A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

As well as telling stories, my book asks questions. It tries to avoid giving too many answers, since this habit has been one of the great vices of organized religion.

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. Even now, by no means all sections of the Christian world have undergone the mutation of believing unequivocally in tolerating or accepting any partnership with other belief systems.

The central text of Christianity is the Bible, as mysterious and labyrinthine a library as that portrayed by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose.

It is not surprising that so many have sought the Last Days. The writing and telling of history is bedevilled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well.

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. After much ill-tempered debate on such matters, the outcome of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was dictated by political circumstances and did not carry the whole Christian world with it. The schisms which followed were made permanent by the political bitterness aroused by the Western Crusades of the High Middle Ages, their transmutation into attacks on Eastern Christians and their eventual failure either to recapture the Holy Land or to defend Eastern Christianity against Islam. All these cataclysmic human events stemmed from an idea constructed by a council of bishops.

Jesus seems to have maintained that the trumpet would sound for the end of time very soon, and in a major break with the culture around him, he told his followers to leave the dead to bury their own dead (see p. 90). Maybe he wrote nothing because he did not feel that it was worth it, in the short time left to humanity. Remarkably quickly, his followers seemed to question the idea that history was about to end: they collected and preserved stories about the founder in a newly invented form of written text, the codex (the modern book format). They survived a major crisis of confidence at the end of the first century when the Last Days did not arrive – perhaps one of the greatest turning points in the Christian story, although we know very little about it.

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

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

Yet he was also to find his most mischievous disciple in a nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran who overturned even the systematic pursuit of rationality: S⊘ren Kierkegaard (see pp. 833–5).

For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness. Although Plato nowhere explicitly draws the conclusion from that oneness, it points to the proposition that God also represents perfection. Being perfect, the supreme God is also without passions, since passions involve change from one mood to another, and it is in the nature of perfection that it cannot change. This passionless perfection contrasts with the passion, compassion and constant intervention of Israel’s God, despite the fact that both the Platonic and the Hebrew views of God stress transcendence.

for two thousand years after his death Aristotle would set the way in which Christians and Muslims alike shaped their thoughts about the best way to organize and think about the physical world, about the arts and the pursuit of virtue.

Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ.

even in the last twenty years the leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome have reaffirmed the synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelian thought which Thomas Aquinas devised at that time.

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.

Little local imitations of the Classical Greek polis sprouted and survived for centuries as far away as the Himalayas in the east. So the Afghan city of Kandahar is called by a disguised version of the name which Alexander and his admirers gave to a scatter of cities across his conquests: Alexandria.

Nineteenth-century scholars started calling this world created in the wake of Alexander’s conflicts ‘Hellenistic’, to show how Greek it was, but also in order to differentiate it from the Greece which had gone before it.27 Classical Greece, however briefly, had fostered democracy, while here were states which were undisguised dictatorships. Their rulers took on divine trappings which Greeks had long ago rejected, but which Philip II had revived for himself; Alexander had turned this strategy into a major programme of identification with a variety of Greek and oriental divinities.28

If philosophers could no longer hope to alter the policies of cities by influencing the thought of the people in the marketplace, and monarchs seemed impervious to the instruction of the most cultivated tutors, philosophy might as well concentrate on the inward life of the individual which no mighty ruler might tamper with.

There was little follow-up to the remarkable advances seen in Classical Greece in the understanding of technology, medicine and geography. When the steam engine was invented in Alexandria about a hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ, it remained a toy, and the ancient world failed to make the breakthrough in energy resources which occurred in England seventeen centuries later. Abundant slave labour, after all, blunted the need for any major advance in technology. Yet in the realm of ideas, philosophy and religious practice, Hellenistic civilization created a meeting place for Greek and oriental culture, which made it easy and natural for Jewish and then non-Jewish followers of Jesus Christ to take what they wanted from the ragbag of Greek thought which any moderately educated inhabitant of the Middle East would encounter in everyday conversation.

Otherwise, the Roman Republic starkly contrasted with the development of democracy in the Athenian mould. Its unequal balance appealed greatly to aristocrats in Christian societies, once Christian societies came into existence, and we will meet several such ‘Republics’ (or, in an alternative English translation, ‘Commonwealths’) as alternatives to monarchy, in both Latin and Orthodox Christendom: Venice, Novgorod, Poland-Lithuania, the seventeenth-century England of Oliver Cromwell. The Roman Republic’s difference from developed Greek city-states probably arose because of Rome’s continual yearning to expand: a state more or less permanently at war either to maintain or to expand its frontiers could not afford the luxury of real democracy.

Greek became just as much an international language as Latin for the Roman Empire. Indeed, it was the lingua franca of the Middle East in the time of Jesus, and it was the language which, in a rather vulgar marketplace form, most Christians spoke in everyday life during the Church’s first two centuries of existence. By the sixth and seventh centuries, Greek was ousting Latin as the official language of the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, with the strong encouragement of the Christian Church.

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

They learned ancient tales, like the story well known throughout the Middle East about a great flood, and incorporated them in their own narrative of the ancient past.

More profoundly, post-Exilic Jews puzzled about how a loving God could have allowed the destruction of his Temple and the apparent overturning of all his promises to his people. One answer was to try to let God off the hook by conceiving of a being who devoted his time to thwarting God’s purposes: he was called the Adversary, Hassatan, and although he was a fairly insignificant nuisance in the Hebrew scriptures, he grew in status in later Jewish literature, particularly among writers who were influenced by other religious cultures which spoke of powerful demonic figures.

Job’s suffering arises not out of anything that he has done, for he is one of God’s most loyal servants; it results from a peculiar and apparently heartless wager between God and Satan about his loyalty. It can only be resolved when Job fully submits to the mysterious will of God.

From this period under Persian rule comes an acceptance that it was not necessary to be born a Jew to enter the Jewish faith: what was necessary was to accept fully the customs of the Jews, including the rite of genital circumcision performed on all Jewish males. One could then be accepted as a convert (‘proselyte’, from a Greek word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner living in the land’).

The life of the synagogue and the assumptions of a well-instructed, well-ordered and uniformly observant community that it fostered furnished an attractive and distinctive model which Christianity later readily imitated as it developed its own separate institutions.

They found that Greek reaction to what the translation revealed of Hebrew sacred literature posed problems: Greeks respected such ancient writings, but were also puzzled that a God who was supposed to be so powerful would do strange things like walk in the Garden of Eden or indulge in arguments with earthly men like Lot or Jonah. Many Jews came to feel that such apparent embarrassments in their stories must conceal deeper layers of truth and so must be allegories. Greeks had after all already applied this idea of allegorical meaning to their own myths and to the writings of Homer (see pp. 24–5), and the allegorical approach became naturalized among Alexandrian Jews in the biblical commentaries of Jesus Christ’s Jewish contemporary the scholar and historian Philo.47 When a Christian community eventually became established alongside the Alexandrian Jewish community, it was much influenced by Philo’s allegorical method.

The most readily available vocabulary and central concept was actually Greek and had been particularly developed by Plato: he talked of individual humans as having a soul, which might reflect a divine force beyond itself. The first Jewish texts to say much about the soul therefore appear in the Hellenistic period, in ‘Inter-Testamental literature’ dating after the closure of the Tanakh, like the so-called Wisdom of Solomon, probably written between the mid-second century BCE and the early first century BCE.50 The Book of Daniel (or at least most of its text) managed to find a place in the Tanakh, but likewise it is almost certain to have been written as late as the second century. It is unprecedented in Jewish sacred literature in spelling out the idea of an individual resurrection of a soul in a transformed body in the afterlife – though still not for everyone!

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).11 This Christian use of the Septuagint was either cause or result of changing perspectives on Jesus, which emerged out of what is likely to have been a cacophony of opinions and assertions among his first followers, trying to make sense of the extraordinary impact of this Jewish teacher.

The individual, living in Christ, is never his own person. Love, participation, indwelling bind all together: such relationships transcend the usual human bonds of marriage, family ties or social status, which are allowed to survive precisely because they are irrelevant to the categories of the new age to come. The Christian future was to present many alternative situations and possibilities.

Paul was not alone in his development of a Christ message which strayed away from Jesus’s own emphases. Some very similar themes are to be found in the fourth Gospel, John, which is thought to have been written rather later than the Synoptic Gospels, some time around the turn of the first and second centuries CE.

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.

A strange poetic work known as Revelation now forms the last book of the New Testament, an open letter addressed to a number of named Church communities in what today is southern Turkey. It is likely to have been written in the time of the Emperor Domitian (81–96 CE) and to be the product of Christian fury at his brutal campaign to strengthen the cult of emperor worship.

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’.

So Revelation is the great exception: the one book of the New Testament which positively relishes the subversiveness of the Christian faith. It is not surprising that, through the ages of Christian history, again and again this book has inspired oppressed peoples to rise up and destroy their oppressors.

A furious passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians reveals the real seriousness of the quarrel, as Paul accused his opponents, including Jesus’s disciple Peter, one of the original Twelve, of cowardice, inconsistency and hypocrisy.77 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?

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. How did this happen? A great political crisis intervened to transform the situation.

After the revolt of 66–70 no substantial Christian community returned to Aelia/Jerusalem until the fourth century.

The fourth-century Roman scholar Jerome came across surviving Jewish-Christian communities when he moved to live in the East, and he translated their ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’ into Latin, but after that they faded from history. The Church of Paul, which had originally seemed the daughter of the Jerusalem Church, rejected the lineal heirs of the Jerusalem Church as imperfect Christians. Soon it regarded their ancient self-deprecating name of Ebionites (‘the poor’ in Hebrew: an echo of Jesus’s blessing on the poor in the Sermon on the Mount) as the description of a heretical sect.

Interestingly, the later Christian historian Eusebius claims that the Ebionites rejected the idea of the Virgin Birth of Jesus. That may well have been because, unlike Greek-speaking Christians, they knew that the notion was based on a Greek misreading of Isaiah’s Hebrew prophecy

John’s exalted Christ, echoing the exaltation of Christ in the writings of Paul, is emancipated from any concern for Jewish sensibilities about his identity, and in John’s picture of Jesus’s life, ‘the Jews’ repeatedly and often menacingly prowl around the Jesus story as if they had no organic connection with the carpenter’s son from Nazareth.

The Christ revealed in the letters of Paul, the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation, much more than in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, was a cosmic ruler and his followers must conquer the whole world. For Paul, that meant setting his sights westwards across the Mediterranean Sea, to the capital of the empire of which he was a citizen, Rome.

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.

The most striking feature of the correspondence is the locations of its recipients: in busy Graeco-Roman towns, commercial centres throughout the eastern half of the Mediterranean as far as Rome, and including people like Epaenetus, who had much experience of travel. By contrast, the story of Jesus told in the Gospels had been played out in a rural and largely non-Greek environment, where villages within an easy day’s journey of each other could naively be described by the writers as cities and where only the denouement of the story took place in a real city, Jerusalem.

Refers to the letters of Paul

Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it:

Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home and might well have moved around it a good deal – Paul’s restless journeyings are unlikely to have been unique.

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. That attitude has recurred among some of the apocalyptically minded in later ages, although others have drawn precisely the opposite conclusion.

‘every one should remain in the state in which he was called’.

Paul plants the seed of social conservatism in the church.

Paul’s acceptance of the secular status quo had especial implications for two groups whose liberation has over the last quarter-millennium sparked conflict worldwide, but especially within Western Christianity: slaves and women.

The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.13