A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

one of the earliest known definitely Christian artefacts is a fragment of text bearing two little patches of John’s Gospel;

around 85 per cent of second-century Christian texts of which existing sources make mention have gone missing,

The most striking feature of the correspondence is the locations of its recipients: in busy Graeco-Roman towns,

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

All three evangelists make women the first witnesses to the empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus; this is despite the fact that in Jewish Law women could not be considered as valid witnesses.

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.

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.

Yet they have gone on trying, and have used three main tools to build a ‘Catholic’ faith: developing an agreed list of authoritative sacred texts (a ‘canon’ of scripture, from the Greek for ‘straight rod’ or ‘rule’); forming creeds; embodying authority in ministers set aside for the purpose.

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.

Antioch and Jerusalem seem to have found their models for ministry in the organization of the Jewish Temple and its hierarchy,

Break this link, said Clement, and the appointed worship of God is endangered; by implication, succession is the only way of making sure that doctrine remains the same in Corinth and in Rome and throughout the whole Church. In a creative misquotation, Clement called in aid the prophet Isaiah and made him the mouthpiece for God’s pronouncement ‘I will establish their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in faith.’53 This is the first surviving formulation of an idea of apostolic succession in Christian ministry.

The switch to Latin in Christian Rome may have been made by one of the bishops at the end of the century, Victor (189–99).63 He may indeed have been the first monarchical bishop in Rome;

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 (see pp. 173–6).

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:

Tertullian is the first known major Christian theologian who thought and wrote in Latin.

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

It is to be found for the first time in Tertullian’s writings, although probably he did not invent it: Trinitas.

Praxeas.

Clement’s teaching will reveal a great gulf between his concerns and those of the gnosticism

Theology of Clement of Alexandria

Since Clement made so central the idea of moral progress, he wrote much about the way in which the Christian life should be lived on a day-to-day basis; he was one of the earliest Christian writers on what would now be called moral theology.

exuberant adventure of the imagination which was his theology. As we will see, his theological work contains statements of extraordinary boldness, though often presented simply as theoretical suggestions for solving a particular problem.

Origen theology

Hexapla. This was a sixfold transcription of the Tanakh in six different columns side by side, apparently beginning with the Hebrew text and a transliteration of it into Greek alongside four variant Greek translations, including the Septuagint.

Allegorical readers of scripture saw it as having several layers of meaning. The innermost meanings, hidden behind the literal sense of the words on the page, were not only the most profound, but also only available to those with eyes to see. Once more we meet that Alexandrian Christian elitism already encountered in Clement.

The contrast in approach between Alexandria and Antioch, not merely to the Bible but to a whole range of theological issues,

The unnerving self-confidence of Christians and their view of every other form of religion as demonic contrasted with the comfortable openness to variety normal in contemporary religious belief. The only exception Christians made was for Judaism,

codex

The attractive feature of a martyr’s death was that it was open to anyone, regardless of social status or talent. Women were martyred alongside men, slaves alongside free persons.

In that charged encounter is a characteristic moment of tension for Christianity: how does one form of authority relate to another, and which is going to prevail? Perpetua was disobedient not just to her father but to the institutional Catholic Church which later enrolled her among its martyrs, because she was a Montanist.

cancer

Plotinus (c. 205–70). Accounts of him include what seems the first recognizable description in Western history of acute dyslexia,

Neoplatonism

from the Roman technical legal term for someone who pleads guilty as accused in court, these steadfast Christians were termed ‘

The priest Novatian, a hardliner on this issue, opposed the election of his colleague Cornelius as bishop, since Cornelius held that forgiveness was possible at the hands of a bishop.

In the end, North Africa and Rome agreed to differ on the issue of baptism, the North Africans saying that valid baptism could take place only within the Christian community which is the Church, the Romans saying that the sacrament belonged to Christ, not to the Church, and that therefore it was valid whoever performed it if it was done in the right form and with the right intentions.

Following the precedent of the Didachē, which was compiled somewhere in the Syriac region (see p. 120), the liturgy of the Syriac Church continued to have a much more Jewish character than elsewhere.50

was nowhere to be found in Christian cultures before the fifth century: Christ hanging on the Cross, the Crucifixion.

Zoroastrianism, by contrast, was an ancient religion which looked with contempt on the Christian revelation and its developing doctrine of the Trinity. Like Manichaeism, it was a dualist faith, but it was not the dualism which led Manichees and gnostics to regard the world and matter as evil. The Zoroastrian dualist struggle was between being and non-being,

For the most part the city churches were not exactly congregational or parish churches.

So Christian life in Constantinople straight away became based on a rhythm of ‘stational’ visits to individual churches at special times, the clergy linking them by processions which became a characteristic feature of worship in the city. To live in Constantinople was to be in the middle of a perpetual pilgrimage.14

Pilgrimage, from having played a seemingly minor role in Christian life, was now launched as one of its major activities.

Jerusalem and the spectacularly large Church of the Holy Sepulchre begun by Constantine became host to a liturgical round which sought to take pilgrims on a journey alongside Jesus Christ through the events of his last sufferings in Jerusalem, his crucifixion and resurrection.

Interestingly, it is clear from Egeria’s description that the Church authorities made little attempt to commemorate the other events of Jesus’s life which associated him more positively with the old life of Jerusalem, such as his presentation in the Temple in adolescence, or his angry expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple.

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.

Like Diocletian

the Church started using a technical administrative term which Diocletian had adopted for the twelve subdivisions he created in the empire: ‘diocese’. In the Western Latin Church, this has become the term for an area under the control of a bishop. The Churches of Orthodox tradition reserve it for the territories of the whole group of bishops who look to a particular metropolitan or patriarch, such as the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, or the Bishop of Constantinople, who is now known as the Oecumenical Patriarch. For the area presided over by a single bishop, they use a word which the West has redeployed for much smaller pastoral units served by a single priest: the parochia or parish. The West has another term equivalent to diocese, from a Latin word for a chair, sedes, which comes into English as ‘

The first Christian innovation was, wherever possible, to ‘orient’ the building: that is, to lay out its long axis west to east, with an apsidal end at the east to contain the eucharistic table or altar with the bishop’s chair behind it.

Second, instead of an entrance in a long side wall, the west gable of a Christian basilica now housed the entrance. So those coming into the building had their gaze directed throughout its length, both to the bishop’s chair and to the altar in front of it,

In the fourth century the situation changed: the liturgy, like the buildings in which it was celebrated, became more fixed and structured.

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.

From early days, the time of anxiety and tragedy which led up to the Resurrection was marked out by abstinence and vigil. By a natural progression of ideas, this was linked to the story in the Synoptic Gospels that Christ had retreated from his active life and ministry into the desert for forty days and nights.

The closer the Church came to society, the more obvious were the tensions with some of its founder’s messages about the rejection of convention and the abandonment of worldly wealth.