A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Christianity is, at root, a personality cult.

modern European professional expectations that a true scholar knows a lot about not very much.

As well as telling stories, my book asks questions.

More surprising is the fact that the Jews’ constant experience of misfortune did not kill their faith in their own destiny.

The first generations of Christians were Jews who lived in a world shaped by Greek elite culture. They had to try to fit together these two irreconcilable visions of God, and the results have never been and never can be a stable answer to an unending question.

For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes.

It is also full of criticism of Church tradition, in the class of writings known as prophecy, which spend much of their energy in denouncing the clergy and the clerical teaching of their day. This should provide a healthy warning to all those who aspire to tell other people what to do on the basis of the Bible.

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.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all discovered that the text between the covers cannot provide all the answers.

There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

logos is the story itself.

It means not so much a single particle of speech, but the whole act of speech, or the thought behind the speech, and from there its meanings spill outwards into conversation, narrative, musing, meaning, reason, report, rumour, even pretence.

the words ‘logos’ and ‘Christos’ tell us what a tangle of Greek and Jewish ideas and memories underlies the construction of Christianity.

named after the Jewish folk hero Joshua

Egypt. They seem to have had a real preference for living in and therefore identifying with small city-states, which made perfect sense in their fragmented and mountainous heartland,

recognized each other as Greek by their language,

So Greek religion was a set of stories belonging to the entire community, rather than a set of well-bounded statements about ultimate moral and philosophical values, and it was not policed by a self-perpetuating elite entrusted with any task of propagating or enforcing it.

Greek curiosity created the literary notion of allegory: a story in literature which must be read as conveying a deeper meaning or meanings than is at first apparent, with the task of a commentator to tease out such meanings. Much later, first Jews and then Christians treated their sacred writings in the same way.

Ekklēsia

the assembly of citizens of the polis who met to make decisions.

Democracies such as that of Athens notoriously had their limits.

Just as messy and fraught as our democracy.

Nevertheless, with all these caveats, large numbers of ordinary people who were not privileged by birth or divine favour were indeed charged with responsibility for their own future and the future of their community.

...thus providing the impetus to think deeply about life, existence, etc.

His lifestyle was an enacted reminder that although human beings were rational animals, they were still animals – he was nicknamed ‘the dog’, from which his admirers and imitators took the name Cynics (‘those like dogs’).

Christianity has at various stages produced saints in his mould, holy fools and others openly contemptuous of worldly wealth, although they have rarely shared Diogenes’s propensity for masturbation in public as a symbol of detachment from conventional

Lol!!!

Christians inherited Graeco-Roman culture and thought, and when they have talked about questions of faith or morals or have tried to make sense of their sacred books, it has taken an extraordinary effort of will and original imagination to avoid doing so in ways already created by the Greeks.

questions can never cease to be asked if human beings are to battle with any success against the constant affliction of public and private problems.

Western culture has borrowed the insistence of Socrates that priority should be given over received wisdom to logical argument and rational procession of thought, and the Western version of the Christian tradition is especially prone to this Socratic principle.

First, his view of reality and authenticity propelled one basic impulse in Christianity, to look beyond the immediate and everyday to the universal or ultimate.

Plato’s second major contribution to Christian discussion is his conception of what God’s nature encompasses: oneness and goodness.

Equally, he discussed abstract matters such as logic, meaning and causation in a series of texts which, being placed in his collected works after his treatise on physics, were given the functional label meta ta physica, ‘After The Physics’. And so the name of metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality, was born in an accident.

Modern historians should sympathize with Herodotos’s engaging unwillingness to ignore the inconvenient, or to mistake moralizing for morality.

Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings, and that

they often behave far more discreditably than individuals.

Without the general peace brought by Roman power, Christianity’s westward spread would have been far more unlikely.

Pax Romana

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.

there is very little reference to the Patriarchs in the pronouncements of ‘later’ great prophets like Jeremiah, Hosea or the first prophet known as Isaiah, whose prophetic words date from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. It is as if these supposedly basic stories of Israel’s origins a thousand years before were largely missing from the consciousness of Jeremiah, Hosea and Isaiah, whereas references to the Patriarchs appear abundantly in material which is of sixth-century or later date.

In the course of this Exodus, God provides formidably precise sets of regulations for everyday life and also for furnishing and running a temple – a temple which in the event did not rise in Israel for another couple of centuries.

An Egyptian Name; not Jewish

they seem to concern a social rather than an ethnic grouping, and their context invariably suggests people who were uprooted and on the edges of other societies, people of little account except for their nuisance value.11

They were those who had been marginalized: nomads, semi-nomads, the dispossessed who now began to find ways of settling down and building new lives. While

they constructed a new identity, sealed by a God who was not necessarily to be associated with older establishments or older shrines.

It would be natural for the worshippers of this God to begin a long process of refashioning a patchwork of ancient stories from their varied previous homes into a plausible single story of common ancestors, among whom may be numbered Abram/Abraham and Jacob/Israel.

they are untidy and anomalous, preserved out of respect for their antiquity despite their inconvenience.

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.

The time of the Judges and then of David and Solomon had coincided with weakness in Egypt and an Assyrian monarchy which was preoccupied in another direction; these circumstances may have afforded opportunity for the brief success of the united kingdom of Israel.

Israel suffered frontal assault and destruction by the Assyrians around 722 BCE; thousands of its people were exiled and its political organization disappeared for ever.

The modern meaning of the word ‘prophecy’, relating it to the future, may mislead; in Greek, prophēteia means the gift of interpreting the will of the gods.

The exiles and their descendants continued to feel condescension or hostility to these others as ‘the people of the land’, a people who had not shared in the sufferings of God’s chosen people – had not sat by the waters of Babylon and wept remembering Zion.32 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.

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