A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Since Clement made so central the idea of moral progress, he wrote much about the way in which the Christian life should be lived on a day-to-day basis; he was one of the earliest Christian writers on what would now be called moral theology.

Emphatically Clement did not base justifications for marriage on romantic love, but on the necessity for procreating children: he was capable of saying ‘to have sex for any other purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature’.

Later his combativeness made Origen many enemies, not least his bishop, Demetrius, who was doing his best to pull together the Church in Egypt, laying the foundations of a formidable ecclesiastical machine which later made the Bishopric of Alexandria one of the major powers in the Church.

Origen’s importance was twofold as biblical scholar and speculative theologian, in which roles he exhibited interestingly different talents. As a biblical scholar, he had no previous Christian rival. He set standards and directions for the giant task which was already occupying the Church, of redirecting the Tanakh to illuminating the significance of Jesus Christ in the divine plan: creating the text of the Bible as Christians now know it. His biblical commentaries became foundational for later understanding of the Christian sacred texts.91 Origen’s biblical work showed a concern for exactness and faithfulness to received texts, something very necessary in an age when the text was still uncertain in many details;

It is a mark of how far Christianity and Judaism had now drifted apart that Origen, the greatest of third-century Christian biblical scholars, was hesitant in his grasp of Hebrew.

Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly.

because all parts of the scriptures were divinely inspired truth, but they should not be read as if they were historical events,

Syrian city of Antioch was home to theologians who were inclined to read the Bible as a literal historical record.

As far as Origen was concerned, the main role of the Holy Spirit was to bring strength to those who were full members of the Church.

Origen might say that the purpose of proclaiming Christianity was to proclaim truth and wisdom, regardless of any initiative like an escape from damnation.

as long as a religion had a tradition behind it, they could accept it as having some vague relationship to the official gods of Rome.

Even Judaism, an exceptionally exclusive religion which refused to make this concession, with an awkward insistence on regarding every other religion as untrue, could be accepted because it had a long pedigree

Paul. At the beginning of his letter to the Romans, he develops at some length the idea that all religion directed away from the true God and towards ‘images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles’ is a perversion,

Christians and their view of every other form of religion as demonic contrasted with the comfortable openness to variety normal in contemporary religious belief.

For the authorities, one feature of the Christians’ exclusivity was particularly alarming: their frequently negative attitude to military service.

A more complicated fabrication was the story promulgated by Bishop Apollinaris of Hierapolis in Phrygia (Asia Minor) that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161–80) had recently recruited a legion of Christian soldiers, who saved him from defeat not by their military prowess, but by successfully praying for a strategically placed storm on the River Danube (conveniently for Apollinaris, a location a long way away from Phrygia).

It stipulates that soldiers could be admitted to the Church only on condition that they do not kill or take the military oath. Hippolytus, however, was a notoriously crotchety moralist who inclined to extremes, and versions of his text preserved in other languages than Coptic modify his unrealistic demand.

For Christians, such separation was inevitable, given their sense of the falsity of all other religions: ancient life was saturated with observances of traditional religion, and to play any part in ordinary life was to risk pollution, particularly in public office.

The separate nature of Christian life is symbolized in a puzzling peculiarity of their literature: with remarkable consistency, they recorded their sacred writings not in the conventional form of the scroll, like their Jewish predecessors and like everyone else in the ancient world, but in gatherings of sheets of parchment or paper in the form of our modern book (the technical Latin name is codex, and that has no Greek equivalent word, telling us something significant about its origins).

Christians also jealously guarded their ceremonies of Baptism and Eucharist from the uninitiated.

In the early days of the spread of Christianity, the first Christians in cities had usually begun proclaiming their ‘good news’ within the Jewish communities, and when they did so, they often provoked violence from angry Jews.

gravediggers unnamed.13 In Rome, towards the end of the second century, the Church was already acquiring rights to excavate tunnels for burial in the soft tufa stone of the region, the first Christian catacombs – not refuges from persecution, as pious Counter-Reformation Catholics assumed in the sixteenth century, just places for decent and eternal rest (see Plate 2). The whole system of catacombs

relative lack of social or status differentiation in them: bishops had no more distinguished graves than others, apart from a simple marble plaque to record basic details such as a name. This was a sign of a sense of commonality, where poor and powerful might be all one in the sight of the Saviour. The picture was already changing by the mid-third century, when it becomes apparent that wealthier members of the Church wanted to make more of an artistic splash with elaborate wall paintings or expensive sculpted stone coffins.

The attractive feature of a martyr’s death was that it was open to anyone, regardless of social status or talent.

strong and aggressive body of Christians, which was emptying the temples and ruining local trade by following Paul’s old recommendation and boycotting sales of meat previously offered in sacrifice.

from the late second and early third centuries

This is true, for instance, in North Africa around Carthage, in Alexandria and in the south of France at Lyons.

the Black Sea).21 The largest cities of the empire produced the largest and most important Christian communities – Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage

The genuineness of such claims is less important than the witness they give to the way in which apostolic succession had now established itself as a vital idea in the thinking of the Church,

the late second century, intelligent non-Christians had started to realize the significance of this self-confidence. Christianity was beginning to offer a complete alternative to the culture and assumptions of the Roman establishment,

Christianity had no national base; it was as open to those who wished to work hard to enter it as Roman citizenship itself. It talked much of new covenant, new law, amid all its selective annexation of a Jewish past.

But the price of this survival was that imperial government became the ancient equivalent of a police state.

The third century has been seen as an ‘age of anxiety’, when people were driven to find comfort in religion.

The worship of the sun became steadily more dominant, a natural universal symbol to choose in the brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean. So Christianity was not the only religion

talk of oneness, to offer strict tests for initiation or to expect the result of these to be a morally regulated life with a continuing theme of purification. The sun cult of Mithraism, imported from the East like Christianity, had this character, and it is not surprising that Christians felt a particular bitterness towards Mithras.32

He spoke in a trinitarian fashion of a divine nature consisting of an ultimate One, of Intelligence and of the Soul.

Christianity faced an equally powerful challenge from a new religion with the same Semitic background from which it had itself emerged, in the teachings of a new prophet called Mani.

Jesus occupied a very important place in Mani’s scheme of divinity: indeed, he habitually referred to himself as the ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’, as Paul of Tarsus had done before him.

Mani’s teachings equalled the spread of Eastern Christianity in time and geography, taking Manichaean faith as far as the shores of China as well as into the Roman Empire.

Celsus had made it clear that it was now impossible for the Roman authorities to ignore Christianity.

An edict of Septimius Severus in 202 had forbidden conversions to either Christianity or Judaism, and that had been significant in promoting persecution during his reign and those of his sons.

Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ’s punning proclamation in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16.18).

272 the Church even called in the Emperor Aurelian for legal support in a long-running effort to evict the obstinate deposed Bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who had refused to end his occupation of the cathedral church complex in Antioch:

Eastwards of Rome’s Mediterranean provinces, something remarkable had happened a century before: the religion of the carpenter’s son and the tent-maker Roman citizen had entered an alliance with a monarch. So, for the first time, it experienced what it was like to be established and promoted by the powerful. In cultures beyond the empire, Christianity expressed itself in other languages than Greek or Latin.

They survive today, reminding the heirs of Greece and Rome that Christianity began as a religion of the Middle East and was as likely to move east as west.

there is apparently no substantial architectural provision for an altar for the Eucharist.

Absent is the representation which modern Christians might expect, but which was nowhere to be found in Christian cultures before the fifth century: Christ hanging on the Cross, the Crucifixion. Christ in the art of the early Church was shown in his human life or sprung to new life – never dead,

condemnation from neighbours to the west. The first major personality of the Syriac Church for whom there is reasonably certain dating was a combative Christian convert from Mesopotamia who, in the mid-second century, travelled as far as Rome for study, and who was known in Greek and Latin as Tatian.

probably a smear, intended to discredit him, for Tatian was responsible for another major enterprise, the harmonization (Diatessaron) of the four canonical Gospels.

Gospel harmony survived long enough to be translated into Arabic and Persian perhaps five centuries later.