A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The first generations of Christians were Jews who lived in a world shaped by Greek elite culture. They had to try to fit together these two irreconcilable visions of God, and the results have never been and never can be a stable answer to an unending question.

In particular I highlight the huge consequences when the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century monarchs of the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) reinvented their multi-faith society as a Christian monopoly and then exported that single-minded form of Christianity to other parts of the world.

In the old city of Jerusalem is a medieval church which stands on the site of the basilica that the Emperor Constantine and his mother built over the likely site of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ.3 Within the walls of what the Western Churches call the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the Orthodox give it an entirely different name, the Anastasis, Resurrection), the results of Constantine’s decision are played out daily in the epically bad behaviour of the various fragments of the imperial Christian Church whose adherents worship in the building. I have witnessed early one December morning the instructive spectacle of two rival ancient liturgies noisily proceeding simultaneously above the empty tomb of the Saviour himself, on opposite faces of the ugly and perilously decayed nineteenth-century Sepulchre shrine. It was a perfect juxtaposition of Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christianity, as the serenity of a Latin Mass with full organ struggled against the spirited chanting of the Miaphysite Copts (see Plate 21). I particularly enjoyed the moment when the bearer of the Coptic censer swept with brio around the shrine to the very frontier of the rival liturgy and sent his cloud of incense billowing into the heretical Latin West.

The Bible speaks with many voices, including shouts of anger against God. It tells stories which it does not pretend ever happened, in order to express profound truths, such as we read in the books of Jonah and Job.

The Bible thus embodies not a tradition, but many traditions. Self-styled ‘Traditionalists’ often forget that the nature of tradition is not that of a humanly manufactured mechanical or architectural structure with a constant outline and form, but rather that of a plant, pulsing with life and continually changing shape while keeping the same ultimate identity.

Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally.

I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems.

am more of a devotee of capital letters than is common today; in English convention, they are symbols of what is special, or different, and, in the context of this book, of what links the profane and the sacred world.

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

Greeks recognized each other as Greek by their language, which afforded them their common knowledge of Homer’s epics, together with religious sites, temples and ceremonies which were seen as common property.

not sure about this

The gods are constantly present in the Iliad and Odyssey, an intrusive and often disruptive force in human lives: often fickle, petty, partisan, passionate, competitive – in other words, rather like Greeks themselves. It was no accident that Greek art portrayed gods and humans in similar ways,

Greek gods are rather human; so may humans be rather like gods, and go on trying to be as like them as possible? The remarkable self-confidence of Greek culture, the creativity, resourcefulness and originality and the consequent achievements which have been borrowed by Christian culture, have much to do with this attitude to the gods embedded in the Homeric epics.

It is very different from the way in which the Jews came to speak of the remote majesty of their one God, the all-powerful creator, who (at relentless length) angrily reminded the afflicted Job how little a lone created being like him understood divine purposes; who dismissed Moses’s question ‘What is your name?’ with a terrifying cosmic growl out of a burning bush in the desert, ‘I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE’.6 The name of the God of Israel is No Name.

So Greek religion was a set of stories belonging to the entire community, rather than a set of well-bounded statements about ultimate moral and philosophical values, and it was not policed by a self-perpetuating elite entrusted with any task of propagating or enforcing it.

Greek curiosity created the literary notion of allegory: a story in literature which must be read as conveying a deeper meaning or meanings than is at first apparent, with the task of a commentator to tease out such meanings. Much later, first Jews and then Christians treated their sacred writings in the same way.

didn't most cultures do this?

Ekklēsia is already common in the Greek New Testament: there it means ‘Church’, but it is borrowed from Greek political vocabulary, where it signified the assembly of citizens of the polis who met to make decisions.

When Christians were faced with making theological comments on natural subjects like biology or the animal kingdom, they turned to Aristotle, just as Christian theologians today may turn to modern science to inform themselves about matters in which they are not technically expert.

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.

all worldviews inherit ideas from their predecessors

Greek became just as much an international language as Latin for the Roman Empire.

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. That was an achievement unparalleled among languages of supposedly defeated peoples, and a tribute to Hellenistic cultural vitality and adaptability long after the end of the various Hellenistic monarchies.

Before the hills rise to mountains in the north, they curve to the coast, enclosing the Kishon river valley running down to the sea. Through this curve of hills there is only one major north–south pass, guarded by an ancient strongpoint now called Megiddo. This is the chief passage point for land traffic from Egypt north-east to all the lands of the Middle East and beyond, especially the successive civilizations which rose and fell around the great rivers of Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates.

Moses’s name is therefore a clue to connect a people who ended up in the land of Canaan/Israel/Palestine with a mass movement of people out of Egypt. Maybe the Egyptian migrants were only a small part of that later population, who then contributed their story of exodus to the greater identity of the people, whom we can now meet in their Promised Land in the Books of Joshua and Judges.

At Genesis 31.53 a dispute involving Jacob is settled by appealing to the judgement of the disputing parties’ respective personal gods, the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, with Jacob sealing the deal with an oath to the Fear of his father, Isaac.13

The literature of the Hebrew scriptures was produced by the victors in that struggle, although the editors of it were often too respectful of the ancient texts which they had inherited entirely to eliminate rival voices. We have already met examples of this respectful preservation in the text of the

one explanation for contradiction

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.

how does he know it comes from this period?

synagogues were the setting for prayer and the reading of sacred scripture, but they also provided a focus for the general activities of the community – especially education. This was not just education for an elite, as was the case in Greek society, but education for everyone in the Jewish community; and it had a strong moral emphasis, unlike the concentration on cultic practice in the many other religions of the Mediterranean world.

The long process of creating and re-editing texts now approached something like completion, and a number of books, twenty-four in all, came to be recognized as having a special status. It is difficult to say exactly when this happened: in Jewish tradition the decision is said to have been made in a ‘Great Assembly’ in 450 BCE, but that is a fairly typical historical back-projection of a process which was probably gradual and incremental. In fact it must have been completed at a much later date, especially since some books within the collection, like the prophecies of Daniel, patently cannot be as old as the fifth century BCE, whatever superficial claims they make to a particular antiquity.

On the whole, before the time of the Maccabees, Jewish discussion of God had shown little interest in the nature of the afterlife;

Perhaps, then, the resurrection of the martyrs would be in a life to come, and the reward should be specific to individual suffering; this implied the prolonging of a recognizable personal existence.49 No doubt the era of the Maccabees was not the first time that this fairly obvious train of argument had occurred to thoughtful Jews, but now they could listen to voices in other religious or philosophical traditions which might give shape to the idea.

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!

Yet these Christian books are an unusually ‘down-market’ variety of biography, in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is often the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.

gospel

It is important to realize that a book of good news is not the same as straightforward reported news, or its more aged and academically respectable relative, history. The writer Jan Morris once recalled being advised by the Sudanese Minister of National Guidance, soon after the Second World War, that as a foreign correspondent she should try to report ‘thrilling, attractive and good news, corresponding, where possible, with the truth’. That might sound cynical, but Ms Morris felt that the minister, an austere man, spoke more wisely than might at first appear, and she fruitfully bore it in mind in her career in journalism.2 The minister’s words provide a model of how we might approach the Gospels in a spirit which goes beyond cynicism.

Fundmental worldview stuff

Implausibilities multiply: the Roman authorities would not have held a census in a client kingdom of the empire such as Herod’s, and in any case there is no record elsewhere of such an empire-wide census, which

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):

There is further proof that this notion of an intimate Fatherhood between God and humanity is a basic layer of Jesus’s message: he goes beyond self-reference. In ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, which lies at the heart of Christian approaches to God, he tells his disciples to pray to their Father in Heaven – though the followers address God not as abba but by the ordinary Greek word for ‘father’, patēr.12

Scholars from a Western Christian or Enlightenment background have now spent more than two centuries trying to reach through the filters of the four Gospels and the letters of Paul to find a ‘real’ Jesus and an ‘authentic’ version of what he actually said: it has been perhaps the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated analysis of any set of texts in the history of human thought.

These Passion narratives are probably the earliest continuous material in the Gospels, a set of stories first formulated for public recital in the various communities which compiled their own accounts of his life, sufferings and resurrection.

was not a theological but a political threat to the fragile stability of the region.

That ‘King of the Jews’ phrase is an inescapable repeated refrain through the Passion narratives, even despite the embarrassment which it was to cause Christians in the fraught political situation which emerged a few decades after that death on the Cross.

The evangelist John pictured the Jews as being forced by legal circumstance to hand over a man condemned for blasphemy to the Roman authorities if they were to secure the death sentence for him which they ardently sought.44 That is implausible, considering that three decades later the Jerusalem High Priest was directly responsible for the execution of Jesus’s brother James, then leader of the Christians in Jerusalem.

Easter is the earliest Christian festival, and it was for its celebration that the Passion narratives were created by the first Christians.

Obedience is a theme to which Paul obsessively returns. He speaks of Christ’s followers as being like slaves, wives, debtors, younger sons, coheirs: the relationship of the believer to Christ can become so intimate that he can speak of it in terms of one personality absorbing another – one of his characteristic phrases is that believers are ‘in Christ’. This

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

Jesus was crucified because he was said to have claimed to be just that, ‘King of the Jews’.

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.

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.

The Jewish Christian Church, interestingly, fled from the city; it was distant enough from the world of Jewish nationalism to wish to keep out of this struggle. The result of the revolt was in the long term probably inevitable: the Romans could not afford to lose their grip on this corner of the Mediterranean and they put a huge effort into crushing the rebels.

Their refusal to become associated with the second great Jewish revolt of 132–5 cost them dear in terms of violence from their fellow Jews, who regarded them as traitors, but even when the crushing of the rebellion brought them relief, their future was one of gradual decline.

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 (see p. 81).81

any section of the Jewish nation had been responsible for the train of events leading up to the death of Jesus, it had been the Temple establishment of Sadducees, but the Pharisees come in for far more abuse recorded by the Gospel writers, often in the mouth of Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus seems to have resembled the Pharisees in much of his teaching and outlook.