Church History
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50 free Church History trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Church history is a story about people as much as doctrine: emperors who changed sides, monks who copied manuscripts through dark centuries, scholars who risked the stake to put scripture into everyday language, and preachers who drew crowds in fields and meeting halls. Two thousand years of it have shaped calendars, alphabets, universities and nations. This quiz walks through that story by its famous figures. It opens with the names almost everyone has heard of, then moves on to the early bishops and martyrs, the medieval popes and missionaries, the Reformation and its rivals, and the revivals and resisters of the modern age. Along the way you will meet a hermit on a column, a trial held for a dead man and a row over sausages. It is written for Sunday school teachers, seminary students, confirmation classes and anyone who likes their history with some faith in it. The questions run from easy to demanding, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fourth-century bishop of Myra, famed for secret gift-giving, inspired the legend of Santa Claus?
Saint Nicholas
Saint Nicholas is said to have dropped a sack of gold through a window on three nights so that a poor man's three daughters would each have a dowry.
Q 02Which English king, once named Defender of the Faith by a pope, made himself head of the Church of England?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII won the papal title in 1521 for a book defending the seven sacraments, then broke with Rome in the 1530s when the pope would not annul his first marriage.
Q 03Which German monk translated the New Testament while hiding at Wartburg Castle disguised as a knight?
Martin Luther
Martin Luther lived at the castle under the name Junker Jörg for about ten months after his excommunication, and finished the translation from Greek in roughly ten weeks.
Q 04Which missionary to Ireland first arrived there as a teenage slave after being seized by pirates?
Saint Patrick
Saint Patrick spent six years as a herder before escaping home to Britain, then went back by choice to preach to the people who had enslaved him.
Q 05Which Roman emperor blamed Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, according to Tacitus?
Nero
Nero needed someone else to carry the blame for the blaze, and the already unpopular Christians of the city were arrested and killed in the empire's first persecution of the faith.
Q 06Which astronomer was tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 and spent his final years under house arrest?
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was found "vehemently suspect of heresy" for defending a Sun-centred universe, and his books were banned along with the sentence.
Q 07Which Frankish king was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day in 800?
Charlemagne
Charlemagne became the first emperor in western Europe in more than 300 years, which set him at odds with the Byzantine emperors in the East.
Q 08Which Italian friar is credited with staging the first live nativity scene, at Greccio in 1223?
Francis of Assisi
Francis of Assisi had been shown the grotto of the Nativity on a visit to the Holy Land, and re-created it in a cave so that villagers could picture the first Christmas.
Q 09Which former slave-ship captain became an English clergyman and wrote the hymn Amazing Grace?
John Newton
John Newton turned to faith when his ship nearly sank in a storm off Ireland in 1748, yet he gave up the slave trade only years later, before campaigning for its abolition.
Q 10Which fifth-century Syrian monk became famous for living for decades on top of a pillar near Aleppo?
Simeon Stylites
Simeon Stylites climbed up to escape the crowds who came for his prayers, but the pillar drew even more pilgrims and sightseers than before.
Q 11Which Roman emperor reportedly saw a vision promising victory before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge?
Constantine
Constantine had his soldiers mark their shields with a Christian sign, won when his rival drowned in the Tiber, and became the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.
Q 12Which early bishop described stealing pears as a boy in his autobiography, the Confessions?
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo used the theft to ask why people do wrong for its own sake, in a book often called the first Western autobiography.
Q 13Which scholar, often painted with a lion, translated the Bible into the Latin version called the Vulgate?
Jerome
Q 21Which sixth-century Italian abbot founded Monte Cassino and wrote a Rule that shaped Western monastic life?
Benedict of Nursia
Benedict of Nursia wrote with such balance and moderation that most religious communities founded in the Middle Ages adopted his Rule.
Q 22Which pope sent monks to convert the Anglo-Saxons and later had a style of church chant named after him?
Gregory I
Gregory I is said to have been moved by the sight of Anglo-Saxon slaves on sale in Rome; the chant was credited to him only some three centuries after his death.
Q 23Which English monk of Jarrow helped popularise counting years from the birth of Christ, the AD system?
Bede
Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus I and finished the work in Bethlehem, where he lived as an ascetic for 34 years; legend says he tamed the lion by healing its paw.
Q 14Which bishop of Alexandria was exiled five times for opposing Arianism in the fourth century?
Athanasius
Athanasius spent 17 years in exile under four different emperors, and his refusal to give way earned him the title Father of Orthodoxy.
Q 15Which bishop of Caesarea is called the Father of Church History for his Ecclesiastical History?
Eusebius
Eusebius quoted earlier Christian writings at such length that his narrative, running from the apostles to his own day, preserves material found nowhere else.
Q 16Which bishop of Smyrna, by tradition a disciple of the apostle John, was martyred at the stake around 155?
Polycarp
Polycarp, the story goes, was stabbed when the flames failed to consume him; it is one of the earliest accounts of a Christian martyrdom outside the New Testament.
Q 17Which writer from Carthage is the first known to have used the Latin word for Trinity?
Tertullian
Tertullian was the first theologian to write in Latin rather than Greek, which is why he has been called the father of Latin Christianity.
Q 18Which Roman emperor launched the Great Persecution of 303, the last and harshest against Christians?
Diocletian
Diocletian ordered churches razed and scriptures burned across the empire, yet within a decade Christianity had been made legal.
Q 19Which agreement between two Roman emperors in 313 gave Christians legal freedom to worship?
Edict of Milan
The Edict of Milan went further than toleration: it ordered confiscated meeting places and other property to be handed back to Christians without charge.
Q 20Which symbol did early Christians adopt because its Greek name, ichthys, spells out a title of Jesus?
A fish
A fish worked as an acrostic: the five Greek letters of the word are the initials of the phrase meaning Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour.
Bede earned the title Father of English History for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and his way of dating became standard across medieval Europe.
Q 24Which English missionary, called the Apostle to the Germans, is said to have chopped down a sacred oak?
Boniface
Boniface felled the tree, sacred to the thunder god Donar, in what is now Hesse around 723; three decades later he was killed on a mission to Frisia.
Q 25Which two brothers from Thessalonica devised the first alphabet for the Slavs in the ninth century?
Cyril and Methodius
Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolitic script so that scripture and worship could be put into Slavonic; its descendant, Cyrillic, is still used by many languages.
Q 26On the altar of which great Byzantine church did papal envoys lay a bull of excommunication in 1054?
Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia had been prepared for worship when the envoys walked in; the patriarch excommunicated them in return, a breach remembered as the start of the East-West Schism.
Q 27Which pope's speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095 launched the First Crusade?
Urban II
Urban II was answering a Byzantine emperor's plea for military help against the Seljuk Turks, and the call to arms led in the end to the capture of Jerusalem.
Q 28Which theologian, locked up by his family to stop him becoming a friar, wrote the Summa Theologica?
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas was held for almost a year in the family castles, passed the time tutoring his sisters, and joined the Dominicans anyway; his great Summa was left unfinished.
Q 29To which city in present-day France did the popes move their court in 1309, staying for 67 years?
Avignon
Avignon housed seven popes in a row, all of them French, and critics called the long absence from Rome the Babylonian captivity of the papacy.
Q 30In which French city was Joan of Arc tried for heresy and burned at the stake in 1431?
Rouen
Rouen is also where a church retrial overturned the verdict in 1456, finding it tainted by deceit and procedural errors; she was made a saint in 1920.