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A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

Diarmaid MacCulloch

4.11 · Rating details · 5,245 ratings · 463 reviews

The author of The Reformation returns with the definitive history of Christianity for our time. Once in a generation a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read--a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Ambitious, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bib ...more

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Hardcover, 1016 pages

Published May 5th 2010 by Allen Lane (first published October 1st 2009)

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Dec 20, 2012 Warwick rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, religion, christianity

‘What religion am I?’ asks Homer Simpson in one episode of his family's eponymous cartoon. ‘I'm the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work out in real life…uh…Christianity.’ One of the many pleasures in Diarmaid MacCulloch's amazingly comprehensive book is getting a handle on what historical basis there is for the rules and doctrines of this prolific and mercurial religion, which nowadays seems characterized by extreme reactions of either perfect secular indifference or increasingly ...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Marcus rated it it was ok

Shelves: won-t-finish

This book should have been called Christianity: A Speculative History from a Somewhat Antagonistic Viewpoint. I only read the first 150 pages, plenty far enough to understand how MacCulloch feels about Christianity. Most of the book is, by nature, extrapolation based on a very fragmented set of documents and conflicting histories, but MacCulloch is always overanxious to undermine Christianity by taking huge leaps of speculation and is never, at least that I saw in the first 150 pages, willing to This book should have been called Christianity: A Speculative History from a Somewhat Antagonistic Viewpoint. I only read the first 150 pages, plenty far enough to understand how MacCulloch feels about Christianity. Most of the book is, by nature, extrapolation based on a very fragmented set of documents and conflicting histories, but MacCulloch is always overanxious to undermine Christianity by taking huge leaps of speculation and is never, at least that I saw in the first 150 pages, willing to remain neutral or actually go the other direction.

I found his writing style to be good and the idea for the book is fantastic. I'm fully prepared to deal with problems in history and with the faults of Christians throughout history, but I'm not willing to read a book by an author I feel I can't trust or have to constantly second guess. Because of that, the bits of information I gleaned are all mentally footnoted as being something to go back and verify from a less biased source.

Here are a few examples:

"Yet at the heart of the Egypt and Exodus story is something which no subsequent Israelite fantasist would have wished to make up, because it is an embarrassment: the hero and leader of the Exodus, the man presented as writing the Pentateuch itself, has a name which is not only non-Jewish but actually Egyptian: Moses." My response is that if the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years is it so surprising and embarrassing that they'd eventually adopt Egyptian names? If the implication is that Moses was actually Egyptian, why doesn't MacCulloch just say that. It wouldn't be the longest logical jump he makes in the book.

Later, this is what MacCulloch concludes about the Beatitudes. "There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of normal expectations. They form a code of life which is a chorus of love directed to the loveless or unlovable, of painful honesty expressing itself with embarrassing directness, of joyful rejection of any counsel suggesting careful self-regard or prudence. That, apparently, is what the Kingdom of God is like." Really? Only the most literalistic reading of such a poetic passage could lead to such an imbecilic interpretation. MacCulloch makes similar mistakes of interpretation of various other passages in the New Testament, notably in the Lord's Prayer and the command to "leave the dead to bury their dead."

When writing about the resurrected Christ (note, resurrected) he says, "He repeatedly appeared to those who had known him, in ways which confused and contradicted the laws of physics." Again, we are talking about a ressurected being. Why is physics even relevant?

When he refers to Paul and his desire to teach of salvation through Christ alone, MacCulloch phrases it this way: "Paul managed to find a proper in the Tanakh to sum up what he wanted to say:.." This comes across as incredibly condescending, to take for granted that Paul was just manipulating the Tanakh to justify his message. If MacCulloch had left out "managed to find" and replaced it with "found" it would have made all the difference. It is maybe a small infraction on its own, but it was, for me, the last straw.

In a way, I'm really disappointed to stop reading this. The parts of the book that talk about the origins of the Old Testament and the influence of Socrates and Aristotle on Christianity are great. The discussion of differing ideas of Satan, comparisons of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, ideas on prophecy and life after death in the Old Testament and the obsession with the virginity of Mary are all fascinating. For now though, I'm done. I don't have time to verify every reference and I don't trust MacCulloch to give it to me straight. ...more

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Nov 19, 2010 Jamie rated it really liked it

Shelves: library-finds, non-fiction

It took three library renewals to get through this book (and thanks to an ice storm, the fifth this year!, I still owe the library a one day fine, a whole nickel that they thank you for and dump in a desk drawer with a bunch of rubber bands, and I love living in the country and having that library), and then work kind of slammed me a little, so it’s just been sitting there languishing on my currently-reading shelf for two weeks. And in all that time I still haven’t come up with something deeply It took three library renewals to get through this book (and thanks to an ice storm, the fifth this year!, I still owe the library a one day fine, a whole nickel that they thank you for and dump in a desk drawer with a bunch of rubber bands, and I love living in the country and having that library), and then work kind of slammed me a little, so it’s just been sitting there languishing on my currently-reading shelf for two weeks. And in all that time I still haven’t come up with something deeply insightful or clever to say.

I keep coming up with jokes, like, “You know what they say, ‘An atheist is just someone who’s studied their religion.’”

Honestly, this book was really very good. It’s history, which I love, and religious history, which utterly fascinates me with the scale and grandeur of brutality people are willing to inflict on other people in the name of charity and salvation. The whole book— which kept switching from the macro to the micro with expert timing, by the way— I just kept picturing all of this three-thousand-year saga, a hiccup on the evolutionary timescale, playing out from the vast vantage point of elsewhere in our galaxy, where we’re not even a blip of starlight in deep space. And if it didn’t seem petty before, well.

Back down on an earthly scale— or not even that, on a continent’s scale, country by country— the epic and the exhaustive scope of MacCulloch’s research has to be praised. I can’t imagine taking on a scholarship of that magnitude. It’s just bewildering in breadth, and meticulous in detail. All told, though, I much preferred Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God; not because it does the subject more justice, but because it deals with the slightly different angle— the actual evolution of the anthropological and sociological aspects of a religion, as well as what is worshipped within it— that is far more fascinating to me.

For a history of the church, though, you couldn’t do much better than this without devoting your time in semester-sized chunks, and maybe not even then.

Honestly, to hold onto the mystery and conviction of a religion: don’t study its history. ...more

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Apr 06, 2017 Ray rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This is a monumental piece of work by an erudite scholar. It covers the whole range of Christian history from its roots in Judaism to modern day.

As a starting point it delves into the Old Testament contrasting it's God jehovah -a jealous and vengeful God - with the loving God that sacrifices his son in the New Testament.

It shows the rise of Christianity from an obscure Jewish sect, through the rebranding by St Paul, and on to an established state religion. It is a truly astonishing journey. Thr ...more

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Dec 26, 2016 BAM Endlessly Booked rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobooks, own, biblical-nonfiction

This book is seriously insane! I'm only halfway through and we've already covered: Rome, early popes, African christians, the Orthodox Church, the beginnings of various brotherhoods and convents, ways to pray, Constantine, early theologians and philosophers, pergatory, the energy of God. I can't list everything. The only issue I have is that it's just too much at once. This is the perfect book for someone studying theology.

The Virgin Mary, the Tartars, the reformation and restoration, Martin Lut ...more

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Apr 17, 2010 Ben Fairchild rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: history

This is a very good history. It depresses me a bit because it is written in the cynical, anti-establishment style which is typical of the educated elite today, but it is valuable for its quality and the insight which it offers regarding the multitude of different takes on Christianity (most of them sincere and justified, none of them isolated from political expediency) which were the fruit of the early Church. Its quite humbling for those who maintain 'the correct doctrines' and at the same time ...more

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May 19, 2018 Matt Tandy rated it it was amazing

As a double priests kid (both my parents were Anglican clergy) an assumption was usually made that I knew quite a bit about Christianity. This was not accurate as I neither had much interest in the subject, nor access to a decent history about the faith. MacCulloch has rectified this with A History Of Christianity. Detailed yet readable, he takes an unbiased look at both the good and bad of the religion, never apologizing for either. He also doesn’t ignore the spiritual, faith aspect of his subj ...more

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Jun 12, 2010 Justin Evans rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history-etc

MacCulloch makes reading exhaustive history exhilarating rather than exhausting, and although everyone will have a favourite nit to pick - mine being the dubious treatment of Hegel, and the absence of anything about Erigena - only the most die-hard partisan could claim that this is anything other than brilliant. Ignore anyone who tells you it's anti-(insert your own sect here), and read it. Take your time. And I'm sure you'll be mining the 'recommended reading' section at the back of the book be ...more

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Aug 08, 2017 Stuart Woolf rated it it was amazing

I'll begin my review this way: there are a few reviewers who did not like this book due to the secular (but by no means anti-Christian) perspective most educated readers would expect from a serious church historian. (Naturally, many of these reviewers associate MacCulloch with the atheistic academic left, which I'm sure would come as a surprise to the author, given his background in the Church of England.) If Christian apologetics masked as church history is what you are looking for, then I have ...more

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Nov 19, 2011 Erik Graff rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Christians

Recommended to Erik by: Kelly Kingdon

Shelves: religion

This book may be too ambitious. It claims to cover three thousand years of global history, but it does so sketchily, most of its focus being on, first, the Middle East and, second, Europe and America. The Britishness of the author is clear as is the fact that he himself is not a Christian. The content ranges from the breezy, as in his descriptions of modern trends, to the dense, as in his treatment of the controversies animating the earliest church councils. Most readers will find parts of it ob ...more

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Mar 31, 2020 tom bomp rated it it was ok

Shelves: religion, christian, history, non-fiction

For most of the book, my biggest problem is one that's basically impossible to solve in something with such a sweeping objective - too much stuff passes by in a flurry of names and dates without enough detail to understand it. To be clear he does go into detail on some stuff! But I kept finding myself wanting more. And obviously that's an unreasonable ask in even a big book on the history of 2000 years.

When it gets to modern times it's more things that I have Strong Opinions on and feel a bit h For most of the book, my biggest problem is one that's basically impossible to solve in something with such a sweeping objective - too much stuff passes by in a flurry of names and dates without enough detail to understand it. To be clear he does go into detail on some stuff! But I kept finding myself wanting more. And obviously that's an unreasonable ask in even a big book on the history of 2000 years.

When it gets to modern times it's more things that I have Strong Opinions on and feel a bit hmm about. He talks about the French Revolution for a couple of pages and it's just a depiction of it as a ridiculous, horrific bolt from the blue with no motivation other than murderous terror, leading to him defending the Catholic church and presenting it as the *actual* popular movement. The line "Against a French Revolution which represented more than two decades of male nationalist violence, the Church found itself managing an international uprising of women - what has been termed with a pleasing overturning of modern sociological assumptions 'ultramontane feminism'" made me put the book down - it's an erasure of women's role in the French revolution, an erasure of the entire history of male violence that's been a significant factor in the church, and an erasure of actual feminism in favour of a movement devoted to subjection to a male-only church.

The bigger issue here is that it puts his failures to cast judgement in other areas into a worse light, and the most egregious example is slavery. It becomes more and more obvious that the examples he's using are 95% the positive examples of Christian resistance to slavery while giving very limited space to the dominant Christian slavery defending and racist views. He mentions the way Noah's curse on his grandson in genesis became a tool for biblical justification of racism...but incredibly he focuses on it (apparently) having first been stated by a Jewish scholar and then follows up with reference to "scientific" racism to soften the blow. He emphasises evangelicals' role in the abolition of the slave trade, focusing inevitably on Wilberforce and insisting it was a mostly moral decision, then mentions the colonisation projects of Sierra Leone and Liberia, where a racial hierarchy was created on the basis of which Africans were sufficiently Christian, with no greater judgment that that it later caused "troubles". To a large extent I assume he thinks the bad will speak for itself, but the extent to which he minimises the culpability of Christian institutions or at least hedges it with the language of good intentions is noticeable and pretty bad. The sections on Christianisation of the Americas are also particularly bad on this - emphasising the "good" of syncretism and cooperation of native elites and the examples of those who spoke out against the genocide while barely paying attention to Christianity as justification for said genocide.

A particularly clear example: he dedicates 4 good sized paragraphs to the American Civil War. First he splits Evangelicals 3 ways - abolitionists/slavers/african americans. He describes the defence of slavery as rather bizarrely "sliding" into white supremacy and explicitly makes the point that both abolitionists and slavers were "equally angry". Then he states the outbreak of the civil war, where the "tensions exploded into fighting" and it was "ostensibly not about slavery but about individual states' rights to make decisions on slavery for themselves" without explaining further. And then we get the line "Already the rhetoric of the struggle had been cast in terms of Christian moral crusade, thanks to the barely sane actions of a fervent Calvinist from a family long committed to the abolitionist cause, John Brown."

Woah. Hang on. "Barely sane"? After a couple of paragraphs which explicitly did not include any moral condemnation of slavers and muddied the waters instead of preventing the facts which condemn them, suddenly John Brown is brought up just to attack him. The whole paragraph after I'll quote here. I may well be making too much of it! But it bothers me.

Brown came from the same generation as Joseph Smith, and he remains just as controversial a figure, though nature endowed him with more potential than Smith for looking like an Old Testament prophet Proud of a New England Puritan heritage but unusual among abolitionists in embracing violence for the cause amid the rising tide of violence in the Midwest, he reversed the dictum of the High Priest Caiaphas on the death of Jesus, proclaiming that 'it was better that a score of bad men should die than that one man who came here to make Kansas a Free State should be driven out'. Accordingly in 1856 he was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five pro-slavery activists, but despite that hardly defensible crime, his Northern canonization as an abolitionist martyr came as a result of his seizure of an undefended Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry three years later. When the raid failed to arouse a black insurrection, Brown sat tight in the arsenal and waited to be martyred, which the Commonwealth of Virginia duly did, for the moment casting oblivion over the crazy character of his campaign. A Massachusetts newspaper editorial picked up the mood: 'no event . . . could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution'.

The comparison to Smith is bizarre. He completely elides the horrific context of "Bleeding Kansas" to make it seem like Brown's words are just an absurd unprovoked piece of violence. His "campaign" was "crazy" - before this point the term crazy isn't used by him pejoratively and talk of sanity is only used of Ivan the Terrible and John of Leyden (as an aside, John of Leyden is presented as an evil figure in the 1 sentence about him, but it's unsourced and looking it up Wikipedia points out all the sources on him are by his enemies who were massacring Anabaptists. weird pattern, this). By not putting any of this into context he's made John Brown's actions inexplicable and therefore the abolitionist support of him too.

The next paragraph then completely changes tone as we go back to the slavers' perspective. Apparently "the suddenness of the change in Southern society, the freeing of four million human beings, was a deep trauma to add to the sheer destructiveness and death of the war itself," which feels a pretty gross way of talking about it. "Southerners [a term here clearly excluding Black people] took revenge on Black Christians [excluding a lot of Black people!]" "They also viewed their own plight as that of an endangered victim culture. For the prominent Southern Baptist pastor in South Carolina and Alabama E. T. Winkler, that sense justified his defence of the Ku Klux Klan to Northern Baptists in 1872 as an example of necessary 'temporary organizations for the redress of intolerable grievances'. It was unlikely that he would apply the same argument to any temporary organizations which threatened blacks might form... "The scars persist in American society to this day."

None of this is a serious handling of the American Civil War, Reconstruction or slavery in America. By not providing any context to the naive reader, focusing on the "crazy" John Brown and repeating a narrative that slaver sympathisers hold today with only mild implicit criticism - and surely accidentally but dodgily implicitly tying Black personhood to Christianity, readers will come away with a very warped view.

The problem is as I said before it's clear who's getting the benefit of the doubt. The section on Mormons incredibly avoids criticism of the church. Mormon polygamy is mentioned but it's emphasised that Brigham Young, a horrible misogynist racist, implemented polygamy "with as much public decorum as the nineteenth century would wish". The end of it is an "incursion of external liberal values" along with the allowing of Black men into the priesthood - the racist ban is not explained at all. Almost unbelievably he refers to the revoke of the ban as "allowing men of Negro descent" to become priests - I believe this is a quote but it's not in quotes. He says "Wholesome prosperity... has become a worldwide Mormon speciality". It's a bizarre whitewashing.

As it moves through the modern era you get a description of the civil war that presents the Republicans as the aggressors against the Catholic Church and describes their purported crimes against the clergy in lurid detail for several paragraphs while again giving no context of Spain's horrifically unequal society at the time. Then for "balance" he mentions that Franco set up an authoritarian secret police but with no details. The average reader is going to come away thinking the Nationalists were right.

I've put up with enough. I got about 90% in so I didn't technically finish but close enough. I'm not reading any more and can't seriously recommend it given his constant willingness to cover for the right wing established order and for Christians in general as against misleading and outright dangerous slavery apologism used to describe the people who tried to change things. Screw this. ...more

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Jun 01, 2010 Clif Hostetler rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, religion

The title provides an early indication that the Ancient Greek and Hebrew roots of Christianity are covered by this book in addition to the past two thousand years that are more commonly accepted as the era of Christianity. That's a very long span of history, in fact too broad of a scope to cover in great detail even with 1184 pages (actually 1000 pages plus table of contents, notes, bibliography, index and illustrations). Nevertheless, the author does a good job telling the story in a free flowi ...more

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Oct 31, 2012 Matt J rated it it was ok

Shelves: unfinished

I was looking for a straight forward, unbiased and thorough history of Christianity so when I found this book at my local bookshop and read the title I assumed that exactly what it was. Unfortunately, after reading the first 300 pages I decided to put it down. This book is certainly thorough, however, it is neither straight forward or unbiased. Firstly, the author's style of writing is very "busy". Points and ideas that could easily be made in 1 or 2 sentences usually takes the writer 4 or 5 to ...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Wendell Jones rated it did not like it

MacCulloch is so uptight PC he must squeak when he walks. The first tipoff is his use of CE and BCE instead of Anno Domini (AD) and BC. CE refers to a "common era". The terms he uses are used by certain publishing houses and writers to "avoid offending non-Christians". The use of these terms seems ludicrous considering the subject of his book. His survey of Christianity seems to me to not be dispassionate or objective. It gets more PC the closer he gets to our time. The book is over 1,000 pages ...more

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Oct 11, 2014 Emily rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, theology, world-history

Exactly three months later, I'm done! Review obviously to come. ...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Caroline rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: world-history

I'm what you might call a slightly bewildered agnostic, but I've always had a particular interest in Christianity. So much of its own history - fragmented, argumentative and hypocritical - has always seemed to be at odds with much of Christ's core message, and I've never quit understood how so many Christians can fail to see that contradiction in their own faith's history. But this book, which is surely destined to become a classic in the field, goes a long way to explaining why Christianity has ...more

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Jan 08, 2017 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it really liked it

Christianity is complex. After having had read this book two years earlier, I had to reread this book in order to understand why I didn't understand it the first time I read it. The first time I had read this book I was trying to make sense of the Trinity and how it developed and caused differentiation between sects of the Christian faith. I realize now that was a mistake. Whether it be one person, one nature, and one will; or two people, one nature, and one will; or ....... doesn't make sense a ...more

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Sep 29, 2014 Richard Thomas rated it it was amazing

Shelves: general-history

A thorough history of the christian religion from an Oxford don and the son of a Church of England parson whose background and upbringing give the whole book a flavour of what has made the Anglicans or the C of E such a distinctive part of Christanity. His deep learning and understanding of his subject are set with an elegant and flowing prose style so the book is both a pleasure to read and a means of understanding most of the hows, whys and wherefores of Christianity. It is a large book but if ...more

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May 28, 2020 John Wiltshire added it

Shelves: given-up-on

I have a feeling that 'currently reading' may stay the status of this book for quite a while. It's not only huge, it's pretty overwhelmingly erudite. One fifth of the way in, I've concluded I'm a 'cultural' Christian. My Christ is obviously English and he, like me, loves churchyards and cathedrals, waits every year with eager anticipation for a decent carol service so he can join robustly in the old, familiar favourites, and if it ever snows at Christmas, likes to read Elliot's Journey of the Ma ...more

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Mar 02, 2012 Dinah Küng rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Dinah by: my son

Well, I'm currently reading this, and probably will be for some time. This is my go-to book at bedtime. It's rich with explanations of periods and time that my education skipped over—oh, let's be frank, my education didn't even go faintly near, periods like the entire history of the Eastern Christian Church and the millenium of Byzantine history.

Where I come from, the midwest of the 1950's, it just didn't happen, right?

Trying to make up for that now, I'm discovering whole worlds of thought and d ...more

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Jan 21, 2016 Jared rated it did not like it · review of another edition

What I purchased, I thought, was going to be an objective, historical account of the Christian faith, and what I got was a biased, obsessive attempt to discredit the Christian faith and its roots.

I have read the first two and a half chapters and have sensed MacCulloch's subtle, but chronic orientation toward presenting "disproving" or "invalidating" conclusions based on far-fetched assumptions and speculation.

Seeking a historical account, I could not accept this awfully apparent bias with each n ...more

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Dec 12, 2013 E. rated it it was ok · review of another edition

MacCulloch's history of the Reformation, which I read a few years ago, was powerful, informative, engaging, and even inspiring in places. I had high hopes for his one-volume Christian history with its intriguing title.

He spends hundreds of pages on the roots of the Christian tradition (that first one thousand years) beginning in Greece and not the Ancient Near East. While it seemed a pretty standard presentation of these ancient histories, it was primarily a history of ideas, which intrigued me MacCulloch's history of the Reformation, which I read a few years ago, was powerful, informative, engaging, and even inspiring in places. I had high hopes for his one-volume Christian history with its intriguing title.

He spends hundreds of pages on the roots of the Christian tradition (that first one thousand years) beginning in Greece and not the Ancient Near East. While it seemed a pretty standard presentation of these ancient histories, it was primarily a history of ideas, which intrigued me for the possibilities of what was to come -- was he going to focus on ideas, particularly the development of these concepts from Greek and Hebrew culture?

No, that's not what happened, leaving me to puzzle over why so much time and space were spent on these origins.

Increasingly church histories have devoted more attention to the non-European parts of our story. Ever since my first church history class in college, I've been interested in the little tidbits about these churches and with each new volume I'm pleased to see that the tidbits have turned into more full-scale treatments. Not only does this volume give a much fuller treatment of the Orthodox Churches, the Churches of the East are treated with more detail (though I still desire more), plus he followed their history first after the division of Christianity after Chalcedon. Later he gives much attention to the developments, particularly of indigenous movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

That said, there still seemed to be too much focus in the early sections on the development of Roman Christianity (as compared to the other versions) and in later sections he is very Anglican-focused, which is understandable since he is.

MacCulloch is a little less interested in dates and names and more in general movements and trends. So, I was glad I already knew some of that from previous books I'd read. I'm not sure for someone who came to this as their first church history if they would be lost or confused or would benefit from this lack of information.

Also, there were the things I missed seeing. Some of this is just picky or my own preferences or enjoyments. But there were at least two times it seemed really to hurt the narrative.

In particular, there is no discussion of the divisions in the Dutch Reformed Church around the theology of Arminius. This is strange given that Arminius is mentioned as an influence on Wesley and then the term Arminian is used multiple times in the narrative after that. But never was that story told.

The other absence was the development of the African-American church and religious experience. No mention of Nat Turner. No discussion of spirituals. No black liberation theology. The treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr. was piss poor.

Though there was discussion of race and slavery and its stain on the Christian story, I don't think it was given the attention it deserved. I'm influenced in that thinking by Willie Jennings and Kameron Carter and their books exposing the racism that pervades modern theology.

Finally, I was not sure of the overall theme that MacCulloch wanted me to take away from the book. LaTourette's church history was focused on the theme of missions. Paul Johnson highlighted figures who were more open and broad-minded struggling against forces in the opposite direction (Erasmus, Locke, and Voltaire were heroes in his volume). I'm not sure what the theme was here.

Opposite all that criticism is the praise for MacCulloch's writing style which is clear and enjoyable and not "academic" in a bad way. He also employs a good sense of humour now and then. And throughout the book draws attention to how old debates or turns of events continue to impact world politics and/or the Christian faith in the 21st century. This makes it an enjoyable enough read, as I have devoured little but it the last few weeks (and at 1016 pages it took a few weeks). ...more

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Apr 16, 2011 Maggie rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

to read 1100+ pages of christianity's history is to read 1100+ pages of world history since christianity has been a prime mover of human history. every continent and every religion has found a place of clarity in this book. it does not disappoint. whereas it is true that to cover 3000 years of human and religious history, the writer must default to an inch and a half below the surface and some readers may be disappointed in that factor, i decidedly was not. the sheer breadth of the work, by defa ...more

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May 15, 2010 Nicholas Whyte rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2012, non-fiction, 1211, xb, religion

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2021907.html[return][return]This magisterial and thorough book goes through Chrstianity's roots in Judaism and Greek philosophy, the life of Jesus and the immediate aftermath, and then the historical development of the movement that his followers became. I learned a lot; MacCullough's broad historical focus took us to places I had not really thought of before, like the early history of Christianity in Asia (including China), and explained to me stuff I thought I alr ...more

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Oct 07, 2013 Frank Roberts rated it it was amazing

Shelves: theology-philosophy, history

A massive book--over 1000 pages. It was not easy to finish just because of the size of the book, though the style was very readable and engaging. I didn't get bored throughout; quite the opposite--I was eager to read and learn more. This history helped connect lots of other historical events and developments for me, as if the religious aspect provided a key element to understanding the past two millennia of Western history, an aspect that has been neglected in other histories.

Other than providi ...more

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Sep 29, 2013 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: church-history, history

This is probably the best one-volume history of Christianity that you can find. So if you want an overview of church history, and don't mind wading through a 1000 page book (though, with 2000 years of history to tell, how much shorter could such a book be?) this book is for you.

I have to admit, MacCulloch almost lost me in the early part when he said the biblical book of Philemon was later used to support slavery by Christians. Admittedly, me disagreeing on this is like a flea barking at a pit b ...more

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Dec 21, 2020 Eric Brown rated it really liked it

MacCulloch gives sardonic and playful commentary, emerging from his status as a self-professed "friend of Christianity", as an aid to his herculean task of writing a popular history and prognosis for established Christianity in an era of doubt, while also trying to address modern outbreaks of fervour, from Latter-Day Saints to Pentecostals. Weaknesses and glosses seem to multiply the closer he gets to the modern era, but that is partially the danger of moving from popular historian to commentato ...more

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May 22, 2020 Emlyn Roberts rated it really liked it

Very good book. No nonsense. First half was more interesting from a historical point of view. Any book disliked by religious fundamentalist must be on to something!

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Mar 27, 2012 Aaron Arnold rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, read-in-2011, favorites

This kind of book is exactly why the adjective "magisterial" was invented. It's so learned, engaging, and comprehensive that by the time you finish it your mind feels full. It's nothing less than an attempt at a truly "ecumenical" (pun intended) history of Christianity, covering not only its temporal history, which as you can tell by the subtitle goes back much farther than the BC-AD line, but also all of the different denominations, their doctrinal disputes, the major figures, philosophical lin This kind of book is exactly why the adjective "magisterial" was invented. It's so learned, engaging, and comprehensive that by the time you finish it your mind feels full. It's nothing less than an attempt at a truly "ecumenical" (pun intended) history of Christianity, covering not only its temporal history, which as you can tell by the subtitle goes back much farther than the BC-AD line, but also all of the different denominations, their doctrinal disputes, the major figures, philosophical lineages, and how the various Christian faiths changed and were changed by the countries they touched. If that sounds just a little too ambitious to be doable, let me say that MacCullouch pulls it off magnificently. He seems equally comfortable recounting the most well-known events in Christianity, like the Council of Nicaea and the Reformation, as he does delving into the most obscure sects and controversies, and he is admirably even-handed when he gets into the weeds of the many, many schisms and splits Christianity has undergone since before the ink was dry on the very first epistle.

I think I found the controversies most interesting: Miaphysitism vs. Diaphysitism, Monophysitism vs. Nestorianism, Arianism vs. Trinitarianism, transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation, iconophilia vs. iconoclasm, faith vs. works, making the sign of the cross with three fingers vs. making it with two, and more, in an unbelievable, one might say miraculous profusion. I enjoyed reading about them not because I'm a smug atheist (although I am), but because even though these violent, frequently lethal disputes seem maddeningly pointless all these years later, they bring home how nobody is exempt from the unquenchable human need to split hairs and make mountains out of molehills. Someday many of the issues I care about will be totally irrelevant, and even though I can claim that at least I'm not wasting my time arguing over just how many loaves and fishes got multiplied or the proverbial angels dancing on a pin, it's humbling to see all these obviously smart people like Aquinas and Augustine spend their time on Earth wrestling with Big Questions through the medium of theology. Who can say what will seem ridiculous thousands of years in the future, and aren't we still dealing with many of the same questions of meaning and purpose that troubled these ancient people? It really helps put your own concerns in perspective, although quite frankly it's tough not to feel smug when you're reading about the sacred towel Mandylion, or some of the weirder cults like the Skoptsis, who had mandatory castration for initiates (!!!).

Where MacCullouch's curating and narrative genius really shines through is in knotting together all these narrative threads across millennia and continents into the full story of one of the most influential ideas in world history. Time and time again a group of people will try to freeze their belief system into an orthodoxy, and then it will fracture under the weight of numbers, or through contact with another group, or from some lone individual convinced they've gotten a True Revelation. Then to these spiritual arguments you add the political dimension - the Byzantine Empire in particular was frequently crippled by religious arguments, but the lesson about the perils of entangling spiritual and political power is universally applicable. I finished this book on Easter Sunday, interestingly enough, and although I'll still never be able to understand how people can believe that someone magically came back from the dead, I think I have a greater appreciation for how this need for mystery and worship has endured over time. ...more

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Feb 15, 2014 CD rated it liked it

Shelves: history, religion, read-in-2014

An ambitious and massive work. The title alone should tell potential readers that they are in for an interesting journey.

Three thousand years in even 1000+ pages is pushing the limits for any topic. For the history of Christianity and its pre-history (the other 1000 years) in many places it is eclectic and only mars, not scratches the surface. MacCulloch does bring a lot of interesting if not probably important nuggets to the surface. The decisions about what to include and not alone are worth An ambitious and massive work. The title alone should tell potential readers that they are in for an interesting journey.

Three thousand years in even 1000+ pages is pushing the limits for any topic. For the history of Christianity and its pre-history (the other 1000 years) in many places it is eclectic and only mars, not scratches the surface. MacCulloch does bring a lot of interesting if not probably important nuggets to the surface. The decisions about what to include and not alone are worth thousands of more page of writing!

Obviously this is a work of breadth and not depth. The evolution of various doctrines, the complete geographic scope, and most of the social interface of religion during its various glory periods is only briefly examined. As a survey of the topic alone this work could rate much higher if not for several flaws.

Diarmaid MacCulloch in a valiant attempt to leave out as little as possible, leaves out important and essential elements from various eras. There is a definite English/Anglican historical bias in places that minor additional research would quickly answer or allow for a better history to have been written. One example is that of the 'failure of the Mission in India'. The British missionaries never did really understand their role on the sub-continent. Whether from a Roman/Latin Catholic perspective or a different Protestant group far better and very succinct analysis of what MacCulloch skips over is widely available. This points out a stylistic flaw in the book.

The word processor and a lack of thorough editing led to single sentences being the only reference to various important events. They are treated as just big historical facts that don't need any further commentary or interpretation. Ranging from issues at the time or the first Christian Emperors to the Christian movement in China to modern dichotomies in theology such as Law v Gospel a lot is left not merely unexplored but in cases just stated incorrectly. This is due to the lack of a few essential details where depth was needed beyond the scope of the general breadth of the subject.

There are some flaws in the chronology of the early Popes that reminded me of Gibbon (and I am entertained highly by the "Decline and Fall") in not a positive way. There are some biased or incomplete views of the modern world, i.e. 20th Century, certainly in the Americas as to location of events and their relative importance. That combined with the China problems, and the subcontinent problems flaw this work in the last 200 or so pages.

Finally there are reference works used that are either so esoteric that outside of the authors academic circle or being cited for promotional reasons don't seem to have much traction with other authorities in the field. Some rather obscure evaluations of the evolution of the two World Wars that don't settle on a particular era of scholarship or research lend an air to this work of flippancy.

Many readers will still find a lot of value in this work. They should proceed with caution and do some additional research in most of the main topics covered. This is not to say that there are reasons for all of the authors historical evaluations, just that one or two sentences that might change how the much of this history is recorded and evaluated isn't enough even in a broad survey work.

It might not be my first recommendation to someone wanting to explore these topics, but there are some excellent sections and it one of the more readable works on this topic I've had in my hands in some time. ...more

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Great book, but taking forever for me to finish!	11	45	Sep 24, 2016 04:48PM

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“Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death.” — 6 likes

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