Christianity - The First Three Thousand Years Part 1

Christianity_ The First Three Thousand Years.

by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Introduction.

In seventeenth-century England, there lived a country parson called Samuel Crossman. A rather reluctant Anglican of Puritan outlook, he spent most of his ministry in a small Gloucesters.h.i.+re parish, whose chief hamlet is delightfully called Easter Compton, though briefly at the end of his life he was Dean of Bristol Cathedral. Crossman wrote a handful of devotional poems, one of which, in a most unusual metre, is a work of genius. Beginning 'My song is Love unknown', it ends the tale of Jesus's arrest, trial, death and burial with an exclamation of quiet joy that this suffering so long before had shaped the life of Mr Crossman in his little English parsonage: Here might I stay and sing, No story so divine; Never was love, dear King!

Never was grief like Thine.

This is my Friend, In Whose sweet praise I all my days Could gladly spend.

1.

The intimacy of Crossman's lines hints at the degree to which Christianity is, at root, a personality cult. Its central message is the story of a person, Jesus, whom Christians believe is also the Christ (from a Greek word meaning 'Anointed One'): an aspect of the G.o.d who was, is and ever shall be, yet who is at the same time a human being, set in historic time. Christians believe that they can still meet this human being in a fas.h.i.+on comparable to the experience of the disciples who walked with him in Galilee and saw him die on the Cross. They are convinced that this meeting transforms lives, as has been evident in the experience of other Christians across the centuries. This book is their story.

There are two thousand years' worth of Christian stories to tell, which may seem a daunting task for historians who are used to modern European professional expectations that a true scholar knows a lot about not very much. Yet two millennia are not very much. Christianity has to be seen as a young religion, far younger than, for instance, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism or its own parent, Judaism, and it occupies a small fraction of the lived experience of what is so far a very short-lived species. I have given the book a subt.i.tle which invites the reader to consider whether Christianity has a future (the indications, it must be said, can hardly be other than affirmative); yet it also points to the fact that what became Christian ideas have a human past in the minds of people who lived before the time of Jesus Christ. As well as telling stories, my book asks questions. It tries to avoid giving too many answers, since this habit has been one of the great vices of organized religion. Some readers may find it sceptical, but as my old doctoral supervisor Sir Geoffrey Elton once remarked in my hearing, if historians are not sceptical, they are nothing.

2.

The book conceives the overall structure of Christian history differently, I believe, from any of its predecessors. Within the cl.u.s.ter of beliefs making up Christian faith is an instability which comes from a twofold ancestry. Far from being simply the pristine, innovative teachings of Jesus Christ, it draws on two much more ancient cultural wellsprings, Greece and Israel. The story must therefore begin more than a millennium before Jesus, among the ancient Greeks and the Jews, two races which alike thought that they had a uniquely privileged place in the world's history. The extraordinary cultural achievements in art, philosophy and science of the ancient Greeks gave them good reason to think this. More surprising is the fact that the Jews' constant experience of misfortune did not kill their faith in their own destiny. Instead it drove them to conceive of their G.o.d not simply as all-powerful, but as pa.s.sionately concerned with their response to him, in anger as well as in love. Such an intensely personal deity, they began to a.s.sert, was nevertheless the G.o.d for all humanity. He was very different from the supreme deity who emerged from Greek philosophy in the thought of Plato: all-perfect, therefore immune to change and devoid of the pa.s.sion which denotes change. The first generations of Christians were Jews who lived in a world shaped by Greek elite culture. They had to try to fit together these two irreconcilable visions of G.o.d, and the results have never been and never can be a stable answer to an unending question.

After the period of Jesus's life and its immediate aftermath, as I try to explain in Part II of this book, the history of Christianity can only be a unified narrative for around three centuries before it begins to diverge into language-families: Latin-speakers, Greek-speakers and those speaking Oriental languages (the chief among them being of course Jesus Christ himself). As a result, after the three or four centuries which followed the birth of Jesus, the story of Christianity told here is divided three ways. One split emerged because a section of Christianity, the Church within the Roman Empire, found itself suddenly receiving patronage and increasingly unquestioning support from the successors of the emperors who had formerly persecuted it. Those to the east of that empire did not. Within the imperial Church, there was a further division between those who, when looking for a formal language in which to express themselves, habitually chose Greek and those who turned to Latin. This tripart.i.te split became inst.i.tutionalized after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the three tales can thereafter be told with little overlap until around 1700.

First is the Christianity which in the early centuries one would have expected to become dominant, that of the Middle Eastern homeland of Jesus. The Christians of the Middle East spoke a language akin to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus himself, the language which developed into Syriac, and very early they began developing an ident.i.ty which diverged from the Greek-speakers who first dominated most of the great Christian centres of the Roman Empire to the west. Many of these Syriac Christians were on the margins of the empire. When, at Chalcedon, a Roman emperor sought to impose a solution to a difficult theological problem - how to talk of the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ - most Syrians rejected his solution, though they radically disagreed among themselves as to why they were rejecting it, taking precisely opposite views, which are most precisely if inelegantly described as 'Miaphysite' and 'Dyophysite'. We will find Miaphysite and Dyophysite Syriac Christians performing remarkable feats of mission in north-east Africa, India and East Asia, although their story was also profoundly and destructively altered by the coming of a new monotheism from the same Semitic homeland, Islam. Still in the eighth century of the Christian era, the great new city of Baghdad would have been a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. The extraordinary accident of the irruption of Islam is the chief reason why Christian history turned in another direction.

The second story is that of the Western, Latin-speaking Church, which came to look to the Bishop of Rome, and within which he became an unchallenged leader. In the Latin West, the prominence of the Bishop of Rome, already often referred to as papa papa ('Pope'), was becoming apparent during the fourth century, as the emperors abandoned Rome, and he was increasingly left to his own devices at a time when more and more power was flowing into the hands of churchmen. After this Western story has reached the point in the fourteenth century when the papal project of monarchy ran into difficulties, we move eastwards to meet the third story, of Orthodoxy. Like Rome, the Orthodox are the heirs of the Roman Empire, but whereas Western Latin Christians emerged out of the ruins of the western half of that empire, the Greek-speaking Eastern Church was shaped by the continuing rule of the Eastern emperor. Just when it seemed doomed to decay after the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans, a new variety of Orthodoxy far to the north began revealing its potential as leader among the Orthodox: I outline the development of Russian Christianity. The Western Latin story resumes with the 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. ('Pope'), was becoming apparent during the fourth century, as the emperors abandoned Rome, and he was increasingly left to his own devices at a time when more and more power was flowing into the hands of churchmen. After this Western story has reached the point in the fourteenth century when the papal project of monarchy ran into difficulties, we move eastwards to meet the third story, of Orthodoxy. Like Rome, the Orthodox are the heirs of the Roman Empire, but whereas Western Latin Christians emerged out of the ruins of the western half of that empire, the Greek-speaking Eastern Church was shaped by the continuing rule of the Eastern emperor. Just when it seemed doomed to decay after the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans, a new variety of Orthodoxy far to the north began revealing its potential as leader among the Orthodox: I outline the development of Russian Christianity. The Western Latin story resumes with the 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 compet.i.tors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found s.p.a.ce 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 partners.h.i.+p 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-ba.s.s of the narrative in my previous book, Reformation 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 G.o.d 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 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 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 wors.h.i.+p 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. It was a perfect juxtaposition of Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christianity, as the serenity of a Latin Ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sions 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 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 G.o.d which are far from straightforward. G.o.d knows who G.o.d 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 G.o.d has a personal relations.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d. 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 cla.s.s 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. The Bible speaks with many voices, including shouts of anger against G.o.d. 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 cla.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+p and life-practice (such as circ.u.mcision 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 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 The Da Vinci Code into best-seller lists. 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 ident.i.ty. 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 j.a.panese 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 astonis.h.i.+ng variety of language groups in Eastern Europe and the area of the former Soviet Union. 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 j.a.panese 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 ident.i.ty. The Bible's authority for Christians lies in the fact they have a special relations.h.i.+p with it that can never be altered, like the relations.h.i.+p of parent and child. This does not deny relations.h.i.+ps with other books which may be both deep and long-lasting, and it does not necessarily make the parental relations.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d, or how one might sensibly describe three manifestations of the one Christian G.o.d, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 trans.m.u.tation into attacks on Eastern Christians and their eventual failure either to recapture the Holy Land or to defend Eastern Christianity against Islam. All these cataclysmic human events stemmed from an idea constructed by a council of bishops.

The Bible of the Church was itself a disputed text at least until late in the second century of the Christian era. But even when Christians had argued their way to a consensus as to which texts should be included in the Bible and which should not, they encountered a problem common to all Peoples of the Book. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all discovered that the text between the covers cannot provide all the answers. Hence the growth of a vast array of p.r.o.nouncements, interpretations and pragmatic solutions to new problems which formed bodies of tradition in various parts of Christianity. As early as the fourth century CE, a respected Christian authority in the eastern Mediterranean, Basil of Caesarea, was saying that some traditions were as important and authoritative as the Bible itself. It was one of the big issues of the European Reformation, whether any of this tradition beyond scripture should be regarded as part of the essential kit of being a Christian. Roman Catholics said yes - the official Church was the guardian of the tradition and must be obeyed in all things. Protestants said no - most of the tradition was part of the confidence trick played on ordinary Christians by the Church, diverting them from the glorious simplicity of the biblical message. Protestants were not consistent on this, for otherwise they could not justify aspects of their own Christianity not found in scripture, like the universal baptism of infants. Radicals who believed in scripture alone criticized them as hypocrites, with some justice.

All the world faiths which have known long-term success have shown a remarkable capacity to mutate, and Christianity is no exception, which is why one underlying message of this history is its sheer variety. Many Christians do not like being reminded of Christianity's capacity to develop, particularly those who are in charge of the various religious inst.i.tutions which call themselves Churches, but that is the reality and has been from the beginning. This was a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works. Jesus seems to have maintained that the trumpet would sound for the end of time very soon, and in a major break with the culture around him, he told his followers to leave the dead to bury their own dead (see p. 90). Maybe he wrote nothing because he did not feel that it was worth it, in the short time left to humanity. Remarkably quickly, his followers seemed to question the idea that history was about to end: they collected and preserved stories about the founder in a newly invented form of written text, the codex (the modern book format). They survived a major crisis of confidence at the end of the first century when the Last Days did not arrive - perhaps one of the greatest turning points in the Christian story, although we know very little about it. Christianity emerged from it a very different inst.i.tution from the movement created by its founder or even its first great apostle, Paul.

Since from the beginning, radical change and trans.m.u.tation were part of the story, the succeeding millennia provide plenty of further examples. After three centuries of tension and confrontation with Roman imperial power, the counter-cultural sect mutated into the agent of settled government and preserved Graeco-Roman civilization in the West when that government collapsed. In nineteenth-century America, marginal Christians created a frontier religion with its own new sacred book, the basis of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). The astonis.h.i.+ng growth of the Mormons is as much part of the modern story of Christianity as that of Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, however fiercely conventionally conceived Christianity may deny the Mormons the name Christian. So are later extensions of the Christian core ident.i.ty, such as the Kimbanguists of central Africa or the Unification Church founded by the Korean Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Such transformations have always been unpredictable. In Korea, an extraordinarily successful Presbyterian (Reformed Protestant) Church now lectures Reformed Protestants in Europe on how to be true to the sixteenth-century European Reformer John Calvin, while this same Korean Church expresses its faith in hymns borrowed from the radically anti-Calvinist Protestantism of Methodism. What is more, many Korean Christians manage to be intensely patriotic, while wors.h.i.+pping in churches which are careful reproductions of the Protestant church architecture of the Midwestern United States (see Plate 68).

The pa.s.sions which have gone into the construction of a world faith are if nothing else the catalyst for extraordinary human creativity in literature, music, architecture and art. To seek an understanding of Christianity is to see Jesus Christ in the mosaics and icons of Byzantium, or in the harshly lit features of the man on the road to Emmaus as Caravaggio painted him (see Plate 18). Looking up at the heavily gilt ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, one should realize that all its gold was melted down from temples across the Atlantic Ocean, sent as a tribute to the Christian G.o.d and to the Catholic Church by the King of Spain, the theft accompanied or justified by frequent misuse of the name of Christ. The sound of Christian pa.s.sion is heard in the hymns of John and Charles Wesley, bringing pride, self-confidence and divine purpose to the lives of poor and humble people struggling to make sense of a new industrial society in Georgian Britain. It shapes the sublime abstractions of the organ music of Johann Sebastian Bach. During the drab and mendacious tyranny of the German Democratic Republic, a Bach organ recital could pack out a church with people seeking something which spoke to them of objectivity, integrity and serene authenticity. All manifestations of Christian consciousness need to be taken seriously: from a craving to understand the ultimate purpose of G.o.d, which has produced terrifying visions of the Last Days, to the instinct to comfortable sociability, which has led to cricket on the Anglican vicarage lawn (see Plates 12 and 52).

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 wondering 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 p.r.o.nouncement as to whether Christianity, or indeed any religious belief, is 'true'. This is a necessary self-denying ordinance. Is Shakespeare's Hamlet 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 ba.n.a.l 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 compet.i.tion between them. But historians do not possess a prerogative to p.r.o.nounce on the truth of the existence of G.o.d 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 '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 ba.n.a.l 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 compet.i.tion between them. But historians do not possess a prerogative to p.r.o.nounce on the truth of the existence of G.o.d 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 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. It has been calculated, for instance, that in the half-acre of one English village churchyard, Widford in Hertfords.h.i.+re, there are more than five thousand corpses, laid to rest over at least nine centuries. We could never know as much as the names of more than a few hundred of them, let alone much else about them, and there is a special excitement in gathering up the fragments of past lives where we can. 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. It has been calculated, for instance, that in the half-acre of one English village churchyard, Widford in Hertfords.h.i.+re, there are more than five thousand corpses, laid to rest over at least nine centuries. We could never know as much as the names of more than a few hundred of them, let alone much else about them, and there is a special excitement in gathering up the fragments of past lives where we can.6 I hope that this book will help readers stand back from Christianity, whether they love it or hate it, or are simply curious about it, and see it in the round. The book is self-evidently not a work of primary-source research; rather, it tries to synthesize the current state of historical scholars.h.i.+p across the world. It also seeks to be a reflection on it, a way of interpreting that scholars.h.i.+p for a larger audience which is often bewildered by what is happening to Christianity and misunderstands how present structures and beliefs have evolved. It can be no more than a series of suggestions to give shape to the past, but the suggestions are not random. At some points in it, I have developed further the text of my previous book, Reformation Reformation, which was an attempt to tell part of this wider story, but which led me on to this attempt to put shapes on the greater picture. My aim is to tell as clearly as possible an immensely complicated and varied tale, in ways which others will enjoy and find plausible. Furthermore, I am not ashamed to affirm that although modern historians have no special capacity to be arbiters of the truth or otherwise of religion, they still have a moral task. They should seek to promote sanity and to curb the rhetoric which breeds fanaticism. There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

I have been given great privileges in my career, which now demand their price. I have enjoyed the precious opportunity of research, teaching and discussion in the understanding and serene environment of world-cla.s.s universities, Cambridge and Oxford. Many may think of such settings as an ivory-tower retreat from reality, and they will have some justification for their opinion if those within the university do not extend the discussion out beyond its walls. That is what I seek to do here. Equally, I feel immensely privileged to have been trained as a professional historian, because my training is a call to discipline my strong feelings of both affection and anger towards my own inheritance. That training may help me tell a story which readers can consider fair and sympathetic, even if they have very different personal standpoints on what Christianity means and what it is worth. My aim has been to seek out what I see as the good in the varied forms of the Christian faith, while pointing clearly to what I think is foolish and dangerous in them. Religious belief can be very close to madness. It has brought human beings to acts of criminal folly as well as to the highest achievements of goodness, creativity and generosity. I tell the story of both extremes. If this risibly ambitious project can at least help to dispel the myths and misrepresentations which fuel folly, then I will believe my task to have been more than worthwhile.

CONVENTIONS.

Most primary-source quotations in English are in modern spelling, but where I have quoted translations made by other people from other languages, I have not altered the gender-skewed language common in English usage up to the 1980s. I am more of a devotee of capital letters than is common today; in English convention, they are symbols of what is special, or different, and, in the context of this book, of what links the profane and the sacred world. The Ma.s.s and the Rood need capitals; both their devotees and those who hated them would agree on that. So do the Bible, the Eucharist, Saviour, the Blessed Virgin and the Persons of the Trinity. The body of the faithful in a particular city in the early Church, or in a particular region, or the worldwide organization called the Church, all deserve a capital, although a building called a church does not. The Bishop of Exeter needs a capital, as does the Earl of Salisbury, but bishops and earls as a whole do not. My decisions on this have been arbitrary, but I hope that they are at least internally consistent.

My general practice with place names has been to give the most helpful usage, whether ancient or modern, sometimes with the alternative modern or ancient usage in brackets and with alternatives given in the index. The common English versions of overseas place names (such as Brunswick, Hesse, Milan or Munich) are also used. Readers will be aware that the islands embracing England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales have commonly been known as the British Isles. This t.i.tle no longer pleases all their inhabitants, particularly those in the Republic of Ireland (a matter to which this descendant of Scottish Protestants is sensitive), and a more neutral as well as more accurate description is 'the Atlantic Isles', which is used at various places throughout this book. I am aware that Portuguese-speakers have long used the phrase to describe entirely different islands, and indeed that Spaniards use it for yet a third collection; I hope that I may crave their joint indulgence for my arbitrary choice. Naturally the political ent.i.ty called Great Britain, which existed between 1707 and 1922, and later in modified form, will be referred to as such where appropriate, and I use 'British Isles' in relation to that relatively brief period too.

Personal names of individuals are generally given in the birth-language which they would have spoken, except in the case of certain major figures, such as rulers or clergy (like the emperors Justinian and Charles V, the kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or John Calvin), who were addressed in several languages by various groups among their subjects or colleagues. Many readers will be aware of the Dutch convention of writing down names such as 'Pieterszoon' as 'Pietersz'; I hope that they will forgive me if I extend these, to avoid confusion for others. Similarly in regard to Hungarian names, I am not using the Hungarian convention of putting first name after surname, so I will speak of Miklos Horthy, not Horthy Miklos. Otherwise the usage of other cultures in their word order for personal names is respected, so Mao Zedong appears thus.

In the notes and bibliography, I generally try to cite the English translation of any work written originally in another language, where that is possible. I avoid cluttering the main text too much with birth and death dates for people mentioned, except where it seems helpful; otherwise the reader will find them in the index. I employ the 'Common Era' usage in dating, since it avoids value judgements about the status of Christianity relative to other systems of faith. Dates unless otherwise stated are 'Common Era' (CE), the system which Christians have customarily called 'Anno Domini' or AD. Dates before 1 CE are given as BCE ('before the Common Era'), which is equivalent to BC. I have tried to avoid names which are offensive to those to whom they have been applied, which means that readers may encounter unfamiliar usages, so I speak of 'Miaphysites' and 'Dyophysites' rather than 'Monophysites' or 'Nestorians', or the 'Catholic Apostolic Church' rather than the 'Irvingites'. Some may sneer at this as 'political correctness'. When I was young, my parents were insistent on the importance of being courteous and respectful of other people's opinions and I am saddened that these undramatic virtues have now been relabelled in an unfriendly spirit. I hope that non-Christian readers will forgive me if for simplicity's sake I often call the Tanakh of Judaism the Old Testament, in parallel to the Christian New Testament. Biblical references are given in the chapter-and-verse form which Christians had evolved by the sixteenth century, so the third chapter of John's Gospel, at the fourteenth verse, becomes John 3.14, and the first of two letters written by Paul to the Corinthians, the second chapter at the tenth verse, becomes I Corinthians 2.10. Biblical quotations are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible unless otherwise stated.

PART I.

A Millennium of Beginnings (1000 BCE-100 CE)

1.

Greece and Rome (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE)

GREEK BEGINNINGS.

Why begin in Greece and not in a stable in Bethlehem of Judaea? Because in the beginning was the Word. The Evangelist John's Gospel narrative of Jesus the Christ has no Christmas stable; it opens with a chant or hymn in which 'Word' is a Greek word, logos logos. The Word, says John, was G.o.d, and became human flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.1 This logos logos means far more than simply 'word': means far more than simply 'word': logos logos is the story itself. is the story itself. Logos Logos echoes with significances which give voice to the restlessness and tension embodied in the Christian message. It means not so much a single particle of speech, but the whole act of speech, or the thought behind the speech, and from there its meanings spill outwards into conversation, narrative, musing, meaning, reason, report, rumour, even pretence. John goes on to name this echoes with significances which give voice to the restlessness and tension embodied in the Christian message. It means not so much a single particle of speech, but the whole act of speech, or the thought behind the speech, and from there its meanings spill outwards into conversation, narrative, musing, meaning, reason, report, rumour, even pretence. John goes on to name this logos logos as a man who makes known his Father G.o.d: his name is Jesus Christ. So there we read a second Greek word: Christ. To the very ordinary Jewish name of this man, Joshua/Yeshua (which has also ended up in a Greek form, 'Jesus'), his followers added ' as a man who makes known his Father G.o.d: his name is Jesus Christ. So there we read a second Greek word: Christ. To the very ordinary Jewish name of this man, Joshua/Yeshua (which has also ended up in a Greek form, 'Jesus'), his followers added 'Christos' as a second name, after he had been executed on a cross.2 It is notable that they felt it necessary to make this Greek translation of a Hebrew word, 'Messiah', or 'Anointed One', when they sought to describe the special, foreordained character of their Joshua. In life, the carpenter's son who died on the Cross would certainly have known Greek-speakers well, but they were the folks in the town down the road from his own Jewish hometown of Nazareth: other people, not his people. The name 'Christ' underlines the importance of Greek culture from the earliest days of Christianity, as Christians struggled to find out what their message was and how the message should be proclaimed. So the words ' It is notable that they felt it necessary to make this Greek translation of a Hebrew word, 'Messiah', or 'Anointed One', when they sought to describe the special, foreordained character of their Joshua. In life, the carpenter's son who died on the Cross would certainly have known Greek-speakers well, but they were the folks in the town down the road from his own Jewish hometown of Nazareth: other people, not his people. The name 'Christ' underlines the importance of Greek culture from the earliest days of Christianity, as Christians struggled to find out what their message was and how the message should be proclaimed. So the words 'logos' and 'Christos' tell us what a tangle of Greek and Jewish ideas and memories underlies the construction of Christianity.

How, then, did Greeks become so involved in the story of a man who was named after the Jewish folk hero Joshua and whom many saw as fulfilling a Jewish tradition of 'Anointed One', saviour of the Jewish people? We must follow the Greeks back to the stories they told of themselves, in lands which they had made home some two millennia before Joshua the Anointed One was born: mountainous peninsulas, inlets and islands which are the modern state of Greece, together with the coast now the western fringe of the Turkish Republic. Around 1400 BCE, one grouping among the Greek people was organized and wealthy enough to create a number of settlements with monumental palaces, fortifications and tombs. Chief among them was the hill-city of Mycenae in the near-island of southern Greece known as the Peloponnese, the centre of an empire which for a couple of centuries was capable of wielding power as far as the great island of Crete. Around 1200 BCE there was a sudden catastrophe, whose nature is still mysterious, which was contemporary with destruction and a collapse of culture which affected many other societies in the eastern Mediterranean; three centuries followed which have been termed a 'Dark Age'. Mycenae was overwhelmed and left in ruins, never again to be a major power. But its name was not forgotten. Mycenae was celebrated by a Greek poet who knew very little about it, but who managed to make its memory into the primary cultural experience first of Greeks, then of all peoples in the Mediterranean and then of the world which has taken on the culture of the West.3 To talk of this 'poet' is no more than convention. There are two epic poems, the Iliad Iliad and the and the Odyssey Odyssey, traditionally ascribed to a single author called 'Homer'. It is certain that Homer lived long after Mycenae's fall around 1200 BCE - certainly not less than four hundred years later. Yet this writer or writers or band of professional singers who created the two surviving epics drew on centuries of songs and stories about that lost world. They deal with one military campaign, probably reflecting some real conflict of the remote past, in which Greeks besieged and destroyed the non-Greek city of Troy in Asia Minor (the modern Turkey). There follow the adventures of one Greek hero, Odysseus, in an agonizingly prolonged ten-year journey home. The two epics, which took shape in recitation some time in the eighth or seventh century BCE, became central to a Greek's sense of being Greek - which is strange, because the Trojan enemies are depicted as no different in their culture from the Greeks besieging them. In Asia Minor, Greeks lived close to several other peoples like the Trojans, and although in formal terms they loftily regarded all non-Greeks as barbaroi barbaroi, speakers of languages which sounded as meaningless as a baby's 'ba-ba' babble, they were in fact keenly interested in other sophisticated cultures, particularly in two great powers which affected them: the Persian (Iranian) Empire, which came to dominate their eastern flank and rule many of their cities, and south across the Mediterranean the Egyptian Empire, whose ancient civilization stimulated their jealous imitation and made them keen to annex and exploit its agreeably mysterious reserves of knowledge.

I. Greece and Asia Minor.

Despite their strong sense of common ident.i.ty, summed up in their word h.e.l.las h.e.l.las ('Greekdom'), Greeks never achieved (and mostly did not seek to create) a single independent political structure on the gigantic scale of Persia or Egypt. They seem to have had a real preference for living in and therefore identifying with small city-states, which made perfect sense in their fragmented and mountainous heartland, but which they also replicated in flatlands in colonies around the Mediterranean. Greeks recognized each other as Greek by their language, which afforded them their common knowledge of Homer's epics, together with religious sites, temples and ceremonies which were seen as common property. Chief among the ceremonies were compet.i.tive games held to honour their chief G.o.d, Zeus, and his companions at Olympia below the mountain of Zeus's father, Kronos; there were lesser games elsewhere which likewise embodied the intense spirit of compet.i.tion in Greek society. Further north was Delphi, shrine and oracle of the G.o.d Apollo, whose prophetess, dizzy and raving on volcanic fumes rising from a rock fissure, chanted riddles which any Greek might turn into guidance on worries private or public. ('Greekdom'), Greeks never achieved (and mostly did not seek to create) a single independent political structure on the gigantic scale of Persia or Egypt. They seem to have had a real preference for living in and therefore identifying with small city-states, which made perfect sense in their fragmented and mountainous heartland, but which they also replicated in flatlands in colonies around the Mediterranean. Greeks recognized each other as Greek by their language, which afforded them their common knowledge of Homer's epics, together with religious sites, temples and ceremonies which were seen as common property. Chief among the ceremonies were compet.i.tive games held to honour their chief G.o.d, Zeus, and his companions at Olympia below the mountain of Zeus's father, Kronos; there were lesser games elsewhere which likewise embodied the intense spirit of compet.i.tion in Greek society. Further north was Delphi, shrine and oracle of the G.o.d Apollo, whose prophetess, dizzy and raving on volcanic fumes rising from a rock fissure, chanted riddles which any Greek might turn into guidance on worries private or public.

So, like Jews, Greeks made their religion central to their ident.i.ty; and they were also the people of a book - more precisely, two books - their common cultural property. Like Jews, they borrowed a particular method of writing down their literature from the Phoenicians, a seafaring people with whom they had much commercial contact: an alphabetic script. Throughout the world, the earliest and some of the most long-lasting writing systems have been pictogrammic: so a tree could be represented by the picture of a tree. By contrast, alphabetic scripts abandon pictograms and represent particular sounds of speech with one constant symbol, and the sound symbols can be combined to build up particular words - so instead of hundreds of picture symbols, there can be a small, easily learned set of symbols: generally twenty-two basic symbols in both Greek and Hebrew, twenty-six in modern English. It was in the Greek alphabet that the earliest known Christian texts were written, and the overwhelming majority of Christians until the Roman Catholic world missions of the sixteenth century experienced their sacred scriptures in some alphabetic form. Indeed, the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, repeatedly uses a metaphor drawn from the alphabet to describe Jesus: he is Alpha and Omega, the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet, the beginning and the end.4 But there the cultural similarities between Jews and Greeks end: their religious outlooks were significantly different. Like most ancient societies, Greeks inherited a collection of stories about a variety of G.o.ds which they welded into an untidy description of a divine family, headed by Zeus; the Homeric legends drew on this body of myth. The G.o.ds are constantly present in the Iliad Iliad and and Odyssey Odyssey, an intrusive and often disruptive force in human lives: often fickle, petty, partisan, pa.s.sionate, compet.i.tive - in other words, rather like Greeks themselves. It was no accident that Greek art portrayed G.o.ds and humans in similar ways, as it moved beyond its imitation of Egyptian monumental sculpture of the human form. Without knowing something of the complex iconography of this art, one would be hard put to tell the beauty of the foppish would-be dictator Alcibiades from the beauty of the G.o.d Apollo, or distinguish the n.o.bility of the Athenian politician Pericles from that of a bearded G.o.d. The portrayal of human beings tended away from the personal towards the abstract, which suggested that human beings could indeed embody abstract qualities like n.o.bility, just as much as could the G.o.ds. Moreover, Greek art exhibits a fascination with the human form; it is the overwhelming subject of Greek sculpture, the form in which G.o.ds as well as humans are portrayed to the exclusion of any other representational possibility.5 The fascination extended to a cult of the living and breathing body beautiful, at least in male form, which in turn led to an insistence on athletes performing in the nude in Greek compet.i.tive games; this peculiarity baffled and horrified most other cultures, and rather embarra.s.sed the Romans, who later tried to make themselves as much as possible the heirs of Greek culture. The fascination extended to a cult of the living and breathing body beautiful, at least in male form, which in turn led to an insistence on athletes performing in the nude in Greek compet.i.tive games; this peculiarity baffled and horrified most other cultures, and rather embarra.s.sed the Romans, who later tried to make themselves as much as possible the heirs of Greek culture.

Greek G.o.ds are rather human; so may humans be rather like G.o.ds, and go on trying to be as like them as possible? The remarkable self-confidence of Greek culture, the creativity, resourcefulness and originality and the consequent achievements which have been borrowed by Christian culture, have much to do with this att.i.tude to the G.o.ds embedded in the Homeric epics. It is very different from the way in which the Jews came to speak of the remote majesty of their one G.o.d, the all-powerful creator, who (at relentless length) angrily reminded the afflicted Job how little a lone created being like him understood divine purposes; who dismissed Moses's question 'What is your name?' with a terrifying cosmic growl out of a burning bush in the desert, 'I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE'.6 The name of the G.o.d of Israel is No Name. The name of the G.o.d of Israel is No Name.

Greeks could not be accused of marginalizing religion, for Greek cities were not dominated visually by palaces, as they had been in Mycenaean culture; instead they focused themselves around temples. Such temples will be familiar from that iconic and exceptionally splendid example in Athens, the Parthenon of the G.o.ddess Pallas Athene, and the most superficial examination of their layout will reveal that however monumental Greek temples appear, their chief function was not to house a large wors.h.i.+pping congregation, but to house a particular G.o.d, like the shrine-churches dedicated to an individual holy figure which Christians built later. Temples were served by priests, who performed local rituals for a G.o.d or G.o.ds in approved customary fas.h.i.+on, but who were not normally seen as a caste apart from the rest of the population. They were doing a job on behalf of the community, rather like other officials of the city, who might collect taxes or regulate the market. So Greek religion was a set of stories belonging to the entire community, rather than a set of well-bounded statements about ultimate moral and philosophical values, and it was not policed by a self-perpetuating elite entrusted with any task of propagating or enforcing it.

Such a system is not hospitable to the idea of heresy, to which (as we will see) certain varieties of Christianity have consistently been attracted. It is true that Socrates, one of the greatest of Greek philosophers, was tried and executed in 399 BCE after accusations that his disbelief in his society's G.o.ds (and his rhetoric generally) corrupted young people, but Socrates lived in a time of huge political crisis and he could be seen as a threat to Athenians' hard-won democracy (see pp. 30-31). Generally Greeks' esteem for their G.o.ds did not place limits on their hunger to make sense of the world around them, and they could see that stories about the G.o.ds left unanswered many questions about being and reality. Maybe answers could be extracted by trying to make as tidy a system as possible out of the stories: the first surviving Greek literature in prose is a varied set of records of these traditional stories, 'mythographies'. The poet Hesiod, writing in the same era as Homer, created an epic, Theogony Theogony, which later generations regarded with grat.i.tude as the most accessible effort at making sense of the tangle.

Within the common Greek culture, then, was an urge to understand and create a systematic structure of sacred knowledge which ordered their everyday life. Greeks so esteemed Homer's two epics that they extended this quest to the Homeric stories. A volume of commentary was developed on what they were really about, under the narrative surface. Greek curiosity created the literary notion of allegory: a story in literature which must be read as conveying a deeper meaning or meanings than is at first apparent, with the task of a commentator to tease out such meanings. Much later, first Jews and then Christians treated their sacred writings in the same way. Greeks were convinced that the learning of a race as ancient as the Egyptians must conceal wisdom which ought to be shared more widely, and when they eventually encountered Jewish literature, they likewise found its antiquity impressive. But they were not afraid to turn from the past to search anew for wisdom for themselves. That search for wisdom they entrusted to people whom they defined as lovers of wisdom: philosophers.

Some concerns of philosophers were not new. Long before in Babylon and Egypt, let alone in cultures which have left no written records as far north as the isles of Shetland, people spent a good deal of time considering the skies above them; the movements of stars and planets had practical relevance to the pa.s.sage of time in their farming and religious observances. Greek philosophy was far more all-encompa.s.sing, and its obsession with questioning, cla.s.sifying and speculating has little parallel in the earlier cultures of which the Greeks had knowledge. The fact that Greeks adopted an alphabetic script has often been seen as one of the stimuli to their achievements in philosophy, since it is rather easier to convey abstract ideas in the easily learned handful of symbols in alphabets than in the multiple pictorial symbols of pictogrammic script. But that hardly explains why Phoenicians or Jews were not stimulated by their own alphabetic writing systems to produce anything like the intellectual adventures of the Greeks.

A better answer must lie in the peculiar history of the Greeks which emerged from their early geography: that proliferation of tiny independent communities eventually scattered from Spain to Asia Minor. Each of these was a polis polis - another of those Greek words like - another of those Greek words like logos logos which at first sight seems easy to translate into English, in this case as 'city'. Even if the meaning of the word is given one more layer of sophistication as 'city-state', the translation is inadequate to convey the resonance of which at first sight seems easy to translate into English, in this case as 'city'. Even if the meaning of the word is given one more layer of sophistication as 'city-state', the translation is inadequate to convey the resonance of polis polis, with the same sort of difficulty one might find in speaking of the resonance of the English word 'home'. Polis Polis was more than the cl.u.s.ter of houses around a temple which was its visible embodiment and gave it its name. The was more than the cl.u.s.ter of houses around a temple which was its visible embodiment and gave it its name. The polis polis included the surrounding mountains, fields, woods, shrines, as far as its frontiers; it was the collective mind of the community who made it up, and whose daily interactions and efforts at making decisions came to const.i.tute 'politics'. We will need to consider the politics of the included the surrounding mountains, fields, woods, shrines, as far as its frontiers; it was the collective mind of the community who made it up, and whose daily interactions and efforts at making decisions came to const.i.tute 'politics'. We will need to consider the politics of the polis polis at some length to understand just why the Greeks made their remarkable contribution to shaping the West and the versions of Christianity which it created. at some length to understand just why the Greeks made their remarkable contribution to shaping the West and the versions of Christianity which it created.

In the end, the mega-states of Macedonia and then Rome swallowed up the freedom of these poleis poleis. Nevertheless, more than a millennium after Homer's time, the life of the Greek polis polis still represented an ideal even for those Mediterranean societies which had turned to Christianity. In the words of the great twentieth-century philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood: 'Deep in the mind of every Roman, as in the mind of every Greek, was the unquestioned conviction which Aristotle put into words: that what raised man above the level of barbarism . . . to live well instead of merely living, was his members.h.i.+p of an actual, physical city.' still represented an ideal even for those Mediterranean societies which had turned to Christianity. In the words of the great twentieth-century philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood: 'Deep in the mind of every Roman, as in the mind of every Greek, was the unquestioned conviction which Aristotle put into words: that what raised man above the level of barbarism . . . to live well instead of merely living, was his members.h.i.+p of an actual, physical city.'7 When Christians first described their own collective ident.i.ty, with its customs, structures and officer-bearers, they used the Greek word When Christians first described their own collective ident.i.ty, with its customs, structures and officer-bearers, they used the Greek word ekklesia ekklesia, which has pa.s.sed hardly modified into Latin and its successor languages. Greek-speaking Jews before the Christians had used the same word to speak of Israel. Ekklesia Ekklesia is already common in the Greek New Testament: there it means 'Church', but it is borrowed from Greek political vocabulary, where it signified the a.s.sembly of citizens of the is already common in the Greek New Testament: there it means 'Church', but it is borrowed from Greek political vocabulary, where it signified the a.s.sembly of citizens of the polis polis who met to make decisions. who met to make decisions.

So the ekklesia ekklesia represents the represents the polis polis, a local ident.i.ty within the greater whole of Christianity or Christendom, just as the Greek polis polis represented the local ident.i.ty of the greater whole represented the local ident.i.ty of the greater whole h.e.l.las h.e.l.las, 'Greekdom'. Yet the Christian ekklesia ekklesia has become more complicated, because the word can also describe the universal Church, the equivalent of has become more complicated, because the word can also describe the universal Church, the equivalent of h.e.l.las h.e.l.las, as well as the local - not to mention the fragments of universal Christianity with particular ident.i.ties which call themselves 'Church', and even the buildings which house all these different ent.i.ties. There is a further interesting dimension of the word. If the ekklesia ekklesia is the embodiment of the city or is the embodiment of the city or polis polis of G.o.d, lurking in the word of G.o.d, lurking in the word ekklesia ekklesia is the idea that the faithful have a collective responsibility for decisions about the future of the is the idea that the faithful have a collective responsibility for decisions about the future of the polis polis, just as the people of a polis polis did in ancient Greece. This creates a tension with another borrowing from Greek which has pa.s.sed into several northern European languages, and which appears in English as the wor