A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Now Plato presented a very different picture of the ultimate God. His perspective looking beyond the traditional pantheon has a further dimension, which does actually in effect limit the way in which he envisaged the goodness of God. Although Plato’s supreme God is unlike the fickle, jealous, quarrelsome gods of the Greek pantheon, his God is distanced from compassion for human tragedy, because compassion is a passion or emotion. For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness. Although Plato nowhere explicitly draws the conclusion from that oneness, it points to the proposition that God also represents perfection. Being perfect, the supreme God is also without passions, since passions involve change from one mood to another, and it is in the nature of perfection that it cannot change. This passionless perfection contrasts with the passion, compassion and constant intervention of Israel’s God, despite the fact that both the Platonic and the Hebrew views of God stress transcendence. There is a difficulty in envisaging how Plato’s God could create the sort of changeable, imperfect, messy world in which we live – indeed, have any meaningful contact with it.

No one sane has sought to replicate Plato’s picture of government in the real world – although some insane societies have warmed to his recommendation that the activities of musicians should be curbed and all poets expelled.

The Roman Republic’s difference from developed Greek city-states probably arose because of Rome’s continual yearning to expand: a state more or less

permanently at war either to maintain or to expand its frontiers could not afford the luxury of real democracy.

In any case, the effect was to give an ever-widening circle of people a vested interest in the survival of Rome.

By the sixth and seventh centuries, Greek was ousting Latin as the official language of the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, with the strong encouragement of the Christian Church. That was an achievement unparalleled among languages of supposedly defeated peoples, and a tribute to Hellenistic cultural vitality

and adaptability long after the end of the various Hellenistic monarchies.

The theme of peace was well chosen: most Romans were more interested in the fact that Augustus brought them peace and prosperity than they were in the Republic. For all that his own military prowess was dubious, Augustus and his successors tore down political frontiers all round the Mediterranean, and by controlling piracy, they made it comparatively safe and easy to travel from one end of the sea to the other. The first great exponent of a worldwide Christianity, the Apostle Paul, made the most of this, and so would the Christian faith as a whole. Without the general peace brought by Roman power, Christianity’s westward spread would have been far more

unlikely.

Around Abraham’s rackety grandson Jacob are woven several engaging tales of outrageous cheating and deceit, and they culminate in an all-night wrestling match with a mysterious stranger who overcomes Jacob and is able to give him another new name, Israel, meaning ‘He who strives with God’.5 Out of that fight in the darkness, with one who revealed the power of God and was God, began the generations of the Children of Israel. Few peoples united by a religion have proclaimed by their very name that they struggle against the one whom they worship. The relationship of God with Israel is intense, personal, conflicted. Those who follow Israel and the religions which spring from his wrestling match that night are being told that even through their harshest and most wretched experiences of fighting with those they love most deeply, they are being given some glimpse of how they relate to God.

Judaism. 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.

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

other side, the casualties reputedly running into hundreds.

By all the rules of ancient statecraft, the fact of external threat and eventual conquest should have erased Israel’s national identity and religion, as sooner or later it repeatedly erased every other national identity created by a state structure in the Middle East. Uniquely in Israel, this was not the case. The nation’s commitment to Yahweh, probably forged out of very miscellaneous materials, survived the destruction first of the northern kingdom and then finally, in 586 BCE, of the southern kingdom as well. This achievement owed much to the insights of the prophets of Judah and Israel. Either through their individual genius or through divine revelation, the eighth-century prophets understood the international situation, with its constant threats of annihilation by Assyrian military might, and perceived that the only thing which could save their people from long-term annihilation was that obedience to Yahweh for which Elijah and his fellow prophets had fought in the previous century. And Yahweh was powerful enough to decide the course of history – occasionally these prophets were

prepared to proclaim that he was lord of universal history and of nations beyond their own. It was an astonishing claim for this people who were apparently helpless before the great empires of their day: … many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD [Yahweh], to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’. For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares

and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shal...

The kingdom’s political turbulence culminated in a coup d’,état which around 640 BCE killed King Amon of Judah and installed his young son Josiah as a puppet ruler. As the boy grew up, his energy and zeal were harnessed to push forward a reform programme which, in the way of such

innovations in the ancient world, was presented as the rediscovery of a venerable document: a code of law, attributed to Moses himself. With impeccable timing, this set out regulations, particularly for sacrifice, which had not been applicable at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, but which were judged extremely relevant to the age of Josiah. 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.28

There were more laws to come in a period much later than Josiah’s reign, but they were likewise back-projected to the time of Moses.

Many of these despised people built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim in the central Palestinian territory known as Samaria, and hence they were called Samaritans (a word of contempt to Jews); in very reduced numbers, they still live round their sacred mountain now.

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.

Judaism was nevertheless reluctant to make too much of any rival to God, having put such effort into affirming his sole and cosmic power. Some Jews felt that any questioning of or search for understanding of their tragedy was impious as well as a waste of energy. This is the message in the Book of Job, a tale which is the classic cry of pain and anger against unjust suffering, and which provides Satan’s first major debut in biblical literature. Job’s suffering arises not out of anything that he has done, for he is one of God’s most loyal servants; it results from a peculiar and apparently heartless wager between God and Satan about his loyalty.

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: All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun … In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

On this principle was founded the continuing existence and development of Judaism. Like its daughter religion, Christianity, Judaism has often fostered the idea that it has an exclusive approach to the divine. Yet this claim to exclusivity was coupled with a remarkable new feature of Yahweh’s religion – or perhaps really a return to its miscellaneous origins amid the displaced people of the Habiru. From this period under

Persian rule comes an acceptance that it was not necessary to be born a Jew to enter the Jewish faith: what was necessary was to accept fully the customs of the Jews, including the rite of genital circumcision performed on all Jewish males. One could then be accepted as a convert (‘proselyte’, from a Greek word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner living in the land’). It was enough to accept the story which Judaism told: so in theory, Judaism could become a universal religion. Jews did not generally take that logical step of thought. It was left first to Christianity and then to Islam to make it a great theme of their faith.36

The Tanakh is recognizable to Christians as their Old Testament, albeit arranged in a different order. Beyond it, reflecting and in some cases obviously including the symbolic seventy rejected books, are a series of texts which neither Jews nor Christians afforded the same special status, but which have had a large influence on both religious

traditions. Some of these books were actually added to the Tanakh by Jews in Greek-speaking settings such as Alexandria (see p. 69), and hence the early Christians, also Greek-speaking, regarded them as having the full status of God’s word. 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.42 For Protestants, this had the useful effect of undercutting various doctrines held by that part of the Western Church still loyal to the pope, doctrines which could find biblical warrant only within books of the Apocrypha. Martin Luther duly fished these extra books out of the general assemblage of scripture, yet he kept them in an appendix to his German Bible of 1534, and the Church of England allowed some samples of them to be read in public worship; other Protestants dropped them altogether.

In general these Hellenized Jews were much more interested in winning respect from Greeks for their culture than Greeks were interested in Judaism. They found that Greek reaction to what the translation revealed of Hebrew sacred literature posed problems: Greeks respected such ancient writings, but were also puzzled that a God who was supposed to be so powerful would do strange things like walk in the Garden of Eden or

indulge in arguments with earthly men like Lot or Jonah. Many Jews came to feel that such apparent embarrassments in their stories must conceal deeper layers of truth and so must be allegories. Greeks had after all already applied this idea of allegorical meaning to their own myths and to the writings of Homer (see pp. 24–5), and the allegorical approach became naturalized among Alexandrian Jews in the biblical commentaries of Jesus Christ’s Jewish contemporary the scholar and historian Philo.47 When a Christian community eventually became established alongside the Alexandrian Jewish community, it was much influenced by Philo’s allegorical method. Powerful currents of opinion within Judaism also continued to suggest modifications of aspects of Jewish belief if there seemed to be valuable material in the religions of others. Following Greek thought, Jews embraced the concept of nothingness, and that gave them a new perspective on creation. 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.48 This was important for Christians later, as they struggled to find a convincing way of expressing their conviction that God could remain divine while entering the world which he had created. Greek discussion of nothingness helped to change Jewish views on beginnings; Jewish thinkers also borrowed ideas to help them understand the end of human life and its aftermath. On the whole, before the time of the Maccabees, Jewish discussion of God had shown little interest in the nature of the afterlife; Judaism was concerned with this life and with interpreting the many tragedies that happened to people on earth. Because of this, the Tanakh does not have all that much to say about death and what comes after. What it does say, particularly in texts written before the Babylonian exile, suggests that human life comes to an end and, for all but a few exceptional people, that is it. A new impulse to deve...

particularly lavish reward? Some argued that God would grant back the martyrs bodily resurrection in this life, but inconveniently this failed to happen. Perhaps, then, the resurrection of the martyrs would be in a life to come, and the reward should be specific to individual suffering; this implied the prolonging of a recognizable personal existence.49 No doubt the era of the Maccabees was not the first time that this fairly obvious train of argument had occurred to thoughtful Jews, but now they could listen to voices in other religious or philosophical traditions which might give shape to the idea. The most readily available vocabulary and central concept was actually Greek and had been particularly developed by Plato: he talked of individual humans as having a soul, which might reflect a divine force beyond itself. The first Jewish texts to say much about the soul therefore appear in the Hellenistic period, in ‘Inter-Testament...

find a place in the Tanakh, but likewise it is almost certain to have been written as late as the second century. It is unprecedented in Jewish sacred literature in spelling out the idea of an individual resurrection of a soul in a transformed body in the afterlife – though still not for everyone!51 Naturally all these developments within Judaism were highly controversial and provoked continuing argument; yet by the time Christians were beginning to construct their own literature, their writers clearly found such talk of the individual soul and of resurr...

Essene separation from the rest of Judaism was a matter of principle, whereas the eventual Christian separation was a result of Christianity’s failure to become the leading force within the Judaism of

the first century CE, and Christians became eager to move out into the world beyond Palestine, as we will see (see pp. 108–11).55

Out of that destruction emerged a group which at first seemed just another minority answer to the problem of Jewish identity. Now it did much towards the permanent shaping of that identity, as well as becoming a world religion in its own right. The Jewish sect which became Christianity borrowed the sacred literature created by the Jews and shaped Christian belief in its founder-Messiah along lines already present in the sacred books of the Tanakh. Christian history thereafter is shot through with and shaped by the stories of the Tanakh – they became particularly useful when Christians allied with monarchies, for the Christian New Testament has little to do with kings,

while the Old Testament has much to say about them. When Christians created a sacred book of two ‘Testaments’, they turned their brand-new belief system into one which could stand on an ancient sacred tradition and claim to be the most ancient religion of all. Muslims likewise took over this claim to antiquity, remaining conscious of the two older assemblies of books, but Muslims replaced the authority of the two Testaments with a further book which became their supreme revelation of God’s word, the Qur’an. For Christians, that revelation had already appeared in the Jew Jesus of Nazareth.

One wonders what Paul was preaching when he started out. His surviving writings are virtually empty of what the earthly Jesus had taught

the silence contrasts significantly with the fact that he is regularly prepared to quote the Tanakh. A person, and not a system, had captured him in the mysterious events on the road to Damascus.

Brooding on the Roman government’s maltreatment of Christians, John the

Divine delighted in constructing a picture of the Roman Empire’s collapse which would have been familiar to pre-Christian Jewish writers in the apocalyptic tradition. He described Rome in a frequent Jewish shorthand for tyrannical power, ‘Babylon’. Significantly, John the Divine is the only New Testament writer uninhibitedly and without qualification to use the provocative title of ‘king’ for Christ. There are plenty of New Testament references to the Kingdom of God, or Christ as the King of the Jews, or the King of Israel; but those are not the same at all. The early Christians were scared of what the Roman authorities might think if they started calling Christ a king; after all, Jesus was crucified because he was said to have claimed to be just that, ‘King of the Jews’.

life. As we have noted (see p. 98), the most important among these leaders was at first James the brother of Jesus. When the Jewish authorities executed James in 62 CE on charges of breaking the Jewish Law, his place was taken by another ‘kinsman’ of the Lord, Simeon.

In 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.88 Christians

Without the tragedy of the destruction of Jerusalem, Rome might never have taken the unique place which it has held in the story of Western Christian faith. But no one would have realized this 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. That is why the next stage of this story will take us east, rather than in the westward and northward directions so often chosen by the historians of Christianity.

Paul emphasizes that he has not done this: he tells us that he has supported himself, although in what seems to be an attempt to face down criticism, he proclaims his contradiction of Jesus’s practice as a privilege renounced rather than an obligation spurned. He makes no bones about saying ‘keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us’. So much for Jesus and his wandering Twelve. Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.5

This set a significant pattern for the future: Christianity was not usually going to make a radical challenge to existing social distinctions. The reason was that 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.

Paul’s acceptance of the secular status quo had especial implications for two groups whose liberation has over the last quarter-millennium sparked conflict worldwide, but especially within Western Christianity: slaves and women. One short letter of Paul from a Roman prison to a fellow Christian called Philemon is undoubtedly genuine, since it contains no useful discussion of doctrine and can only have been preserved for its biographical information about the Apostle. It centres on the future of Onesimus, a slave to Philemon. He had recently been serving Paul in imprisonment and the letter contains a none-too-subtle hint that Paul would appreciate continuing to enjoy the benefit of Onesimus’s service.

There is no suggestion that he should be freed, only that now he could be ‘more than a slave’ to Philemon; and certainly there is no question of consulting Onesimus about his own wishes. The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.13 Slavery was, after all, an indispensable institution in ancient society. A Christian writer from a generation later than Paul, who bore the name of Jesus’s disciple Peter but who is unlikely to have been the same man, wrote a miniature treatise which became one of the epistles accepted into the New Testament. It told house-slaves to compare their sufferings to the unjust sufferings of Christ, in order that they should bear injustice as Christ had done. That did not say much about the writer’s expectations that Christian slave owners would be better than any others, and it followed a strong command to ‘be subject to every human institution’.14 In the early second century, when the Church’s leadership was beginning to

be concentrated in the hands of single individuals styled bishops (see pp. 130–37), Bishop Ignatius of Antioch observed in a letter to his fellow bishop Polycarp of Smyrna that slaves should not take advantage of their membership in the Christian community, but live as better slaves, now to the glory of God – and his opinion was that it would be inappropriate to use church funds to help slaves buy their freedom. 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 n...

Yet in the same passage Paul said something more positive: that both husband and wife have mutually conceded each other power over each other’s bodies. This gives a positive motive for Christian counter-cultural opposition to divorce, but it is also striking in its affirmation of mutuality in marriage. That message has struggled to be heard through most of Christian history.28