Three thousand years from Galilee to the world
Trish Carn reviews Dairmaid MacCulloch's hostory of christianity, which accompanies the recent BBC4 TV series.
A History of Christianity: the first three thousand years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allan Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books. ISBN: 978 0 713 99869 6. £35 The size alone is impressive. Comprising 1,161 pages including almost sixty pages of index, seventy-seven pages of notes and fourteen pages of suggested further reading, it makes you realise that here is a book to take seriously. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury said in his Guardian review: ‘The provocative subtitle alerts you to the fact that this is going to be much more than a textbook. Diarmaid MacCulloch begins with what turns out to be one of many tours de force in summarising the intellectual and social background of Christianity in the classical as well as the Jewish world, so that we can see something of the issues to which the Christian faith offered a startlingly new response.’
I couldn’t agree more. Having studied both Old and New Testament history at university and read more since, I thought I knew something of the history of Christianity, but this book stunned me at many turns.
In his introduction MacCulloch says: ‘The book conceives the overall structure of Christian history differently, I believe, from any of its predecessors. Within the cluster of beliefs making up Christian faith is an instability, which comes from a twofold ancestry. Far from being the pristine, innovative teachings of Jesus Christ, it draws on two much more ancient cultural wellsprings, Greece and Israel.’
For me, this was an approach that I hadn’t considered. Some of the retranslations of Biblical narratives and comparison between interpretations struck me. For instance, in Matthew stressing the ancestry of Jesus back to being a son of David the lineage is through Joseph, but then Joseph is not the father, or in Mark back to Adam it is traced through the maternal line. For me this has never been a particular point of interest but I hadn’t been worried about it either.
When MacCulloch discusses the Lord’s Prayer, he points out Jesus’s preoccupation with the imminent kingdom where he addresses the Father in heaven and pleads for ‘Thy kingdom come’. The section asking for our ‘daily bread’ is also a mystery as the Greek word ‘epiosios’ is a very rare Greek word and could ‘point to the new time of the coming kingdom: there must be provision when God’s people are hungry in this new time – yet the provision for tomorrow must come now, because the kingdom is about to arrive.’
Continuing the history MacCulloch covers the rise of Islam in 622 and the way in which the Qur’an is preoccupied with the two monotheistic religions known by Muhammad in his boyhood. Muhammad’s concern was ‘to proclaim a new unity of religion through “the God” (al-ilh) who had been the focus of the shrine cult at Mecca’ ... ‘and he was very aware of the sacred books which had previously spoken of one God, the Tankh and the Christian New Testament’.
The growth of the Latin Church, Protestantism and its various sects are covered diligently. The different men of the Reformation and their various beliefs are covered in a way that helped me understand more fully the variations in the church in the West. He queries whether the Enlightenment was an enemy or an ally of Christianity in its various guises. Many more varied questions are addressed and opened up for understanding.
In his introduction Diarmaid MacCulloch states: ‘I hope that this book will help readers stand back from Christianity, whether they love it or hate it, or are simply curious about it, and see it in the round’. I feel that he has achieved this goal.
I found the book an easy read even though packed with details. It was a fascinating overview of how Christianity has evolved from the teachings of a man in Galilee into a major world religion.
The book has also been covered in a six-part television show on BBC4, visiting many of the sites mentioned. According to the BBC shop online, the DVD set will be available from February 2010. I am pleased because I want to watch again to take in the things that I didn’t process fully the first time. But, for readers who have just seen the series, this book will be a must if they want to study in depth.
This boook is available from the Quaker Bookshop.
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