A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The council accepted as orthodoxy the ‘Tome’ presented to Ephesus by Pope Leo’s envoys two years before, and it constructed a carefully balanced definition of how to view the mystery of Christ: ‘the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity

So, like Nicaea in 325, 451 remains an important moment in the consolidation of Christian doctrine

There is a common assumption among those Christians who are heirs of either Eastern or Western European theology that Chalcedon settled everything, at least for a thousand years. The stories which we are about to follow show how mistaken this is.

is nothing less than the story of Gautama Buddha, turned into a Christian novel about a hermit and a young prince, Barlaam and Josaphat.

they signed its Definition, they faced death back home, and it soon became clear that they were not exaggerating. Alexandria was, after all, the city

On Marcian’s death in 457, he was left defenceless. A mob who regarded him as a traitor to Dioscorus pursued him into the baptistery of a city church, butchered him and six of his clergy, and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city: all in the name of the mia physis of Jesus Christ.

Now Coptic language and distinctive culture were becoming badges of difference from the Greek Christianity of the Church in Constantinople.

410 had come the sack of Rome itself by barbarian armies: a deep humiliation for Romans proud of their history, even if the city had long ceased to be the capital for the emperors. In 451 there had still been an emperor in the West – more or less – but in 476 the barbarian rulers who were taking over so much of the former western territories of Rome allowed the last emperor to reign for no more than a few months of his teenage years before

that the Eastern Empire stood alone, it often paid little attention to the opinions or outraged representations of the leading bishop in the surviving Western Church, the pope in Rome.

As a result, from 482 until 519, Rome and Constantinople were in formal schism

To the south of Egypt, the King of Nobatia (a northern kingdom of Nubia) was converted in the 540s, turning what had previously been a small cult into a Court religion. Christianity eventually spread eastwards through much of what is now Sudan, halfway to the Niger as far as Darfur, and remnants of it survived in one Nubian kingdom into the eighteenth century.

the Armenians specifically declared themselves against Chalcedon in the sixth century and have never been reconciled to its formulae since. They saw its language as expressing unacceptable novelties, partly because, like the Georgians, their normal word for ‘nature’ was closely related to the Iranian root-word for ‘foundation’, ‘root’ or ‘origin’ – so any description of Christ as having two natures, even the qualified definition of Chalcedon, sounded like blasphemous nonsense to them.

‘Holy God, Holy and Strong, Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us’ – the Trisagion (‘Thrice-Holy’).23 There is no common consent among the wide spectrum of Christians who use this chant as to whether it is addressed to the whole Trinity of the Godhead, as its threefold shape might suggest, or to Christ alone.

The imperial Church in Constantinople eventually rejected the addition, but the Armenians defiantly adopted it into their liturgical practice; so every congregation in the Armenian Church continues in this solemn prayer to affirm the intimacy of relationship of divine and human in Christ.

The first historical accounts are from the fourth century, and make it clear that Christian approaches came not southwards from Egypt but from the east across the Red Sea, via Ethiopia’s long-standing trade contacts with Arabia and ultimately Syria.

This has meant that the abun rarely had much real power or initiative in a Church to which he came usually as an elderly stranger with a different native language. Authority was displaced elsewhere, to monarchs and to abbots of monasteries; monasticism seems to have arrived early in the Church in Ethiopia and quickly gained royal patronage.

education of these priests, deacons and cantors might not extend far beyond a detailed knowledge of how to perform the liturgy, but that was a formidable intellectual acquisition in itself.

Ethiopia’s Semitic links are also apparent in the unique fascination with Judaism which has developed in its Christianity.

At its extreme, the preoccupation with the Hebrew past in Ethiopian Christianity has produced a grouping of peoples first attested in Ethiopia in the fourteenth century, who have been styled by other Ethiopians Falasha, ‘Strangers’,

Ethiopian literature, the Kebra Nagast, the ‘Book of the Glory of Kings’. It is this work, difficult to date and composite in character, which sets out the origins of the Ethiopian monarchy in the union of King

Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, that legendary ruler of a Yemeni kingdom whom the Tanakh had recorded as visiting Jerusalem in great splendour.

Every Ethiopian church has a much-venerated representation of the tabot in its sanctuary.

in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure.

A complex and wealthy society which had flourished on the irrigation provided by the dam was ruined for ever, and with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia.

Five hundred miles to the north, in the same decade that the dam failed, there was born an Arab destined...

the worst sequence under Shah Yazdgerd II, what is now the Iraqi city of Kirkuk witnessed the slaughter of ten bishops and reputedly 153,000 Christians (a biblically symbolic number for a figure

anything helped to integrate Syriac Christianity into Sassanian elite life after its traumatic sufferings, it was the role of Gondeshapur in providing a series of skilled physicians who were Dyophysite Christians, and who became doctors first to the shahs and later to Islamic rulers in Seleucia-Ctesiphon.

One paradoxical trace of that is the presence of a substantial number of Syriac loanwords in the text of Arabian Christianity’s nemesis, the Qur’an; these probably derive from Muhammad’s knowledge of Jewish and Christian sacred texts in that language.

From this date, some monastic communities of Dyophysites held on to their places in Tūr ‘Abdīn, and it was not until after 1838 that the last monks from the Church of the East left this enclave of extraordinary Christian sanctity.

To begin with, it must have been something like a chaplaincy for expatriates, but it was also a mission which could draw on the natural articulacy and propensity for salesmanship which

Church of the East, which had spread its faith from Persia to Churches in India and even Sri Lanka,

Besides a number of carved stone crosses, the earliest datable artefacts of their history are five copper plates which record tax privileges and corporate rights granted them by local monarchs and rulers in the eighth and ninth centuries.44 Their lifestyle, despite various individual customs, became very similar to that of their Hindu neighbours; they found a rather respectable niche in Indian society.

monks in the Syrian tradition into their extraordinary self-punishments to achieve such imitation, but it also represents an optimistic pole of the Christian spectrum of beliefs in human worth, potential and capacity, because if Jesus had a whole human nature, it must by definition be good, and logically all human nature began by being good, whatever its subsequent corruptions. This was a contrast with the savage pessimism that has often emerged from Latin Western Christianity, following Augustine of Hippo’s emphasis on original sin

As so often in the history of Christianity, when mystics try to explain their experience of transcendence, the results are not just difficult for those beyond to understand, but seem to overstep the mark between creator and created.

Only once in this period did the Church of the East come close to any such prospect, and the result was in the long term a disaster for it – fateful indeed for all Christianity,

Now there was a moment when the new shah or his successors might well have decided to make the sort of turnaround to Christianity which had seized Trdat, Constantine and Ezana.

One of Khusrau II’s most significant trophies in his campaigns against the Byzantines had been not territory but a prime Christian relic: no less an object than the True Cross, which had somehow appeared in Jerusalem in the fourth century during the city’s self-promotion as a holy place

The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins.

For centuries the shrine at Mecca had been of merely local importance, far outshone by the Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, whose cult Christians had in good measure renewed by their pilgrimage in honour of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, while leaving the actual site of the Jerusalem Temple dishonoured and waste.

In contrast to the similar transition in fortunes for the followers of Christ witnessed in the Gospels, Acts and Epistles of the New Testament, the Muslims from their earliest days won their survival at least partly by physical force of arms,

forced conversions were not at all the rule in early Islam, even while

At the centre of Muhammad’s achievement was the extraordinary poetry which enshrined his revelations.

The Qur’an is strikingly preoccupied with the two monotheisms which Muhammad had known from his boyhood, Judaism and Christianity. He was concerned to proclaim a new unity of religion through ‘the God’ (al-ilah, subsequently abbreviated as Allah) who had been the focus of the shrine cult at Mecca, but otherwise Muhammad spoke contemptuously of Arabian traditional cults, and he was very aware of the sacred books which had previously spoken of one God, the Tanakh and the Christian New Testament. His concern for them, and indeed stringent criticism of their

The name of Mary, the mother of Jesus, occurs almost twice as often in the Qur’an as in the New Testament, and she gives her name to one of its suras.

His theme of oneness is a clear contrast with the Christian quarrels about the nature of Christ which Chalcedon had failed to heal.

To begin with, Muhammad instructed his followers to pray facing Jerusalem, and he only altered the direction of prayer to Mecca after a murderous disagreement with the Jews of Medina.

That concept of a united ummah has survived all subsequent divisions in Islam, including the great and so far permanent rupture between Sunni and Shī’a,

Egypt, for example, excavations at one of its greatest international Christian shrines, that of St Menas at Abū Mīnā, have revealed how suddenly Greek documents disappeared from the life of the community when the Muslim armies arrived. The last Greek receipts for the wine harvest scribbled on pottery are precisely for the invasion year of 641, and from then on the Coptic Church was entirely in charge at the shrine.

Umar signified the triumph of Islam on the vacant site of the Temple by building a mosque above the ruins. In doing so, the Caliph achieved what the Emperor Julian the Apostate (see p. 217) had planned long before: to restore honour and splendour to this long-desecrated sacred site which Christians had deliberately spurned, and whose memory had been so vital for Muhammad.

What the Dome of the Rock proclaimed was the arrival of a new empire which would replace the surviving Christian empire of the Byzantines; the city of Constantinople was now the goal of what seemed an unstoppable programme of conquest.