A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

John enjoyed the privileges of a traditional elite which had made a smooth transition from the old regime to the new: his grandfather, Mansūr ibn Sargūn, a Chalcedonian Christian, had been the last governor of the city on behalf of the Byzantine emperor, while John’s father was a high-ranking official in Umayyad administration.

John grew up alongside the future Caliph Al-Yazīd, and assumed the hereditary family place in publi...

he withdrew into the celebrated monastery of St Saba...

the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads in 750,

Baghdad replaced both Damascus and Seleucia-Ctesiphon as the key city of the Middle East. In the battle for prominence among the various factions of Christianity, that shift eastwards would inevitably favour the Dyophysite ‘Church of the East’ against the Melchites and Miaphysites, and the Abbasids gave an unprecedented official jurisdiction to the Dyophysite patriarch over all Christians in their caliphate, which stretched from Egypt into Central Asia.

Christians particularly dominated its specializations in astronomy and medicine.

The Abbasid caliphate was interested in drawing on all the resources of pre-Islamic learning that might be useful to it, and the chief source of this was the literature preserved by the Church of the East, translations from Greek into Syriac.

was these texts, translated yet again into Latin, which were the source of the reimport of swathes of lost Classical knowledge into Latin Europe in later centuries.

through forty years from the 780s its patriarch, Timothy I, was an outstanding diplomat in his dealings with caliphs who continued to be erratic in their attitude to the Church.

The Patriarch’s Church increasingly looked east beyond the Abbasid borders.

Patriarch Timothy is known to have consecrated a bishop for Tibet,

the Christian Church which had flourished there for more than a century.

the Tang dynasty,

Bishop Alopen

From being the poor relation of the Greek- and Semitic-speaking Churches of the East, Latin Christianity survived largely unscathed the eruption of Islam, and embarked on adventures which turned it into the first world faith.

It should not be forgotten how unpredictable this outcome was.

Diocletian removed the real centre of imperial government to four other capitals more strategically placed for emperors to deal with the problematic northern and eastern frontiers of the empire – Nicomedia in Asia Minor, Sirmium in what is now

Emperors never again returned to Rome for extended residence.

By the end of the fourth century this combination of advantages made it worthwhile for Greek Christians in their various intractable disputes to appeal to popes for support,

Constantine gave the Church in the city a set of Christian buildings which in some important respects set patterns for the future of Christian architecture, and

War and death seem

Pontifex Maximus

the Emperor built in all six funeral churches in Rome, capable of accommodating thousands of Christians in death as well as in life.

Damasus (366–84).

the first pope to use the distant language favoured by the imperial bureaucracy in his correspondence.

took a keen interest in the process of making Rome and its suburbs into a Christian pilgrimage city,

it was in Damasus’s time that Peter came to be regarded not merely as the founder of the Christian Church in Rome, but also as its first bishop.

it was a conscious effort to show that Christianity had a past as glorious as anything that the old gods could offer.

Damasus

In 382 he persuaded his secretary, a brilliant but quarrelsome scholar called Jerome, to begin a new translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin,

Damasus,

Traditionally it had been an occupation associated with elite wealth, and even in the case of this monk in Bethlehem it was backed up with an expensive infrastructure of assistants and secretaries.

Study and writing, he insinuated, were as demanding, difficult and heroically self-denying as any physical extravagance of Syrian monks, or even the drudgery of manual labour and craft which were the daily occupation of monastic communities in Egypt.

Either he is portrayed in a lavishly equipped study, as a scholar absorbed in his reading and writing, or he is a wild-eyed hermit in the desert –

a lion,

he constructed a Latin biblical text so impressive in its scholarship and diction that it had an unchallenged place at the centre of Western culture for more than a thousand years.

Damasus

The Church would also have to decide what it should keep from the literary culture so prized by wealthy and distinguished Romans.

Virgil.

epic poem told of the wanderings of Aeneas, both refugee from the Greek siege of Troy and ancestor of the founders of Rome.

the great Augustan poet could be pictured as foretelling the coming of Christ in one of his Eclogues, where he spoke of the birth of a boy from a virgin who would usher in a golden age.

Prudentius (348–c. 413)

first distinguished Latin verse written in the Christian tradition but not intended for the Church’s liturgy; some has nevertheless been adapted into it as hymnody.

Prudentius, like Constantine’s adviser Bishop Hosius, like Pope Damasus and the Emperor Theodosius, was a Spaniard.

bishops, taking with them the mitres which were part of the uniform of officials at the imperial Court in Byzantium.

Their prime role model came from the late fourth century, in the form of the imperial governor who became Bishop of Milan:

Ambrose.

It was an extraordinary transformation of fortunes for Christianity that a man who might easily have become emperor himself now wielded the spiritual power of the Church against the most powerful ruler in the known world.

to cancel an order for compensation to a Jewish community in Mesopotamia whose synagogue had been burned down by militant Christians and, on the other hand, successfully ordered the Emperor to do penance for his vindictiveness in massacring the riotous inhabitants of Thessalonica

So it appeared in the 390s that the future lay with a Christian empire under strong rulers like Theodosius and strong bishops like Ambrose: a culmination of God’s plan for the world and the beginning of a golden age,