A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

strong lead by the great fourth-century preaching Bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, were honourably prepared to acknowledge the surprising femininity of Junia, but then there was a sudden turn in the writings of Giles of Rome in the thirteenth century, which was only rectified during the twentieth century.

First- and second-century Christians may not have made such a distinction between male and female deacons or the part that either played in the life of the Church.

also insists in his first letter to the Corinthians on a hierarchical scheme in which God is the head of Christ, Christ the head of men and a husband the head of his wife: quite a contrast to his proclamation of Christian equality for all.

Ephesians contains a patchwork of words and phrases from Colossians and from authentic letters of Paul, to the extent that it seems to be a devout

First, they were much more rigorous about matters of sex than the prevailing attitudes in the Roman Empire; they did not forget their founder’s fierce disapproval of divorce.

Christian communism thereafter lapsed for nearly three centuries until the new counter-cultural impulse of monasticism appeared, in very

One has always to remember that throughout the New Testament we are hearing one side of an argument. When the writer to Timothy insists with irritating fussiness that ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’, we can be sure that there were women doing precisely the opposite, who were probably not slow in asserting their own point of view.

Didachē’s assertion that it is necessary for us to work to ransom our sins.

How could a Jewish carpenter’s son, who had died with a cry of agony on a gallows, really be the God who was without change or passions, and whose perfection demanded no division of his substance?

Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, grouped such alternative Christianities together under a common label, talking about gnōstikē hairesis (‘a choice to claim knowledge’), with adherents who were gnōstikoi. A seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar, Henry More, turned this into an English word, ‘gnosticism’.

They are all likely to have been translations from much older texts in other languages, principally Greek, since one of them is a section from Plato’s Republic.

Much of gnosticism is a dialogue with Judaism – that is particularly true of the documents from Nag Hammadi – but the dialogue partners were not necessarily Greek.

suggest acquaintance with the dualism of Zoroastrian religion in Iran (Persia). It would be possible to argue for influence from as far away as India,

Implicit in most gnostic systems was a distrust of the Jewish account of creation.

gnostic documents. First, if the God of the Jews who created the material world said that he was the true and only God, he was either a fool or a liar. At best he can be described in Plato’s term as a ‘demiurge’

there can be no true union between the world of spirit and the world of matter, then the cosmic Christ of the gnostics can never truly have taken flesh by a human woman, and he can never have felt what fleshly people feel – particularly human suffering. His Passion and Resurrection in history were therefore not fleshly events, even if they seemed so; they were heavenly play-acting

gnostics opposed the authority structures then evolving in parts of the Church, particularly in relation to one important issue: martyrdom.

there is positive evidence that gnostics opposed martyrdom as a regrettable self-indulgence and were angry that some Christian leaders encouraged

Apocalypse of Peter, also recovered from Nag Hammadi, says that bishops and deacons who send little ones to their death will be punished.

Gnostic contempt for the flesh ran against the whole tendency of Jewish religion, with its earthy affirmation of created things and its insistence on God’s personal relationship with his chosen people.

It is not easy to reconstruct Marcion’s biblical writings and commentary, since they were largely destroyed by his enemies, but it is clear that he was a literalist who despised any figurative or allegorical interpretation of scripture and rather took the first apparent sense. If that sense clashed with his own sense

To hammer home his anti-Jewish and ultra-Pauline message, he added a book of Antitheses, pointing out the difference in approach between his selection of scripture and the Hebrew sacred books. He was no isolated eccentric: references to Christians opposing Marcion come from places as far apart as France and Syria,

Marcion fascinated the great German Lutheran Church historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Adolf von Harnack, and it must be said that there are curious resemblances in Marcion’s thought to the spiritual progress of Martin Luther:

The Christianity which emerged in reaction to these two possibilities adopted the same strategy as Marcion: it sought to define, to create a uniformity of belief and practice, just as contemporary Judaism was doing

From an ordinary Greek adjective for ‘general’, ‘whole’ or ‘universal’, katholikos/ē, there developed a term of great resonance for Christianity, despite the fact that the word is not to be found in the Bible. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch provides the first known use in his letter written to the Christians of Smyrna, in the early second century,

Christians have never since abandoned their rhetoric of unity, despite their general inability to sustain it at any stage in the reality of history.

when they spoke of ‘scripture’ at the beginning of the second century CE, it is the Tanakh that they meant.

thing. It is likely that the first collection of biblical ‘New Testament’ books which would be familiar to modern Christians was made in the middle of the second century, but that is not the same as saying that it was universally accepted by Christians straight away.

books that we would recognize as the New Testament comes as late as 367 CE, laid down in a pastoral letter written by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria.

necessary to have four Gospels which did not always agree with each other, and some Churches went on into the fifth century using a harmony (in...

Some Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean regarded the Book of Revelation with suspicion as late as the fifth century.

The second century saw a marked increase in the authority and coherence of the Church’s ordained ministry. By 200 CE there was a mainstream Catholic Church which took for granted the existence of a threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, and there would be few challenges to this pattern for the next thirteen hundred years.

It was not surprising that the Jerusalem Church had a single leading figure in the wake of the death of Jesus, since it was Jesus’s own brother, James.

It was perhaps not surprising that a mobile and a local ministry should sometimes come into conflict: they represented two different ways of presenting authority handed down from the Apostles,

theme was prominent in an influential document of about 100 CE, a letter sent to the Church at Corinth. Arguments at Corinth had led to the congregation dismissing their leaders and appointing others. Clement, a leader of the Church in Rome, wrote to protest in the most solemn terms, not because the congregation was deviating in any way in belief, but simply because it was endangering a God-given line of authority from the Apostles, who first preached the Gospel which they received directly from Jesus, himself ‘sent from God’. Break this link, said Clement, and the appointed worship of God is endangered;

it was also the first known occasion that a Roman cleric had successfully influenced the life of another Church:

Much later, the distinctive role of the deacon diminished, and late in the Roman Empire there were already examples of the diaconate being used as the first step in a successful clerical career through the order of presbyters, up to the rank of bishop, just like the various career grades in the Roman civil service. Amid these developments

the West was Rome. Here in the imperial capital one of the two great martyrs of the first generation who had died there, Christ’s Apostle Peter, was later credited not only with having died there but also with having been the city’s first monarchical bishop.

but in Rome manifestly the balance has now drastically shifted towards Peter.

The fading of Paul from popular devotional consciousness and from much share in the charisma of Rome is one of the great puzzles of Christian history, but it is obvious that part of the answer to the puzzle lies in a vast expansion of the power and prestige of the Bishops of Rome.

The threefold Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison (‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy’) is so intensely used in Orthodox liturgy that its repetition can almost sound like a mantra;

The most dramatic effect of the fight against gnosticism was to halt Christianity’s march away from its Jewish roots,

It is a mark of how far Christianity had spread by the second century that some of the most prominent in the writings which have survived to us – Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian – worked mainly in Rome and Churches of the western Mediterranean. Two others – Clement of Alexandria and Origen – came from the great intellectual and commercial centre of Alexandria.

Tertullian is the first known major Christian theologian who thought and wrote in Latin. He came from the important North African city of Carthage, which in the third and second centuries BCE had nearly succeeded in ending the steady rise of the Roman Republic. Its conquest, destruction and refoundation as a Roman colony had been so thoroughgoing that it was now a centre of Latin culture, with its own flourishing schools of advanced education; it is likely that a Latin-speaking Christian Church emerged first here rather than in Rome. The city’s links with Rome were close,

Unlike Justin, he affected to despise the Classical tradition, coining the rhetorical question which sums up the preoccupation of second-century Catholic theologians, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’

which had evolved out of the Church’s sense, perceptible already in the writings of Paul, that the one God is experienced in three aspects, as Father, Son and Spirit – creator, redeemer and strengthener. But what was the relationship between

One, ‘Adoptionist Monarchianism’, explained the nature of Christ by saying that he had been adopted by God as Son, although he was a man; he was only God in the sense that the

The other Monarchian approach was ‘modalist’, so called because it saw the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as corresponding merely to different aspects

When one manuscript might be the only source of a particular work and might easily crumble to dust in obscurity if someone did not think it worth copying, quiet ecclesiastical censorship could make sure that many works of these dangerous and audacious masters remained uncopied and so disappeared from sight.

he regarded knowledge not merely as a useful intellectual tool of analysis for a Christian but as the door to a higher form of Christian spiritual life.