Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years Read Free Page B

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.
    Repeatedly the Bible has come to mean salvation to a particular people or cultural grouping by saving not merely their souls, but their language, and hence their very identity. So it was, for example, for the people of Wales, through the Bible published for the first time in good literary Welsh by the Protestant Bishop William Morgan in 1588. Morgan's Bible preserved the special character of Welsh culture in the face of the superior resources and colonial self-confidence of the English, and it also ensured, against all likelihood in the early Reformation, that the religious expression of the Welsh became overwhelmingly Protestant. 5 So it was too for Koreans at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Korean Bible translation revived their alphabet and became a symbol of their national pride, sustaining them through Japanese repression and paving the way for the extraordinary success of Christianity in Korea over the last half-century. And one of the reasons for the obstinate survival and now huge revival of Orthodox Christianity has been a story (largely unknown in the Christian West) of biblical translation, undertaken by the Russian Orthodox Church for an astonishing variety of language groups in Eastern Europe and the area of the former Soviet Union.
    The Bible thus embodies not a tradition, but many traditions. Self-styled 'Traditionalists' often forget that the nature of tradition is not that of a humanly manufactured mechanical or architectural structure with a constant outline and form, but rather that of a plant, pulsing with life and continually changing shape while keeping the same ultimate identity. The Bible's authority for Christians lies in the fact they have a special relationship with it that can never be altered, like the relationship of parent and child. This does not deny relationships with other books which may be both deep and long-lasting, and it does not necessarily make the parental relationship easy or pleasant. It is simply of a different kind, and can never be abrogated. Once we see this, much modern neurosis about the authority of the Bible can be laid aside. Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally.
    Books are the storehouses for human ideas. Three great religions which come from the Middle East centre their practice on a sacred book and are indeed frequently known as Religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. This book about the people of a book therefore necessarily discusses ideas. Many readers may want to see it as a narrative: students and scholars may find it helpful to test how social and political history both breed and are transformed by theology. Ideas, once born, often develop lives of their own within human history, and they need to be understood in their own terms as they interact with societies and structures. Christianity in its first five centuries was in many respects a dialogue between Judaism and Graeco-Roman philosophy, trying to solve such problems as how a human being might also be God, or how one might sensibly describe three manifestations of the one Christian God, which came to be known collectively as the Trinity. After much ill-tempered debate on such matters, the outcome of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was dictated by political circumstances and did not carry the whole Christian world with it. The schisms which followed were made permanent by the political bitterness aroused by the Western Crusades of the High Middle Ages, their transmutation into attacks on Eastern Christians