A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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.