A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Organized Christianity came into existence, and exists, to preserve a treasure, a command to be executed, a promise to be repeated, a mission to be fulfilled.

As well as telling stories, my book asks questions. It tries to avoid giving too many answers, since this habit has been one of the great vices of organized religion.

the destruction of Spanish Judaism and Islam after 1492 had a major role in developing new forms of Christianity which challenged much of the early Church’s package of ideas, and also in fostering the mindset which led in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Enlightenment in Western culture.

There is Augustine of Hippo, the brilliant teacher whose life was turned around by reading Paul, and who, more than a thousand years later, deeply influenced another troubled, brilliant academic called Martin Luther.

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.

This should provide a healthy warning to all those who aspire to tell other people what to do on the basis of the Bible.

This logos means far more than simply ‘word’:

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

and even in the last twenty years the leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome have reaffirmed the synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelian thought which Thomas Aquinas devised at that time.

The Athenians had been brought low by their pride and decline in political morality.

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.

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

Sadducees had little time for the comparatively recently evolved discussion of the afterlife;

proclamation of Mary’s perpetual virginity meant commentators clumsily making the best that they could of clear references in the biblical text to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit (see p. 597

Paul was not alone in his development of a Christ message which strayed away from Jesus’s own emphases.

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 Church of Paul, which had originally seemed the daughter of the Jerusalem Church, rejected the lineal heirs of the Jerusalem Church as imperfect Christians.

Thanks to these developments, and to the energy of Paul’s work in reaching out to the non-Jewish world, the movement which had started as a Jewish sect decisively shifted away from its Palestinian home, and all the sacred writings which form the New Testament were written in Greek.

It was in fact in Antioch, according to the Book of Acts, that colonial Latin-speakers coined a word for Christ-followers (in no friendly spirit) – Christiani.

But no one would have realized this even two centuries after the death of Jesus Christ; and for centuries more there was as much likelihood of Christianity spreading as strongly east as west from the ruins of Jerusalem, to become the religion of Baghdad rather than of Rome.

By the fourth century, Christian writers like Bishop Ambrose of Milan or Bishop Augustine of Hippo were providing even more robust defences of the idea of slavery than non-Christian philosophers had done before them – ‘the lower the station in life, the more exalted the virtue’, was Ambrose’s rather unctuous opinion.15

In a set of movements or tangles of thought with such variety, a search for the origins of gnosticism is unlikely to produce one answer.

Implicit in most gnostic systems was a distrust of the Jewish account of creation.

Gnostic contempt for the flesh ran against the whole tendency of Jewish religion, with its earthy affirmation of created things and its insistence on God’s personal relationship with his chosen people.

Christians have never since abandoned their rhetoric of unity, despite their general inability to sustain it at any stage in the reality of history.

Interesting tbat bishops see clerical control of the Euchrist as source of dogmatic power

Soon, big churches had many presbyters under the bishop’s authority: deacons were the bishops’ assistants, occasionally themselves rising to be bishops, but never being made presbyters.

The fading of Paul from popular devotional consciousness and from much share in the charisma of Rome is one of the great puzzles of Christian history, but it is obvious that part of the answer to the puzzle lies in a vast expansion of the power and prestige of the Bishops of Rome.

One might regard the Montanist emphasis on new revelations of the Spirit as a natural reaction to the gradual closing of the New Testament canon, but there was little that could actually be described as heretical in what they said.

Christianity has never ceased to debate the relationship between truth revealed from God in sacred text and the restless exploration of truth by human reason, which on a Christian account is itself a gift of God. It

In 260 Ardashir’s son Shapur achieved the ultimate humiliation for the Romans by taking the Emperor Valerian prisoner in battle; Valerian died in captivity.

Mani combined all the religions which he respected with his own experience of revelation into a new ‘Manichaean’ cult. Like gnostic dualism before it, this provided a convincingly stark account of the world’s suffering, portraying it as the symptom of an unending struggle between matched forces of good and evil.

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.

One of the greatest, close to the Imperial Palace, was dedicated to Holy Peace (Hagia Eirēnē).

It is perhaps difficult for modern observers of Christianity, who accept hermits, monasteries and nunneries as a traditional feature of Christianity, to see that this acceptance was not inevitable.

His extrovert craziness is an interesting counterpoint or safety valve to the ethos of prayerful silence and traditional solemnity which is so much part of Orthodox identity.

Although Arian Christianity was now harried to extinction in the imperial Church, significantly where imperial repression could not follow, across the northern frontier, it flourished – among the ‘barbarian’ tribes known as the Goths and their relatives the Vandals.

In the manner of many politically inspired middle-of-the-road settlements, it left bitter discontents on either side in the Eastern Churches.

From now on Egyptian Christianity increasingly worshipped God in the native language of Egypt, Coptic.

Now Coptic language and distinctive culture were becoming badges of difference from the Greek Christianity of the Church in Constantinople.

The Church would also have to decide what it should keep from the literary culture so prized by wealthy and distinguished Romans.

So it appeared in the 390s that the future lay with a Christian empire under strong rulers like Theodosius and strong bishops like Ambrose: a culmination of God’s plan for the world and the beginning of a golden age, the vision of Constantine’s historian Eusebius of Caesarea finally realized.

By contrast, his impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated; only his beloved example, Paul of Tarsus, has been more influential, and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine’s eyes.

turns to the problem at the centre of Augustine’s thought: what is the nature and cause of evil, and how does it relate to God’s majesty and all-powerful goodness?

the theme of two cities: ‘the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord’.

Pelagius’s views have often been presented as rather amiable, in contrast to the fierce pessimism in Augustine’s view of our fallen state.

Sometimes the growth of belief in the saints has been seen as a superstition of the ignorant or half-converted, a stealthy return of the old gods in saintly disguise: this was a favourite theme of some humanists and Protestant reformers in the sixteenth-century West. In fact it is a logical outcome of the Platonic cast of Augustine’s theology, and an echo of the hierarchies which Plato and his admirers saw as existing in the cosmos around the supreme God.

Whatever the source, he was inspired to develop a defence of the doctrine of three equal persons in one substance, which in its subtlety and daring both shaped the Western Church’s thinking and helped to alienate Eastern Christians from the West.

Perhaps a less miraculous explanation of such triumphs in the face of conflict is to be found in Martin’s evident ability to fascinate young aristocrats from important Gallo-Roman families, which resulted in his drawing them into the religious life.