Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years Read Free

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. 3 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.