A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

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Introductory essays on major groups of biblical writings - Pentateuch, Prophets, Gospels, and other sections - give readers an overview that guides more intensive study.

I am a New Testament scholar, with an expertise in Pauline Theology, who has spent my working life trying to make New Testament scholarship more accessible for non-experts.

Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty - and inspired its most sublime accomplishments. His book is very thorough, covering the topic from ancient polytheistic Mediterranean mythology up through the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostics, and early Christianity. For the historian Charles Freeman, this noxious combination of secular and ecclesiastical power stands as the origin of the development he described earlier in The Closing of the Western Mind (Anchor, 2005). When I worked in China for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bays was frequently sought out by me and other reporters who needed to understand the long view of Christianity in China. A History of Christianity (2010), which was adapted into a six-part BBC television series, was awarded the Cundill and Hessel-Tiltman Prizes.

This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. I find that very engaging and exciting – that you can meet someone from this very remote place, this very remote world, and still feel, ‘Yes – I could talk to this person. He tells the story of the European colonialists in the 15th and 16th centuries, which is a Portuguese/Spanish story, and he tells the story of the English and their missionary efforts, evangelicals for the most part, in the 19th century. Apart from the fact that Aquinas would have seen every page he wrote as seeking to hold the philosophical and the relational or personal together, Dante's Paradiso sets out what it was like, imaginatively and spiritually, to sense these dimensions of faith as essentially one.Diarmaid MacCulloch's epic, celebrated book A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years follows the story of Christianity around the globe.

The edition is intended for use by students and scholars of Latin literature, theology and Church history. D. 381, Theodosius, emperor of the eastern Roman empire, issued a decree in which all his subjects were required to subscribe to a belief in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He tells us that great story about going to Rome and standing in the ruins of the forum as the friars chanted in the background.Maps are included throughout the text, helping to illuminate every chapter of Christianity’s global journey. The Ottoman Empire had tolerated them and given them an honoured place in its setup, but a terrible intolerance set in in the 19th century, I think provoked by anger against the West.

If Rembrandt is, as has been said, the greatest Protestant commentator on the Bible, we might have expected more of a nod in his direction. I have been fascinated by the Bible since my earliest days in Sunday school, coloring pictures of Noah’s Ark. What Christianity brought into all this was a definition of Jewish identity that opened up to become a definition of human identity independent of any particular state apparatus; it created, you could say, the very idea of a religion as a form of belonging together that did not depend on political loyalties. I would love to hear Gibbon’s comments on fundamentalism in the United States, or in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Still, "the source notes are often more interesting than the text, and the bibliography is thorough and up-to-date, the most useful part of the entire work.