Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years,
Viking Penguin, 2010, 1016 Pages plus 96 pages of notes

Normally, Christianity is said to be 2,000 years old, but MacCulloch claims that the 1,000 years between King David and Jesus Christ are the first millennium of Christian history, during which key notions that would shape its thinking and imagery were established. These include the longing for a deliverer sent from God to visit and redeem His people. However, Christianity also incorporates ideas borrowed from Classical Greece (especially Plato) and organizational systems from the Roman Empire. Christianity has been a very adaptive religion(s) which is why it has more than two billion adherents—almost four times its number in 1990 and a third of the world’s population—and half a billion more followers than its nearest rival Islam. Of course, it has never been unified into a single, coherent belief system and is unlikely to ever be. This is well illustrated in this books extended discussions of the theological disputes which once aroused passions bewildering to us today.

Unlike the Church of the West, oriental Christianity had no political support. It could not withstand the rise of Islam, and throughout North Africa, Egypt and Asia, oriental Christianity succumbed to Islamic rule.
Christianity’s success in converting indigenous populations, particularly in South America, is attributable to these populations vulnerability to the diseases the Europeans brought with them and the failure of their own religions to protect them.

My Notes:

A particularly interesting section of the book explains how the killing in warfare was a problem for the nobles in the European Carolingian areas of dominance. Warfare was necessary to placate the nobility’s need for plunder, but the Catholic dictates condemning killing, even in warfare, remained a problem. This was solved by the nobles by creating monasteries and nunneries on their estates, thus providing monks to perform the necessary penance to remove the sin from the resident nobility. This was possible as the Catholic religion at the time, although demanding penance for killing did not care who actually performed the penance. Of course these monasteries had the additional benefit of providing a dumping ground for non-inheriting sons of the nobility as well as daughters. Yet, to their credit, it is doubtful that European civilization would have survived without the monasteries and nunneries.

The Roman Catholic Church is the biggest religious show on Earth. There is a tendency in human nature, fearful of its own capacity for chaos, to long for absolute authority and the order it promises, which is why the Roman Catholic Church is unlikely to go out of business any time soon.

Pg. 12: There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

Pg. 23: It was in the Greek alphabet that the earliest known Christian texts were written.

Pg. 31: 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.

Pg. 83: Mark’s text is generally held to be written earlier than Matthew, Luke, or John. They are all likely to have been written in the last three decades of the first century, around a half a century after Jesus died.

Pg. 102: Paul’s theological world has curiously little interest in the life and teaching of its founder, concentrating instead on the effect of his death and resurrection in God’s cosmic plan. All Christians alive today are the heirs of the Church which Paul created. The other type of Christianity once headed by James, the brother of the Lord, has disappeared.

Pg. 135: It is unclear whether Peter had actually played the role of bishop in the Church in Rome, even if he did indeed die in the city, and the names traditionally provided for his successor bishops up to the end of the first century are no more than names. They are probably the result of later second-century back-projection to create a history for the episcopal succession in the era when episcopal succession had become significant.

Pg. 166: By the end of the second century, the Roman empire ceased to expand; it reached its maximum extent under the Emperor Trajan (reigned 98-117), who annexed new territories in what are now Romania and Iraq.

Pg. 301: Augustine probably has had nearly as much influence on Christianity as Paul and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine’s eyes. Augustine was a Latin-speaking theologian who had little interest in Greek literature, only came to the Greek language late in life, read virtually nothing of Plato or Aristotle, and had very little influence on the Greek Church.

Pg. 304: In 412 CE Augustine provided theological reasons for repression: he pointed out that Jesus had told a parable in which a host had filled up places at his banquet with an order, ‘Compel them to come in.’ That meant that a Christian government had the duty to support the Church by punishing heresy and schism. This was a side of Augustine’s teaching which had much appeal to Christian regimes for centuries to come.

Pg. 333: The Irish clergy developed a series of ‘tariff books’ which were based on the idea not only that sin could be atoned for through penance, but that it was possible to work out exact scales of what penance was appropriate for what sin: tariffs of forgiveness. In the seventh century they brought tariff books with them when they started spreading their faith in northern and central Europe. Despite its dramatic success, the whole system directly contradicted Augustine’s theology of grace, and that was to become an issue which helped permanently to split the Western Church in the sixteenth century Reformation.

Pg 355: During the eighth century the Celtic monks radically changed the older Christian idea of confession as a single event in an individual’s life, something like a second baptism, into an encounter with a priest to be repeated again and again using the tariff books as their guide. By the 1170s theologians came up with the name of Purgatory for an already growing belief in a middle ground between hell and heaven. (Marriage became a sacrament during the 11th and 12th centuries.

Pg. 366: Most of the churches constructed in the eleventh century were built as stages or goals on pilgrimage tracks. The Compostela pilgrimage was only the flagship of this great new industry.

Pg. 367: In the early medieval period, the chief way of gathering wealth was by warfare, yielding plunder and slaves; the Carolingian kings survived by giving handouts to their warlords. By the eleventh century this system was coming to an end.

Pg. 372: Churchmen were deeply concerned about the loss of ecclesiastical estates to possession by families; that had a further effect on the Church’s regulation of marriage. Very many clergy at that time who were not monks customarily married. Married clergy might well found dynasties, and might therefore be inclined to make Church lands into their hereditary property. The result was a long battle to forbid marriage for all clergy, not just monks: to make them compulsorily celibate. There had been efforts to achieve this before, and the Western Church had from the fourth century generally prevented higher clergy from being married, but in 1139 a council at the Lateran Palace declared all clerical marriages not only unlawful but invalid.

Pg. 400: One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals. For instance, in 1321 there was panic all over France that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Pogroms followed.

Pg. 405: In 1215 the Lateran council declared the principal of transubstantiation. Also it was declared mandatory that each person confess at least once per year and receive communion.

Pg. 443: Augustine concluded that the ten commandments needed renumbering in order to allow statues and paintings in churches (graven images). So the second commandment forbidding graven images was dropped and the tenth commandment on covetousness was split, thereby preserving the sacred ten. The Eastern church did not go along with this and retained the graven image prohibition; they did not consider icons to be images.

Pg. 552: Through several years, 1348-53, the effect of the Black Death in Europe was more thoroughgoing than any other recorded disaster: proportionally, it was far more destructive than the First World War, with perhaps as many as one in three of the population dying, and in some places up to two-thirds.

Pg. 602: 1John 5 7-8 is the only explicit mention in the Bible of the Trinity in something like its developed form.

Pg. 686: Maybe forty or fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial North America on witchcraft charges between 1400 and 1800, most noticeably from around 1560, at just about the time when large-scale execution of heretics was coming to an end. The Salem incident of 1692 led to around 150 prosecutions and nineteen executions.

Pg. 696: About half the indigenous population of the Americas died in the first wave of epidemics. By 1800 indigenous populations in the western hemisphere were a tenth of what they had been three centuries before.

Pg. 763: The elite education of the American Revolutionary leaders tended to lead them to the Enlightenment and Deism versions of Christianity, or virtually no Christianity at all. The constitution which they created made no mention of God or Christianity.

Pg. 825: At the 1869 First Vatican Council Pope Pius IX was declared ‘possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith and morals’. This authority, so far, has only been used in 1950 by Pius XII to declare Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven as a fact. His decree infuriated Protestant, Orthodox and Eastern Churches alike, and did not please those Catholic theologians who cared about the doctrine’s lack of justification in the Bible or in early Church tradition.

Pg. 848: One of the most pernicious offshoots of official Russian anti-Semitism was a work of propaganda published in 1903, the work of an agent of the tsarist secret police: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document pictured an imaginary worldwide Jewish conspiracy to take-over the world. Henry Ford helped it distribution immensely in the 1920’s when he had 500,000 copies printed and distributed at his expense.

Pg. 903: At the time of the American 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 1815 active Church membership had grown to around a quarter of the population, by 1914 it was approaching half – this in a country which in the same period through immigration and natural growth had seen its numbers balloon from 8.4 million to 100 million.

Pg. 970: Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) which made dramatic changes to Catholicism: introduction of vernacular liturgy, an openness to the previous two centuries of biblical scholarship, an openness to ecumenism, an affirmation of the ministry of laypeople, and an open apology to the Jewish people that the Church had ever allowed them to be charged with deicide—the killing of God. Of course, every Pope since has tried to put the genie back in the bottle.

Pg. 996: Behind the long papacy of John Paul II was a program which could never be made too explicit: to reverse a raft of changes launched y Vatican II. Wojtylas right-hand man, Ratizinger (now Pope himself) continues the program.