A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Christianity in its first five centuries was in many respects a dialogue between Judaism and Graeco-Roman philosophy, trying to solve such problems as how a human being might also be God, or how one might sensibly describe three manifestations of the one Christian God, which came to be known collectively as the Trinity.

To the very ordinary Jewish name of this man, Joshua/Yeshua (which has also ended up in a Greek form, ‘Jesus’), his followers added ‘Christos’ as a second name, after he had been executed on a cross.2 It is notable that they felt it necessary to make this Greek translation of a Hebrew word, ‘Messiah’, or ‘Anointed One’, when they sought to describe the special, foreordained character of their Joshua.

It was in the Greek alphabet that the earliest known Christian texts were written, and the overwhelming majority of Christians until the Roman Catholic world missions of the sixteenth century experienced their sacred scriptures in some alphabetic form. Indeed, the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, repeatedly uses a metaphor drawn from the alphabet to describe Jesus: he is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet, the beginning and the end.

It is very different from the way in which the Jews came to speak of the remote majesty of their one God, the all-powerful creator, who (at relentless length) angrily reminded the afflicted Job how little a lone created being like him understood divine purposes; who dismissed Moses’s question ‘What is your name?’ with a terrifying cosmic growl out of a burning bush in the desert, ‘I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE’.6 The name of the God of Israel is No Name.

The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, speaking in the bush, called himself by a single name that is not a name, ‘I will be who I will be’, which is an explanation of a name used thousands of times throughout the Hebrew scripture, Yahweh.14 By itself, the story gives no reason to suppose that these personal gods had previously been linked by a single name. In effect the story tells of the recognition of a new god, and that point is underlined on a further occasion when God says to Moses about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that ‘by my name [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them’.

The whole collection of authorized and privileged texts came to be known by a Hebrew word, Tanakh. This was actually a symbolic acronym formed from the three initial Hebrew letters of the three category names of books it contained: Law, Prophets and Writings. The last is a rather vague catch-all term for history, psalms and writings containing wise sayings, and the categories are not altogether helpful as concepts: books which are mainly historical are to be found among both Prophets and Writings, while Job and Qoheleth nestle among the Writings, despite their prophetic brutality towards the sort of common-sense advice for coping with everyday life which is represented by the Wisdom literature of the Writings – works like the Book of Proverbs, for example. The Tanakh is recognizable to Christians as their Old Testament, albeit arranged in a different order.

One of the most significant Jewish communities formed in the Egyptian seaport city which remained as Alexander’s most spectacular single memorial, Alexandria: a symbol of the success of Hellenistic culture throughout the eastern Mediterranean. By the time of Jesus there may have been a million Jews there, the largest single community of Jews outside Palestine, and they were kept from dominating city politics only by the exclusive practices of their religion.

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.

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.

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 resurrection completely natural, and it became the basis of that Christian concern with the afterlife which sometimes has bordered on the obsessional.

During the first century CE the Romans experimented with a mixture of indirect rule through various members of the Herodian family and direct imperial rule of parts of Palestine through a Roman official – Pontius Pilate was one of these. Within Judaea itself, there were at least four identities for Judaism, Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, Zealots, and probably many lesser sects. Even though they tolerated each other’s existence, each saw itself as the most authentic expression of Jewish identity.

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.

Matthew’s and Luke’s ancestor lists are in their present form pointless. They claim to show that Jesus could be described as the Son of David; in fact Luke goes further, taking Jesus back to Adam, the first man. Yet they do this by tracing David’s line down to Jesus’s father, Joseph. Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus. Matthew does it by abruptly ending the genealogical mantra ‘father of’ after the generation of ‘Jacob the father of Joseph’, continuing ‘Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born’. Luke is more directly indecorous by calling Jesus ‘the son (as was supposed) of Joseph’.10 These rather lame phrases cannot be other than emendations of the rival texts, designed to accommodate the rapidly growing conviction of Christians that Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a virgin in human terms and became with child by the Holy Spirit.

This tangle of preoccupations with Mary’s virginity centres on Matthew’s quotation from a Greek version of words of the prophet Isaiah in the Septuagint (see p. 69): ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel’. This alters or refines the meaning of Isaiah’s original Hebrew: where the prophet had talked only of ‘a young woman’ conceiving and bearing a son, the Septuagint projected ‘young woman’ into the Greek word for ‘virgin’ (parthenos).

The Gospels do not give a definite answer as to whether Jesus’s ministry lasted for three years (John) or one (Matthew, Mark and Luke), or where its main focus lay within the Holy Land.

This sense that all the rules have changed is to be found in many of the sayings attributed to Jesus, particularly those which in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels have been gathered into an anthology, known from Matthew’s version of it as the Sermon on the Mount (Luke’s shorter version actually places the event on a plain, not a mountain, but somehow that setting has never captured Christians’ imagination to the same extent).

He produced outrageous inversions of normality – ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead,’ Jesus said to a man who wanted to postpone becoming his disciple in order to see to his father’s funeral.40 This saying is clearly authentic, since Gospel writers felt bound to preserve it even though it outrages every pious norm of the ancient world and a universal human instinct; moreover, Christianity has stonily ignored the command throughout its subsequent history.

Unlike the two infancy narratives, their details have much circumstantial overlap and feel like real events, but in their present shape they are also designed to make sense of something which came to be a real problem for the later Church. The Romans killed Jesus, however much the Temple establishment, in fury and fear at the nature of his preaching, had prompted them to do so. Jesus had said nothing more outrageous about the religion of the Jews than other wild representatives of Judaism had proclaimed either before him or in his own time. His was not a theological but a political threat to the fragile stability of the region.

Non-Jews killed a potential Jewish leader, as they had killed the Maccabean heroes long before. This was emphasized by the title inextricably associated with the stories of Jesus’s last hours and said to have been affixed to his cross: ‘King of the Jews’. Like ‘Son of Man’, this was not a title for which the later Christian Church found any use and so its survival in the tradition is all the more instructive. That ‘King of the Jews’ phrase is an inescapable repeated refrain through the Passion narratives, even despite the embarrassment which it was to cause Christians in the fraught political situation which emerged a few decades after that death on the Cross.

Most Christians did not want to be enemies of the Roman Empire and they soon sought to play down the role of the Romans in the story. So the Passion narratives shifted the blame on to the Jewish authorities, and the local representative of Roman authority – a coarse-grained soldier called Pontius Pilate – was portrayed as inquisitive and bewildered, cross-questioning the sedit...

Historians might take comfort from the fact that nowhere in the New Testament is there a description of the Resurrection: it was beyond the capacity or the intention of the writers to describe it, and all they described were its effects. The New Testament is thus a literature with a blank at its centre; yet this blank is also its intense focus.

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’. So the rest of the New Testament seems almost to be avoiding the idea; modern Western Christians, who tend to talk a lot about Christ as king (see pp. 931–41), generally do not notice this.

At stake was an issue which would trouble Christ-followers for 150 years: how far should they move from the Jewish tradition if, like Paul, they preached the good news of Christ’s kingdom to non-Jews? Questions of deep symbolism arose: should converts accept such features of Jewish life as circumcision, strict adherence to the Law of Moses and abstention from food defiled by association with pagan worship (that would include virtually all meat sold in the non-Jewish world)? Paul would allow only that Christians should not eat food which they knew had been publicly offered to idols, and otherwise not make much of a fuss about wares on sale in the market or about the dishes at a non-believer’s table.78 One might have expected that the result of this would be the development of two branches of Christianity in fundamental disagreement with one another about their relationship with the parent Judaism: there would be a Jewish Church looking to the tradition represented by James and a Gentile Church treasuring the writings of Paul and John. In fact this is not so. There is one epistle in the New Testament which has been given James’s name, and which does represent a rather different view of the Christian life and the role of the Law from that of Paul, but otherwise all Christians alive today are the heirs of the Church which Paul created. The other type of Christianity once headed by the brother of the Lord has disappeared.

In 66 CE a Jewish revolt broke out in Palestine which drew its inspiration from the traditions of Jewish self-assertion and rage against outside interference which looked back to the heroic era of Judas Maccabeus (see pp. 65–6). The comforts provided by Roman rule were not enough to persuade everyone in the Jewish community that they should outweigh the constant reminder from the Roman authorities that Jews were not masters of their own destinies. The rebels eventually took control in Jerusalem and massacred the Sadducee elite, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans. The Jewish Christian Church, interestingly, fled from the city; it was distant enough from the world of Jewish nationalism to wish to keep out of this struggle.

The result of the revolt was in the long term probably inevitable: the Romans could not afford to lose their grip on this corner of the Mediterranean and they put a huge effort into crushing the rebels. In the course of the capture of Jerusalem, whether by accident or by design, the great Temple complex went up in flames, never to be restored; its site lay as a wasteland for centuries.

The growing coherence in Judaism, the narrowing in variety of Jewish belief, meant that by the end of the first century CE a break between Christianity and Judaism was more and more likely: a symptom of that is John the Divine’s readiness to replace the Temple with the Lamb Jesus.

Moreover, at some very early stage, Christians celebrated their main worship on a different day: the day following the Jewish Sabbath. Many Christian cultures refer to it by its pagan Roman name, Sunday, but in many languages other than English it is called the Lord’s Day, as it was the day on which the Lord had risen from the dead, according to the accounts in the Gospel Passion narratives.

In everyday life, the Roman imperial authorities unwittingly encouraged the process of separation between Jews and Christians by imposing a punitive tax in place of the voluntary contributions which Jews had once paid to the Jerusalem Temple. For Roman bureaucrats, therefore, it became important to know who was and was not a Jew. Despite all the Jewish rebellions, tax-paying Jews continued to enjoy a status as an officially recognized religion (religio licita). 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.

It was in fact in Antioch, according to the Book of Acts, that colonial Latin-speakers coined a word for Christ-followers (in no friendly spirit) – Christiani.90 This name ‘Christian’ has a double remoteness from its Jewish roots. Surprisingly in view of its origin in the Greek eastern Mediterranean and amid the Semitic culture of Syria, the word has a distinctively Latin rather than Greek form, and yet it also points to the Jewish founder not by his name, Joshua, but by that Greek translation of Messiah, Christos. With its Latin development of a Greek word summing up a Jewish life-story, this very name ‘Christian’ embodies a violent century which had set Rome against Jerusalem, and the word has resonated down nearly two thousand years, during which Christianity in turn has set itself against its surviving parent, Judaism. ‘Christian’ embodies the two languages which became the vehicle for talking about Christianity within the Roman Empire: Latin and Greek, the respective languages of Western Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy.

Scripture says nothing to link Peter and his death to Rome, and the suspicion does linger that the story of Peter’s martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city. Nevertheless there are strong witnesses in tradition and archaeology that at least as early as the mid-second century the Christians of Rome were confidently asserting that Peter was buried among their dead, in a cemetery across the Tiber beyond the western suburbs of Rome.91 The leadership of the Western Church went on to build on that memory or claimed memory over a thousand years, to create one of Christianity’s most noble and dangerous visions, the Roman papacy.

The city of Rome is now the centre of the largest branch of Christian faith, which styles itself the Catholic Church, but we should remember that this is an oddity: Rome was, after all, the capital of the empire which killed Christ. 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.

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.

The Gospel narratives give a prominence to women in the Jesus movement unusual in ancient society; this culminates in the extraordinary part which they play in Matthew’s, Mark’s and John’s accounts of the human discovery of the Resurrection. All three evangelists make women the first witnesses to the empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus; this is despite the fact that in Jewish Law women could not be considered as valid witnesses.

There is a silence of about six crucial decades, during which so many different spirals of development would have been taking place away from the teachings of the Messiah, who had apparently left no written record.

The Christianity which emerged in reaction to these two possibilities adopted the same strategy as Marcion: it sought to define, to create a uniformity of belief and practice, just as contemporary Judaism was doing at the same time in reaction to the disaster of Jerusalem’s fall. That demanded a concept of the Church as one wherever it was: a universal version of Christianity which had taken up Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and combined it with much of the rhetoric and terminology of ancient Israel to express its wider unity. From an ordinary Greek adjective for ‘general’, ‘whole’ or ‘universal’, katholikos/ē, there developed a term of great resonance for Christianity, despite the fact that the word is not to be found in the Bible.

To begin with, Christians had the Jewish Tanakh, obsessively redirected in its reference towards their efforts to grapple with the meaning of the life and death of Jesus, and when they spoke of ‘scripture’ at the beginning of the second century CE, it is the Tanakh that they meant. By the end of that same century, ‘scripture’ was a more complicated word, because by then many Christians would include in the term a new series of books, a ‘New Testament’ of exclusively Christian works.

The earliest surviving complete list of books that we would recognize as the New Testament comes as late as 367 CE, laid down in a pastoral letter written by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria.

Already, therefore, during the third century, the Bishop of Rome was consolidating a role which was likely to give him a special prominence in Western Churches. The first surviving use of the title ‘papa’ in Rome occurs in the time of Bishop Marcellinus (296–304), in a funerary inscription for his deacon Severus in one of the catacombs in the city.66 There was, after all, no other Church in the West which could lay claim to the burial place of two Apostles and pilgrimage was beginning to draw Christians to Rome.

Much of Origen’s work consequently remains in fragments, though censorship cannot account for the loss of most of his unchallengeably admirable work, the crown of his biblical labours, the Hexapla. This was a sixfold transcription of the Tanakh in six different columns side by side, apparently beginning with the Hebrew text and a transliteration of it into Greek alongside four variant Greek translations, including the Septuagint. This columnar arrangement, which had precedents in official documents, but is likely never to have been used before in a book, was partly designed for use in the still-continuing theological debates with Judaism over the meaning of the sacred text of the Tanakh.

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.

Looking at the Genesis account of creation, ‘who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?’ Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly.

took the Romans some time to distinguish between Christians and the other quarrelling segments of Judaism, but once Jews and Christians had separated, Christianity could not hope for any sort of official recognition. Normally the Roman authorities were tolerant of the religions in their conquered territories; 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. All that they demanded was that subjects of the empire accept in turn some sort of allegiance to the official cult of the emperors, alive and dead.

Greek-speaking Christians, like Jews before them, called all non-Christians who were not Jews ‘Hellenes’, a word to which a sneer was attached, but it was probably during the third century that Western Latin-speaking Christians developed their own contemptuous term for this same category: pagani. The word means ‘country folk’, and the usual explanation is that urban Christians looked down on rural folk who stuck like backwoodsmen to traditional cults. More likely is that the word was army slang for ‘non-combatants’: non-Christians had not enrolled in the army of Christ, as Christians did in baptism.

As Christian communities established themselves as recognizable communities in cities, they often did not endear themselves to people. This was not because they lived austere lifestyles which made a painful contrast to a world of debauchery and luxury around them; that is a later Christian caricature which ignores the austere and world-denying character of much Greek thought in the early empire. Nor was it because they indulged in much public proclamation or systematic soliciting of converts, in the manner of modern Evangelicals. After the descriptions of such activity in the New Testament, there is very little indication that early Christians continued as flamboyant public proclaimers of the Gospel, unless they were cornered in time of persecution. What really offended was the opposite: Christian secretiveness and obstinate separation into their own world.

Christians also jealously guarded their ceremonies of Baptism and Eucharist from the uninitiated. It is indeed one of the peculiarities of their surviving literature from the first century CE (mostly the books of the New Testament) that although it talks a great deal about Baptism, it almost seems deliberately to avoid mention of the Eucharist – after Paul’s description of the Eucharist when writing to the Corinthians in the mid-first century, and the parallel descriptions in the Gospels, there is hardly any reference to it except in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch and the Didachē, both perhaps from the beginning of the second century (see p. 120). As a result, these ceremonies were thoroughly misunderstood by intelligent and sensitive Roman observers. There arose reports of incest from their talk of love-feasts, of cannibalism from the language of eating and drinking body and blood.

As they attracted converts, many unsympathetic outsiders became convinced that Christian success must be the result of erotic magic, strong enough to tear wives away from non-Christian husbands; after all, a number of Christian accounts of martyrdom did indeed describe women leaving their husbands or fiancés for Christian life or death.

It is impossible to estimate the numbers of converts involved; Pliny’s experience in Bithynia would suggest that in Asia Minor at least, right at the beginning of the second century, Christians could form an economically significant part of the population. That likelihood of a precocious Christian presence there is reinforced by the prominent part played by Asia Minor in the theological ferment already discussed (see Ch. 4) and by archaeological finds which show that during the third century Christians in Asia Minor were putting up blatantly Christian tombstones, presumably in public places – generations before the appearance of similar openly Christian material in provincial settings elsewhere.20 Beyond Asia Minor, Christian communities were probably quite small, particularly in the West outside Rome, and even there their numbers were dwarfed by the immense scale of the city. What was impressive, and increasingly noticed by non-Christians, was not so much the numbers of any one community but the geographical spread of the Church throughout the empire and beyond, and its sense of community.

In what may be the earliest datable Christian sculpted inscription, a self-composed epitaph from before 216, Abercius, Bishop of Phrygian Hierapolis, in the next generation from Bishop Apollinaris, proudly describes his Mediterranean adventures in terms of the travels of Paul of Tarsus. It is notable that among the places he describes, Judaea and Jerusalem do not figure. The Catholic Church had already rewritten the history of its past and there was no longer much need for Jerusalem to play an active role in it.

In 303, as persecution of Christians gathered momentum in the empire, the last thing anyone would have expected was for the Church to enter an alliance with the Roman state in any way comparable with what had happened in Osrhoene or Armenia. Yet between the military campaigns of Constantine I and the end of the fourth century, the alliance became so complete that it governed the way that the Greek and Latin Christian traditions thought of themselves through to the twentieth century.