A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The coast has few decent harbours, and other peoples than the Children of Israel tended to dominate the ones that did exist, so the Jews never became seafarers

The first book of scripture, Genesis, has accounts of leaders who have come to be known as Patriarchs, beginning with Abram, who is pictured as coming from Ur in what is now Iraq and receiving a repeated promise from God that his descendants will receive the land, symbolized by a new name given him by God, Abraham, ‘Father of Multitudes’.

Few peoples united by a religion have proclaimed by their very name that they struggle against the one whom they worship.

One silence is significant: there is very little reference to the Patriarchs in the pronouncements of ‘later’ great prophets like Jeremiah, Hosea or the first prophet known as Isaiah, whose prophetic words date from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.

The logic of this is that the stories of the Patriarchs, as we now meet them in the biblical text, post-date rather than predate the first great Hebrew prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries, even though various stories embedded in the Book of Genesis are undoubtedly very ancient.6

Altogether, the chronology of the Book of Genesis simply does not add up as a historical narrative when it is placed in a reliably historical wider context.

The Book of Judges at last provides stories which begin to sit more robustly and extensively amid conventional historical and archaeological evidence, and that evidence fits into the period 1200–1050 BCE. The Israel revealed in this biblical text

But the Philistines also performed a service to Israel, because they securely date the Book of Judges by their presence in its narrative.

Consequently they left abundant traces in Egyptian records, which show the Philistines came over the sea from the west and occupied the coastal zone of Palestine between 1200 and 1050, as part of the same widespread disruption which had destroyed Mycenae

The Book of Judges consistently tells Israel’s story in reference to the one God, who called the people of Israel (with intermittent success) to be faithful to his commands.

There is frequent and uninhibited mention of sacred trees and stones, which do not figure in later Jewish cultic practice.

Genesis 31.53 a dispute involving Jacob is settled by appealing to the judgement of the disputing parties’ respective personal gods, the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, with Jacob sealing the deal with an oath to the Fear of his father, Isaac.

It was a natural political consequence that he lent respectability to his venture by relocating in Jerusalem a cultic symbol of Yahweh, a sacred wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant. This has attracted much subsequent speculation and fascination in both Judaism and Christianity, partly because we have no reliable notion of what the chest originally contained, but principally because of its subsequent mysterious and undatable disappearance.

During the long reign of Solomon (c. 970–c. 930 BCE) the kingdom of Israel reached its greatest extent, and it might even have been seen as a regional power, a status which later biblical writers living in less glorious days did nothing to diminish.

These thousand years of Jewish history between David and Jesus Christ the ‘Son of David’ are also effectively the first millennium of Christian history, for that span of time established key notions which would shape Christian thinking and imagery: for instance, the central importance of the kingdom of God’s chosen one David and of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Solomon’s empire quickly split on his death into two kingdoms, southern Judah and northern Israel, whose union had even in David’s time appeared fragile;

While Judah kept the Solomonic capital of Jerusalem with its Temple, the kings of Israel had to retreat to the northern city of Samaria.

To judge by the inscriptions and imagery of their victory monuments, the Assyrians delighted in the use of terror and punitive sadism to seal their military success. The rise of this horrifying new threat to the north inevitably affected Israel, the northern kingdom, more than Judah.

In one of Elijah’s clashes with Ahab and Jezebel, Yahweh dramatically ended a long drought, showing that Elijah’s God could see off any fertility god if he so chose. Both Elijah and Jezebel in their confrontations indulged in massacres of prophets who adhered to the other side, the casualties reputedly running into hundreds.

After the destruction of the northern kingdom, the people of Judah brooded on the recent catastrophe and on how to defend what was left. Their fierce debate about the future was played out in an appeal to the past – in fact, a large-scale reinterpretation and invention of the past. What we know of the story can be gleaned through the history written by the winners in the struggle, preserved for us in the second Books of Kings and Chronicles.

In its present developed form, the law code is to be found in the Pentateuch as the Book of Deuteronomy (this name ‘second law’ was provided by Greek translators of the Hebrew scriptures). Significantly the place of its discovery was the Temple in Jerusalem, and the lucky find was made by the High Priest of the Temple.

The angry, precise legislative programme of the Deuteronomic party extended beyond the book itself into a wholesale rewriting of Jewish history.

The southern kingdom had managed to withstand assaults from the Assyrians. If this had been more by luck than judgement, that is not how the historians in the Deuteronomic tradition saw matters; it was the result of faithfulness to God’s commands.

around 586 BCE the Babylonians sacked the already shattered city, destroyed the Temple and carried off many people from Judah to exile in Babylon.

Babylon which for centuries continued to be one of the most important centres of Judaism outside the homeland.

the exiles who returned were able to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem; it was reconsecrated in 516 BCE.

So the Temple and its priesthood became the absolute centre of Jewish identity, as well as being the only significant institution in Jerusalem, and remained so for the next half-millennium.

More profoundly, post-Exilic Jews puzzled about how a loving God could have allowed the destruction of his Temple and the apparent overturning of all his promises to his people. One answer was to try to let God off the hook by conceiving of a being who devoted his time to thwarting God’s purposes: he was called the Adversary, Hassatan, and although he was a fairly insignificant nuisance in the Hebrew

scriptures, he grew in status in later Jewish literature, particularly among writers who were influenced by other religious cultures which spoke of powerful demonic figures. Hassatan caught the imagination of the Christian sect, and by the time that the Christian Book of Revelation was written, he had become a figure of cosmic significance now called Satan, depicted as the final adversary for God in the End Time.34 Judaism was nevertheless reluctant

Dispensing with any story as a vehicle for what he wanted to say, he made a series of observations which form one of the most compelling and unexpected expressions in any sacred literature of resignation at the futility of human existence:

Like its daughter religion, Christianity, Judaism has often fostered the idea that it has an exclusive approach to the divine.

Protestant Christians are not generally familiar with the Books of Maccabees, because in the sixteenth-century Reformation they were among the works sidelined from the Bible and relegated to the so-called Apocrypha

Synagogues were remarkable institutions, with little other parallel in the ancient world. They were not temples, because with the exception of a few insignificant rival institutions Jewish sacrifice now took place only in the Jerusalem Temple, yet from the start synagogues seem to have had a religious function.

larger number of other books, supposedly seventy, were no longer to be treated as having the same degree of authority as the twenty-four.

The Tanakh is recognizable to Christians as their Old Testament, albeit arranged in a different order.

During the fourth century CE doubts began to be expressed by some Christian commentators, who gave them the description ‘apocrypha’ (‘hidden things’). In the sixteenth-century Reformation of the Western Church, Protestants made a definite decision to exclude them from what Christians term the ‘canon’ of recognized scripture.

The name given to this collection of translations (together with the Apocrypha books in Greek which Hellenized Jews themselves added) was an indication of how proud Greek-speaking Jews were of their achievement; it became known as the Septuagint, from the Latin word for seventy. This was a reference to the seventy-two translators who, legend said, had produced it in seventy-two days, and who were themselves an image of the seventy elders who had been with Moses on the sacred mountain during the Exodus.

II Maccabees, a work of the Apocrypha probably written in the second century BCE, is the first in Jewish literature to insist that God did not make creation ‘out of things that existed’, unformed, chaotic material, but summoned creation out of nothing.

And so to Bethlehem of Judaea, where Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn. Or perhaps not.

all four were probably written not less than half a century after his death

Anglo-Saxon scholars were more adventurous than the early Christian Latin-speakers: they considered the etymology of the original Greek and came up with their word ‘Godspell’, once more meaning ‘good news’ – Gospel. This care

Implausibilities multiply: the Roman authorities would not have held a census in a client kingdom of the empire such as Herod’s, and in any case there is no record elsewhere of such an empire-wide census, which would certainly have left traces around the Mediterranean.

one observes how little the birth and infancy narratives have to do with the later story of Jesus’s public ministry, death and resurrection, which occupies all four Gospels;

We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem.

The same thoughts run through the whole Gospel narrative which is given Matthew’s name: of all the Gospel writers, he is the most concerned to define how far and in what ways the Christian community for whom he is writing can depart from Jewish tradition while still observing its spirit.

Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus.

and it is striking that Christian devotion and Christian art have overwhelmingly concentrated on Luke’s account of an ‘Annunciation’ to Mary and have ignored Joseph’s equal revelation. It is a surprising reversal of the

In the centuries which followed, Christians went further, coming to insist that Jesus’s mother remained a virgin throughout her life. A proclamation of Mary’s perpetual virginity meant commentators clumsily making the best that they could of clear references in the biblical text to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit

actually produces one of his most remarkable innovations by calling God ‘abba’, an Aramaic word equivalent to ‘Dad’, which had never been used to address God before in Jewish tradition, and whose peculiar novelty was attested

Julius’s figures were themselves wrong, because they were based on a misdating of the death of King Herod the Great, making it three years too late.