A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The intimacy of Crossman’s lines hints at the degree to which Christianity is, at root, a personality cult.

More surprising is the fact that the Jews’ constant experience of misfortune did not kill their faith in their own destiny. Instead it drove them to conceive of their God not simply as all-powerful, but as passionately concerned with their response to him, in anger as well as in love. Such an intensely personal deity, they began to assert, was nevertheless the God for all humanity. He was very different from the supreme deity who emerged from Greek philosophy in the thought of Plato: all-perfect, therefore immune to change and devoid of the passion which denotes change.

Such a paradox will lead to a constant urge to describe the indescribable, and that is what the Bible tries to do. It does not have all the answers, and – a point many forget – only once does it claim to do so, in one of the last writings to squeeze into the biblical canon, known as Paul’s second epistle to Timothy.

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.

Western culture has borrowed the insistence of Socrates that priority should be given over received wisdom to logical argument and rational procession of thought, and the Western version of the Christian tradition is especially prone to this Socratic principle.

Plato’s influence on Christianity was equally profound in two other directions. First, his view of reality and authenticity propelled one basic impulse in Christianity, to look beyond the immediate and everyday to the universal or ultimate.

Plato’s second major contribution to Christian discussion is his conception of what God’s nature encompasses: oneness and goodness.

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.

Around Abraham’s rackety grandson Jacob are woven several engaging tales of outrageous cheating and deceit, and they culminate in an all-night wrestling match with a mysterious stranger who overcomes Jacob and is able to give him another new name, Israel, meaning ‘He who strives with God’.5 Out of that fight in the darkness, with one who revealed the power of God and was God, began the generations of the Children of Israel. Few peoples united by a religion have proclaimed by their very name that they struggle against the one whom they worship. The relationship of God with Israel is intense, personal, conflicted. Those who follow Israel and the religions which spring from his wrestling match that night are being told that even through their harshest and most wretched experiences of fighting with those they love most deeply, they are being given some glimpse of how they relate to God.

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. One could then be accepted as a convert (‘proselyte’, from a Greek word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner living in the land’). It was enough to accept the story which Judaism told: so in theory, Judaism could become a universal religion. Jews did not generally take that logical step of thought. It was left first to Christianity and then to Islam to make it a great theme of their faith.

The most readily available vocabulary and central concept was actually Greek and had been particularly developed by Plato: he talked of individual humans as having a soul, which might reflect a divine force beyond itself.

Both Jesus and Paul can be identified by their backgrounds as closer to the Pharisees than to any other religious grouping, though it is unlikely that Jesus had anything like the pungent command of everyday Greek which is evident in Paul’s surviving letters and which marked Paul out as part of the dispersed and Hellenized Jewish population – the diaspora which could now be found all round the Mediterranean and into the Middle East.

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): ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel’. This alters or refines the meaning of Isaiah’s original Hebrew: where the prophet had talked only of ‘a young woman’ conceiving and bearing a son, the Septuagint projected ‘young woman’ into the Greek word for ‘virgin’ (parthenos).

The evidence for Jesus’s concentration on the imminence of the coming kingdom piles up, all the more strikingly because within decades of Jesus’s death the Church began to have second thoughts on just how imminent it might be. The Apostle Paul hardly ever recorded what Jesus had actually taught, so it is all the more notable that he records as a ‘word of the Lord’ that ‘the Lord himself will descend from Heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God’

Jesus spoke Aramaic as his first language. As the encounter with the Canaanite woman seems to indicate, and is in any case to be expected, he could speak marketplace Greek when he needed to,

Christianity was not usually going to make a radical challenge to existing social distinctions. The reason was that Paul and his followers assumed that the world was going to come to an end soon and so there was not much point in trying to improve it by radical action.

One short letter of Paul from a Roman prison to a fellow Christian called Philemon is undoubtedly genuine, since it contains no useful discussion of doctrine and can only have been preserved for its biographical information about the Apostle. It centres on the future of Onesimus, a slave to Philemon. He had recently been serving Paul in imprisonment and the letter contains a none-too-subtle hint that Paul would appreciate continuing to enjoy the benefit of Onesimus’s service. There is no suggestion that he should be freed, only that now he could be ‘more than a slave’ to Philemon; and certainly there is no question of consulting Onesimus about his own wishes. The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.

The Gospel of Mary, for instance, is a ‘gnostic’ work probably of the second century and represents a fairly even-tempered attempt at conversation with non-gnostic Christians. Here, Jesus’s disciple Levi is presented as exclaiming to Peter, ‘if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you then to reject her? Certainly the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.’

While Paul thus provides evidence about the roles that women were playing in positions of authority in Christian communities, his list of witnesses to Resurrection appearances significantly contrasts with that of three Gospels, by not including any women at all. He also insists in his first letter to the Corinthians on a hierarchical scheme in which God is the head of Christ, Christ the head of men and a husband the head of his wife: quite a contrast to his proclamation of Christian equality for all.

What is striking in this literature is the way in which the idea that the end is at hand, so prominent in Paul’s letters, has faded from view. The author of Ephesians is prepared to talk about ‘the coming ages’, which seems to mean a long time on this earth.

Yet in the same passage Paul said something more positive: that both husband and wife have mutually conceded each other power over each other’s bodies. This gives a positive motive for Christian counter-cultural opposition to divorce, but it is also striking in its affirmation of mutuality in marriage. That message has struggled to be heard through most of Christian history.

Gnosticism was a creed for cultural frontiers, for instance, where Judaism interacted with Greek culture, as in Alexandria.37 But 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? Why is the human body such a decaying vessel, so vulnerable even amid the beauty of youth to disease and petty lusts? Platonic assumptions about the unreality of human life, or prevailing Stoic platitudes about the need to rise above everyday suffering, could conspire with dualism from the East to produce a plausible answer: what we experience with our physical senses is mere illusion, a pale reflection of spiritual reality. If the world of senses is such an inferior state of being, then it could not possibly have been created by a supreme 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).

If there can be no true union between the world of spirit and the world of matter, then the cosmic Christ of the gnostics can never truly have taken flesh by a human woman, and he can never have felt what fleshly people feel – particularly human suffering. His Passion and Resurrection in history were therefore not fleshly events, even if they seemed so; they were heavenly play-acting (the doctrine known as Docetism, from the Greek verb dokein, ‘to seem’).

The gnostics included people of sophistication and learning – the complexity and frequent obscurity of their literature impressively demonstrated that – and arguably they had a more intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil in the world than the mainstream Christian Church has ever been able to provide. Evil simply exists; life is a battle between good and evil, in a material world wholly beyond the concern of the true God.

Like gnostics, with whom he has often been wrongly identified, he was determined to pull Christianity away from its Jewish roots. He saw the writings of Paul as his chief weapon, but moving on from Paul’s own conflicted relationship with Judaism, he came to the same conclusion as gnostics in saying that the created world must be a worthless sham and Jesus’s flesh an illusion; his Passion and death should be blamed on the Creator Demiurge. In characteristically Greek fashion, Marcion found the Tanakh in its Greek form crude and offensive – ‘Jewish myths’, in a phrase of the Epistle to Titus, which he would have attributed to the Apostle Paul.42 He saw the Creator God of the Jews as a God of judgement, rather than the God of love whom he saw perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. Christ had died to satisfy the Creator God.

What remained of the New Testament was a collection of Paul’s letters (probably the collection which he inherited), together with a version of Luke’s Gospel.

Thus the name of Mary’s mother and Jesus’s grandmother, Anna or Anne, is only provided in the excluded books, first the work which is termed the ‘Infancy Gospel [Protevangelium] of James’.

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).

The first surviving use of the title ‘papa’ in Rome occurs in the time of Bishop Marcellinus (296–304), in a funerary inscription for his deacon Severus in one of the catacombs in the city.

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

While the Montanists early on became firmly convinced that they were about to see the New Jerusalem descend on earth at Pepouza, their enthusiasm contrasted sharply with the Catholic Church’s general abandonment of Paul’s original conviction that the Lord Christ would soon be returning.

Cyprian thought not, but a new Bishop of Rome, Stephen, wishing to be conciliatory to those who were coming in, disagreed with him. Now a furious argument broke out between them, partly an expression of Rome’s growing feeling that the North African bishops were inclined to think too well of their own position in the Western Church. Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ’s punning proclamation in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16.18).46 It is the first time known to us that the text had been thus used by a Bishop of Rome; this row in 256 represents another significant step in Rome’s gradual rise to prominence.

Now the fish was far outclassed not only by the new imperial Chi-Rho monogram referring to the same word, but also by the Cross. Crosses had featured little in public Christian art outside written texts before the time of Constantine; now they could even be found as motifs in jewellery.

The name of Mary, the mother of Jesus, occurs almost twice as often in the Qur’an as in the New Testament, and she gives her name to one of its suras. By contrast, there is one silence in the Qur’an which is startling once it is noticed: the name of Paul of Tarsus.

Although these subsequent popes had discovered that they had helped to create an institution impossible to control from Rome, the pope’s participation in the empire’s foundation had been a dramatic assertion of the papacy’s new self-confidence in its cosmic role, and it signalled the returning vitality of the Latin West. Both these characteristics were reflected in documents which now emerged to prove that this new situation in fact reflected an ancient reality. We can call them forgeries, but our attitudes to such matters are conditioned by the humanist historical scholarship which emerged in Italy in the fifteenth century. That leads us to expect that our history must be based on carefully checked and authenticated evidence, or it simply cannot exist. For centuries before, though, people lived in societies which did not have enough documents to prove what they passionately believed to be true: the only solution was to create the missing documentation.

In this spirit, there emerged one of the most significant forgeries in history: the so-called Donation of Constantine. The document claims to be the work of Constantine I; after reciting a story of his healing, conversion to Christianity and baptism at the hands of Pope Sylvester, it grants the Pope and all his successors not merely the honour of primacy over the universal Church but temporal power in the territories of the Western Empire, reserving to himself the empire ruled from Byzantium (see Plate 26). Its real date is problematic, but it is generally thought to predate the coronation of Charlemagne, which would have rendered the second part of the gift embarrassing, and to have been written in the late eighth century, in the atmosphere of papal tensions with the Byzantine Empire and of energetic Frankish Church reform.66 The forged Donation much fired the imagination of later popes and clerical supporters of their power, who saw it as a manifesto for a world in which Christ’s Church would be able to rule all society. It is possible to see that as a noble vision.

Despite prodigious expenditure of heroism and resources over two centuries, no crusade equalled the success of the first.

One of the best-known works to emerge from this tradition, an anonymous English fourteenth-century meditation probably by a country priest and called The Cloud of Unknowing, goes beyond Aquinas in quoting that mysterious and subversive fount of Eastern spirituality, Dionysius the Areopagite, when he says that ‘the most godlike knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing’.

historians. It is a peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition of public worship that it contains hymns of hate, directed towards named individuals who are defined as heretical, all the way from Arius through Miaphysites, Dyophysites and Iconoclasts.

Contemporary events in Italy made it equally easy for Italians to see the Last Days arriving. Two years after Granada had fallen, French armies invaded the Italian peninsula, sparking warfare and miseries of half a century’s duration. A terrifying and hitherto unknown disease also broke out. Although apparently as fatal as the plague, it played with its victims for months or years, destroying their looks, their flesh and sometimes their minds. Equally seriously, it brought public shame, because very quickly people realized that it was associated with sexual activity. Naturally the Italians in their double affliction called the new scourge the French pox, a name which soon caught all Europe’s imagination, much to French annoyance; France’s attempt to relabel the pox as the Neapolitan disease was not an especially successful ploy. The title of a poem about the pox published in 1531 by an Italian doctor, Girolamo Fracastoro, has given the modern descendant of this disease the name syphilis.

In 1910, a classically high level of 140 yearly communions per hundred Church members was recorded in the countryside of Hesse-Kassel, but at the other extreme the equally rural district of Jever in north-west Germany registered seven communions per hundred members, which was much the same as the most extreme example of urban abstention, six per hundred, in the north German port of Kiel. By then one factor had become clear: a great many working-class people turned away from Protestant churches which had identified themselves with the conservative imperial system, and instead embraced a socialism which had begun providing them with a whole alternative subculture for leisure activities and welfare, paralleling what the Church could provide. The German Social Democratic Party was Europe’s first mass socialist party, and it was as much the subject of government repression as the Catholic Church. German Protestantism was thus caught between Catholics and socialists.

That frequently aroused the fears of the Victorian paterfamilias, paralleling the neurosis of the Catholic layman since the High Middle Ages that his wife or daughter would be seduced in the confessional by lustful celibate priests. The worries were generally groundless, partly because the unprecedented singleness of many Anglo-Catholic clergy had a rather different dimension. From its earliest phases in its eponymous university, the Oxford Movement came to host a male homosexual subculture which even the sexual liberation movements from the 1970s did not entirely absorb or supplant.

Strauss, enthusiastic for Hegel’s symbolic approach to Christianity, wanted to apply his analytical skills to the New Testament as well. In 1835 he published the result, usually known by its shortened German title Leben Jesu, or in the English translation made by the freethinking novelist Marian Evans or ‘George Eliot’, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. The Jesus Strauss portrayed was a great Jewish teacher whose followers had retold the story of his life in the best way they knew by borrowing themes from Old Testament stories and fitting their hero’s life into them. No conscious deception was involved, but the New Testament narratives were works of theological symbolism rather than historic fact.

In 1906 the theologian and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, son of a Lutheran pastor in Alsace, wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which argued that this preoccupation of liberal scholarship was misguided. The historical Christ Schweitzer saw in the Gospels was a man who believed that the end of the world was coming immediately, and had gone on to offer up his life in Jerusalem, to hasten on the time of tribulation. His career had therefore been built round a mistake. If there was a historical Jesus to be found in the Gospels, he was a figure of failure and tragedy who could only speak of failure and tragedy to the modern world.

At the time of the Revolution, despite all the bustle of the Great Awakenings, only around 10 per cent of the American population were formal Church members, and a majority had no significant involvement in Church activities.

In the contested territory of Volhynia, lately Polish-administered, in 1943 Ukrainians were able amid mutual genocidal conflict to identify Polish Roman Catholics because the Poles observed Christmas earlier than either Greek Catholics or Orthodox. The Poles were generally holding their Christmas celebrations in wooden churches, which burned easily, and anyone escaping these infernos was shot. Overall, around seventy thousand Poles died throughout the Ukraine in this violence, and twenty thousand Ukrainians.

Liberals showed plenty of enthusiasm for missionary activism, but this increasingly included an emphasis on justice and equality in the world, as a necessary reflection of the Christian message – what in North America was commonly called a ‘Social Gospel’.

So the Pope finally ignored the work and issued his own statement in 1968: the encyclical Humanae vitae (‘Of Human life’), which gave no place for artificial contraception in Catholic family life.13 To his astonishment and dismay, the case was not closed when Rome had spoken. There were open and angry protests both lay and clerical all over the northern Catholic world, and worse still, demographics soon revealed that millions of Catholic laity paid no attention to the papal ban. They have gone on rejecting it, the first time that the Catholic faithful have ever so consistently scorned a major papal pronouncement intended to structure their lives.

In King, the Evangelicalism of the South met the writings of one of the greatest exponents of the ‘Social Gospel’ in the USA, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose synthesis of Reformed and Lutheran theology and liberal Protestant analysis of society he much admired.