A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

It told house-slaves to compare their sufferings to the unjust sufferings of Christ, in order that they should bear injustice as Christ had done. That did not say much about the writer’s expectations that Christian slave owners would be better than any others, and it followed a strong command to ‘be subject to every human institution’.

Bishop Ignatius of Antioch observed in a letter to his fellow bishop Polycarp of Smyrna that slaves should not take advantage of their membership in the Christian community, but live as better slaves, now to the glory of God – and his opinion was that it would be inappropriate to use church funds to help slaves buy their freedom. By the fourth century, Christian writers like Bishop Ambrose of Milan or Bishop Augustine of Hippo were providing even more robust defences of the idea of slavery than non-Christian philosophers had done before them – ‘the lower the station in life, the more exalted the virtue’, was Ambrose’s rather unctuous opinion.15

He also insists in his first letter to the Corinthians on a hierarchical scheme in which God is the head of Christ, Christ the head of men and a husband the head of his wife: quite a contrast to his proclamation of Christian equality for all.

Perhaps this was not surprising as hopes of Christ’s imminent return began to fade in the later first century and Christians began to realize that they must create structures which might have to last for a generation or more amid a world of non-believers.

What is striking in this literature is the way in which the idea that the end is at hand, so prominent in Paul’s letters, has faded from view. The author of Ephesians is prepared to talk about ‘the coming ages’, which seems to mean a long time on this earth.21 Nowhere is this shift more perceptible than in one feature of these documents, also to be found in the first of the two epistles attributed to Peter, which also takes many cues from Ephesians: sets of rules for conducting a human household, which in the sixteenth century Martin Luther styled Haustafeln, ‘tables of household duties’.

The Church is worried about its public image and concerned to show that it is not a subversive organization threatening the well-being of society, ‘that the word of God may not be discredited’.

In just two respects are the first Christians recorded as having been consciously different from their neighbours. First, they were much more rigorous about matters of sex than the prevailing attitudes in the Roman Empire; they did not forget their founder’s fierce disapproval of divorce.

Paul’s contribution was once more ambiguous. A celibate himself, he was of the opinion that marriage was something of a concession to human frailty, to save from fornication those who could not be continent, so it was better to marry than to burn with lust. Many Christian commentators, mostly fellow celibates, later warmed to this joyless theme. Yet in the same passage Paul said something more positive: that both husband and wife have mutually conceded each other power over each other’s bodies. This gives a positive motive for Christian counter-cultural opposition to divorce, but it is also striking in its affirmation of mutuality in marriage. That message has struggled to be heard through most of Christian history.28

For instance, one very early book about church life and organization called the Didachē (‘Teaching’) tells us a good deal about the worship used in the community whose life the writer was seeking to regulate, perhaps some time at the turn of the first and second centuries. It is much closer both to earlier Jewish prayers and to forms to be found in later Jewish liturgy than is perceptible in other early Christian liturgies.

for Greeks, who looked to the writings of Plato to shape their understanding of God’s nature, it was more difficult still. How could a Jewish carpenter’s son, who had died with a cry of agony on a gallows, really be the God who was without change or passions, and whose perfection demanded no division of his substance?

As early as the end of the second century, one leader destined to be seen as defining mainstream Christianity, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, grouped such alternative Christianities together under a common label, talking about gnōstikē hairesis (‘a choice to claim knowledge’), with adherents who were gnōstikoi.

Gnosticism represented an alternative future for the Church. It is probably no exaggeration to say that wherever there were Christians in the second-century world, a good many of them could have been labelled gnōstikoi by the likes of Irenaeus.

Getting to know gnostics has become much easier over the last century thanks to significant archaeological discoveries, the flagship of which was at Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian desert in 1945, when a field-labourer came across a pottery jar containing fifty-two fourth-century texts in the Egyptian language Coptic.

Implicit in most gnostic systems was a distrust of the Jewish account of creation. This suggests that gnostic beliefs were likely to emerge in places with a Jewish presence and gnostics were people who found the Jewish message hard to take – maybe actually renegade Jews.

But anyone imbued with a Greek cast of enquiring mind might raise questions about Jewish insistence that God’s creation is good: if that is so, why is there so much suffering and misery in the world? Why is the human body such a decaying vessel, so vulnerable even amid the beauty of youth to disease and petty lusts?

what we experience with our physical senses is mere illusion, a pale reflection of spiritual reality. If the world of senses is such an inferior state of being, then it could not possibly have been created by a supreme God.

First, if the God of the Jews who created the material world said that he was the true and only God, he was either a fool or a liar. At best he can be described in Plato’s term as a ‘demiurge’ (see pp. 32–33), and beyond him there must be a First Cause of all that is real, the true God. Jesus Christ revealed the true God to humanity, so he can have nothing to do with the Creator God of the Jews.

If there can be no true union between the world of spirit and the world of matter, then the cosmic Christ of the gnostics can never truly have taken flesh by a human woman, and he can never have felt what fleshly people feel – particularly human suffering. His Passion and Resurrection in history were therefore not fleshly events, even if they seemed so; they were heavenly play-acting (the doctrine known as Docetism, from the Greek verb dokein, ‘to seem’).

and arguably they had a more intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil in the world than the mainstream Christian Church has ever been able to provide.

The Christianity which emerged in reaction to these two possibilities adopted the same strategy as Marcion: it sought to define, to create a uniformity of belief and practice, just as contemporary Judaism was doing at the same time in reaction to the disaster of Jerusalem’s fall. That demanded a concept of the Church as one wherever it was: a universal version of Christianity which had taken up Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and combined it with much of the rhetoric and terminology of ancient Israel to express its wider unity. From an ordinary Greek adjective for ‘general’, ‘whole’ or ‘universal’, katholikos/ē, there developed a term of great resonance for Christianity, despite the fact that the word is not to be found in the Bible. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch provides the first known use in his letter written to the Christians of Smyrna, in the early second century, but he evidently expected his readers to be familiar with it; he certainly did not bother to explain exactly what he meant by ‘the whole’ (katholikē) Church.46

If we seek one explanation of why ‘Catholic’ Christianity so successfully elbowed aside both the gnostic alternatives and the tidy-mindedness of Marcion, it is to its sacred literature that we should point: its formation of a text which still remains the anchor of Christian belief, and which is held in common throughout the many varieties of Christian Churches.

It is likely that the first collection of biblical ‘New Testament’ books which would be familiar to modern Christians was made in the middle of the second century, but that is not the same as saying that it was universally accepted by Christians straight away.47 The earliest surviving complete list of books that we would recognize as the New Testament comes as late as 367 CE, laid down in a pastoral letter written by Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria.

The second century saw a marked increase in the authority and coherence of the Church’s ordained ministry. By 200 CE there was a mainstream Catholic Church which took for granted the existence of a threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, and there would be few challenges to this pattern for the next thirteen hundred years.

the elevation of one leading bishop figure above other presbyters was virtually complete by the end of the second century.

Let no one do anything apart from the bishop that has to do with the Church. Let that be regarded as a valid Eucharist which is held under the bishop or to whomever he entrusts it. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the whole [katholikē] Church.’

It must be significant that there is no surviving debate about the gradual domination of Church affairs in each community by one man in apostolic succession (monarchical episcopacy), with the notable exception, as we have seen, of gnostic texts. The early Christians were not afraid to commit their disagreements with each other to writing, and their disagreements have survived, but not in this case.

Amid these developments of a ‘Catholic’ episcopate in the second century, the episcopal leaders of certain cities stood out as especial figures of authority, what would later be called patriarchs: in the East the predictable centres of Antioch and Alexandria (equally predictably by this stage, not Jerusalem). In the West was Rome.

Paul’s epistles are the oldest surviving documents in the Christian tradition. They shaped the theology of the Christianity which survived as mainstream, and the theology of the Latin West especially reflects Paul’s preoccupations, which had brought him into serious conflict with his fellow Apostle Peter

The second-century Roman Church’s numbers were substantial, but still it formed a tiny proportion of the city’s population, and at that time and for some decades to come it revealed its origins as a community of immigrants by the fact that its language was not Latin but Greek.

It was Victor, with the encouragement of Irenaeus, who narrowed the diversity of belief which a Bishop of Rome would consider acceptable, by ending the long-standing custom of sending Eucharistic bread and wine which he had consecrated to a variety of Christian communities in the city – including Valentinian gnostics, Montanists and various exponents of Monarchian views on the Trinity (see pp. 145–6).64 This was in effect a punitive action; as such, it was a pioneering form of a favourite device in later centuries, excommunication – cutting off offenders from fellowship with the Christians in a particular place. Nothing could better illustrate the new formal role of the bishop as teacher and guardian of discipline.

The first surviving use of the title ‘papa’ in Rome occurs in the time of Bishop Marcellinus (296–304), in a funerary inscription for his deacon Severus in one of the catacombs in the city.

It was a dispute in 256 between Bishop Stephen of Rome and the leading Bishop of North Africa, Cyprian of Carthage, that produced a Roman bishop’s first-known appeal to Matthew 16.18: Christ’s pronouncement to Peter that ‘on this rock I will build my Church’ might be seen as conferring particular authority on Peter’s presumed successor in Rome

Montanus was a native of Phrygia in the mountains of Asia Minor, which was already emerging as one of the earliest centres of Christian numerical strength and enthusiasm during the second century.

Like so many converts, Montanus passionately proclaimed his enthusiasm for his new-found faith, but that extended (at a date uncertain, but probably around 165) into announcements that he had new revelations from the Holy Spirit to add to the Christian message. It was not so much the content of these messages that worried the existing Christian leadership of the area as the challenge which they posed to their authority.

Elsewhere in the Christian world, only in North Africa, which came to have a tradition of high-temperature Christianity, did their passionate commitment to the Holy Spirit find a lasting sympathy among prominent Christian activists, especially the distinguished early-third-century Christian writer Tertullian (see pp. 144–7). Yet in their Phrygian homeland, the Montanists persisted obstinately until at least the sixth century. Then in 550 the morale of the proud descendants of the ‘New Prophecy’ was finally broken when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian sent in his troops to wreck their great shrine of the founder-prophets in the now-venerable Montanist stronghold at Pepouza.

Catholic Church’s general abandonment of Paul’s original conviction that the Lord Christ would soon be returning. Generally in the next few centuries, such beliefs were to be found in marginal Christian groups.

The most dramatic effect of the fight against gnosticism was to halt Christianity’s march away from its Jewish roots, that process which had begun so early and had dominated its life in the first century.

A series of highly intelligent and thoughtful Christians thought that the answers to these questions were obvious: the Greek inheritance was indispensable to the Church. In their efforts to harness it to the Christian message, they can be said to have created or manufactured Christian teaching on a heroic scale, and for good or ill the Church universal has never ceased to look back at and build on what they achieved.

Christianity has never ceased to debate the relationship between truth revealed from God in sacred text and the restless exploration of truth by human reason, which on a Christian account is itself a gift of God.

His clinching point in the saga was that the wisdom of the prophets was older than that of the Greeks, and in an age which was inclined to see oldest as best, this was the most promising argument open to any exponent of the new faith in Christ.

Justin of the second century

As we have already seen (see p. 121), Irenaeus took the word hairesis (‘self-chosen opinion’), used in the latest epistles in the New Testament in the sense of ‘sect’, and reapplied it to the whole spectrum of gnostic belief. He thereby implied that he was condemning a single if many-headed movement. Progressing from speaking of sectarianism, he was popularizing a concept with a prosperous future in Christian consciousness: heresy.

Accordingly Irenaeus followed Justin in seeing God’s purpose unfold through all human history. The Old Testament was the central text on that history – so much for Marcion’s dismissal of it – and Irenaeus delighted in stressing the symmetries or ‘recapitulations’ which its text revealed: thus the fall of the first man, Adam, was remedied by the second Adam, Christ, rising from the dead; the disobedience of the woman Eve remedied by the obedience of the woman Mary; the fateful role of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden was remedied by the Tree of Life which was Christ’s cross.75 Such symmetries appealed to a culture fascinated by the poetry of numbers and geometry, and they make sense of the lively confidence with which both Justin and Irenaeus looked, on the basis of Revelation 20, to a coming earthly thousand-year rule of God’s chosen (a millennium, hence the belief in such an event being known as millenarianism).

Tertullian is the first known major Christian theologian who thought and wrote in Latin. He came from the important North African city of Carthage, which in the third and second centuries BCE had nearly succeeded in ending the steady rise of the Roman Republic.

Tertullian suggested that the human soul is transmitted by parents to their children and is therefore inescapably associated with continuing human sin: this doctrine of ‘traducianism’ underlay the pessimistic view of the human condition and its imprisonment in original sin which was presented in an extreme form by that later theological giant from North Africa, Augustine of Hippo

He dealt combatively with a most perplexing problem which had evolved out of the Church’s sense, perceptible already in the writings of Paul, that the one God is experienced in three aspects, as Father, Son and Spirit – creator, redeemer and strengthener. But what was the relationship between them? Oneness in divinity was somehow reflected in threeness – indeed, one would need a word to express that idea of threeness. It is to be found for the first time in Tertullian’s writings, although probably he did not invent it: Trinitas.

Monarchian models of God could take two forms. One, ‘Adoptionist Monarchianism’, explained the nature of Christ by saying that he had been adopted by God as Son, although he was a man; he was only God in the sense that the Father’s power rested in his human form.

The other Monarchian approach was ‘modalist’, so called because it saw the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as corresponding merely to different aspects or modes of the same divine being, playing transitory parts in succession, like an actor on the Classical stage donning a theatrical mask to denote a tragic or a comic role.

Among Alexandrian theologians there developed the closest relationship with Greek philosophy which early Christianity achieved without entirely losing contact with the developing mainstream of the Church.

knowledge of God was found both in scripture and in such achievements of the human intellect as the writings of Aristotle and Plato:

Clement of Alexandria

Clement pointed out that ‘He who has cast away his worldly abundance can still be rich in passions even though his substance is gone … A man must say goodbye, then, to the injurious things he has, not to those that can actually contribute to his advantage if he knows the right use of them.’