A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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.