A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

my book asks questions. It tries to avoid giving too many answers, since this habit has been one of the great vices of organized religion.

new city of Baghdad would have been a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. The extraordinary accident of the irruption of Islam is the chief reason why Christian history turned in another direction.

Just when it seemed doomed to decay after the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans, a new variety of Orthodoxy far to the north began revealing its potential as leader among the Orthodox: I outline the development of Russian Christianity.

Despite their present variety, modern Christianities are more closely in touch than they have been since the first generations of Christians in the first-century Middle

does not have all the answers, and – a point many forget – only once does it claim to do so, in one of the last writings to squeeze into the biblical canon, known as Paul’s second epistle to Timothy.

including shouts of anger against God. It tells stories which it does not pretend ever happened, in order to express profound truths, such as we read in the books of Jonah and Job. It is also full of criticism of Church tradition, in the class of writings known as prophecy, which spend much of their energy in denouncing the clergy and the clerical teaching of their day. This should provide a healthy warning to all those

who aspire to tell other people what to do on the basis of the Bible. From th...

And one of the reasons for the obstinate survival and now huge revival of Orthodox Christianity has been a story (largely unknown in the Christian West) of biblical translation, undertaken by the Russian Orthodox Church for an astonishing variety of language groups in Eastern Europe and the area of the former Soviet Union.

Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally.

The schisms which followed were made permanent by the political bitterness aroused by the Western Crusades of the High Middle Ages, their transmutation into attacks on Eastern Christians and their eventual failure either to recapture the Holy Land or to defend Eastern Christianity against Islam. All these cataclysmic human events stemmed from an idea constructed by a council of bishops.

The astonishing growth of the Mormons is as

much part of the modern story of Christianity as that of Orthodoxy,

When I was young, my parents were insistent on the importance of being courteous and respectful of other people’s opinions and I am saddened that these undramatic virtues have now been relabelled in an unfriendly spirit.

this man, Joshua/Yeshua (which has also ended up in a Greek form, ‘Jesus’), his followers added ‘Christos’ as a second name, after he had been executed on a

in recitation some time in the eighth or seventh century BCE, became central to a Greek’s sense of being Greek – which is strange, because the Trojan enemies are depicted as no different in their culture from the Greeks besieging them.

was in the Greek alphabet that the earliest known Christian texts were written,

The gods are constantly present in the Iliad and Odyssey, an intrusive and often disruptive force in human lives: often fickle, petty, partisan, passionate, competitive – in other words, rather like Greeks themselves.

Greeks could not be accused of marginalizing religion, for Greek cities were not dominated visually by palaces, as they had been in Mycenaean culture; instead they focused themselves around temples.

Greeks were convinced that the learning of a race as ancient as the Egyptians must conceal wisdom which ought to be shared more widely, and when they eventually encountered Jewish literature, they likewise found its antiquity impressive. But they were not afraid to turn from the past to search anew for wisdom for themselves. That search for wisdom they entrusted to people whom they defined as lovers of wisdom: philosophers.

The polis included the surrounding mountains, fields, woods, shrines, as far as its frontiers; it was the collective mind of the community who made it up, and whose daily interactions and efforts at making decisions came to constitute ‘politics’. We will need to consider the politics

Ekklēsia is already common in the Greek New Testament: there it means ‘Church’, but it is borrowed from Greek political vocabulary, where it signified the assembly of citizens of the polis who met to make decisions.

the ekklēsia is the embodiment of the city or polis of God, lurking in the word ekklēsia is the idea that the faithful have a collective responsibility for decisions about the future of the polis, just as the people of a polis did in ancient Greece.

with some sort of appeal to a higher divine approval: witness the way in which the books of Samuel in the Hebrew scriptures present the usurper David’s takeover from the dynasty of Saul as God’s deliberate abandonment of the old king for his disobedience.9

rule by ordinary people (or rule by the mob, if one was feeling sour about the idea).

It was the democratic institutions of Athens which caught the imagination of subsequent generations, and turned the city into something of a theme park of the Greek Way of Life, long after the comparatively brief period during which Athenian democracy had actually functioned.

Take all these factors together and perhaps only around a fifth of the adult inhabitants of proudly democratic Classical Athens could actually be described as active citizens:

philosopher Plato nicknamed ‘Socrates gone mad’, became a wandering beggar and, when infesting Athens with his presence, he slept in a

large wine jar (he was sufficiently appreciated by the citizenry that when a teenage vandal broke his jar the ekklēsia is said to have bought him a replacement and to have had the boy flogged). His lifestyle was an enacted reminder that although human beings were rational animals, they were still animals – he was nicknamed ‘the dog’, from which his admirers and imitators took the name Cynics (‘those like dogs’). Christianity has at various stages produced saints in his mould, holy fools and others openly contemptuous of worldly wealth, although they have rarely shared Diogenes’s propensity for masturbation in public as a symbol of

Patterns were provided by three philosophers who taught in Athens: Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), Plato (428/7–348/7 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE).

At Socrates’s trial, Plato portrays the philosopher as insisting in his speech of defence that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.

excellence or virtue. The path is through the intellect. ‘Excellence [aretē] of soul’ is our chief purpose or direction, because beyond even the Forms is the Supreme Soul, who is God and who is ultimate aretē.

How unlike the home life of the Christian Trinity.

Greeks generally looked on this disconcerting lack of moral predictability among their divinities with cheerful resignation and did their best to secure the best bargain available from them by due ceremonial observances at home or in temples or shrines.

For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness.

Aristotle sought for reality in individual and observable objects.

Aristotle organized a research team to gather data on as many different existing governments as possible from which to produce potted descriptions of them. Only one remains, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and, as luck would have it, it is the description of the constitution of Athens.21 This

because for two thousand years after his death Aristotle would set the way in which Christians and Muslims alike shaped their thoughts about the best way to organize and think about the physical world, about the arts and the pursuit of virtue.

Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ.

Out of their urge to comprehend came a tradition of historical writing which has become particularly associated with the culture of the Christian West; this book stands in that tradition,

know of no one before Herodotos who had tried to gather memories and documents together on such a scale to tell a connected story about the past.

a small minority of its people ruled a conquered and cowed population through military force and deliberately sustained terror, keeping themselves in permanent armed readiness by means of a tradition of brutal training for their male elite.23

He and his father had immersed themselves in Greek modes of life and social or intellectual assumptions, far beyond their ready adoption of same-sex love. Alexander transformed modes of thought and culture for the Near East and for Egypt in ways which were still the norms for that world in the time of Jesus Christ. His imperial style much impressed those later imperial conquerors, the Romans, who treated his cultural legacy with reverence and created an enduring empire in his mould.

So the Afghan city of Kandahar is called by a disguised version of the name which Alexander and his admirers gave to a scatter of cities across his conquests: Alexandria.

Never again did the Greek polis enjoy the true independence which was its ideal. The new Hellenistic cities remained little elite colonies, rather as two millennia later British colonial officials created imitations of an English village from Surrey when they wanted somewhere to relax in the India of Queen-Empress Victoria.

When the steam engine was invented in Alexandria about a hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ, it remained a toy, and the ancient world failed to make the breakthrough in energy resources which occurred in England seventeen centuries later. Abundant slave labour, after all, blunted the need for any major advance in technology.

Strabo, the Greek historian and geographer, who died just before Jesus embarked on his public ministry, shrewdly observed that Rome’s sheer lack of resources made its people acutely aware that their only assets were their energies in war and their determination to survive;

state more or less permanently at war either to maintain or to expand its frontiers could not afford the luxury of real democracy.

They gave away Roman citizenship to deserving foreigners – by deserving, they would mean those who had something to offer them in return,

Without the general peace brought by Roman power, Christianity’s westward spread would have been far more unlikely.

a very remote past it was called Canaan, but its later turbulent history left it with two names, Israel and Palestine,