Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years Read Free Page A

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. 4 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