A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

I seek to give due weight in these narratives to the tangled and often tragic story of the relations between Christianity and its mother-monotheism, Judaism, as well as with its monotheistic younger cousin, Islam. For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes. Even now, by no means all sections of the Christian world have undergone the mutation of believing unequivocally in tolerating or accepting any partnership with other belief systems.

It is not surprising that so many have sought the Last Days. The writing and telling of history is bedevilled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again.

My aim is to tell as clearly as possible an immensely complicated and varied tale, in ways which others will enjoy and find plausible. Furthermore, I am not ashamed to affirm that although modern historians have no special capacity to be arbiters of the truth or otherwise of religion, they still have a moral task. They should seek to promote sanity and to curb the rhetoric which breeds fanaticism. There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

The name ‘Christ’ underlines the importance of Greek culture from the earliest days of Christianity, as Christians struggled to find out what their message was and how the message should be proclaimed. So the words ‘logos’ and ‘Christos’ tell us what a tangle of Greek and Jewish ideas and memories underlies the construction of Christianity.

Temples were served by priests, who performed local rituals for a god or gods in approved customary fashion, but who were not normally seen as a caste apart from the rest of the population. They were doing a job on behalf of the community, rather like other officials of the city, who might collect taxes or regulate the market. 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.

The Athenians had been brought low by their pride and decline in political morality. Like the view of humanity presented in the cynical governmental structures of Plato’s Republic, this was a bleak assessment of the true potential of human nature and the flaws of Athenian democracy, born of bitter experience; and although it was an emphatically moral view of history, it was not one which especially involved divine intervention – if at all.24 Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings, and that they often behave far more discreditably than individuals.

Rome’s sheer lack of resources made its people acutely aware that their only assets were their energies in war and their determination to survive; the city had few natural endowments apart from timber and river transport to recommend it and, sited in the centre of the Italian peninsula, it was not even on any international trade route. It lacked any strong natural defences and, as it grew, its local agriculture would have been quite inadequate to support its population had it not acquired new territory.

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.

Augustus and his successors tore down political frontiers all round the Mediterranean, and by controlling piracy, they made it comparatively safe and easy to travel from one end of the sea to the other. The first great exponent of a worldwide Christianity, the Apostle Paul, made the most of this, and so would the Christian faith as a whole. Without the general peace brought by Roman power, Christianity’s westward spread would have been far more unlikely.

post-Exilic Jews puzzled about how a loving God could have allowed the destruction of his Temple and the apparent overturning of all his promises to his people. One answer was to try to let God off the hook by conceiving of a being who devoted his time to thwarting God’s purposes: he was called the Adversary, Hassatan, and although he was a fairly insignificant nuisance in the Hebrew scriptures, he grew in status in later Jewish literature, particularly among writers who were influenced by other religious cultures which spoke of powerful demonic figures. Hassatan caught the imagination of the Christian sect, and by the time that the Christian Book of Revelation was written, he had become a figure of cosmic significance now called Satan, depicted as the final adversary for God in the End Time.