A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

In everyday life, the Roman imperial authorities unwittingly encouraged the process of separation between Jews and Christians by imposing a punitive tax in place of the voluntary contributions which Jews had once paid to the Jerusalem Temple. For Roman bureaucrats, therefore, it became important to know who was and was not a Jew. Despite all the Jewish rebellions, tax-paying Jews continued to enjoy a status as an officially recognized religion (religio licita). In fact, despite the brutality with which Rome

The Gospel narratives give a prominence to women in the Jesus movement unusual in ancient society; this culminates in the extraordinary part which they play in Matthew’s, Mark’s and John’s accounts of the human discovery of the Resurrection.

The Gospel of Thomas, which of all such Gospel pastiches beyond the New Testament most resembles the four ‘mainstream’ Gospels in its content and its likely dating to the late first century, describes a confrontation between Mary Magdalene and the Apostle Peter, in which Jesus intervenes on her behalf to reproach Peter. This theme of arguments between the Magdalene and Peter occurs elsewhere. The

Paul is apparently inconsistent about the status of women. In his seven authentic letters, various women are named as office holders: amid the large number of people whom he lists as sending greetings to the Romans are Phoebe the deacon (administrative officer or assistant) in the Church of Cenchreae (a port near Corinth), Prisca, a ‘fellow worker’ and Tryphaena and Tryphosa, ‘workers in the Lord’ – descriptions also applied to men in the same passage. Most strikingly, there is Junia, a female ‘apostle’, so described alongside another ‘apostle’ with a male name – this was considered such an appalling anomaly by many later readers of Romans that Junia’s name was frequently changed to a male form in the recopying of manuscripts,

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.

Likewise, abortion and the abandonment of unwanted children were accepted as regrettable necessities in Roman society, but, like the Jews before them, Christians were insistent that these practices were completely unacceptable.

gnosticism is unlikely to produce one answer. Much of gnosticism is a dialogue with Judaism – that is particularly true of the documents from Nag Hammadi – but the dialogue partners were not necessarily Greek.

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?

there could follow a train of thought perceptible in various forms in many gnostic documents. 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. Knowledge of the true God is a way to contemplate the original harmony of the cosmos before the disaster represented by the creation of the physical world. That harmony is so distant and distinct from physical creation that it involves a complicated hierarchy of beings or realities (lovingly described in mind-numbing detail and variety in different gnostic systems). Those capable of perceiving this harmony and hierarchy are often said to have been granted that privilege by a fate external to themselves: a predestination. It is these people – gnostics – whom Jesus Christ has come to save. And who is Jesus? If there can be no true union between

To begin with, Christians had the Jewish Tanakh, obsessively redirected in its reference towards their efforts to grapple with the meaning of the life and death of Jesus, and when they spoke of ‘scripture’ at the beginning of the second century CE, it is the Tanakh that they meant. By the end of that same century, ‘scripture’ was a more complicated word, because by then many Christians would include in the term a new series of books, a ‘New Testament’ of exclusively Christian works. The construction of a canon of scripture to stand in this New Testament alongside the Tanakh was a gradual process, even given the spur that Marcion was proposing to do the same thing. 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 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.

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

was chief among a series of ‘Apologists’ who, in the second century, opened a dialogue with the culture around them in order to show that Christianity was superior to the elite wisdom of the age.

For Justin, God the Father corresponded to Plato’s discussion of a supreme Being. Justin wanted to say with the mainstream Church against gnosticism that this supreme God had created the material world, and he tried to get over the problem of relating the two by seeing the Logos as a mediator between them. This Logos had been glimpsed by the Hebrew prophets, but also by great philosophers like Plato, thus happily enrolled among Christian witnesses.

In the eyes of many later unsympathetic writers, both he and Origen had stepped over the borders which could be considered orthodox for Christianity. It is no coincidence that many of Clement’s and Origen’s writings are lost to us. When one manuscript might be the only source of a particular work and might easily crumble to dust in obscurity if someone did not think it worth copying, quiet ecclesiastical censorship could make sure that many works of these dangerous and audacious masters remained uncopied and so disappeared from sight.

‘Philosophy is a preparation, making ready the way for him who is being perfected by Christ.’84 Clement was so concerned to stress the Christian progress in holiness that he saw each individual’s journey as continuing after physical death: ‘after he has reached the final ascent in the flesh, he still continues to advance’.85 He spoke of these further advances in afterlife in terms of the cosmic hierarchies which would have been familiar to gnostics, but he also spoke of this progress as a fiery purging – not the fires of Hell, but (borrowing a concept from Stoicism) a fire of wisdom.86

This is sounding awfully new age

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.

Origen’s importance was twofold as biblical scholar and speculative theologian, in which roles he exhibited interestingly different talents. As a biblical scholar, he had no previous Christian rival. He set standards and directions for the giant task which was already occupying the Church, of redirecting the Tanakh to illuminating the significance of Jesus Christ in the divine plan: creating the text of the Bible as Christians now know it. His

There are various explanations of why there might have been different Greek versions of the Tanakh – the most obvious being that there simply were – but by the second century one possibility is that Jews had ceased to trust their Septuagint Greek version of scripture precisely because Christians habitually used it.

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

There were contrary currents in the East too: the Syrian city of Antioch was home to theologians who were inclined to read the Bible as a literal historical record. 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. 222–37).

Origen tried to explain this proposition with yet more adventurousness. He suggested that amid the catastrophe of the Fall, one soul alone had not fallen, and that it was this soul which the Logos entered when finally he decided that he must come himself to save humankind.98 The point of this idea was to safeguard Christ’s free will in his earthly life: he enjoyed the free will granted to that soul, so he was making real choices, not playing a Docetic charade, as gnostics maintained. Thus our free will also has value, because it is seen most perfectly in Christ, and it is a gift for us to use properly. The

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.

pagani

For the authorities, one feature of the Christians’ exclusivity was particularly alarming: their frequently negative attitude to military service. No Christian of the first three centuries CE would fit easily into the army, since military life automatically demanded as routine attendance at official sacrifices as today it demands salutes to the flag and parades.

pollution, particularly in public office. Christians generally avoided public baths; and the full enormity of this refusal can only be appreciated if one visits the surviving public baths of Eastern Europe or the Middle East and sees the way in which they serve as centres of social life, politics and gossip.

The contrast between Judaism, the religion of the scroll, and Christianity, the religion of the book, would have been evident in their liturgies when the codex of scripture was used as a performed chanted text. The surviving fragments of early biblical texts have a set of consistent abbreviations singling out sacred words, the most frequent being the especially reverenced name ‘Jesus’. One would have to be specially informed to know how to interpret these abbreviations (known as sacred terms, nomina sacra), for they do not occur in other literary works (see Plate 1).

Outside the periods of persecution, which, however brutal while they lasted, were extremely episodic until the last savagery under Diocletian (see pp. 175–

The end of the autonomous culture of the polis had profound consequences for religion. Traditional cults were linked with local identities: in towns and cities, with the self-government which had helped to sustain them.

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 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

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians gave way. This might have been predicted, because the same thing had happened when, for instance, Pliny the Younger had arrested Bithynian Christians back in 112. It was only natural to wish to obey the emperor: that most Christians felt a deep reverence for the empire is obvious from their leading writers’ confused and contradictory statements about the limits on obedience to it.

Many of the lapsed flocked to the confessors to gain pardon and re-entry to the Church, and the bishops did not like this at all. Especially important disputes broke out in Rome and Carthage over the issue of forgiveness.

In cultures beyond the empire, Christianity expressed itself in other languages than Greek or Latin. These Christians might have very different priorities and perspectives from those within the Roman imperial frontiers and they went on to produce Christian traditions very different in character. They survive today, reminding the heirs of Greece and Rome that Christianity began as a religion of the Middle East and was as likely to move east as west.

Absent is the representation which modern Christians might expect, but which was nowhere to be found in Christian cultures before the fifth century: Christ hanging on the Cross, the Crucifixion. Christ in the art of the early Church was shown in his human life or sprung to new life – never dead, in the fashion of the crucifixions which were to become so universal in the art of the later Western Church.

Syrian town

The worst that one can say of his individuality on the evidence available was that he was enthusiastic for the sort of world-denying lifestyle which in the next century crystallized into monasticism.

hymns are preserved from Syria in a collection known as the Odes of Solomon which are likely to be second century in date. One of them gives what may be the first reference beyond the biblical text to Mary the mother of Jesus as a virgin mother, and they pioneer a characteristic feature of Syrian Christianity, reference to the Holy Spirit as female. Grammatically, after all, ruha, the Syriac word for spirit, is feminine, although later Christians found this disconcerting and from around 400 CE arbitrarily redefined the word as masculine in grammatical gender.67 Ephrem

Moreover, the Church started using a technical administrative term which Diocletian had adopted for the twelve subdivisions he created in the empire: ‘diocese’.

churches borrowed their form not from the temples of the Classical world, which were not designed for large congregations, and which in any case had inappropriate associations with sacrifice to idols, but instead from the secular world of administration.

The model chosen was the audience hall of a secular ruler, called from its royal associations a basilica. Conventionally it was a rectangular chamber big enough to hold large numbers, with an entrance through one of the long sides to face the chair of the presiding magistrate or ruler, often housed in a semicircular apse in the other long wall.

Despite the efforts of much liturgical scholarship, it is remarkably difficult to get a coherent picture of what Christian worship looked like or felt like before the time of Constantine; throughout the Christian world, probably only the present-day liturgy of the Syriac Churches is anything like a form which predates that period

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.

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

Seems like a bold statement. Doesnt seem applicable to Glastonbury...

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.

What remains for scholars of Islam to achieve is the equivalent of Western Christian culture’s patient analysis of the documents at the heart of Christian faith, to gain a clearer picture of the society and thought-world in which the Qur’an was created.2

Muslim sources have often ascribed the Qur’an’s power to its exceptional beauty in the Arabic language, and the Qur’an does not translate well, particularly into English.

has become as subject to the possibility of intricate reinterpretation and meditation as its predecessors in sacred scripture – all the more because, in most forms, Islamic societies have not developed the equivalent of the Christian hierarchy of clergy who might champion a single meaning.

All this suggests a faith which, to a degree highly unusual in Christian history, allowed itself to listen to other great interpretations of the divine. Perhaps

This was the first check on Mongol power, and the beginning of steady decline for the Il-Khans of Iran, who themselves turned away from their alliance with Christianity when they realized that Christian Europe had more important priorities than giving them support, and that Christian Europe was in any case less impressive in military terms than it liked to think.

Once the Church became the ally and beneficiary of emperors rather than the victim of their persecution, that vacuum in secular power in the ancient capital meant that the Christian bishop was given an opportunity to expand his power and position. By the end of the fourth century this combination of advantages made it worthwhile for Greek Christians in their various intractable disputes to appeal to popes for support, the most outstanding example being the place of Pope Leo I’s Tome at Chalcedon.

Constantine gave the Church in the city a set of Christian buildings which in some important respects set patterns for the future of Christian architecture, and in others remained deeply idiosyncratic.