Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch is a doorstop of a book that is readable, fascinating, and approachable.

When historian Diarmaid MacCulloch set out to write “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years,” he made an interesting choice right in the title that added several hundred pages to the book. By starting his history a millennium before Jesus’s birth, MacCulloch argues that you can’t understand Christianity without grasping the Greek philosophical and Jewish theological ideas from which it grew. Over 1,016 densely packed pages, the book is definitely the most comprehensive single-volume history of the world’s largest religion ever written.

The book was published in 2010, so it’s missing the absolute most recent updates…but the last chapters are not out of date at all. Even though the book is about a lightning-rod controversial topic, it stands out for its scholarly rigor and refreshing evenhandedness. MacCulloch, himself a former Anglican deacon, a “candid friend of Christianity”, approaches his subject with both intimate knowledge and critical distance. He manages to thread the needle between respect for believers and clear-eyed historical analysis.

Takeaways

There are a lot of interesting quotes, facts, tidbits, etc throughout the book. But the main themes were –

Christianity Is More Diverse Than You Think

MacCulloch demolishes any notion of a monolithic Christian tradition. From the earliest Jewish-Christian communities (i.e., like the Apostle Paul and the Jerusalem Church) to the explosion of African and Asian Christianity today, the faith has constantly spawned new interpretations and practices. What we think of as “traditional Christianity” is often just one branch that happened to gain power in a specific area for a specific reason in time. Most Christians know their congregation and maybe a neighbor group (i.e., United Methodists on one block and the strange Presbyterians across the street), but rarely know anything about congregations around the world or that came from a different tradition.

It’s All About Translation

One of the book’s most fascinating threads is how Christianity became a “religion of translation.” Unlike Islam’s emphasis on Arabic or Judaism’s on Hebrew, Christians translated their texts and ideas into local languages and cultures from the start. This adaptability helped it spread but also created endless debates about authenticity and authority. In fact, the original, vicious split in the 11th Century (i.e., “The Great Schism”) happened because one side spoke Greek and the other spoke Latin and linguistics had not been invented…and so the Roman and Eastern churches split over what they both admitted in the 20th Century to be no difference at all.

Politics and Religion Are Inseparable

MacCulloch shows how political power shaped Christian doctrine and vice versa. From Constantine’s conversion to modern culture wars, the line between church and state has always been blurry. Every major theological dispute had political implications, and every major political shift affected how people interpreted Christianity.

The Global Story Was Always Global

While many histories focus on Western Christianity, MacCulloch gives extensive attention to Eastern Orthodox traditions and early Christian communities in Asia and Africa. He reveals how Christianity was a global phenomenon long before European colonialism, with thriving churches along the Silk Road and in Ethiopia, in India, and even into China.

Geography Matters

The book emphasizes how physical geography shaped Christian development. The split between Eastern and Western churches wasn’t just about theology – it reflected the natural division between Greek and Latin language zones. Mountain ranges, trade routes, and climate all influenced how Christianity evolved in different regions. The Alps and cultural differences in Germany drove much of the Reformation, ditto with England’s status as an island.

The history challenges both secular dismissals of religion as mere superstition and fundamentalist claims about an unchanging faith handed down from the apostles. MacCulloch shows how Christianity has been continuously reimagined and reinvented while maintaining certain core continuities. Christianity has maintained a core story thanks to the written word, but so much of “old-time” Christianity is incredibly new…and it always has been. One of the most interesting anecdotes was how J.S. Bach was heavily criticized for his church music that had “strange harmonies” and “bombastic variations”. Same with many “traditions” and beliefs that are, at most, 80 to 100 years old.

For anyone interested in history, religion, or how ideas evolve over time, MacCulloch’s work offers invaluable insights into how a small Jewish sect became a global force that has shaped art, politics, philosophy, and human consciousness for two millennia. It’s a reminder that understanding Christianity – whether you’re a believer or not – is essential for understanding our world.

What I Liked

To be an absolute tome and written as an “Oxford History”, the book is very well-written and readable. And even though it’s 1000+ pages, the book is so comprehensive that once it’s broken down into areas & era, it’s more like a bunch of mini-books.

The author has the perfect background to write a book like this. He’s kind, understanding, friendly, and rigorous. He also has just an insane store of knowledge that allows him to make connections across centuries. And since he grew up deep in the Church, he also has an understanding of the emotional resonance of beliefs & traditions along with the ability to sort controversies that, even though they are a big deal…aren’t a big deal, from those that don’t seem like a big deal…but actually are.

The book is chock full of anecdotes, interesting characters, and funny events.

Since the book is so comprehensive with such a thoughtful framework, it makes so many other books, articles, etc on Christianity make sense.

What I Did Not Like

The book is physically big. Like, it’s hard to hold and read. Even though I started with a copy from the library, by page 60, I had bought the ebook edition from Amazon for my Kindle.

There were some dense chapters, especially on the Eastern Orthodox Church. Even though they are a very important branch of Christianity, they have actually changed very little over a very long time. Most of their deal comes from political influence & infighting…which, despite the author’s best intentions, becomes a giant list of boring dates & names.

Quotes

This is emphatically a personal view of the sweep of Christian history, so I make no apology for stating my own position in the story: the reader of a book which pontificates on religion has a right to know. I come from a background in which the Church was a three-generation family business, and from a childhood spent in the rectory of an Anglican country parish, a world not unlike that of the Rev. Samuel Crossman, of which I have the happiest memories. I was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and I remember with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the statements of Christian belief. I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems. I live with the puzzle of wonder- ing how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species. It is in part to answer that question for myself that I seek out the history of this world faith, alongside those of humankind’s countless other expressions of religious belief and practice. Maybe some familiar with theological jargon will with charity regard this as an apophatic form of the Christian faith.

I make no pronouncement as to whether Christianity, or indeed any religious belief, is ‘true’. This is a necessary self-denying ordinance. Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet ‘true’? It never happened, but it seems to me to be much more ‘true’, full of meaning and significance for human beings, than the reality of the breakfast I ate this morning, which was certainly ‘true’ in a banal sense. Christianity’s claim to truth is absolutely central to it over much of the past two thousand years, and much of this history is dedicated to tracing the varieties of this claim and the competition between them. But historians do not possess a prerogative to pronounce on the truth of the existence of God itself, any more than do (for example) biologists. There is, however, an important aspect of Christianity on which it is the occupation of historians to speak: the story of Christianity is undeniably true, in that it is part of human history. Historical truth can be just as exciting and satisfying as any fictional style of construction, because it represents the flotsam from a host of individual stories of human beings like ourselves. Most of them are beyond recall or can only be tantalizingly glimpsed, with the aid of the techniques which historians have built up over the last three centuries.

The author’s statement on his perspective

Why was Rome’s expansion so remarkably successful? Plenty of other states produced dramatic expansion, but survived for no more than a few generations or a couple of centuries at most. The western part of the Roman state survived for twelve hundred years, and in its eastern form the Roman Empire had a further thousand years of life after that. The answer probably lies in another contrast with Greece: the Romans had very little sense of racial exclusiveness. They gave away Roman citizenship to deserving foreigners by deserving, they would mean those who had something to offer them in return, if only grateful collaboration. Occasionally whole areas would be granted citizenship. It was even possible for slaves to make the leap from being non-persons to being citizens, simply by a formal ceremony before a magistrate, or by provision in their owners’ wills.

A status game based on ability

If there is any one explanation why the Latin West experienced a Reformation and the Greek-speaking lands to the east did not, it lies in this experience of listening to a new voice in the New Testament text.

Humanist scholarship had general consequences for the way in which the Bible was experienced in the Western Church, and moved it still further from the common tradition which had united Catholicism and Orthodoxy, just at the time when political circumstances were doing the same thing.

On why The Reformation only happened to the Latin Church

Much, and most of the greatest, of Christian art has been produced by those decidedly outside or on the margins of Christian tradition of their time

Even Bach was hounded for his ridiculous harmonies

Can the many faces of Christianity find a message which will remake religion for a society which has decided to do without it?

Original sin is one of the more plausible concepts within the Western Christian package, corresponding all too accurately to everyday human experience. One great encouragement to sin is an absence of wonder. Even those who see the Christian story as just that a series of stories – may find sanity in the experience of wonder: the ability to listen and contemplate. It would be very surprising if this religion, so youthful, yet so varied in its historical experience, had now revealed all its secrets.

Author’s final takeaway

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