A Short History of Christianity

Geoffrey Blainey

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780281076208
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia del cristianesimo

From the pen of a great historian, here is the most accessible and affordable one-volume history of Christianity you can buy.As well providing a masterly panoramic survey of the religion itself, Professor Blainey keeps you informed about the social and economic forces that influenced it, making fascinating connections with politics, literature, popular culture, other religions and wider historical events along the way. The result is a vivid account of the world's largest religion, packed with illuminating insights into the ideas and achievements of some of the most powerful people and movements that have shaped our world right up to the present day.

PART ONE

1

THE BOY FROM GALILEE

Of all the known people of the world, living or dead, Jesus is the most influential.

His birth was viewed as a momentous event, and still is. When the chronology now used in the world was created, the assumed date of his birth was singled out and named as Year One. The decision was not quite accurate. The exact year of his birth is not known. Even today, various facets of his birth, life and death are veiled in mystery and argument, and yet his influence on human history has been profound.

Jesus was Jewish, in race and culture and religion. The name ‘Jew’ is derived from ‘Judah’, which occupied half of the narrow strip of the territory flanking the Mediterranean Sea long known as Palestine. Long ago, Jesus’s ancestors had lived elsewhere. Traditionally they were known as the Hebrews, meaning the people who ‘crossed over’: in essence they were travellers or wanderers.

No matter in what land the Jews lived, they viewed Jerusalem as the holy place. It stood on a mountain ridge, held a permanent spring of fresh water, and was easily fortified. After it was captured by King David for the Hebrews in about 1000 BC, it became the site of the great temple, one of the most lavish buildings in the western world. Built by King Solomon, the son of David, it became the heart of the Jewish religion. Here sacrifices and prayers could be offered to God, and holy words read aloud by the chief priest and his attendants. Because the Jews, unlike other peoples and kingdoms of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, believed in only one God, and because the temple in Jerusalem was considered his only shrine, it is likely that no other place of pilgrimage in the Middle East and Europe was imbued with more awe. The final crisis in Jesus’s life – the start of the quick chain of events that led to his death – was on the site of King Solomon’s temple.

After the death of King Solomon his kingdom was divided into two: Israel to the north and Judah to the south. In 587 BC Jerusalem was conquered by the powerful Babylonians. The capture of Jerusalem was one of the traumatic events in the long history of a people who endured many mishaps and disasters. Many of the leading Jews were deported to Babylon. In exile they dwelt on their misfortunes and wondered whether they had so offended God that this was their punishment.

In less than half a century the Persians captured Babylon, and most of the Jews were able to return to their own land, where, in about 520, they began to rebuild the temple. Living under a succession of foreign rulers, and ultimately under a Greek-speaking regime, they eventually recaptured their own land in 142 BC. For almost eighty years they rejoiced in their independence; they would not be independent again until the twentieth century.

THE ROMANS CONQUER

In 63 BC the Romans invaded Palestine. Already possessing the largest and most diverse empire in the world, they conferred some independence on those colonies that were subservient and dutiful and which paid their taxes. Finally, appointing a local ruler under the title of King Herod, the Romans delegated power to him, and in turn he allowed the Jewish authorities considerable freedom in supervising religious life. It was near the end of the reign of Herod that Jesus was born, possibly in 6 BC.

Under the occupation of a small Roman army, the Jews maintained their unusual culture and religion. As far as possible they ignored the Romans’ gods and paid only a formal respect to the distant Roman emperor, who was increasingly worshipped as a god by those around him. Jews continued to obey the rules of their own religion. Their daily life was ruled by powerful traditions. Thus, baby boys had to be circumcised soon after birth, and it was judged unholy and unclean to neglect that rule. Certain foods, including pork, were never to be eaten. Widows and the very poor had to be cared for. The Sabbath, or Saturday, was a day of rest and worship, a strict rule that made it difficult for Jewish soldiers to serve honourably in the Roman army, although some did.

So a distinct Jewish world operated inside the Roman Empire. It is doubtful whether any other province of the empire survived as such a distinct cultural and religious entity. This was the miracle of the Jewish religion – its sheer tenacity through century after century. Jesus inherited this religion and culture.

God dominated the Jewish culture. He was their God, though not exclusively. Called the Eternal One, he was invisible and immortal, the possessor of enormous power and knowledge and an immense capacity for love as well as anger. Having created human beings in his own image, and given them a free will, he thereby gave them the opportunity to choose evil as well as good. If they obeyed his laws, his help could be relied on. He was their father – they were his children: the children of Israel. Most of the hymns they sang to him, called psalms, were written during the time of the exile in Babylon and the jubilant return to Jerusalem. In the light of their experience they could confidently proclaim: ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.’

According to the Hebrews, God was everywhere. Sometimes he was seen to be in ‘his holy temple’ or sometimes in heaven, but his spirit and his presence and his knowledge were such that he could be in ten thousand places at the same time. As Psalm 139 proclaimed, nobody could escape from him: ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?’

When the Jewish people came to Babylon, God was waiting for them. They returned to Jerusalem, and he was already there. God even knew ‘when I sit down and when I rise up’. One psalm explained that God knew one’s inner thoughts even before they were spoken.

The Hebrews’ emphasis on their all-powerful and perfect God stood side by side with their understanding of the human condition. Mankind, in contrast to God, was imperfect, with a capacity for evil as well as good. ‘Sin’ was the word widely used, but it did not equate fully with the modern meaning of sin. A sinner was disobedient to the will of God. A sinner disobeyed not only moral precepts but also cultural and ceremonial rules laid down by Moses and recorded in the books now called the Old Testament. Disbelief – atheism or agnosticism – was also a sin.

Hebrews held the view that humans had an innate disposition to be sinful: they should therefore be acutely conscious of their failings and should seek forgiveness. This sounds like a gloomy view of life but it was actually optimistic. The individuals who came to terms with their human nature could live in harmony with God, and feel deep comfort, peace and even joy. That joy might even continue after death, although personal immortality was not a common theme in the Jewish scriptures.

To many modern eyes, the Jewish attitude to God seems subservient, but to Jewish eyes God was just. Nothing on earth could approach his sense of justice. He would richly reward the good and the ‘righteous’. His love was boundless and endured forever, a message that Psalm 136 repeated two dozen times. On the other hand, God would exact vengeance on those who seriously disobeyed him, and on those who, having infringed his rules, did not repent. The Jews could not readily comprehend the idea of an unjust God. If their world was turned upside down by a natural disaster or a foreign conqueror, it was because they deserved it.

These were the Jewish beliefs that Jesus absorbed as a child. A few of them he reshaped towards the end of his short life, but most he accepted instinctively and followed wholeheartedly.

STARS AND COMETS

In the time of Jesus, the stars in the night sky were more fascinating to most people than they are today. It was believed that an unusually bright star was a sign that momentous events would soon take place. Thus, the great Roman poet Virgil described how a brilliant star had once guided the founder of Rome to the exact place where the city grew. The birth of the founder of a religion might also be announced by his own star.

According to the gospel of Matthew, three wise men or sages living in a faraway land saw a brilliant light shining in the night sky, beckoning them in the direction of Palestine. Believing it signified the birth of an exceptional child, they collected gifts for him and followed the star in the hope, indeed the certainty, that they would find the child: ‘We saw his star in the East and have come to worship him.’

The star finally halted above a small building where a mother named Mary nursed her newborn son, Jesus. On entering the doorway, the wise men ‘fell down and worshipped’ him. From their bags they unpacked their gifts, which included gold – the emblem of kings – and frankincense and myrrh.

This charming story, or allegory, was later set down in writing, to be recounted century after century, and altered a little in the retelling. The baby was so important that the three wise men were thought to deserve more prestige, and they eventually became three kings. About five hundred years later they were belatedly given names.

The birth of Jesus eventually caught the imagination of a large part of the world, and even The Three Kings, now spelled in capital letters, became the unseen passengers in major voyages of exploration. When Christopher Columbus discovered Cuba, which he first thought was somewhere near the Holy Land, he told his crew he expected to go ashore and find the source of the gifts that The Three Kings had placed at the feet of Jesus. When Abel Tasman, the Dutchman, discovered New Zealand and named some of its headlands and adjacent islands during his fleeting visit, he selected one biblical name. He conferred on several rugged islands not the name of an apostle but the title of The Three Kings.

Independent evidence suggests that unusual events did indeed occur in the skies around the time of Jesus’s birth. One was the brilliant spectacle of Halley’s comet, which made one of its rare appearances in 12 or 11 BC. Another was the uncommon convergence of three planets – Jupiter, Saturn and Mars – in 8 BC.

The place of Jesus’s birth is not known with certainty. Mark, the author of the earliest gospel or life of Jesus, did not specify a birthplace. The other gospel-writers nominated Bethlehem, a small town only a morning’s stroll from Jerusalem. Being the home of David, the hero of Jewish history, Bethlehem was a fitting birthplace for someone soon to be hailed as the saviour of the Jewish people. It is said by Luke that Jesus’s parents actually lived in Nazareth but were compelled by a coming census to be present in Bethlehem at what proved to be the time of his birth. In fact, the records reveal that no census was held at that time, and even if it had been held, the officials would not have compelled inhabitants to make a long journey simply in order to be counted in the place where their family originated.

The town of Nazareth in Galilee, where Jesus spent most of his life, is seen by some as the alternative birthplace. Indeed, his followers were initially called the Nazarenes, and Jesus himself is described in the New Testament as Jesus the Nazarene. Several modern biblical scholars, after surveying the evidence, can affirm no more than that he was a Galilean: ‘We must conclude that we do not know where he was born.’

Jesus’s father’s name was Joseph, and his mother’s name was Mary, and it was she who would rise to fame as the centuries passed. According to Mark’s gospel, Jesus also had younger brothers and sisters, but some scholars say that these were really cousins or other relatives who shared his upbringing,. A matter of deep importance to the people who came to be called Christians, it will be discussed later.

There can be little doubt that Joseph and Mary nurtured their family. From an early age, Jesus attended a synagogue and learned the highlights of the books now called the Old Testament. He also learned to read and write, accomplishments that were not attained by most people living in his home town.

It is reported that Jesus, as a boy of twelve, went with his parents to Jerusalem. A journey that took several days on foot, it was made at the annual feast of the Passover, the foremost festival of the Jewish calendar. It was a wonderful time to be in that small city, in the company of Jewish pilgrims from near and far; and in the temple, Jesus listened to the various teachers and to readings from the Jewish scriptures. He was so eager to explore that his parents could not find him. Discovered at last ‘sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions’, he explained his disappearance with surprising authority: ‘Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’

These are his first recorded words. The word ‘must’, emphasising the nature of his relationship with God, is significant. Luke, in his gospel, reports Jesus using that word on eighteen different occasions. The young Jesus, as depicted in the various gospels, conveys an unusual air of duty.

Jesus became a carpenter and also acquired som...