Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2 page)

The intimacy of Crossman's lines hints at the degree to which Christianity is, at root, a personality cult. Its central message is the story of a person, Jesus, whom Christians believe is also the Christ (from a Greek word meaning 'Anointed One'): an aspect of the God who was, is and ever shall be, yet who is at the same time a human being, set in historic time. Christians believe that they can still meet this human being in a fashion comparable to the experience of the disciples who walked with him in Galilee and saw him die on the Cross. They are convinced that this meeting transforms lives, as has been evident in the experience of other Christians across the centuries. This book is their story.

There are two thousand years' worth of Christian stories to tell, which may seem a daunting task for historians who are used to modern European professional expectations that a true scholar knows a lot about not very much. Yet two millennia are not very much. Christianity has to be seen as a young religion, far younger than, for instance, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism or its own parent, Judaism, and it occupies a small fraction of the lived experience of what is so far a very short-lived species. I have given the book a subtitle which invites the reader to consider whether Christianity has a future (the indications, it must be said, can hardly be other than affirmative); yet it also points to the fact that what became Christian ideas have a human past in the minds of people who lived before the time of Jesus Christ. 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. Some readers may find it sceptical, but as my old doctoral supervisor Sir Geoffrey Elton once remarked in my hearing, if historians are not sceptical, they are nothing.
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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 simply the pristine, innovative teachings of Jesus Christ, it draws on two much more ancient cultural wellsprings, Greece and Israel. The story must therefore begin more than a millennium before Jesus, among the ancient Greeks and the Jews, two races which alike thought that they had a uniquely privileged place in the world's history. The extraordinary cultural achievements in art, philosophy and science of the ancient Greeks gave them good reason to think this. 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. The first generations of Christians were Jews who lived in a world shaped by Greek elite culture. They had to try to fit together these two irreconcilable visions of God, and the results have never been and never can be a stable answer to an unending question.

After the period of Jesus's life and its immediate aftermath, as I try to explain in Part II of this book, the history of Christianity can only be a unified narrative for around three centuries before it begins to diverge into language-families: Latin-speakers, Greek-speakers and those speaking Oriental languages (the chief among them being of course Jesus Christ himself). As a result, after the three or four centuries which followed the birth of Jesus, the story of Christianity told here is divided three ways. One split emerged because a section of Christianity, the Church within the Roman Empire, found itself suddenly receiving patronage and increasingly unquestioning support from the successors of the emperors who had formerly persecuted it. Those to the east of that empire did not. Within the imperial Church, there was a further division between those who, when looking for a formal language in which to express themselves, habitually chose Greek and those who turned to Latin. This tripartite split became institutionalized after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the three tales can thereafter be told with little overlap until around 1700.

First is the Christianity which in the early centuries one would have expected to become dominant, that of the Middle Eastern homeland of Jesus. The Christians of the Middle East spoke a language akin to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus himself, the language which developed into Syriac, and very early they began developing an identity which diverged from the Greek-speakers who first dominated most of the great Christian centres of the Roman Empire to the west. Many of these Syriac Christians were on the margins of the empire. When, at Chalcedon, a Roman emperor sought to impose a solution to a difficult theological problem - how to talk of the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ - most Syrians rejected his solution, though they radically disagreed among themselves as to why they were rejecting it, taking precisely opposite views, which are most precisely if inelegantly described as 'Miaphysite' and 'Dyophysite'. We will find Miaphysite and Dyophysite Syriac Christians performing remarkable feats of mission in north-east Africa, India and East Asia, although their story was also profoundly and destructively altered by the coming of a new monotheism from the same Semitic homeland, Islam. Still in the eighth century of the Christian era, the great new city of Baghdad would have been a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. The extraordinary accident of the irruption of Islam is the chief reason why Christian history turned in another direction.

The second story is that of the Western, Latin-speaking Church, which came to look to the Bishop of Rome, and within which he became an unchallenged leader. In the Latin West, the prominence of the Bishop of Rome, already often referred to as
papa
('Pope'), was becoming apparent during the fourth century, as the emperors abandoned Rome, and he was increasingly left to his own devices at a time when more and more power was flowing into the hands of churchmen. After this Western story has reached the point in the fourteenth century when the papal project of monarchy ran into difficulties, we move eastwards to meet the third story, of Orthodoxy. Like Rome, the Orthodox are the heirs of the Roman Empire, but whereas Western Latin Christians emerged out of the ruins of the western half of that empire, the Greek-speaking Eastern Church was shaped by the continuing rule of the Eastern emperor. Just when it seemed doomed to decay after the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans, a new variety of Orthodoxy far to the north began revealing its potential as leader among the Orthodox: I outline the development of Russian Christianity. The Western Latin story resumes with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which tore the Western Church into fragments, but which also launched Christianity as the first world faith. From 1700, the three stories converge once more, as the world was united by the expansion of Western Christian empires. Despite their present variety, modern Christianities are more closely in touch than they have been since the first generations of Christians in the first-century Middle East.

I seek to give due weight in these narratives to the tangled and often tragic story of the relations between Christianity and its mother-monotheism, Judaism, as well as with its monotheistic younger cousin, Islam. For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes. Even now, by no means all sections of the Christian world have undergone the mutation of believing unequivocally in tolerating or accepting any partnership with other belief systems. In particular I highlight the huge consequences when the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century monarchs of the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) reinvented their multi-faith society as a Christian monopoly and then exported that single-minded form of Christianity to other parts of the world. I develop the theme which became (rather to my surprise) a ground-bass of the narrative in my previous book,
Reformation
: 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. Here I examine the role of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Christian empires in creating a reaction of fundamentalist intolerance within other modern world faiths, principally Islam, Judaism and Hinduism.

Deeply embedded in Christian tradition is a vocabulary of 'repentance' and 'conversion', both words which mean 'turning around'. So this book describes some of the ways in which individuals were turned around by Christianity, but also the ways in which they could turn around what Christianity meant. We will meet Paul of Tarsus, suddenly struck down by what he heard as a universal message for all human beings, who then quarrelled fiercely with other disciples of Jesus who saw their Lord as a Messiah sent only to the Jews. 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. There is Constantine, the soldier who hacked his way to total control of the Roman Empire and became convinced that the Christian God had destined him to do so - for Constantine, his side of the bargain was to turn Christians from a harried, suppressed cult, accused of ruining the empire, into the most favoured and privileged of all Roman religions.

In the old city of Jerusalem is a medieval church which stands on the site of the basilica that the Emperor Constantine and his mother built over the likely site of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ.
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Within the walls of what the Western Churches call the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the Orthodox give it an entirely different name, the
Anastasis
, Resurrection), the results of Constantine's decision are played out daily in the epically bad behaviour of the various fragments of the imperial Christian Church whose adherents worship in the building. I have witnessed early one December morning the instructive spectacle of two rival ancient liturgies noisily proceeding simultaneously above the empty tomb of the Saviour himself, on opposite faces of the ugly and perilously decayed nineteenth-century Sepulchre shrine. It was a perfect juxtaposition of Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christianity, as the serenity of a Latin Mass with full organ struggled against the spirited chanting of the Miaphysite Copts (see Plate 21). I particularly enjoyed the moment when the bearer of the Coptic censer swept with brio around the shrine to the very frontier of the rival liturgy and sent his cloud of incense billowing into the heretical Latin West. The extremes of Christianity result from its seizing the most profound and extreme passions of humanity. Its story cannot be a mere abstract tale of theology or historical change.

The central text of Christianity is the Bible, as mysterious and labyrinthine a library as that portrayed by Umberto Eco in
The Name of the Rose
. It has two parts, the Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures), which Christians retained as their 'Old Testament', and a new set of books, the 'New Testament', concentrating on the life, death, resurrection and immediate after-effects of Jesus Christ. It describes ancient encounters with God which are far from straightforward. God knows who God is, as he once remarked to Moses out of the fire of a burning bush. Jewish and Christian traditions want to say at the same time that God has a personal relationship with individual human beings and that he is also beyond all naming, all characterization. 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.
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The Bible speaks with many voices, including shouts of anger against God. It tells stories which it does not pretend ever happened, in order to express profound truths, such as we read in the books of Jonah and Job. It is also full of criticism of Church tradition, in the class of writings known as prophecy, which spend much of their energy in denouncing the clergy and the clerical teaching of their day. This should provide a healthy warning to all those who aspire to tell other people what to do on the basis of the Bible.

From the biblical text, a great variety of Christian and pre-Christian themes re-emerge periodically in new guises. In Ethiopia, Miaphysite Christianity returned to the practices of mainstream Judaism, borrowing features of worship and life-practice (such as circumcision and refraining from eating pork) which shocked sixteenth-century Jesuits coming from Counter-Reformation Europe. One of the most numerically successful movements of modern Christianity, Pentecostalism, has centred its appeal on a particular form of communication with the divine, speaking in tongues, which was severely mistrusted by Paul of Tarsus and which (despite the understandable claims of Pentecostals to the contrary) has very little precedent in Christian practice between the first and the nineteenth centuries CE.

A much more frequent recurrence has been that basic theme of the founder so far never fulfilled, the imminence of the Last Days - for some reason, a particularly common theme in Western rather than Eastern Christianity. In the medieval West, it was usually the property of the powerless, but it became mainstream in sixteenth-century Europe's Reformation, playing a major part in launching warfare and revolution. After the nineteenth-century addition of particular sub-themes, premillennialism and the 'Rapture' of the saved, it has come to play an equal part in American conservative evangelical Protestantism, and it has spread throughout Asia, South America and Africa wherever Western Pentecostalism has taken root and become an indigenous religion. It is not surprising that so many have sought the Last Days. The writing and telling of history is bedevilled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again. This is the impulse which makes King Arthur's knights sleep under certain mountains, ready to bring deliverance, or creates the fascination with the Knights Templar and occult conspiracy which propelled
The Da Vinci Code
into best-seller lists.