the Persians' Zoroastrianism in seeking converts, especially among residents of the Arabian Peninsula. All these strands came together with the emergence of Islam in Arabia during the lifetime of Muhammad (d. 632). After his death, Islamic forces conquered much of the Eastern Empire and Persia, starting with Syria in 634–635 and reaching Egypt in 640–641, Persia between 637 and 642, North Africa in the later seventh century, and the Iberian Peninsula in 711. By 714, Islamic forces controlled much of the peninsula in a region they called Al-Andalus.The Islamic conquests reached their peak in the mid-eighth century. The defeat of Muslim forces at the Battle of Tours in 732 led to the reconquest of southern France by the Franks, but the main reason for the halt of Islamic growth in Europe was the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate and its replacement by the Abbasid Caliphate. The Abbasids moved their capital to Baghdad and were more concerned with the Middle East than Europe, losing control of sections of the Muslim lands. Umayyad descendants took over the Iberian Peninsula, the Aghlabids controlled North Africa, and the Tulunids became rulers of Egypt. By the middle of the 8th century, new trading patterns were emerging in the Mediterranean; trade between the Franks and the Arabs replaced the old Roman economy. Franks traded timber, furs, swords and slaves in return for silks and other fabrics, spices, and precious metals from the Arabs.

paragraph_text: Since the 1930s, work on the papyri has continued. For many years it was under the supervision of Professor Peter Parsons of Oxford. Eighty large volumes of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri have been published,  and these have become an essential reference work for the study of Egypt between the 4th century BC and the 7th century AD. They are also extremely important for the history of the early Christian Church, since many Christian documents have been found at Oxyrhynchus in far earlier versions than those known elsewhere. At least another forty volumes are anticipated.

paragraph_text: Little is known of Agatho before his papacy but he may have been among the many Sicilian clergy in Rome at that time, due to the Islamic Caliphate battles against Sicily in the mid-7th century. He served several years as treasurer of the church of Rome. He succeeded Donus in the pontificate.

paragraph_text: Jerusalem reached a peak in size and population at the end of the Second Temple Period: The city covered two square kilometers (0.8 sq mi.) and had a population of 200,000. In the five centuries following the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century, the city remained under Roman then Byzantine rule. During the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine I constructed Christian sites in Jerusalem such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

paragraph_text: Between 301 and 219 BCE the Ptolemies ruled Judea in relative peace, and Jews often found themselves working in the Ptolemaic administration and army, which led to the rise of a Hellenized Jewish elite class (e.g. the Tobiads). The wars of Antiochus III brought the region into the Seleucid empire; Jerusalem fell to his control in 198 and the Temple was repaired and provided with money and tribute. Antiochus IV Epiphanes sacked Jerusalem and looted the Temple in 169 BCE after disturbances in Judea during his abortive invasion of Egypt. Antiochus then banned key Jewish religious rites and traditions in Judea. He may have been attempting to Hellenize the region and unify his empire and the Jewish resistance to this eventually led to an escalation of violence. Whatever the case, tensions between pro and anti-Seleucid Jewish factions led to the 174–135 BCE Maccabean Revolt of Judas Maccabeus (whose victory is celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah).

paragraph_text: Brass, which is an alloy of copper and zinc, has been used since at least the 10th century BC in Judea and by the 7th century BC in Ancient Greece. Zinc metal was not produced on a large scale until the 12th century in India and was unknown to Europe until the end of the 16th century. The mines of Rajasthan have given definite evidence of zinc production going back to the 6th century BC. To date, the oldest evidence of pure zinc comes from Zawar, in Rajasthan, as early as the 9th century AD when a distillation process was employed to make pure zinc. Alchemists burned zinc in air to form what they called "philosopher's wool" or "white snow".

paragraph_text: The Holy See formally established the congregation in 1820. This, too, was an unusual event, since the Christian Brothers were the first Irish congregation of men approved by a charter from Rome.

paragraph_text: Hedwig glasses or Hedwig beakers are a type of glass beaker originating in the Middle East or Norman Sicily and dating from the 10th-12th centuries AD. They are named after the Silesian princess Saint Hedwig (1174–1245), to whom three of them are traditionally said to have belonged. So far, a total of 14 complete glasses are known. The exact origin of the glasses is disputed, with Egypt, Iran and Syria all suggested as possible sources; if they are not of Islamic manufacture they are certainly influenced by Islamic glass. Probably made by Muslim craftsmen, some of the iconography is Christian, suggesting they may have been made for export or for Christian clients. The theory that they instead originate from Norman Sicily in the 11th century was first fully set out in a book in 2005 by Rosemarie Lierke, and has attracted some support from specialists.

paragraph_text: The Byzantine Empire ruled the northern shores of the Sahara from the 5th to the 7th centuries. After the Muslim conquest of Arabia (Arabian peninsula) the Muslim conquest of North Africa began in the mid-7th to early 8th centuries, Islamic influence expanded rapidly on the Sahara. By the end of 641 all of Egypt was in Muslim hands. The trade across the desert intensified. A significant slave trade crossed the desert. It has been estimated that from the 10th to 19th centuries some 6,000 to 7,000 slaves were transported north each year.

paragraph_text: The New Testament is a collection of Christian works written in the common (Koine) Greek language of the first century, at different times by various writers, and the modern consensus is that it provides important evidence regarding Judaism in the first century AD. In almost all Christian traditions today, the New Testament consists of 27 books. The original texts were written in the first and perhaps the second centuries of the Christian Era, in Greek, which was the common language of the Eastern Mediterranean from the conquests of Alexander the Great (335 -- 323 BC) until the Muslim conquests in the 7th century AD. All the works that eventually became incorporated into the New Testament are believed to have been written no later than around 120 AD,. John A.T. Robinson, Dan Wallace, and William F. Albright dated all the books of the New Testament before 70 AD. Others give a final date of 80 AD, or at 96 AD.

paragraph_text: From the early stages of Christianity, belief in the virginity of Mary and the virgin conception of Jesus, as stated in the gospels, holy and supernatural, was used by detractors, both political and religious, as a topic for discussions, debates and writings, specifically aimed to challenge the divinity of Jesus and thus Christians and Christianity alike. In the 2nd century, as part of the earliest anti-Christian polemics, Celsus suggested that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. The views of Celsus drew responses from Origen, the Church Father in Alexandria, Egypt, who considered it a fabricated story. How far Celsus sourced his view from Jewish sources remains a subject of discussion.

paragraph_text: The Apostolic sees claim to have been founded by one or more of the apostles of Jesus, who are said to have dispersed from Jerusalem sometime after the crucifixion of Jesus, c. 26 -- 36, perhaps following the Great Commission. Early Christians gathered in small private homes, known as house churches, but a city's whole Christian community would also be called a church -- the Greek noun ἐκκλησία literally means assembly, gathering, or congregation but is translated as church in most English translations of the New Testament.

paragraph_text: Christian denominations consider seven to be a holy number because Genesis says that God rested on the 7th day and man was created on the 6th day. Because God rested on the 7th day, that is the reason for the observance of the Hebrew Sabbath on the last day of the week. The 7th day of the week is indicated on the Hebrew Lunar calendar containing 13 months of four weeks each. According to the American publication, the Orthodox Study Bible, 777 represents the threefold perfection of the Trinity. The number 777, as triple 7, can be contrasted against triple 6, for the Number of the Beast as 666 (rather than variant 616).

paragraph_text: The Byzantines were able to regain control of the country after a brief Sasanian Persian invasion early in the 7th century amidst the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 during which they established a new short-lived province for ten years known as Sasanian Egypt, until 639–42, when Egypt was invaded and conquered by the Islamic Empire by the Muslim Arabs. When they defeated the Byzantine Armies in Egypt, the Arabs brought Sunni Islam to the country. Early in this period, Egyptians began to blend their new faith with indigenous beliefs and practices, leading to various Sufi orders that have flourished to this day. These earlier rites had survived the period of Coptic Christianity.

paragraph_text: The New Testament part of the Christian Bible was originally written in Koine Greek, as most of the Church and scholars believe, and is therefore not a translation (notwithstanding that some reference material may have been from Aramaic). However, like other living languages, the Greek language has developed over time. Therefore, various translations have been completed over the centuries to make it easier for Greek speakers to understand Holy Scripture. Translations of the Old Testament, which is the other part of the Christian Bible, have been completed for similar reasons.

Question: Who controlled the holy land where the brand of Christianity practiced in the country where Vasilopita is lasted up until the 7th century?
Answer: Roman then Byzantine