A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

There is Constantine, the soldier who hacked his way to total control of the Roman Empire and became convinced that the Christian God had destined him to do so – for Constantine, his side of the bargain was to turn Christians from a harried, suppressed cult, accused of ruining the empire, into the most favoured and privileged of all Roman religions.

Good point on Constantine

Miaphysites’ and ‘Dyophysites’ rather than ‘Monophysites’ or ‘Nestorians’, or the ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’ rather than the ‘Irvingites’.

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This creates a tension with another borrowing from Greek which has passed into several northern European languages, and which appears in English as the word ‘church’ or in Scots English as ‘kirk’. This started life as an adjective which emerged in late Greek, kuriakē, ‘belonging to the Lord’, and because of that, it emphasizes the authority of the master,

Philip’s murder by a bodyguard drawn into the tangle of his homosexual love life resulted in the succession of the King’s twenty-year-old son as Alexander III.

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

the worship of the pantheon and the priesthoods associated with it were inseparable from Roman identity, and pride in that identity might trump any quasi-Republican distaste for the honours accorded the emperor. Beyond the elite, there was no reason why enthusiasm for the old gods should die among the mass of ordinary Romans.37 The

Perhaps the Habiru felt that this was what was happening to them: God was giving them a new identity.

Hebrew=Habiru

For the group known as the Essenes, however, even the distinctiveness which the Pharisees maintained was not enough to keep them from pollution in semi-colonial Palestine. 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 it was they who gave impetus to the successive disastrous revolts which by the mid-second century CE had shattered Jewish life in Palestine

Only two out of four Gospels, Matthew and Luke, have narratives of this birth in Bethlehem at the end of the reign of King Herod the Great (73–4 BCE), and outside those narratives, there is much to direct the alert reader to a contrary story.

We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem. Why, then, were the stories created? 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.

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).11

So this age old thinking did mary resume wifely duties? And not perpetual virgin

Christian, tried to piece together a coherent chronology for Christian events. He placed the Saviour’s birth in a year which he reckoned as the 5,500th from Creation; this calculation became embedded in the work of later historians, such as the sixth-century Dionysius Exiguus (‘the Short’), who has often wrongly stolen credit from Julius for fixing the first Year of the Lord (annus Domini). Alas, Julius’s figures were themselves wrong, because they were based on a misdating of the death of King Herod the Great, making it three years too late.13

Look up Julius Africanus.

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

‘The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath:

The Apostle Paul hardly ever recorded what Jesus had actually taught, so it is all the more notable that he records as a ‘word of the Lord’ that ‘the Lord himself will descend from Heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God’ – phrases echoed (probably a few decades after Paul wrote) in Matthew’s Gospel.

Paul hardly traslated Jesus word

John has much information about Jesus which is not to be found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. He seems genuinely to supplement their picture of Jesus’s life; yet that is not John’s main purpose, and his information is put to uses other than those in the Synoptics. He portrays from the outset a Jesus who, in the Gospel’s great opening hymn, is already fully identified with the pre-existing Word which was with God: John’s Gospel narrative is a progressive glorification of this figure, to the Cross and beyond. John’s Jesus, in the course of his majestic discourses, sets himself up in great metaphoric statements prefixed by ‘I am’, mystically seven in number like the days of creation. He is Bread, Light, Door, Shepherd, Resurrection/Life, Way/Truth/Life, Vine.72 He repeatedly refers to himself as the Son of God, which he does only once (and then only by implication) in the Synoptics, though they frequently put this title into the mouth of others.73 This Johannine Christ says little about forgiving one’s enemies, which is such a strong theme in the Synoptics.

and his blasphemous invocation of Jupiter and Venus, if it be true, could not possibly be serious. But we read with some surprise, that the worthy grandson of Marozia lived in public adultery with the matrons of Rome: that the Lateran palace was turned into a school for prostitution, and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St. Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.

By the 1170s, theologians observing this growth of popular theology of the afterlife had given it a name: Purgatory.

Puragatory aint real.

Purgatory was to become one of the most important and in the end also one of the most contentious doctrines of the Western Latin Church.

used violence against humble people in order to squeeze revenue and labour obligations from them; this was the era in which a rash of castles began to appear across the continent, centres of military operations and refuges for noblemen.

There had been occasional efforts to achieve this before, and the Western Church had from the fourth century generally prevented higher clergy from being married, but in 1139 a second council to be called at the pope’s residence in Rome, the Lateran Palace, declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but invalid.

Cathars soon set up their own hierarchies of leaders in France, Italy and Germany: a direct criticism of the monolithic and powerful clerical structure created by the Gregorian Reform, for Cathar dualistic rejection of the flesh was a rejection of what could be seen as a fleshly hierarchy.45 The campaign to wipe out the Cathars soon turned into a war of conquest on behalf of the king and nobility of northern France. In its genocidal atrocity, this ‘Albigensian Crusade’ (the city of Albi was a Cathar centre, with its own Cathar bishop), ranks as one of the most discreditable episodes in Christian history; mass burnings at the stake were a regular feature of the crusaders’ retribution against their enemies, who were by no means all Cathars.46

Tyndale, an Oxford scholar from Gloucestershire, made the English Bible his life’s work, had to flee his native land to continue his labours on it and lost his life because of it.

So a heady mixture of Paracelsianism, hermeticism and Cabbala bred an optimism in Protestant

While it was ok for the men to come up with such organization, women attempted to do the same and was burned at stake... and accused of witchcraft

From dispensationalism grew another ‘ism’: ‘Fundamentalism’ was a name derived from twelve volumes of essays issued in the USA by a combination of British and American conservative writers between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals.

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Various political leaders realized just how much advantage they might gain against rivals from missionary backing – often, as large-scale conversions took place, combatants in murderous wars would ally with missionaries of rival denominations, who frequently did not quite grasp how they were being used in local politics. When the Wesleyan Methodists and the LMS, in a laudable attempt to end their own rivalries, agreed in the 1830s to allot Samoa to the LMS and Tonga and Fiji to the Wesleyans,

Perhaps the most celebrated example was the kingdom of Buganda, part of what is now the Republic of Uganda, where Anglicans fought off vigorous competition for established status from Roman Catholicism and Islam.

Mokone was mindful of the psalm-verse (68.31) ‘let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out her hands to God’ – a scriptural fragment which, in conjunction with the story in Acts 8.26–40 of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, was destined to have huge repercussions through the continent over the next century.

Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church,

A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith’s work. Tolkien’s story-telling has many of the same characteristics as the Book of Mormon, although most people today would find Tolkien’s prose a good deal more readable.

Turkey who are not prepared to use the word genocide to describe the deaths of more than a million Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1916. One city, Van, largely Armenian in 1914, simply does not exist on the site that it then occupied.16 Britain, Russia and France appealed to the Turks during the war to end these atrocities, threatening post-war retribution to those involved and denouncing these ‘new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization’. The word ‘humanity’ had significantly replaced ‘Christianity’ in an earlier draft of the statement, and there was little comfort for Christian victims in the peace settlements which followed.17 No official statement was made about the Armenian holocaust.

Wow!

Petrine Christians, who wished to remain close to Judaism, and Pauline Christians, who wished to take it in a new direction.

Syllabus of Errors,

One great encouragement to sin is an absence of wonder.

Good quote