A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Copyright © Diarmaid MacCulloch, 2009

First is the Christianity which in the early centuries one would have expected to become dominant, that of the Middle Eastern homeland of Jesus.

nowhere do these Gospels refer back to the tales of birth and infancy, which suggests that the bulk of their texts were written before these particular stories.

We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem.

Haha

Matthew’s list unconventionally includes descent through women, unlike Luke’s; a strange bunch those women are, all associated with eyebrow-raising sexual circumstances and also, Jesus’s mother, Mary, excepted, with non-Jews.

his destiny is confirmed as a universal one,

Matthew’s and Luke’s ancestor lists are in their present form pointless.

After the revolt of 66–70 no substantial Christian community returned to Aelia/Jerusalem until the fourth century.

The Jewish-led Christ-followers regrouped in the town of Pella in the upper Jordan valley and maintained contact with other like-minded Jewish Christian communities in the Middle East.

The fourth-century Roman scholar Jerome came across surviving Jewish-Christian communities when he moved to live in the East, and he translated their ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’ into Latin,

The Church of Paul,

regarded their ancient self-deprecating name of

Ebionites

(‘the poor’ in Hebrew: an echo of Jesus’s blessing on the poor in the Sermon on the Mount) as the des...

The catastrophe for Jerusalem

left the Jewish intelligentsia determined to make their peace with the Roman authorities,

Jamnia

the end result was indeed a much more clearly circumscribed identity for Judaism.

the People of the Book.

Jamnia,

And is pseudo epigraphic successors

Celsus.

Christianity was not the only religion to 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.

Mithraism,

Mithras.

Justin Martyr,

Philostratus,

Julia Domna,

Apollonius of...

Plotinus

Mani.

Mani

Diocletian (reigned 284–305)

Discoveries of Greek, Syriac and Coptic papyri

two boards bearing word lists of key Manichaean phrases in Syriac with Coptic translations,

revealing the sense of a commonality in this Coptic- and Greek-speaking community with Manichees a thousand miles away

Antony and Pachomius,

the biography of Antony written by the great fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria Athanasius makes it clear that he was not the first Christian hermit;

the first monasteries.

They owed their existence principally to Pachomius, a soldier who converted to Christianity during the Great Persecution,

the stipulation that seniority in his communities was acquired simply by the date at which the individual joined.

The Church might well have seen the ‘silent rebellion’ as a threat, not simply because of the dubious and possibly gnostic origins of monasticism, but because the most ‘orthodox’ of hermits, simply by his style of life, denied the whole basis on which the Church had come to be organized, the eucharistic community presided over by the bishop.

How could Antony receive the Eucharist out in the desert, and how therefore did he relate to the authority of the bishop?

Athanasius painted a portrait of Antony which suited his own purposes: an ascetic who was soundly opposed to Athanasius’s opponents, the Arians (see pp. 211–22), and was a firm supporter of bishops such as Athanasius himself. The biography was specifically addressed to monks beyond Egypt; the bishop’s aim was a triumphant assertion of Egypt’s spiritual prowess, providing a model for all monastic life. Its first half was a dramatic account of the solitary’s twenty years of lonely struggle with demons of the desert, often in the shape of wild animals, snakes and scorpions; worse still, in the form of a seductive woman.

‘the desert was made a city by monks’.

Athanasius deliberately emphasized the desert as he told Antony’s story,

‘the Desert Fathers’.

In default of any more martyrdoms provided by Roman imperial power, they martyred their bodies themselves,

They were extending the category of sainthood.

There was quite conscious competition in this between Egyptians and Syrians, what Athanasius in his biography was happy...