A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy narratives place Jesus’s birth in the final year or so of Herod’s reign, and Herod’s death actually took place in 4 BCE.14 Assuming (although it is a large and even illogical assumption) that we can place more faith in the infancy narratives’ chronological fix on Jesus’s birth than in their general claims for a birth in Bethlehem, it is likely that Jesus was born in that same year, 4 BCE.

Mark’s text is generally held to be the earliest, with separate forms of development and use of additional

around half a century after Jesus died, but certainly no later than that, since they are already beginning to be quoted in other Christian texts datable not much later than 100

The three Gospels are together known as the ‘Synoptic’ Gospels to distinguish them from the Gospel of John, which was probably written a decade or two later than they were; the three present the basic story of Jesus in a similar way, quite differently from John’s narrative

Another quirk is Jesus’s frequent and apparently unprecedented use of the emphatic Hebrew and Aramaic exclamation ‘Amen!’ before he makes a solemn pronouncement: ‘Amen I say to you …’ The word was considered so important that it was preserved in its original form in the Greek biblical text;

His was not a theological but a political threat to the fragile stability of the region.

So the Passion narratives shifted the blame on to the Jewish authorities, and the local representative of Roman authority – a coarse-grained soldier called Pontius Pilate – was portrayed as inquisitive and bewildered, cross-questioning the seditious prisoner before him as if Jesus were an equal and making every effort to get him off the hook.

That is implausible, considering that three decades later the Jerusalem High Priest was directly responsible for the execution of Jesus’s brother James, then leader of the Christians in Jerusalem.

It would have been better for the moral health of Christianity if the blame had stayed with Pilate.

Nevertheless they can hardly fail to note the extraordinary galvanizing energy of those who spread the story after their experience of Resurrection and Ascension, and they can reconstruct something of the resulting birth of the Christian Church, even if the story can never be more than fragmentary.

We should try to understand why these people of past societies were so angry, frightened and sadistic, even if we cannot sympathize with them.

Probably none of these texts were written by anyone who had known Jesus in person, though some have taken the names of people who did. Those now thought to be written first

went away to Arabia to preach Christ, then three years passed before his first encounter in Jerusalem with two of the earlier Apostles, Peter (whom he calls Cephas) and the leader of the Jerusalem Church, James.

the eastern Mediterranean, and finally to Rome, the scene of his death some time in the mid-60s CE. It was a momentous change, which

His surviving writings are virtually empty of what the earthly Jesus had taught

beside ‘God’ and ‘Christ’: the ‘Spirit’. It was a word familiar to any Jew, already echoing through the Tanakh from its very opening sentences, when, before completed creation, ‘the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters’.69 Paul is constantly speaking of this

of Paul’s motives for writing to the Church at Corinth was that they were celebrating their experience of the Spirit in ways which he found imprudent; he sent them an extended health warning on this theme (I Corinthians 14), particularly the practice of speaking ecstatically in unknown ‘languages’.

Entering Paul’s theological world in his letters is rather like jumping on a moving merry-go-round: the point of entry hardly matters.

John has much information about Jesus which is not to be found in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

This Johannine Christ says little about forgiving one’s enemies, which is such a strong theme in the Synoptics.

and to be the product of Christian fury at his brutal campaign to strengthen the cult of emperor worship.

author is also called John, and may be a contemporary of the Gospel writer (from whom he is distinguished by being called ‘the Divine’); his crude Greek style is very different, as are his preoccupations.

So Revelation is the great exception: the one book of the New Testament which positively relishes the subversiveness of the Christian faith. It is not surprising that, through the ages of Christian history, again and again this book has inspired oppressed peoples to rise up and destroy their oppressors. Such emphases frequently alarmed

Paul repeatedly urges the Churches to whom he writes around the Mediterranean to send funds to the

Jerusalem Church, in the same way that Jews made a contribution to the Temple. This implies that the institution of

A furious passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians reveals the real seriousness of the quarrel, as Paul accused his opponents, including Jesus’s disciple

but otherwise all Christians alive today are the heirs of the Church which Paul created.

The rebels eventually took control in Jerusalem and massacred the Sadducee elite, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans.

Jerusalem, whether by accident or by design, the great Temple complex went up in flames, never to be restored; its site lay as a wasteland for centuries.

Now the Romans erased the name of Jerusalem from the map and created a city, Aelia Capitolina. It took its name with deliberate offensiveness from a new temple of Jupiter, the chief god of the Roman pantheon as worshipped on the Capitoline Hill in Rome itself (the temple was built apparently on a site which encompassed the place of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial, although this was probably coincidental). So Aelia Capitolina was not even intended to be a Greek city; it was a Roman colony.

When the Gospels were compiled in the last decades of the first century, the descendants of the Pharisees, the leaders at Jamnia, were a living force, unlike the Sadducees, and many Christian communities

had become strongly opposed to them.

by the end of the first century CE a break between Christianity and Judaism was more and more likely: a symptom of that is John the Divine’s readiness to replace the Temple with the Lamb Jesus.84 In many communities, the break probably occurred two or more decades earlier. Christ-followers had taken a decisive

Moreover, at some very early stage, Christians celebrated their main worship on a different day: the day following the Jewish Sabbath.

in many languages other than English it is called the Lord’s Day, as it was the day on which the Lord had risen from the dead, according to the accounts in the Gospel Passion narratives.86

By the beginning of the second century at least, we find Ignatius, leader or ‘bishop’ in the Christian community of Antioch, calling this ‘Eucharist’.

fact, despite the brutality with which Rome crushed various Jewish rebellions both in Palestine and beyond, it is remarkable that the Romans continued to regard Judaism with such respect and forbearance – most notably in adopting the Jewish division of the week into seven days rather than the traditional Roman eight, probably in the same century that they destroyed the Temple.

The Christ revealed in the letters of Paul, the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, much more than in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a cosmic ruler and his followers must conquer the whole world. For Paul, that meant setting his sights

There was Alexandria, capital of Egypt, home to the largest single Jewish community beyond Palestine itself, and there was also Antioch of Syria, the old Seleucid capital, still then the chief city in Rome’s eastern imperial provinces. It was in fact in Antioch, according to the Book of Acts, that colonial Latin-speakers coined a word for Christ-followers (in no friendly spirit) – Christiani.90 This name ‘Christian’ has a double remoteness from its Jewish roots. Surprisingly in view of its origin in the Greek eastern Mediterranean and amid the Semitic culture of Syria, the word has a distinctively Latin rather than Greek form, and yet it also points to the Jewish founder not by his name, Joshua, but by that Greek translation of Messiah, Christos.

the sack of Jerusalem and two executions of key early Christian figures, the Apostles Peter and Paul, in Rome itself.

The city of Rome is now the centre of the largest branch of Christian faith, which styles itself the Catholic Church, but we should remember that this is an oddity:

even two centuries after the death of Jesus Christ; and for centuries more there was as much likelihood of Christianity spreading as strongly east as west from the ruins of Jerusalem, to become the religion of Baghdad rather than of Rome.

Paul’s writings to the Corinthians, because this meal of unity had caused trouble there. Some had been withdrawing from the general congregation in order to eat in a separate group and Paul made it clear that it was the wealthy who were at fault. He emphasized that all must eat together.

Paul and his followers assumed that the world was going to come to an end soon and so there was not much point in trying to improve it by radical action.

The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.

By the fourth century, Christian writers like Bishop Ambrose of Milan or Bishop Augustine of Hippo were providing even more robust defences of the idea of slavery than non-Christian philosophers had done before them – ‘the lower the station in life, the more exalted the virtue’, was Ambrose’s rather unctuous opinion.

there are plenty of signs that Christians began by giving women a newly active role and official functions in Church life, then gradually moved to a more conventional subordination to male authority.

describes a confrontation between Mary Magdalene and the Apostle Peter, in which Jesus intervenes on her behalf to reproach Peter. This theme of arguments between the Magdalene and Peter occurs elsewhere.

Jesus’s disciple Levi is presented as exclaiming to Peter, ‘if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you then to reject her? Certainly the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.’

Junia, a female ‘apostle’, so described alongside another ‘apostle’ with a male name – this was considered such an appalling anomaly by many later readers of Romans that Junia’s name was frequently changed to a male form