A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Emphatically Clement did not base justifications for marriage on romantic love, but on the necessity for procreating children: he was capable of saying ‘to have sex for any other purpose other than to produce children is to violate nature’. One might call this the Alexandrian rule, and it still lies behind many of the assumptions of official moral theology in the Roman Catholic Church.

Already in the second century

That meant that when he read the Bible, he shared Greek or Hellenistic Jewish scepticism that some parts of it bore much significant literal meaning. Looking at the Genesis account of creation, ‘who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?’ Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly. He would try to tell them that such things were true, because all parts of the scriptures were divinely inspired truth, but they should not be read as if they were historical events, like the rise and fall of Persian dynasties. He insisted that this rule should even be applied within the text of the Gospels.94

The contrast in approach between Alexandria and Antioch, not merely to the Bible but to a whole range of theological issues, resulted in the long term in some ugly power struggles in the Eastern Churches, as we will see (see pp.

Origen’s preoccupation with the classic concerns of Greek philosophy was as apparent in his work on systematic theology as in his biblical commentaries. Particularly in his book entitled On First Principles, one of the first attempts at a universal summary of a single Christian tradition, he grappled with the old Platonic problem of how a passionless, indivisible, changeless supreme God communicates with this transitory world. For Origen as for Justin, the bridge was the Logos, and like Justin Origen could be quite bold in terming the Logos ‘a second God’, even tending towards making this Logos-figure subordinate to or on a lower level than the supreme God, whose creature he is – a doctrine known as subordinationism.

Like Clement before him, Origen asserted that humankind will be saved through its own efforts with the help of Christ, through purging which goes on past human death. He could not accept that humankind or creation was totally fallen, as that would destroy all moral responsibility: ‘A totally wicked being could not be censured, only pitied as a poor wretch’.97

But Origen had not finished with his startling speculation. Since the first fall was universal, so all, including Satan himself, have the chance to work back towards God’s original purpose. All will be saved, since all come from God.

Greek-speaking Christians, like Jews before them, called all non-Christians who were not Jews ‘Hellenes’, a word to which a sneer was attached, but it was probably during the third century that Western Latin-speaking Christians developed their own contemptuous term for this same category: pagani. The word means ‘country folk’, and the usual explanation is that urban Christians looked down on rural folk who stuck like backwoodsmen to traditional cults. More likely is that the word was army slang for ‘non-combatants’: non-Christians had not enrolled in the army of Christ, as Christians did in baptism.

Indeed, the language they used in their enthusiasm for their saviour seems almost to be borrowed from the language which the imperial cult was developing in the lifetime of Jesus. So a Greek inscription found in Ephesus calls Julius Caesar ‘god made manifest’; the Emperor Augustus’s birthday was called ‘good news’ and his arrival in a city the ‘parousia’ – exactly the same word which Christians used for Christ’s expected return.

The whole system of catacombs in Rome (named after one particular complex of tunnels beside the Appian Way in a sunken valley, In catacumbas, knowledge of which survived when all the others were forgotten) eventually extended over sixty-eight square miles and house an estimated 875,000 burials made between the second and ninth centuries.

That grisly fate Christians later visited on each other a good deal once they gained access to power, yet alongside a continuing Christian inclination to persecute other Christians, there has survived an intense celebration of martyrdom. The first people whom Christians recognized as saints (that is, people with a sure prospect of Heaven) were victims of persecution who died in agony rather than deny their Saviour, who had died for them in agony on the Cross. Such a death, if suffered in the right spirit (not an easy matter to judge), guarantees entry into Heaven. We have seen how many gnostics questioned this cult of death: it was an important part of their objections to the Church of the Catholic bishops

Christian obedience repeatedly plays a troubling wild card. It is the Apostle Peter’s impudent retort to the angry high priest of the Jerusalem Temple, recorded in Acts 5.29: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Not so long after Perpetua brutally confounded her father’s natural expectations and set herself up as the agent of God’s forgiveness, bishops including Peter’s self-styled successor in Rome would come to find themselves cast in the role of the high priest: furious at the disobedience of Christians to their own authority and in the end even condemning Christians to death, as once Peter had been by the Roman authorities.

What was impressive, and increasingly noticed by non-Christians, was not so much the numbers of any one community but the geographical spread of the Church throughout the empire and beyond, and its sense of community. We have no definite witness to Christianity in Britain before the early fourth century, and not much from the far end of the Mediterranean in Spain, but from the late second and early third centuries there is evidence elsewhere of well-established communities, invariably with an episcopal organization which had been in existence for some time. This is true, for instance, in North Africa around Carthage, in Alexandria and in the south of France at Lyons. Fragments preserved from letters of the late-second-century Bishop Dionysius of Corinth shed sudden shafts of light on Christian Churches in Athens, Crete and Pontus (a section of the southern coast of the Black Sea).21

Yet if Christian belief was stupid, it was particularly dangerous because of its worldwide coherence: it was a conspiracy, and one which Celsus saw as especially aimed at impressionable young people.

The third century has been seen as an ‘age of anxiety’, when people were driven to find comfort in religion.31 The idea has been challenged, but the surviving writings of the literate elites do show a new interest in personal religion, remote from the traditionalist respect for the old gods and the cultured cynicism which in easier times had been the received wisdom for aristocrats like Celsus. The worship of the sun became steadily more dominant, a natural universal symbol to choose in the brilliant sunshine of the Mediterranean. So Christianity was not the only religion to talk of oneness, to offer strict tests for initiation or to expect the result of these to be a morally regulated life with a continuing theme of purification. The sun cult of Mithraism, imported from the East like Christianity, had this character, and it is not surprising that Christians felt a particular bitterness towards Mithras.32

Now the intellectual fashion was for Neoplatonism, a development from Plato’s thought which emphasized its religious character. The greatest Neoplatonist teacher was Plotinus (c. 205–70). Accounts of him include what seems the first recognizable description in Western history of acute dyslexia, which probably explains why he was a reluctant writer; his inspirational oral teachings were mediated to a rapidly growing circle of admiring intellectuals through his somewhat self-important biographer and editor Porphyry, who published Plotinus’s works at the beginning of the fourth century.34 Plotinus was a younger contemporary of Origen in the advanced schools of Alexandria and his picture of the supreme God has resemblances to Origen’s. He spoke in a trinitarian fashion of a divine nature consisting of an ultimate One, of Intelligence and of the Soul.

In this scheme, there was no Christ figure to be incarnate; it was the task of the individual soul by ecstatic contemplation of the divine to restore the harmony lost in the world, an ecstasy so rare that Plotinus himself admitted to achieving it only four times in his life. Neoplatonism was largely independent of the old religious forms, though it could coexist perfectly happily with traditional gods, by enrolling them as manifestations of Intelligence. Porphyry’s writings encouraged this tendency, which was yet another force uniting the religions of the Mediterranean. Christian thinkers over many centuries were not exempt from the fascination of Neoplatonism, and we will repeatedly encounter its effects.

Mani combined all the religions which he respected with his own experience of revelation into a new ‘Manichaean’ cult. Like gnostic dualism before it, this provided a convincingly stark account of the world’s suffering, portraying it as the symptom of an unending struggle between matched forces of good and evil. Jesus occupied a very important place in Mani’s scheme of divinity: indeed, he habitually referred to himself as the ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’, as Paul of Tarsus had done before him.

Mani’s teachings equalled the spread of Eastern Christianity in time and geography, taking Manichaean faith as far as the shores of China as well as into the Roman Empire.36 Christians in the eastern Mediterranean in particular found his teachings as fascinating as previously they had the ideas of gnostic teachers, while the traditionalist Emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) loathed Manichees as much as he did the Christians, initiating a policy of burning them alive, even before he and his colleagues had yielded to the impulse to begin brutal persecution of Christianity.

No wonder the episcopal Christian Church loathed the Manichees so much and sought to eliminate them as competitors once it got the chance. It never challenged Diocletian’s provision for burning Manichees alive; indeed, centuries later the Western Latin Church imitated and extended Diocletian’s policy to apply it to other Christian ‘heretics’.

The young Severus Alexander is said, admittedly by a patchily reliable source, to have commissioned statues of Christ and Abraham for his private place of prayer alongside statues of Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander and deceased and deified imperial ancestors. This is the first recorded figure-sculpture of the Saviour in Christian history, although given its eclectic setting, with Christ reduced to a semi-divine celebrity, it forms a rather dubious precedent for the later flowering of Christian sculptural art.41 On both sides there is a sense of ambiguity.

Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ’s punning proclamation in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16.18).46 It is the first time known to us that the text had been thus used by a Bishop of Rome; this row in 256 represents another significant step in Rome’s gradual rise to prominence.

In the last decade of the third century Diocletian became increasingly influenced by a clique of army officers from Rome’s Adriatic provinces in the Balkans, headed by Galerius, one of the colleagues whom Diocletian had chosen to help him govern the empire. Gradually this rabidly anti-Christian group, some of them enthusiasts for Neoplatonism, persuaded Diocletian to follow his inclinations and from 303 a full-scale attack was launched on the Christians, beginning with clergy. Churches were torn down, sacrifices ordered and Christian sacred texts confiscated. Persecution was not so intense in the West, where Diocletian’s colleague Constantius had some sympathy with Christianity, but elsewhere pressure intensified after Diocletian retired from public life in 305. Although this ‘Great Persecution’ proved to be the last in the history of the Roman Empire and ended two decades later with an extraordinary turnaround in the Church’s fortunes, it was far more savage than most previous assaults on Christianity; nearly half all recorded martyrdoms in the early Church period are datable to this period.

Latin and Greek would fade from the ear and the babble of voices in the street was dominated by some variant of the language which Jesus had spoken: Aramaic. Languages like it became known as Syriac and there was originally a single alphabetic script for its literature: Estrangela.

The rulers of one small kingdom to the east of the River Tigris, Adiabene (in the region of the modern Iraqi city of Arbil), were actually converted to Judaism by Jewish merchants in the first century and gave active assistance to the rebels in the Jewish revolt of 66–70

His second-century assertion of ascetic values is one of the signs that we should look behind the common story of monastic origins in Egypt and give the credit to Syria. Tatian’s problem was that, in terms of the subsequent writing of Christian history, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.64

This highlights one of the most significant features of Syrian Christianity: it was a pioneer in creating a repertoire of church music, hymnody and chant.

Ephrem’s musical precedent remains one of the most widely appreciated (if not always acknowledged) legacies of Syrian Christianity. His achievement prompted the writing of hymns in Greek, and the result has been that all Eastern liturgy has become far more based on poetry and hymns than the liturgy of the Western Latin Church.

At the beginning of the third century, Bar-Daisan could speak of Christian communities in the sprawling regions of Central Asia which now form such ex-Soviet Republics as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while from further south Christian graves have been found on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf which can be dated to the mid-third century.

By around 290 there was a bishop based in the Sassanian capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, very near the modern Baghdad, whose successors increasingly took on the role of presiding bishop in the East beyond the Roman frontier.

In the fourth century the Church faced much greater trials. From the beginning of the 340s Bishop Simeon (Shem’on) of Seleucia-Ctesiphon led opposition to separate taxation for the Christian community in the Sassanian Empire, and that provoked Shah Shapur II to a massacre of the bishop and a hundred of his clergy. The Shah’s anger and fear persisted in a persecution whose atrocities outdid anything that the Romans had achieved in their third-century attacks on the Church.

The early stages of Christian contact with the kingdom are obscure, but there are plausible stories of Syrian missions to it during the second and third centuries.

Armenia

The King then ordered his people, including the priesthood of the old religion, to convert en masse to Christianity, in a year which is uncertain but most calculations place in the decade before the Roman Emperor Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312.

The Christian chronicler Eusebius of Caesarea, a fervent admirer of Constantine, came to produce the narrative which tells us most of what we know about these turbulent years, and revising his previous positive account of Licinius, he now had an excuse to portray Constantine’s former colleague as the last great enemy of the Christian faith in the tradition of Valerian and Diocletian.

The culmination of this process was a great council of Church leaders at Chalcedon in 451, under the control of a Roman emperor and his wife. We have already seen mainstream Christianity based on a series of exclusions and narrowing of options: Jewish Christians, gnostics, Montanists, Monarchians were all declared outside the boundaries. Chalcedon was to mark a new stage in this process of exclusion. As a result, after 451 many Christians who owed their allegiance to the Church of Antioch, that same Church where Bishop Ignatius had first used the word ‘Catholic’, were to find themselves on the wrong side of the line.

but first we will see how the new imperial Church asserted itself as the one version of Christian truth for the world to follow, and, in the process, created a great deal of that truth for the first time.

Crosses had featured little in public Christian art outside written texts before the time of Constantine; now they could even be found as motifs in jewellery.20 Pilgrimage, from having played a seemingly minor role in Christian life, was now launched as one of its major activities. The life of Judaism had once revolved around one great pilgrimage: to Jerusalem. For Christians, Jerusalem would be only the principal star of a galaxy of holy places that has never since ceased to proliferate. Shrines have come and gone, but some, like Jerusalem itself, or Rome in the West, have never lost their appeal to the Christian faithful.

Eventually the Latin and Greek Churches became so identified with the Graeco-Roman world that within living memory in the Christian West, almost fifteen hundred years after the disappearance of the last Western Roman emperor, schoolboys and schoolgirls learned Latin as a necessary qualification for entry in any subject to two of England’s leading universities.

The historian Eusebius of Caesarea so identified Constantine’s purposes with God’s purposes that he saw the Roman Empire as the culmination of history, the final stage before the end of the world.

Significantly, imperial Christianity came to follow the political division of the empire which had originally been established by its archenemy Diocletian, when he split the administration of his empire between east and west, with a dividing line running through central Europe to the west of the Balkans, and a separation of North Africa and Egypt. In Europe, that boundary is very largely that existing today between Orthodox and Catholic societies, with fairly minor adjustments, even to the division of Slavic peoples between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Moreover, the Church started using a technical administrative term which Diocletian had adopted for the twelve subdivisions he created in the empire: ‘diocese’.

The idea of a seated bishop presiding over the liturgy but also pronouncing on matters of belief and adjudicating everyday disputes, became so basic to Western Christian ideas of what a bishop represented that the Church annexed a second Latin word for ‘chair’, cathedra, previously associated with teachers in higher education, and used it for the city church in which the bishop’s principal chair could be found: his cathedral.

The model chosen was the audience hall of a secular ruler, called from its royal associations a basilica.

It was an age when clergy began to dress to reflect their special status as the servants of the King of Heaven. The copes, chasubles, mitres, maniples, fans, bells, censers of solemn ceremony throughout the Church from East to West were all borrowed from the daily observances of imperial and royal households. Anything less would have been a penny-pinching insult to God.

It is more surprising that Christianity should make monasteries part of its tradition than that monasticism should have developed in Buddhism, for Christianity affirms the positive value of physical human flesh in the incarnation of Christ, while Buddhism has at its centre nothingness and the annihilation of the self. Christianity’s parent religion, Judaism, is actively hostile to celibacy, one of monasticism’s chief institutions, and Jewish groups which practised a form of monasticism are fairly marginal in Jewish history: the Essenes and the shadowy sect of the Therapeutae mentioned by the Jewish historian Philo.

All Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.

At the root of this quarrel, which resulted in Hippolytus severing his links with the mainstream Church, was the issue of whether the Church of Christ was an assembly of saints, hand-picked by God for salvation, or a mixed assembly of saints and sinners.

Underlining the uneasy relationship between monasticism and the mainstream Church, its origins are in the lands from which gnostic Christianity had also emerged: the eastern borderlands of the Roman Empire in Syria, and in Egypt. Moreover, the first moves to founding monastic communities were made at much the same time as the emergence of that new rival to Christianity, Manichaeism, with its ethos of despising physical flesh. It may be that the famous austerities of Christian monks (see pp. 206–8) were imitations of similar feats of spiritual endurance by Indian holy men and that Manichees were responsible for bringing the idea westwards into the Christian world.

Groups of enthusiasts called Sons (or Daughters) of the Covenant vowed themselves to poverty and chastity, but they avoided any taint of gnostic separation by devoting themselves to a life of service to other Christians under the direction of the local bishop. Their role in the Syrian Church continued for several centuries alongside developed monasticism.31

Like the ascetics of Syria, they would know of the terrible continuing sufferings of Christians in the fourth-century Sassanian Empire, and they would also be uncomfortably aware that such suffering was no longer available in the Roman Empire. In default of any more martyrdoms provided by Roman imperial power, they martyred their bodies themselves, and thus they annexed the esteem which martyrs had already gained among the Christian faithful. They were extending the category of sainthood.

One of the most extraordinary practices adopted by some ascetics in Syria was to spend years on end exposed on top of a specially built stone column, living on a wicker platform which resembled the basket of a modern hot-air balloon. This form of devotion was pioneered in the early fifth century by another Simeon, therefore nicknamed the Stylite (‘pillar-dweller’).

Once more the council did not succeed in appeasing the Donatists, and in the course of much muddled negotiation with Donatist leaders, the Emperor was provoked into ordering troops to enforce their return to the mainstream Church. The first official persecution of Christians by Christians thus came within a year or two of the Church’s first official recognition, and its results were as divisive as previous persecutions by non-Christian emperors. Most Donatists stayed out and stayed loyal to their own independent hierarchy, nursing new grudges against the North African Church, which remained in communion with the rest of the Christian Mediterranean Churches and which thus arrogated to itself the title of Catholic. The split was never healed, and it remained a source of weakness in North African Christianity for centuries until the Church there faded away