A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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 Sadducees provided the elite which ran the Temple.

Sadducees had little time for the comparatively recently evolved discussion of the afterlife;

The Essenes left ordinary society by setting up their own separate communities, usually well away from others, with their own literature and their own traditions of persecution by other Jews.

The Zealots held a militant version of the same Essene theme of separation: for them, the only solution to the humiliation of Roman rule over the Jewish homeland was to take up Maccabean traditions of violent resistance,

And so to Bethlehem of Judaea, where Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn. Or perhaps not.

Yet these Christian books are an unusually ‘down-market’ variety of biography, in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is often the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.

In fact outside the text of the two birth narratives, the Gospels do not refer to Jesus being born in Bethlehem, nor does any other book of the New Testament.

One motive for locating the birth in Bethlehem might be precisely to settle the argument noted in John’s Gospel about Jesus’s status as Messiah of his people Israel: it answered the sceptics who pointed out the problem with Micah’s prophecy.

reflecting the deepening conviction among followers of Christ that this particular birth had profound cosmic importance.

The narrators intend to recall more ancient stories in the minds of the hearers by applying them to the coming of Jesus the Christ.

Matthew raises an echo of Moses

The messages here seem to be that Jesus (and maybe also the circumstances of his birth) transcends petty conventions of behaviour in Jewish society, and also that even while he is a Jew, his destiny is confirmed as a universal one, not simply for the benefit of Jews.

The Tanakh had on rare occasions referred to Israel’s God as Father, but the idea sprouts mightily within the New Testament,

The birth and infancy narratives in the Gospels therefore provide an excellent example of the way in which those biblical accounts which are hardly historical in themselves reveal a great deal about the historical circumstances in which they were created.

Bethlehem, it is likely that Jesus was born in that same year, 4 BCE.

Matthew, Mark and Luke speak of a ministry spent mostly in Galilee in the north,

John, by contrast, deals mostly with activity in the south, Judaea,

Mark’s text is generally held to be the earliest,

They are all likely to have been written in the last three decades of the first century, around half a century after Jesus died,

Gospel of John, which was probably written a decade or two later than they were;

the Synoptic Gospels reveal distinctive quirks of speech in Jesus’s sayings which suggest an individual voice.

Another quirk is Jesus’s frequent and apparently unprecedented use of the emphatic Hebrew and Aramaic exclamation ‘Amen!’

Jesus in the Gospels is his own authority. He is, after all, the one who has seized the intimate word abba and used it when speaking to God.

Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels virtually never calls himself ‘Son of God’,

Rather ‘Son of Man’ may reflect in Greek a phrase in Aramaic (Jesus’s everyday language) meaning ‘someone like me’,

There is nothing like the parables in the writings of Jewish spiritual teachers (rabbis) before Jesus used them;

The overwhelming preoccupation in the parables, despite their various accretions after Jesus’s time, is a message about a coming kingdom which will overwhelm all the normal expectations of Israel and take its establishment figures by surprise.

(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).

Yet epiousios does not mean ‘daily’, but something like ‘of extra substance’, or at a stretch ‘for the morrow’.

These Passion narratives are probably the earliest continuous material in the Gospels,

Unlike the two infancy narratives, their details have much circumstantial overlap and feel like real events,

The evangelist John pictured the Jews as being forced by legal circumstance to hand over a man condemned for blasphemy to the Roman authorities if they were to secure the death sentence for him which they ardently sought.44 That is implausible, considering that three decades later the Jerusalem High Priest was directly responsible for the execution of Jesus’s brother James,

It mattered much less to the first Christ-followers after the Resurrection what Jesus had said than what he did and was doing now, and who he was (or whom people thought him to be).

For one dimension of the story is that Emmaus may not have been a real place near Jerusalem at all in first-century Judaea. Two centuries before, it certainly had been a real place: the site of the first victory of the Maccabean heroes over the enemies of Israel, where ‘all the Gentiles will know that there is one who redeems and saves Israel’.

The variety of answers to these questions dominated the development of the Church in its first five centuries, and at no time have those who call themselves Christians reached unanimity on the puzzles.

Paul knew much in his previous belief system about obedience to the Law, and one senses him struggling with his inheritance of Law in ways that are never wholly coherent.

But this seeming incoherence may be explained by the completeness of his traumatic Damascus road experience: he had rejected what was good, his Jewish heritage, for something incomparably better – Christ.

This Johannine Christ says little about forgiving one’s enemies, which is such a strong theme in the Synoptics.

The Spirit of whom Paul speaks is also a constant presence in this Gospel,

John the Divine is the only New Testament writer uninhibitedly and without qualification to use the provocative title of ‘king’ for Christ.

So Revelation is the great exception: the one book of the New Testament which positively relishes the subversiveness of the Christian faith.

In 66 CE a Jewish revolt broke out in Palestine

The rebels eventually took control in Jerusalem and massacred the Sadducee elite, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans.

Now the Romans erased the name of Jerusalem from the map and created a city, Aelia Capitolina. It took its name with deliberate offensiveness from a new temple of Jupiter,

The Jewish-led Christ-followers regrouped in the town of Pella in the upper Jordan valley

the Pharisees come in for far more abuse recorded by the Gospel writers, often in the mouth of Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus seems to have resembled the Pharisees in much of his teaching and outlook. When the Gospels were compiled in the last decades of the first century, the descendants of the Pharisees, the leaders at Jamnia, were a living force, unlike the Sadducees, and many Christian communities had become strongly opposed to them.

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.

all the sacred writings which form the New Testament were written in Greek.

Alexandria, capital of Egypt, home to the largest single Jewish community beyond Palestine itself,