What do you think?
Rate this book
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
Diarmaid MacCulloch's epic, acclaimed history A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years follows the story of Christianity around the globe, from ancient Palestine to contemporary China.
How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.
Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty - and inspired its most sublime accomplishments.
'A stunning tour de force'
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year
'A landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight ... It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language'
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Guardian
'A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book'
John Cornwell, Financial Times
'Essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it'
Melvyn Bragg, Observer, Books of the Year
'Magnificent ... a sumptuous portrait, alive with detail and generous in judgement'
Richard Holloway, The Times
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490 - 1700, which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Prize.
How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.
Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty - and inspired its most sublime accomplishments.
'A stunning tour de force'
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year
'A landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight ... It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language'
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Guardian
'A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book'
John Cornwell, Financial Times
'Essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it'
Melvyn Bragg, Observer, Books of the Year
'Magnificent ... a sumptuous portrait, alive with detail and generous in judgement'
Richard Holloway, The Times
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490 - 1700, which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Prize.
1184 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2009
2473 people are currently reading
16523 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 599 reviews
May 2, 2013
‘What religion am I?’ asks Homer Simpson in one episode of his family's eponymous cartoon. ‘I'm the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work out in real life…uh…Christianity.’ One of the many pleasures in Diarmaid MacCulloch's amazingly comprehensive book is getting a handle on what historical basis there is for the rules and doctrines of this prolific and mercurial religion, which nowadays seems characterized by extreme reactions of either perfect secular indifference or increasingly literalist devotion.
There are excellent books available for all kinds of angles on this story, but a single-volume history of the whole lot seems crazily ambitious. I think MacCulloch has done a beautiful job, and let's note the fact that anything which is acclaimed by both Christopher Hitchens and the Archbishop of Canterbury as being the definitive work of its kind must be doing something right. What makes it particularly impressive is that it combines a clear explanation of the usual theological debates of the early Church with a very wide-ranging, internationalist scope that also has perceptive things to say about Christianity's survival and development in Ethiopia, or why it succeeded in Korea but failed in Japan.
Though MacCulloch is too even-handed to build a cumulative argument out of this story, the theme that emerges for me is the constant interplay between Christianity's interior, metaphorical truths, and the factual historicity of the information by which such truths have been communicated. This is related to a crucial duality present from the very start.
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 meaning, all characterization.
In part this comes from the dual heritage of Christianity, which is well encapsulated by this book's provocative subtitle, ‘The First Three Thousand Years’. The first 70 pages trace the Greek philosophical traditions of thinking about divinity – the Platonic idea of a remote, unknowable God – which became fused with Judaic tradition in an uneasy but dynamic relationship that is unique to Christianity.
One result of this, after the Enlightenment, has been a hyper-literalist defence of religion which in modern times can be seen, especially in the US, in the uneducated flourishing of ‘Creationism’. MacCulloch, who demonstrates well that ‘there is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history’, gives such concepts short shrift.
The modern conservative Christian (and Islamic) fashion of Creationism is no more than a set of circular logical arguments, and Creationist ‘science’ has been unique among modern aspirations to scientific systems in producing no original discoveries at all.
Quite; and yet, despite referring to modern ‘fashion’, one thing this narrative shows is that polarities of literalism and metaphoricity have always been there. In the second century, Marcion of Sinope was already writing commentaries on Biblical scriptures which denied any but the most literal interpretations; while his contemporary Origen could write such opposite things as this:
Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?
MacCulloch notes drily: ‘Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly.’ And yet neither of these theologians really won out: both saw their writings declared heretical, and the ‘official’ Churches have maintained an uneasy balance between the two ever since. Reading this, it's impossible to escape a sense of arbitrariness about such decisions among early religious authorities.
This is particularly true when it comes to the bewildering array of theological debates over what exactly was meant by such counter-intuitive doctrines as the Trinity, or Christ's divinity. It's instructive to consider how little modern Christians think about such things, given their central importance to early thinkers. Were the three persons of the Trinity separate substances, or one substance manifested in three different essences? The difference was almost wholly semantic, and yet people fought and died over it. Did Christ have two distinct natures, fully human and fully divine, or did he have one composite nature which blended human with divine? The question was fought over with a violence and vehemence that now seems incredible. Those involved would be amazed to know that many modern Christians are probably not sure of the ‘right’ answers to these questions.
While MacCulloch is bracingly clear on the arbitrary nature of many of these doctrines, he is also often critical of modern revisionism – he offers a reminder, for instance, that Gnosticism, far from being a kind of early New-Age mysticism, was generally much more ascetic and authoritarian than mainstream Christianity was. Similarly, a text like 1 Timothy 2:12, often pounced on by the anti-religious because its patriarchal ideas seem so opposed to modern values, is here given a far more interesting and nuanced reading:
One has always to remember that throughout the New Testament we are hearing one side of an argument. When the writer to Timothy inisists with irritating fussiness that ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’, we can be sure that there were women doing precisely the opposite, who were probably not slow in asserting their own point of view. But their voices are lost […].
One thing that this book creates is a deep awareness of just how different things might easily have been, had a few decisions gone the other way. It is fascinating to realise, for example, that if Islam had not suddenly exploded across the Middle East, the centre of Christendom in the Middle Ages would almost certainly have moved east to the region of Iraq, rather than west to Rome. MacCulloch is especially good on the interplay between these two faiths, offering such titbits as the fact that Islamic minarets may well have come about in imitation of Christian stylites – the early Orthodox monks who lived their lives on top of pillars. Such fascinating windows on history and belief are thrown open right the way through to the modern day, revealing such unexpected delights as the fact that most Christians among the Maasai in southern Africa think of God as a woman.
It's hard to find much fault with this book, although there will always be sections where the narrative flags a little, depending on where your interests lie. I thought the tone was exemplary – in the words of Rowan Williams, who reviewed it for the Guardian, it is ‘neither uncritical nor hostile’, which is no small achievement in itself. In one of his most felicitous phrases, MacCulloch describes Christianity at one point as ‘a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works’. Such a faith is always going to be a struggle between different interpretations, leading to a term – ‘Christianity’ – which can embrace the incense swung around an Orthodox icon, the speaking in tongues of a Pentecostalist, the resonant stone slabs which call faithful Ethiopians to prayer, and indeed the breezy indifference of Homer Simpson. If any book can give you a sense of how such diversity developed, and what it can possibly have in common – it's this one.
There are excellent books available for all kinds of angles on this story, but a single-volume history of the whole lot seems crazily ambitious. I think MacCulloch has done a beautiful job, and let's note the fact that anything which is acclaimed by both Christopher Hitchens and the Archbishop of Canterbury as being the definitive work of its kind must be doing something right. What makes it particularly impressive is that it combines a clear explanation of the usual theological debates of the early Church with a very wide-ranging, internationalist scope that also has perceptive things to say about Christianity's survival and development in Ethiopia, or why it succeeded in Korea but failed in Japan.
Though MacCulloch is too even-handed to build a cumulative argument out of this story, the theme that emerges for me is the constant interplay between Christianity's interior, metaphorical truths, and the factual historicity of the information by which such truths have been communicated. This is related to a crucial duality present from the very start.
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 meaning, all characterization.
In part this comes from the dual heritage of Christianity, which is well encapsulated by this book's provocative subtitle, ‘The First Three Thousand Years’. The first 70 pages trace the Greek philosophical traditions of thinking about divinity – the Platonic idea of a remote, unknowable God – which became fused with Judaic tradition in an uneasy but dynamic relationship that is unique to Christianity.
One result of this, after the Enlightenment, has been a hyper-literalist defence of religion which in modern times can be seen, especially in the US, in the uneducated flourishing of ‘Creationism’. MacCulloch, who demonstrates well that ‘there is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history’, gives such concepts short shrift.
The modern conservative Christian (and Islamic) fashion of Creationism is no more than a set of circular logical arguments, and Creationist ‘science’ has been unique among modern aspirations to scientific systems in producing no original discoveries at all.
Quite; and yet, despite referring to modern ‘fashion’, one thing this narrative shows is that polarities of literalism and metaphoricity have always been there. In the second century, Marcion of Sinope was already writing commentaries on Biblical scriptures which denied any but the most literal interpretations; while his contemporary Origen could write such opposite things as this:
Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?
MacCulloch notes drily: ‘Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly.’ And yet neither of these theologians really won out: both saw their writings declared heretical, and the ‘official’ Churches have maintained an uneasy balance between the two ever since. Reading this, it's impossible to escape a sense of arbitrariness about such decisions among early religious authorities.
This is particularly true when it comes to the bewildering array of theological debates over what exactly was meant by such counter-intuitive doctrines as the Trinity, or Christ's divinity. It's instructive to consider how little modern Christians think about such things, given their central importance to early thinkers. Were the three persons of the Trinity separate substances, or one substance manifested in three different essences? The difference was almost wholly semantic, and yet people fought and died over it. Did Christ have two distinct natures, fully human and fully divine, or did he have one composite nature which blended human with divine? The question was fought over with a violence and vehemence that now seems incredible. Those involved would be amazed to know that many modern Christians are probably not sure of the ‘right’ answers to these questions.
While MacCulloch is bracingly clear on the arbitrary nature of many of these doctrines, he is also often critical of modern revisionism – he offers a reminder, for instance, that Gnosticism, far from being a kind of early New-Age mysticism, was generally much more ascetic and authoritarian than mainstream Christianity was. Similarly, a text like 1 Timothy 2:12, often pounced on by the anti-religious because its patriarchal ideas seem so opposed to modern values, is here given a far more interesting and nuanced reading:
One has always to remember that throughout the New Testament we are hearing one side of an argument. When the writer to Timothy inisists with irritating fussiness that ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’, we can be sure that there were women doing precisely the opposite, who were probably not slow in asserting their own point of view. But their voices are lost […].
One thing that this book creates is a deep awareness of just how different things might easily have been, had a few decisions gone the other way. It is fascinating to realise, for example, that if Islam had not suddenly exploded across the Middle East, the centre of Christendom in the Middle Ages would almost certainly have moved east to the region of Iraq, rather than west to Rome. MacCulloch is especially good on the interplay between these two faiths, offering such titbits as the fact that Islamic minarets may well have come about in imitation of Christian stylites – the early Orthodox monks who lived their lives on top of pillars. Such fascinating windows on history and belief are thrown open right the way through to the modern day, revealing such unexpected delights as the fact that most Christians among the Maasai in southern Africa think of God as a woman.
It's hard to find much fault with this book, although there will always be sections where the narrative flags a little, depending on where your interests lie. I thought the tone was exemplary – in the words of Rowan Williams, who reviewed it for the Guardian, it is ‘neither uncritical nor hostile’, which is no small achievement in itself. In one of his most felicitous phrases, MacCulloch describes Christianity at one point as ‘a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works’. Such a faith is always going to be a struggle between different interpretations, leading to a term – ‘Christianity’ – which can embrace the incense swung around an Orthodox icon, the speaking in tongues of a Pentecostalist, the resonant stone slabs which call faithful Ethiopians to prayer, and indeed the breezy indifference of Homer Simpson. If any book can give you a sense of how such diversity developed, and what it can possibly have in common – it's this one.
August 14, 2012
This book should have been called Christianity: A Speculative History from a Somewhat Antagonistic Viewpoint. I only read the first 150 pages, plenty far enough to understand how MacCulloch feels about Christianity. Most of the book is, by nature, extrapolation based on a very fragmented set of documents and conflicting histories, but MacCulloch is always overanxious to undermine Christianity by taking huge leaps of speculation and is never, at least that I saw in the first 150 pages, willing to remain neutral or actually go the other direction.
I found his writing style to be good and the idea for the book is fantastic. I'm fully prepared to deal with problems in history and with the faults of Christians throughout history, but I'm not willing to read a book by an author I feel I can't trust or have to constantly second guess. Because of that, the bits of information I gleaned are all mentally footnoted as being something to go back and verify from a less biased source.
Here are a few examples:
"Yet at the heart of the Egypt and Exodus story is something which no subsequent Israelite fantasist would have wished to make up, because it is an embarrassment: the hero and leader of the Exodus, the man presented as writing the Pentateuch itself, has a name which is not only non-Jewish but actually Egyptian: Moses." My response is that if the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years is it so surprising and embarrassing that they'd eventually adopt Egyptian names? If the implication is that Moses was actually Egyptian, why doesn't MacCulloch just say that. It wouldn't be the longest logical jump he makes in the book.
Later, this is what MacCulloch concludes about the Beatitudes. "There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of normal expectations. They form a code of life which is a chorus of love directed to the loveless or unlovable, of painful honesty expressing itself with embarrassing directness, of joyful rejection of any counsel suggesting careful self-regard or prudence. That, apparently, is what the Kingdom of God is like." Really? Only the most literalistic reading of such a poetic passage could lead to such an imbecilic interpretation. MacCulloch makes similar mistakes of interpretation of various other passages in the New Testament, notably in the Lord's Prayer and the command to "leave the dead to bury their dead."
When writing about the resurrected Christ (note, resurrected) he says, "He repeatedly appeared to those who had known him, in ways which confused and contradicted the laws of physics." Again, we are talking about a ressurected being. Why is physics even relevant?
When he refers to Paul and his desire to teach of salvation through Christ alone, MacCulloch phrases it this way: "Paul managed to find a proper in the Tanakh to sum up what he wanted to say:.." This comes across as incredibly condescending, to take for granted that Paul was just manipulating the Tanakh to justify his message. If MacCulloch had left out "managed to find" and replaced it with "found" it would have made all the difference. It is maybe a small infraction on its own, but it was, for me, the last straw.
In a way, I'm really disappointed to stop reading this. The parts of the book that talk about the origins of the Old Testament and the influence of Socrates and Aristotle on Christianity are great. The discussion of differing ideas of Satan, comparisons of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, ideas on prophecy and life after death in the Old Testament and the obsession with the virginity of Mary are all fascinating. For now though, I'm done. I don't have time to verify every reference and I don't trust MacCulloch to give it to me straight.
I found his writing style to be good and the idea for the book is fantastic. I'm fully prepared to deal with problems in history and with the faults of Christians throughout history, but I'm not willing to read a book by an author I feel I can't trust or have to constantly second guess. Because of that, the bits of information I gleaned are all mentally footnoted as being something to go back and verify from a less biased source.
Here are a few examples:
"Yet at the heart of the Egypt and Exodus story is something which no subsequent Israelite fantasist would have wished to make up, because it is an embarrassment: the hero and leader of the Exodus, the man presented as writing the Pentateuch itself, has a name which is not only non-Jewish but actually Egyptian: Moses." My response is that if the Israelites lived in Egypt for 430 years is it so surprising and embarrassing that they'd eventually adopt Egyptian names? If the implication is that Moses was actually Egyptian, why doesn't MacCulloch just say that. It wouldn't be the longest logical jump he makes in the book.
Later, this is what MacCulloch concludes about the Beatitudes. "There is nothing gentle, meek or mild about the driving force behind these stabbing inversions of normal expectations. They form a code of life which is a chorus of love directed to the loveless or unlovable, of painful honesty expressing itself with embarrassing directness, of joyful rejection of any counsel suggesting careful self-regard or prudence. That, apparently, is what the Kingdom of God is like." Really? Only the most literalistic reading of such a poetic passage could lead to such an imbecilic interpretation. MacCulloch makes similar mistakes of interpretation of various other passages in the New Testament, notably in the Lord's Prayer and the command to "leave the dead to bury their dead."
When writing about the resurrected Christ (note, resurrected) he says, "He repeatedly appeared to those who had known him, in ways which confused and contradicted the laws of physics." Again, we are talking about a ressurected being. Why is physics even relevant?
When he refers to Paul and his desire to teach of salvation through Christ alone, MacCulloch phrases it this way: "Paul managed to find a proper in the Tanakh to sum up what he wanted to say:.." This comes across as incredibly condescending, to take for granted that Paul was just manipulating the Tanakh to justify his message. If MacCulloch had left out "managed to find" and replaced it with "found" it would have made all the difference. It is maybe a small infraction on its own, but it was, for me, the last straw.
In a way, I'm really disappointed to stop reading this. The parts of the book that talk about the origins of the Old Testament and the influence of Socrates and Aristotle on Christianity are great. The discussion of differing ideas of Satan, comparisons of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, ideas on prophecy and life after death in the Old Testament and the obsession with the virginity of Mary are all fascinating. For now though, I'm done. I don't have time to verify every reference and I don't trust MacCulloch to give it to me straight.
October 14, 2022
Honestly, to hold onto the mystery and conviction of a religion: don’t study its history.
August 9, 2017
I'll begin my review this way: there are a few reviewers who did not like this book due to the secular (but by no means anti-Christian) perspective most educated readers would expect from a serious church historian. (Naturally, many of these reviewers associate MacCulloch with the atheistic academic left, which I'm sure would come as a surprise to the author, given his background in the Church of England.) If Christian apologetics masked as church history is what you are looking for, then I have a few titles for you, but they are tear-your-eyeballs-out-bad.
Suffice it to say I have been looking for a book like this one for a long time - and I doubt a better book on church history will be written anytime soon. The book is information-dense and rather dry (but, in all fairness to MacCulloch, a litany of jokes may have added a pound or two to this already hefty tome). Diarmaid doesn't spare us any details.
I was tempted to give this book 4 stars instead of 5, because it is the kind of book where you often have to read a passage more than once - and even then, the details don't always stick. That being said, I found it rather engrossing - and regularly consulted other books on my shelf when reading it.
A very enriching read.
Suffice it to say I have been looking for a book like this one for a long time - and I doubt a better book on church history will be written anytime soon. The book is information-dense and rather dry (but, in all fairness to MacCulloch, a litany of jokes may have added a pound or two to this already hefty tome). Diarmaid doesn't spare us any details.
I was tempted to give this book 4 stars instead of 5, because it is the kind of book where you often have to read a passage more than once - and even then, the details don't always stick. That being said, I found it rather engrossing - and regularly consulted other books on my shelf when reading it.
A very enriching read.
January 25, 2018
This is a monumental piece of work by an erudite scholar. It covers the whole range of Christian history from its roots in Judaism to modern day.
As a starting point it delves into the Old Testament contrasting it's God jehovah -a jealous and vengeful God - with the loving God that sacrifices his son in the New Testament.
It shows the rise of Christianity from an obscure Jewish sect, through the rebranding by St Paul, and on to an established state religion. It is a truly astonishing journey. Throughout its history Christianity evolves, slewing off new offshoots whilst some early established churches wither and die (particularly in the middle east and central asia). Modern Christianity is the largest and most dynamic religion in the world.
I must confess that I got lost at times in trying to comprehend the infinitesimal gradations in interpretations of the substance of God and the trinity that has caused so much trouble in early Christianity, and also in the bewildering array of different churches and shades of thought in later times.
Considering that this book comprises a thousand pages it rattles along, and subjects are introduced and dealt with succinctly, though not superficially, before we get to the next topic.
A good book
As a starting point it delves into the Old Testament contrasting it's God jehovah -a jealous and vengeful God - with the loving God that sacrifices his son in the New Testament.
It shows the rise of Christianity from an obscure Jewish sect, through the rebranding by St Paul, and on to an established state religion. It is a truly astonishing journey. Throughout its history Christianity evolves, slewing off new offshoots whilst some early established churches wither and die (particularly in the middle east and central asia). Modern Christianity is the largest and most dynamic religion in the world.
I must confess that I got lost at times in trying to comprehend the infinitesimal gradations in interpretations of the substance of God and the trinity that has caused so much trouble in early Christianity, and also in the bewildering array of different churches and shades of thought in later times.
Considering that this book comprises a thousand pages it rattles along, and subjects are introduced and dealt with succinctly, though not superficially, before we get to the next topic.
A good book
December 28, 2016
This book is seriously insane! I'm only halfway through and we've already covered: Rome, early popes, African christians, the Orthodox Church, the beginnings of various brotherhoods and convents, ways to pray, Constantine, early theologians and philosophers, pergatory, the energy of God. I can't list everything. The only issue I have is that it's just too much at once. This is the perfect book for someone studying theology.
The Virgin Mary, the Tartars, the reformation and restoration, Martin Luther, Methodist and baptist churches, celebration by slaves, French Revolutionv, Bible Production, Free Masons, Quakers, witches, missionaries, Jesuits, the end of the British empire, Bonhoeffer, the Nazi regime, Pentocostalism, teaching evolution, apartheid-the list is endless!
The Virgin Mary, the Tartars, the reformation and restoration, Martin Luther, Methodist and baptist churches, celebration by slaves, French Revolutionv, Bible Production, Free Masons, Quakers, witches, missionaries, Jesuits, the end of the British empire, Bonhoeffer, the Nazi regime, Pentocostalism, teaching evolution, apartheid-the list is endless!
September 22, 2010
This is a very good history. It depresses me a bit because it is written in the cynical, anti-establishment style which is typical of the educated elite today, but it is valuable for its quality and the insight which it offers regarding the multitude of different takes on Christianity (most of them sincere and justified, none of them isolated from political expediency) which were the fruit of the early Church. Its quite humbling for those who maintain 'the correct doctrines' and at the same time gives one the more justification for preferring the views that one holds. Oddly enough the last word in a huge tome seems to tell that it is, of all things, the doctrine of original sin that gives Christianity its most promising hope for continued relevance into the future!
May 2, 2013
This book may be too ambitious. It claims to cover three thousand years of global history, but it does so sketchily, most of its focus being on, first, the Middle East and, second, Europe and America. The Britishness of the author is clear as is the fact that he himself is not a Christian. The content ranges from the breezy, as in his descriptions of modern trends, to the dense, as in his treatment of the controversies animating the earliest church councils. Most readers will find parts of it objectionable--or, perhaps, find its omissions so.
Still, it is not a bad read. MacCulloch writes well enough, peppering his tale with occasional amusing anecdotes or light sprinklings of wit and sarcasm. I found none of it boring and some of it, most particularly his treatment of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, informative.
My greatest objection to this enormous undertaking is that MacCulloch offered very little insight to the mysteries of the Christian faith. From my perspective, such "mysteries" are those elements of Christian belief that appear to fly in the face of experience, reason and common sense. How was it, for instance, that people murdered other people over questions of the exact nature of the the procession of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity--or for any number of other (to me at least) obscure reasons? That they did so is fact. Why they said they did so is often on record. MacCulloch reports on these matters well enough. What he doesn't do is offer insight into the real interests and passions involved, into the psychologies of those people. I want, in other words, a book that makes such concerns real to me, rather than just another at-a-distance description of the surfaces of history.
Still, it is not a bad read. MacCulloch writes well enough, peppering his tale with occasional amusing anecdotes or light sprinklings of wit and sarcasm. I found none of it boring and some of it, most particularly his treatment of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, informative.
My greatest objection to this enormous undertaking is that MacCulloch offered very little insight to the mysteries of the Christian faith. From my perspective, such "mysteries" are those elements of Christian belief that appear to fly in the face of experience, reason and common sense. How was it, for instance, that people murdered other people over questions of the exact nature of the the procession of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity--or for any number of other (to me at least) obscure reasons? That they did so is fact. Why they said they did so is often on record. MacCulloch reports on these matters well enough. What he doesn't do is offer insight into the real interests and passions involved, into the psychologies of those people. I want, in other words, a book that makes such concerns real to me, rather than just another at-a-distance description of the surfaces of history.
August 30, 2010
MacCulloch makes reading exhaustive history exhilarating rather than exhausting, and although everyone will have a favourite nit to pick - mine being the dubious treatment of Hegel, and the absence of anything about Erigena - only the most die-hard partisan could claim that this is anything other than brilliant. Ignore anyone who tells you it's anti-(insert your own sect here), and read it. Take your time. And I'm sure you'll be mining the 'recommended reading' section at the back of the book before you've finished chapter 7, at the latest.
What I want to know is how MacCulloch manages to tell a linear story in a way that doesn't pervert the thematic content... or maybe he's written a thematically arranged book which doesn't pervert the temporal changes? In either case, a great relief from most long histories which are full either of repetition or of anachronies. Finally, I would guess that this is the only perspective from which such a book could be written: son of a clergyman, friend of but not believer in the religion, who obviously nonetheless cares greatly not only about its history, but also about its survival.
Avoid, of course, if you want a biased, slanted interpretation of any given point.
What I want to know is how MacCulloch manages to tell a linear story in a way that doesn't pervert the thematic content... or maybe he's written a thematically arranged book which doesn't pervert the temporal changes? In either case, a great relief from most long histories which are full either of repetition or of anachronies. Finally, I would guess that this is the only perspective from which such a book could be written: son of a clergyman, friend of but not believer in the religion, who obviously nonetheless cares greatly not only about its history, but also about its survival.
Avoid, of course, if you want a biased, slanted interpretation of any given point.
abandoned
August 16, 2022Read through page 522 out of 1016.
This is an absolutely mammoth tome, and most of the more than three months I’ve spent with it have involved my debating between, on the one hand, “there’s a ton of facts in here I don’t know!” and on the other, “but it’s a drag and I’m not sure I’m retaining that much.” It’s funny—sometimes I’ll see other readers complaining that a book is dry when I find it perfectly readable, and other times others call accessible something I find overly academic. This fell into the latter category, very much the experience of reading an enormous textbook. There’s just so many facts stuffed into such a compact space that it’s hard to keep track of them all, and the writing style did not help me here.
And there’s a sense in which MacCulloch’s writing is a bit toothless. It’s perhaps inevitable that a book covering two millennia and much of the world won’t have room to provide much analysis of specific events, people or ideas, so that anything you know about or are particularly interested in will seem to get short shrift. But his rendition of events also feels very tame. In fairness, he’s clear up front about being “a friend of Christianity” while having left the Anglican faith himself, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that he tries to strike a middle ground in criticizing particular historical actions, but not very sharply. In general I think there’s something to be said for a work that takes criticism from both sides (with some reviewers complaining that he’s not pro-Christian enough while others think he gives Christianity a pass), but in this case I’m inclined to just call it forgettable.
Nevertheless, I’m somewhat sorry to give up on the book just because it is so packed with information, even if not organized in a way conducive to my remembering it. A few tidbits that I learned:
- I’d assumed there were just three branches of Christianity: Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Not so, as it turns out: the early eastern Church, originally headquartered in Jerusalem, gave rise to missions that resulted in Christian churches all over the world, from Armenia to Ethiopia to China to India. These predated Protestantism by more than a millennium while not being under the control of the Catholic or Orthodox hierarchy.
- The design of early Christian churches and the organization of their rites borrows heavily from the architecture and fanfare of royal courts. It was seen as natural to honor God in the same way one would honor a secular power—to do less would be disrespectful!
- All those Catholic penances, where a particular sin can be forgiven if you say a particular number of Ave Marias, or what have you? Invented by early Irish clergy, who evidently had a very legalistic way of viewing the world—they started spreading the idea to everyone else in the 7th century.
The first half of the book covers everything up to the Reformation and the second half the Reformation and onward. While the book does have a western focus overall, it’s actually much less true here than in most English-language history books, and no more than is called for based on where most Christians historically lived. Hundreds of pages focus on other parts of the world: particularly Eastern Europe, but also the Middle East and the broad range of countries with ancient Christian enclaves mentioned above. And the book is certainly an impressive achievement overall. I think I’d like to read something a bit more approachable, with stronger storytelling—Destiny Disrupted for Christianity, essentially. But this book is worth a try for the patient and dedicated reader, and maybe you’ll like it better than I did.
This is an absolutely mammoth tome, and most of the more than three months I’ve spent with it have involved my debating between, on the one hand, “there’s a ton of facts in here I don’t know!” and on the other, “but it’s a drag and I’m not sure I’m retaining that much.” It’s funny—sometimes I’ll see other readers complaining that a book is dry when I find it perfectly readable, and other times others call accessible something I find overly academic. This fell into the latter category, very much the experience of reading an enormous textbook. There’s just so many facts stuffed into such a compact space that it’s hard to keep track of them all, and the writing style did not help me here.
And there’s a sense in which MacCulloch’s writing is a bit toothless. It’s perhaps inevitable that a book covering two millennia and much of the world won’t have room to provide much analysis of specific events, people or ideas, so that anything you know about or are particularly interested in will seem to get short shrift. But his rendition of events also feels very tame. In fairness, he’s clear up front about being “a friend of Christianity” while having left the Anglican faith himself, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that he tries to strike a middle ground in criticizing particular historical actions, but not very sharply. In general I think there’s something to be said for a work that takes criticism from both sides (with some reviewers complaining that he’s not pro-Christian enough while others think he gives Christianity a pass), but in this case I’m inclined to just call it forgettable.
Nevertheless, I’m somewhat sorry to give up on the book just because it is so packed with information, even if not organized in a way conducive to my remembering it. A few tidbits that I learned:
- I’d assumed there were just three branches of Christianity: Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Not so, as it turns out: the early eastern Church, originally headquartered in Jerusalem, gave rise to missions that resulted in Christian churches all over the world, from Armenia to Ethiopia to China to India. These predated Protestantism by more than a millennium while not being under the control of the Catholic or Orthodox hierarchy.
- The design of early Christian churches and the organization of their rites borrows heavily from the architecture and fanfare of royal courts. It was seen as natural to honor God in the same way one would honor a secular power—to do less would be disrespectful!
- All those Catholic penances, where a particular sin can be forgiven if you say a particular number of Ave Marias, or what have you? Invented by early Irish clergy, who evidently had a very legalistic way of viewing the world—they started spreading the idea to everyone else in the 7th century.
The first half of the book covers everything up to the Reformation and the second half the Reformation and onward. While the book does have a western focus overall, it’s actually much less true here than in most English-language history books, and no more than is called for based on where most Christians historically lived. Hundreds of pages focus on other parts of the world: particularly Eastern Europe, but also the Middle East and the broad range of countries with ancient Christian enclaves mentioned above. And the book is certainly an impressive achievement overall. I think I’d like to read something a bit more approachable, with stronger storytelling—Destiny Disrupted for Christianity, essentially. But this book is worth a try for the patient and dedicated reader, and maybe you’ll like it better than I did.
April 3, 2020
For most of the book, my biggest problem is one that's basically impossible to solve in something with such a sweeping objective - too much stuff passes by in a flurry of names and dates without enough detail to understand it. To be clear he does go into detail on some stuff! But I kept finding myself wanting more. And obviously that's an unreasonable ask in even a big book on the history of 2000 years.
When it gets to modern times it's more things that I have Strong Opinions on and feel a bit hmm about. He talks about the French Revolution for a couple of pages and it's just a depiction of it as a ridiculous, horrific bolt from the blue with no motivation other than murderous terror, leading to him defending the Catholic church and presenting it as the *actual* popular movement. The line "Against a French Revolution which represented more than two decades of male nationalist violence, the Church found itself managing an international uprising of women - what has been termed with a pleasing overturning of modern sociological assumptions 'ultramontane feminism'" made me put the book down - it's an erasure of women's role in the French revolution, an erasure of the entire history of male violence that's been a significant factor in the church, and an erasure of actual feminism in favour of a movement devoted to subjection to a male-only church.
The bigger issue here is that it puts his failures to cast judgement in other areas into a worse light, and the most egregious example is slavery. It becomes more and more obvious that the examples he's using are 95% the positive examples of Christian resistance to slavery while giving very limited space to the dominant Christian slavery defending and racist views. He mentions the way Noah's curse on his grandson in genesis became a tool for biblical justification of racism...but incredibly he focuses on it (apparently) having first been stated by a Jewish scholar and then follows up with reference to "scientific" racism to soften the blow. He emphasises evangelicals' role in the abolition of the slave trade, focusing inevitably on Wilberforce and insisting it was a mostly moral decision, then mentions the colonisation projects of Sierra Leone and Liberia, where a racial hierarchy was created on the basis of which Africans were sufficiently Christian, with no greater judgment that that it later caused "troubles". To a large extent I assume he thinks the bad will speak for itself, but the extent to which he minimises the culpability of Christian institutions or at least hedges it with the language of good intentions is noticeable and pretty bad. The sections on Christianisation of the Americas are also particularly bad on this - emphasising the "good" of syncretism and cooperation of native elites and the examples of those who spoke out against the genocide while barely paying attention to Christianity as justification for said genocide.
A particularly clear example: he dedicates 4 good sized paragraphs to the American Civil War. First he splits Evangelicals 3 ways - abolitionists/slavers/african americans. He describes the defence of slavery as rather bizarrely "sliding" into white supremacy and explicitly makes the point that both abolitionists and slavers were "equally angry". Then he states the outbreak of the civil war, where the "tensions exploded into fighting" and it was "ostensibly not about slavery but about individual states' rights to make decisions on slavery for themselves" without explaining further. And then we get the line "Already the rhetoric of the struggle had been cast in terms of Christian moral crusade, thanks to the barely sane actions of a fervent Calvinist from a family long committed to the abolitionist cause, John Brown."
Woah. Hang on. "Barely sane"? After a couple of paragraphs which explicitly did not include any moral condemnation of slavers and muddied the waters instead of preventing the facts which condemn them, suddenly John Brown is brought up just to attack him. The whole paragraph after I'll quote here. I may well be making too much of it! But it bothers me.
The comparison to Smith is bizarre. He completely elides the horrific context of "Bleeding Kansas" to make it seem like Brown's words are just an absurd unprovoked piece of violence. His "campaign" was "crazy" - before this point the term crazy isn't used by him pejoratively and talk of sanity is only used of Ivan the Terrible and John of Leyden (as an aside, John of Leyden is presented as an evil figure in the 1 sentence about him, but it's unsourced and looking it up Wikipedia points out all the sources on him are by his enemies who were massacring Anabaptists. weird pattern, this). By not putting any of this into context he's made John Brown's actions inexplicable and therefore the abolitionist support of him too.
The next paragraph then completely changes tone as we go back to the slavers' perspective. Apparently "the suddenness of the change in Southern society, the freeing of four million human beings, was a deep trauma to add to the sheer destructiveness and death of the war itself," which feels a pretty gross way of talking about it. "Southerners [a term here clearly excluding Black people] took revenge on Black Christians [excluding a lot of Black people!]" "They also viewed their own plight as that of an endangered victim culture. For the prominent Southern Baptist pastor in South Carolina and Alabama E. T. Winkler, that sense justified his defence of the Ku Klux Klan to Northern Baptists in 1872 as an example of necessary 'temporary organizations for the redress of intolerable grievances'. It was unlikely that he would apply the same argument to any temporary organizations which threatened blacks might form... "The scars persist in American society to this day."
None of this is a serious handling of the American Civil War, Reconstruction or slavery in America. By not providing any context to the naive reader, focusing on the "crazy" John Brown and repeating a narrative that slaver sympathisers hold today with only mild implicit criticism - and surely accidentally but dodgily implicitly tying Black personhood to Christianity, readers will come away with a very warped view.
The problem is as I said before it's clear who's getting the benefit of the doubt. The section on Mormons incredibly avoids criticism of the church. Mormon polygamy is mentioned but it's emphasised that Brigham Young, a horrible misogynist racist, implemented polygamy "with as much public decorum as the nineteenth century would wish". The end of it is an "incursion of external liberal values" along with the allowing of Black men into the priesthood - the racist ban is not explained at all. Almost unbelievably he refers to the revoke of the ban as "allowing men of Negro descent" to become priests - I believe this is a quote but it's not in quotes. He says "Wholesome prosperity... has become a worldwide Mormon speciality". It's a bizarre whitewashing.
As it moves through the modern era you get a description of the civil war that presents the Republicans as the aggressors against the Catholic Church and describes their purported crimes against the clergy in lurid detail for several paragraphs while again giving no context of Spain's horrifically unequal society at the time. Then for "balance" he mentions that Franco set up an authoritarian secret police but with no details. The average reader is going to come away thinking the Nationalists were right.
I've put up with enough. I got about 90% in so I didn't technically finish but close enough. I'm not reading any more and can't seriously recommend it given his constant willingness to cover for the right wing established order and for Christians in general as against misleading and outright dangerous slavery apologism used to describe the people who tried to change things. Screw this.
When it gets to modern times it's more things that I have Strong Opinions on and feel a bit hmm about. He talks about the French Revolution for a couple of pages and it's just a depiction of it as a ridiculous, horrific bolt from the blue with no motivation other than murderous terror, leading to him defending the Catholic church and presenting it as the *actual* popular movement. The line "Against a French Revolution which represented more than two decades of male nationalist violence, the Church found itself managing an international uprising of women - what has been termed with a pleasing overturning of modern sociological assumptions 'ultramontane feminism'" made me put the book down - it's an erasure of women's role in the French revolution, an erasure of the entire history of male violence that's been a significant factor in the church, and an erasure of actual feminism in favour of a movement devoted to subjection to a male-only church.
The bigger issue here is that it puts his failures to cast judgement in other areas into a worse light, and the most egregious example is slavery. It becomes more and more obvious that the examples he's using are 95% the positive examples of Christian resistance to slavery while giving very limited space to the dominant Christian slavery defending and racist views. He mentions the way Noah's curse on his grandson in genesis became a tool for biblical justification of racism...but incredibly he focuses on it (apparently) having first been stated by a Jewish scholar and then follows up with reference to "scientific" racism to soften the blow. He emphasises evangelicals' role in the abolition of the slave trade, focusing inevitably on Wilberforce and insisting it was a mostly moral decision, then mentions the colonisation projects of Sierra Leone and Liberia, where a racial hierarchy was created on the basis of which Africans were sufficiently Christian, with no greater judgment that that it later caused "troubles". To a large extent I assume he thinks the bad will speak for itself, but the extent to which he minimises the culpability of Christian institutions or at least hedges it with the language of good intentions is noticeable and pretty bad. The sections on Christianisation of the Americas are also particularly bad on this - emphasising the "good" of syncretism and cooperation of native elites and the examples of those who spoke out against the genocide while barely paying attention to Christianity as justification for said genocide.
A particularly clear example: he dedicates 4 good sized paragraphs to the American Civil War. First he splits Evangelicals 3 ways - abolitionists/slavers/african americans. He describes the defence of slavery as rather bizarrely "sliding" into white supremacy and explicitly makes the point that both abolitionists and slavers were "equally angry". Then he states the outbreak of the civil war, where the "tensions exploded into fighting" and it was "ostensibly not about slavery but about individual states' rights to make decisions on slavery for themselves" without explaining further. And then we get the line "Already the rhetoric of the struggle had been cast in terms of Christian moral crusade, thanks to the barely sane actions of a fervent Calvinist from a family long committed to the abolitionist cause, John Brown."
Woah. Hang on. "Barely sane"? After a couple of paragraphs which explicitly did not include any moral condemnation of slavers and muddied the waters instead of preventing the facts which condemn them, suddenly John Brown is brought up just to attack him. The whole paragraph after I'll quote here. I may well be making too much of it! But it bothers me.
Brown came from the same generation as Joseph Smith, and he remains just as controversial a figure, though nature endowed him with more potential than Smith for looking like an Old Testament prophet Proud of a New England Puritan heritage but unusual among abolitionists in embracing violence for the cause amid the rising tide of violence in the Midwest, he reversed the dictum of the High Priest Caiaphas on the death of Jesus, proclaiming that 'it was better that a score of bad men should die than that one man who came here to make Kansas a Free State should be driven out'. Accordingly in 1856 he was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five pro-slavery activists, but despite that hardly defensible crime, his Northern canonization as an abolitionist martyr came as a result of his seizure of an undefended Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry three years later. When the raid failed to arouse a black insurrection, Brown sat tight in the arsenal and waited to be martyred, which the Commonwealth of Virginia duly did, for the moment casting oblivion over the crazy character of his campaign. A Massachusetts newspaper editorial picked up the mood: 'no event . . . could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution'.
The comparison to Smith is bizarre. He completely elides the horrific context of "Bleeding Kansas" to make it seem like Brown's words are just an absurd unprovoked piece of violence. His "campaign" was "crazy" - before this point the term crazy isn't used by him pejoratively and talk of sanity is only used of Ivan the Terrible and John of Leyden (as an aside, John of Leyden is presented as an evil figure in the 1 sentence about him, but it's unsourced and looking it up Wikipedia points out all the sources on him are by his enemies who were massacring Anabaptists. weird pattern, this). By not putting any of this into context he's made John Brown's actions inexplicable and therefore the abolitionist support of him too.
The next paragraph then completely changes tone as we go back to the slavers' perspective. Apparently "the suddenness of the change in Southern society, the freeing of four million human beings, was a deep trauma to add to the sheer destructiveness and death of the war itself," which feels a pretty gross way of talking about it. "Southerners [a term here clearly excluding Black people] took revenge on Black Christians [excluding a lot of Black people!]" "They also viewed their own plight as that of an endangered victim culture. For the prominent Southern Baptist pastor in South Carolina and Alabama E. T. Winkler, that sense justified his defence of the Ku Klux Klan to Northern Baptists in 1872 as an example of necessary 'temporary organizations for the redress of intolerable grievances'. It was unlikely that he would apply the same argument to any temporary organizations which threatened blacks might form... "The scars persist in American society to this day."
None of this is a serious handling of the American Civil War, Reconstruction or slavery in America. By not providing any context to the naive reader, focusing on the "crazy" John Brown and repeating a narrative that slaver sympathisers hold today with only mild implicit criticism - and surely accidentally but dodgily implicitly tying Black personhood to Christianity, readers will come away with a very warped view.
The problem is as I said before it's clear who's getting the benefit of the doubt. The section on Mormons incredibly avoids criticism of the church. Mormon polygamy is mentioned but it's emphasised that Brigham Young, a horrible misogynist racist, implemented polygamy "with as much public decorum as the nineteenth century would wish". The end of it is an "incursion of external liberal values" along with the allowing of Black men into the priesthood - the racist ban is not explained at all. Almost unbelievably he refers to the revoke of the ban as "allowing men of Negro descent" to become priests - I believe this is a quote but it's not in quotes. He says "Wholesome prosperity... has become a worldwide Mormon speciality". It's a bizarre whitewashing.
As it moves through the modern era you get a description of the civil war that presents the Republicans as the aggressors against the Catholic Church and describes their purported crimes against the clergy in lurid detail for several paragraphs while again giving no context of Spain's horrifically unequal society at the time. Then for "balance" he mentions that Franco set up an authoritarian secret police but with no details. The average reader is going to come away thinking the Nationalists were right.
I've put up with enough. I got about 90% in so I didn't technically finish but close enough. I'm not reading any more and can't seriously recommend it given his constant willingness to cover for the right wing established order and for Christians in general as against misleading and outright dangerous slavery apologism used to describe the people who tried to change things. Screw this.
May 19, 2018
As a double priests kid (both my parents were Anglican clergy) an assumption was usually made that I knew quite a bit about Christianity. This was not accurate as I neither had much interest in the subject, nor access to a decent history about the faith. MacCulloch has rectified this with A History Of Christianity. Detailed yet readable, he takes an unbiased look at both the good and bad of the religion, never apologizing for either. He also doesn’t ignore the spiritual, faith aspect of his subject matter, explaining it as some of the rationale of Christians’ actions, yet not subscribing to it either. Highly recommended for anyone interested in religion and its effect on society.
October 31, 2012
I was looking for a straight forward, unbiased and thorough history of Christianity so when I found this book at my local bookshop and read the title I assumed that exactly what it was. Unfortunately, after reading the first 300 pages I decided to put it down. This book is certainly thorough, however, it is neither straight forward or unbiased. Firstly, the author's style of writing is very "busy". Points and ideas that could easily be made in 1 or 2 sentences usually takes the writer 4 or 5 to get across. He also uses language, idioms and wordplay that makes reading this book a real chore. It is no wonder this book is over 1000 pages long, I think it could be easily cut down to around 750 if it was written in a more reader-friendly style. This writing style has nothing to do with an intellectual gap between author and reader because I have read numerous other history books by British intellectuals that flowed much better and were real page turners. Secondly, this book is written in a very cynical, anti-Christian manner. I say anti-Christian and not anti-religious because while the author takes numerous quips and digs at Christianity, usually as a sarcastic remark at the end of a long, drawn out point, he never had anything negative to say about Judaism or Islam whenever those religions are part of the story. Another point that irked me about this book is the use of BCE and CE instead of AD and BC. I know the author is just being PC (same reason why he doesn't take digs at the other two major religions discussed in this book) but I think it is really silly to avoid AD and BC especially given the book's subject matter. In conclusion, I was disappointed with this book. It was neither as well flowing or as unbiased as I hoped it would be. I am going to look for a more balanced and complete history of Christianity.
January 19, 2019
The title provides an early indication that the Ancient Greek and Hebrew roots of Christianity are covered by this book in addition to the past two thousand years that are more commonly accepted as the era of Christianity. That's a very long span of history, in fact too broad of a scope to cover in great detail even with 1184 pages (actually 1000 pages plus table of contents, notes, bibliography, index and illustrations). Nevertheless, the author does a good job telling the story in a free flowing but yet objective narrative.
The author's discussion of Hebrew history appears to accept the story as portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures of kings David and Solomon as being historical. The strongest suggestion that the accounts of King Solomon may have been exaggerated was, "... later biblical writers living in less glorious days did nothing to diminish." As well informed as the author appears to be of critical historical scholarship elsewhere in the book, I'm reasonably sure he's aware that modern archeological findings have raised questions concerning that history. There is strong archeological evidence that Mt. Zion was unoccupied during that era of history when David and Solomon would have reigned (c.1000-c.930 BCE). I suggest reading The Bible Unearthed if you want to read more about this subject.
The story of the spread of Christianity to the east, as far as the China Sea and India, is a part of history of which I knew little. Since Christianity didn't survive in great numbers in the east, many of the details of this history have been lost. But this book tells of interesting clues of its spread. It's interesting to consider the fate of Christianity in the East as a possible example of what would have happened in the West if Christianity had not received state sponsorship from the Roman Empire.
The church divisions created by subtle differences of word meanings used to describe various views of Christology are enough to make one's head spin. The Council of Chalcedon in 451CE created a distinction between dyophysite and miaphysite views of which I am unable to comprehend the difference, even after reading their definitions more than once. Almost certainly, many of these disagreements were caused by difficulty in translating concepts from Greek into other languages. Differences like this among the Christians of the eastern world made that area ripe for being conquered by Islam. Some miaphysite Christians considered the Moslem invaders to be liberators from the dyophsite Christian rulers. If you want to waste some time, take a look at this chart that graphically portrays the various forms of Christology: (Link to Chart)
Another example of difficulty in translation of ideas related to Christology was in the writings of Augustine (354-430). He, writing in Latin, said something to the effect that Jesus and the Holy Spirit proceeded from God. This wording was generally accepted in the Latin speaking world, but rejected in the Greek speaking world.
Then we come to the so called Dark Ages, more correctly referred to as the Early Medieval Ages. I find it ironic that the so called "invading hordes of Barbarians" who are generally credited with causing the fall of the Western Roman Empire considered themselves to be Christians. But to the Latin speaking world they were known as Arian Christians, the worst kind of heretic. (The word Arian comes from Arius (ca. AD 250–336) whose teaching is generally considered to be slightly less trinitarian. Much of the art, architecture and literature of the Arian Christians have been erased by later generations. But what little does survive indicates that the Arian Christians emphasized the life of Jesus over the story of his crucifixion. (I find this of special interest since I believe that traditional Christianity has focused too much on the death of Christ.)
The author makes the case that if Clovis I (c. 466–511, the first King of the Franks) had not converted to Catholicism that Western Europe may have evolved into a diverse Arian Christianity instead of a Roman Catholic Church loyal to the Pope in Rome. There are many turns of history that this book points out that were not inevitable. History could have gone in many different directions at many different times.
The discussion of early missionary work in northern Europe describes the adoption of Christianity as more of a group experience than decisions made by individuals. Those who experienced the event generally described it with words such as, “accepted” or “submitted” rather than “conversion.” The missionaries targeted the gentry or nobility, and if successful could add a whole kingdom to the fold all at once. The author goes on to say:
The medieval era in the Eastern Orthodox Church is covered next by the book. I was surprised to learn that the Eastern Church went through an iconoclastic era. Ironically, in the end icons became a very important part of their liturgy and theology. The Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Church had the misfortune of needing to fight recurring military and theological battles against the east (Moslems), the west (Roman Catholics), and their own internal dissenters. The story of the Byzantine Empire seems to have a pattern of recurring centralized recovery followed by disintegration. It finally ended in the 1400s though the Orthodox Church continued. The book then tells the history of the Russian Orthodox Church which appeared to adopt traditions and practices from the Greek Orthodox and then embellish them. Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Church histories are also covered.
The book next provided insights into the Reformation era. One fact new to me was that in the years prior to the Reformation the sale of indulgences was more common in northern Europe than in the south. This may partly explain the persistence of the Protestant Reformation in the north. The author also noted that the recent introduction of the Greek New Testament into the West created a reaction never experienced in the East:
One incomprehensible, horrifying and unintended consequence of the Reformation was an outbreak of witchcraft hysteria. Over the 160 years from 1500 to 1660, Europe saw between 50,000 and 80,000 suspected witches executed. (This book says "Maybe forty to fifty thousand ... between 1400 and 1800") About 80% of those killed were women. It occurred in both Protestant and Catholic regions. It's tempting to conclude that this number of executions exceeds the total number of religious martyrs of the same era, but that may not be true. After all, nearly 25,000 (this book says 5,000) Protestants were murdered in Paris alone and perhaps double that number (this book says "many more terrorized") throughout France in the days following the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. The Martyr's Mirror documents over 1,000 Anabaptist martyrs. It was not a good time in which to live.
The spread of Christianity through the advent of European colonization is covered next by the book. Here's an interesting quote regarding slavery:
When the book finally arrived at the Age of Enlightenment, I thought rational thinking might make an appearance. Indeed there was some, but there was also the French Revolution and Pope Pius IX. The French Revolution was extremism in one direction and Pope Pius IX was in the other direction. Pope Pius IX in 1864 issued a Syllabus of Errors which disapproved of anything that might be considered modern; such as human reason, separation of church and state, Protestantism, freedom of religion, progress, modernism and liberalism. It was during his tenure that the decree of papal infallibility was adopted and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was accepted. Intellectuals in the Catholic Church had been resisting the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary ever since the 1100’s, but it proved to be popular with the laity. Soon after it was adopted Mary made an appearance at Lourdes indicating that she approved. (I need to clarify here, for people who are as uninformed as I used to be, that the "immaculate conception" refers to Mary's birth, not Jesus'.) Pope Pius IX was beatified in the year 2000.
The book skimmed through 19th Century Anglican and Orthodox histories, and then proceed through modern philosophy (master of suspicion), archeology and critical biblical scholarship. Then it covered the one topic where the Christian Church actually made a positive contribution (belatedly) to human welfare that went against economic considerations--the antislavery movement. Ironically, it took some creative reinterpretation of scriptures in order to do so.
The book finishes up by covering the subjects of The World Council of Churches, Pentecostalism, Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, cultural revolutions, and post Soviet era changes.
IN SUMMARY, MY RESPONSE TO THE BOOK:
Following Christian history through the ages over its tortuous and scattered path makes one wonder, if indeed there is a triune Christian God who loves us and intervenes in human affairs, that He (or She) must really have a weird sense of humor.
________________
The author MacCulloch has also recorded six lectures on the same subject as this book. The lectures are available on DVD published under the title, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years .
________________
The following short review of this book is from the PageADay Book Lover's Calendar for 4/4/12:
LIVING HISTORY
A massive and sweeping history of the Christian church by a professor of church history at Oxford University. Clocking in at over 1,000 pages and illustrated with color plates, it has time and space to explore philosophical questions regarding Christianity and finer points of Biblical scholarship, and does not ignore the politics that helped drive Christianity’s growth. It is an approach that The New York Times calls “sprawling, sensible and illuminating.”
CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST THREE THOUSAND YEARS , by Diarmaid McCullough (Viking, 2010)
The author's discussion of Hebrew history appears to accept the story as portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures of kings David and Solomon as being historical. The strongest suggestion that the accounts of King Solomon may have been exaggerated was, "... later biblical writers living in less glorious days did nothing to diminish." As well informed as the author appears to be of critical historical scholarship elsewhere in the book, I'm reasonably sure he's aware that modern archeological findings have raised questions concerning that history. There is strong archeological evidence that Mt. Zion was unoccupied during that era of history when David and Solomon would have reigned (c.1000-c.930 BCE). I suggest reading The Bible Unearthed if you want to read more about this subject.
The story of the spread of Christianity to the east, as far as the China Sea and India, is a part of history of which I knew little. Since Christianity didn't survive in great numbers in the east, many of the details of this history have been lost. But this book tells of interesting clues of its spread. It's interesting to consider the fate of Christianity in the East as a possible example of what would have happened in the West if Christianity had not received state sponsorship from the Roman Empire.
The church divisions created by subtle differences of word meanings used to describe various views of Christology are enough to make one's head spin. The Council of Chalcedon in 451CE created a distinction between dyophysite and miaphysite views of which I am unable to comprehend the difference, even after reading their definitions more than once. Almost certainly, many of these disagreements were caused by difficulty in translating concepts from Greek into other languages. Differences like this among the Christians of the eastern world made that area ripe for being conquered by Islam. Some miaphysite Christians considered the Moslem invaders to be liberators from the dyophsite Christian rulers. If you want to waste some time, take a look at this chart that graphically portrays the various forms of Christology: (Link to Chart)
Another example of difficulty in translation of ideas related to Christology was in the writings of Augustine (354-430). He, writing in Latin, said something to the effect that Jesus and the Holy Spirit proceeded from God. This wording was generally accepted in the Latin speaking world, but rejected in the Greek speaking world.
Then we come to the so called Dark Ages, more correctly referred to as the Early Medieval Ages. I find it ironic that the so called "invading hordes of Barbarians" who are generally credited with causing the fall of the Western Roman Empire considered themselves to be Christians. But to the Latin speaking world they were known as Arian Christians, the worst kind of heretic. (The word Arian comes from Arius (ca. AD 250–336) whose teaching is generally considered to be slightly less trinitarian. Much of the art, architecture and literature of the Arian Christians have been erased by later generations. But what little does survive indicates that the Arian Christians emphasized the life of Jesus over the story of his crucifixion. (I find this of special interest since I believe that traditional Christianity has focused too much on the death of Christ.)
The author makes the case that if Clovis I (c. 466–511, the first King of the Franks) had not converted to Catholicism that Western Europe may have evolved into a diverse Arian Christianity instead of a Roman Catholic Church loyal to the Pope in Rome. There are many turns of history that this book points out that were not inevitable. History could have gone in many different directions at many different times.
The discussion of early missionary work in northern Europe describes the adoption of Christianity as more of a group experience than decisions made by individuals. Those who experienced the event generally described it with words such as, “accepted” or “submitted” rather than “conversion.” The missionaries targeted the gentry or nobility, and if successful could add a whole kingdom to the fold all at once. The author goes on to say:
“Christianity everywhere had a big advantage in being associated with the ancient power that obsessed all Europe, Imperial Rome. The Latin speaking church became a curator of Roman-ness. That is a paradox since Jesus had been crucified by a Roman provincial Governor and Peter by an Emperor. But the cultural alliance stuck.”Coverage of the medieval era includes discussion of the development of systems of sacraments, penance, parish, celibacy, monastic orders, canon law, crusades, fighting of heretics, development of universities, and increased knowledge of the writings of Aristotle. On the subject of the worship of Mary, I found the following quotation of interest by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153 CE), who supported the veneration of Mary, but not the Immaculate Conception:
"The idea of immaculate conception was a novelty that Mary would not enjoy."(I wonder if Bernard was smiling when he said that.)
The medieval era in the Eastern Orthodox Church is covered next by the book. I was surprised to learn that the Eastern Church went through an iconoclastic era. Ironically, in the end icons became a very important part of their liturgy and theology. The Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Church had the misfortune of needing to fight recurring military and theological battles against the east (Moslems), the west (Roman Catholics), and their own internal dissenters. The story of the Byzantine Empire seems to have a pattern of recurring centralized recovery followed by disintegration. It finally ended in the 1400s though the Orthodox Church continued. The book then tells the history of the Russian Orthodox Church which appeared to adopt traditions and practices from the Greek Orthodox and then embellish them. Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Church histories are also covered.
The book next provided insights into the Reformation era. One fact new to me was that in the years prior to the Reformation the sale of indulgences was more common in northern Europe than in the south. This may partly explain the persistence of the Protestant Reformation in the north. The author also noted that the recent introduction of the Greek New Testament into the West created a reaction never experienced in the East:
"When scholars heard for the first time the unmediated urgency of the angular street Greek poured out by Jesus' post resurrection convert Paul of Tarsus as he wrestled with the problem of how Jesus represented God, the shock of the familiar experienced in an unfamiliar form was bound to suggest to the most sensitive minds in Latin Christianity that the Western Church was not so authoritative interpreter of scripture as it claimed. If there is any one explanation why the Latin west experienced a Reformation and the Greek speaking lands to the east did not, it lies in this experience of listening to a new voice in the New Testament text."The author skimmed through coverage of the Anabaptists which is to be expected for a book covering 3,000 years of history. After a description of the English reformation the book moves on to the Counter (or Catholic) Reformation. The intrigues during the early years of the Counter Reformations raise interesting speculations as to how differently things could have been, if only... I recommend the book titled Q by Wu Ming (a.k.a. Luther Blisset) (Link to Book) for an interesting fictional account of the Reformation years ending with the intrigue, politics, betrayal, and terror of the Counter Reformation politics in Italy leading up to the Council of Trent.
One incomprehensible, horrifying and unintended consequence of the Reformation was an outbreak of witchcraft hysteria. Over the 160 years from 1500 to 1660, Europe saw between 50,000 and 80,000 suspected witches executed. (This book says "Maybe forty to fifty thousand ... between 1400 and 1800") About 80% of those killed were women. It occurred in both Protestant and Catholic regions. It's tempting to conclude that this number of executions exceeds the total number of religious martyrs of the same era, but that may not be true. After all, nearly 25,000 (this book says 5,000) Protestants were murdered in Paris alone and perhaps double that number (this book says "many more terrorized") throughout France in the days following the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. The Martyr's Mirror documents over 1,000 Anabaptist martyrs. It was not a good time in which to live.
The spread of Christianity through the advent of European colonization is covered next by the book. Here's an interesting quote regarding slavery:
"The expedient of importing African slaves was in part meant to protect the native American population from exploitation. Not many clergy comprehended the moral disaster. One Franciscan based in the University of Mexico City ... (1571) had the clear sightedness to condemn the common argument that Africans were being saved from Pagan darkness by the removal to America, remarking sarcastically, "I don't believe that it can be demonstrated that according the law of Christ the liberty of the soul can be purchased by the servitude of the body." His words found few echoes. "The book moves on to cover North American colonization, Puritans, hymnody and English Glorious Revolution. I was surprised to learn how much the young Charles Wesley was inspired by the Moravians. According to this book the Moravians indeed did enjoy playing the trombone; I previously had considered that to be a myth for a children's story.
When the book finally arrived at the Age of Enlightenment, I thought rational thinking might make an appearance. Indeed there was some, but there was also the French Revolution and Pope Pius IX. The French Revolution was extremism in one direction and Pope Pius IX was in the other direction. Pope Pius IX in 1864 issued a Syllabus of Errors which disapproved of anything that might be considered modern; such as human reason, separation of church and state, Protestantism, freedom of religion, progress, modernism and liberalism. It was during his tenure that the decree of papal infallibility was adopted and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was accepted. Intellectuals in the Catholic Church had been resisting the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary ever since the 1100’s, but it proved to be popular with the laity. Soon after it was adopted Mary made an appearance at Lourdes indicating that she approved. (I need to clarify here, for people who are as uninformed as I used to be, that the "immaculate conception" refers to Mary's birth, not Jesus'.) Pope Pius IX was beatified in the year 2000.
The book skimmed through 19th Century Anglican and Orthodox histories, and then proceed through modern philosophy (master of suspicion), archeology and critical biblical scholarship. Then it covered the one topic where the Christian Church actually made a positive contribution (belatedly) to human welfare that went against economic considerations--the antislavery movement. Ironically, it took some creative reinterpretation of scriptures in order to do so.
"... the 'unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations'. .... abolition was an act of moral revulsion which defied the strict commercial interests of European and anglophone nations. Less frequently has it been recognized as one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Christian history: a defiance of biblical certainties, spearheaded by British Evangelicals who made it a point of principle to uphold biblical certainties."Then the book told the story of late 19th and 20th Century worldwide missionary movement. It goes on the discuss the variety of denominations to develop in the United States. Then it covered church activities before, during and after the World Wars of the 20th Century. It is here that the author decided to talk about the Mennonities, of which I have a special interest. He hardly said anything about them in the material written for the Reformation where I would normally expect to find it. Here's what he said:
The Bolsheviks' hatred of religious practice extended far beyond the official Church. Of all the stories of Christian suffering in Russia after 1917, that of the Mennonites can stand for others because of the peculiar moral dilemma it presented for this sect, which since the Reformation had itself rejected the ideal of Christendom now in collapse. First gathered in the Netherlands in the 1530s by Menno Simons, a Frisian former priest sickened by the blood-soaked end to the siege of Munster, Mennonites expressed their difference from the world around them by renouncing all forms of coercion or public violence, soldiering of course included. Their prosperity attracted Bolshevik and anarchist raids, both out of ideological hatred of 'bourgeois' farmers, and from simple greed or necessity--but there was another intoxicating element for bullies: the Mennonites would not fight back when attacked. Men were murdered, women raped, everything was stolen. For many of them, it was too much. They fought back and sent perpetrators of the outrages packing--but now they had to face the wrath of brethren and sisters who said that they were betraying Mennonite principles. When Russian Mennonites finally had the chance, most made new lives in communities in North America; but they did not forget the controversy. Bad feeling and arguments about the Russian civil war still beset quiet places in the prairies of Canada.The author's decision to tell the story about a subset of Mennonites who ended up in Canada can perhaps be explained by the fact that he is British.
The book finishes up by covering the subjects of The World Council of Churches, Pentecostalism, Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, cultural revolutions, and post Soviet era changes.
IN SUMMARY, MY RESPONSE TO THE BOOK:
Following Christian history through the ages over its tortuous and scattered path makes one wonder, if indeed there is a triune Christian God who loves us and intervenes in human affairs, that He (or She) must really have a weird sense of humor.
________________
The author MacCulloch has also recorded six lectures on the same subject as this book. The lectures are available on DVD published under the title, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years .
________________
The following short review of this book is from the PageADay Book Lover's Calendar for 4/4/12:
LIVING HISTORY
A massive and sweeping history of the Christian church by a professor of church history at Oxford University. Clocking in at over 1,000 pages and illustrated with color plates, it has time and space to explore philosophical questions regarding Christianity and finer points of Biblical scholarship, and does not ignore the politics that helped drive Christianity’s growth. It is an approach that The New York Times calls “sprawling, sensible and illuminating.”
CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST THREE THOUSAND YEARS , by Diarmaid McCullough (Viking, 2010)
July 30, 2011
MacCulloch is so uptight PC he must squeak when he walks. The first tipoff is his use of CE and BCE instead of Anno Domini (AD) and BC. CE refers to a "common era". The terms he uses are used by certain publishing houses and writers to "avoid offending non-Christians". The use of these terms seems ludicrous considering the subject of his book. His survey of Christianity seems to me to not be dispassionate or objective. It gets more PC the closer he gets to our time. The book is over 1,000 pages and I didn't find much in it I didn't already know. I don't trust his objectivity because he lost a high-ranking position in his church when he was outed, and he seems to be sneering at Christianity. All this and I'm not even a Christian.
January 21, 2016
What I purchased, I thought, was going to be an objective, historical account of the Christian faith, and what I got was a biased, obsessive attempt to discredit the Christian faith and its roots.
I have read the first two and a half chapters and have sensed MacCulloch's subtle, but chronic orientation toward presenting "disproving" or "invalidating" conclusions based on far-fetched assumptions and speculation.
Seeking a historical account, I could not accept this awfully apparent bias with each new page and presentation, so I have decided, after faithfully trying to see the "objective" good in this book for nearly a week, that I must return it as it is an unfair and slanted interpretation of history.
If you read carefully the introduction, MacCulloch makes his biases clear:
"I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species." p. 10)
"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." (p. 12)
Just a few of MacCulloch's biased and baseless assertions are:
#1 Jesus was not born in Bethlehem:
"This does not ring true: the idea is based on Luke’s ancestor list for Jesus, designed to show that he was linked to King David a thousand years before, which was a matter of no concern whatsoever to Roman bureaucrats." (p. 78)
"Luke’s birth narrative, the more elaborate, explains that Jesus’s parents travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’s birth because they had to comply with the residence terms of a Roman imperial census for tax purposes, ‘because he was of the house and lineage of David’. 4 This does not ring true: the idea is based on Luke’s ancestor list for Jesus, designed to show that he was linked to King David a thousand years before, which was a matter of no concern whatsoever to Roman bureaucrats." (p. 78)
"This suspicion grows when one observes how little the birth and infancy narratives have to do with the later story of Jesus’s public ministry, death and resurrection, which occupies all four Gospels; nowhere do these Gospels refer back to the tales of birth and infancy, which suggests that the bulk of their texts were written before these particular stories. We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem." (p. 78)
"Why, then, were the stories created?" (p. 78) - he continues...
And makes arguments based upon the same conclusion...
"Assuming (although it is a large and even illogical assumption) that we can place more faith in the infancy narratives’ chronological fix on Jesus’s birth than in their general claims for a birth in Bethlehem, ..."(pp. 81-82)
#2 Moses's God was different than Abraham's God ....because only Moses heard his name
"The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, speaking in the bush, called himself by a single name that is not a name, ‘I will be who I will be’, which is an explanation of a name used thousands of times throughout the Hebrew scripture, Yahweh. 14 By itself, the story gives no reason to suppose that these personal gods had previously been linked by a single name. In effect the story tells of the recognition of a new god, and that point is underlined on a further occasion when God says to Moses about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that ‘by my name [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them’. 15 What more likely than that such a dramatic change was indeed the result of personal revelation (personal inspiration, if you prefer), either to Moses or to someone else?" (p. 54).
#3 The Hebrews weren't actually decendents of Abraham and Israel.
From an early period, the Children of Israel were also called ‘Hebrews’ – usually (even in the Tanakh itself) by those who did not think much of them. The word is well authenticated beyond the Bible; it appears as ‘Habiru’ in a wide variety of times and places from Egypt to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). What is striking about these other references is that they seem to concern a social rather than an ethnic grouping, and their context invariably suggests people who were uprooted and on the edges of other societies, people of little account except for their nuisance value. 11 That is a plausible origin for the peoples who gathered as ‘Israel’ under the rule of the Judges in the land of Canaan/ Israel. They were those who had been marginalized: nomads, semi-nomads, the dispossessed who now began to find ways of settling down and building new lives. While such people were not unique to this area, something remarkable seems to have happened to the groups of Habiru who massed in Canaan from the late thirteenth century BCE, whether from Egypt or elsewhere: they constructed a new identity, sealed by a God who was not necessarily to be associated with older establishments or older shrines. It would be natural for the worshippers of this God to begin a long process of refashioning a patchwork of ancient stories from their varied previous homes into a plausible single story of common ancestors, among whom may be numbered Abram/ Abraham and Jacob/ Israel. It was significant that these Patriarchs had experienced their God changing their names. Perhaps the Habiru felt that this was what was happening to them: God was giving them a new identity." (pp. 52-53)
"Around such a personal god, who announced a new identity for himself, the dispossessed, the migrants, the Habiru, could themselves find comfort and a new identity." (p. 54)
#4 The Bible distorted truth about the virginity of Mary
"Whoever added Matthew’s infancy narrative shared the agenda of the main creator of the Gospel. The messages would be understood and appreciated by the Christian congregation which first heard Matthew’s text recited or chanted in its worship. Furthermore, Matthew’s and Luke’s ancestor lists are in their present form pointless. They claim to show that Jesus could be described as the Son of David; in fact Luke goes further, taking Jesus back to Adam, the first man. Yet they do this by tracing David’s line down to Jesus’s father, Joseph. Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus. Matthew does it by abruptly ending the genealogical mantra ‘father of’ after the generation of ‘Jacob the father of Joseph’, continuing ‘Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born’. Luke is more directly indecorous by calling Jesus ‘the son (as was supposed) of Joseph’. 10 These rather lame phrases cannot be other than emendations of the rival texts, designed to accommodate the rapidly growing conviction of Christians that Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a virgin in human terms and became with child by the Holy Spirit." (pp. 79-80
"A proclamation of Mary’s perpetual virginity meant commentators clumsily making the best that they could of clear references in the biblical text to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit." (p. 80)
"The birth and infancy narratives in the Gospels therefore provide an excellent example of the way in which those biblical accounts which are hardly historical in themselves reveal a great deal about the historical circumstances in which they were created." (p. 81)
MacCulloch dashes a little sugar over his biased work by saying the following in the introduction:
"I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity." (p. 10)
Realistically, I remember the old saying, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
I have read the first two and a half chapters and have sensed MacCulloch's subtle, but chronic orientation toward presenting "disproving" or "invalidating" conclusions based on far-fetched assumptions and speculation.
Seeking a historical account, I could not accept this awfully apparent bias with each new page and presentation, so I have decided, after faithfully trying to see the "objective" good in this book for nearly a week, that I must return it as it is an unfair and slanted interpretation of history.
If you read carefully the introduction, MacCulloch makes his biases clear:
"I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species." p. 10)
"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." (p. 12)
Just a few of MacCulloch's biased and baseless assertions are:
#1 Jesus was not born in Bethlehem:
"This does not ring true: the idea is based on Luke’s ancestor list for Jesus, designed to show that he was linked to King David a thousand years before, which was a matter of no concern whatsoever to Roman bureaucrats." (p. 78)
"Luke’s birth narrative, the more elaborate, explains that Jesus’s parents travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’s birth because they had to comply with the residence terms of a Roman imperial census for tax purposes, ‘because he was of the house and lineage of David’. 4 This does not ring true: the idea is based on Luke’s ancestor list for Jesus, designed to show that he was linked to King David a thousand years before, which was a matter of no concern whatsoever to Roman bureaucrats." (p. 78)
"This suspicion grows when one observes how little the birth and infancy narratives have to do with the later story of Jesus’s public ministry, death and resurrection, which occupies all four Gospels; nowhere do these Gospels refer back to the tales of birth and infancy, which suggests that the bulk of their texts were written before these particular stories. We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem." (p. 78)
"Why, then, were the stories created?" (p. 78) - he continues...
And makes arguments based upon the same conclusion...
"Assuming (although it is a large and even illogical assumption) that we can place more faith in the infancy narratives’ chronological fix on Jesus’s birth than in their general claims for a birth in Bethlehem, ..."(pp. 81-82)
#2 Moses's God was different than Abraham's God ....because only Moses heard his name
"The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, speaking in the bush, called himself by a single name that is not a name, ‘I will be who I will be’, which is an explanation of a name used thousands of times throughout the Hebrew scripture, Yahweh. 14 By itself, the story gives no reason to suppose that these personal gods had previously been linked by a single name. In effect the story tells of the recognition of a new god, and that point is underlined on a further occasion when God says to Moses about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that ‘by my name [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them’. 15 What more likely than that such a dramatic change was indeed the result of personal revelation (personal inspiration, if you prefer), either to Moses or to someone else?" (p. 54).
#3 The Hebrews weren't actually decendents of Abraham and Israel.
From an early period, the Children of Israel were also called ‘Hebrews’ – usually (even in the Tanakh itself) by those who did not think much of them. The word is well authenticated beyond the Bible; it appears as ‘Habiru’ in a wide variety of times and places from Egypt to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). What is striking about these other references is that they seem to concern a social rather than an ethnic grouping, and their context invariably suggests people who were uprooted and on the edges of other societies, people of little account except for their nuisance value. 11 That is a plausible origin for the peoples who gathered as ‘Israel’ under the rule of the Judges in the land of Canaan/ Israel. They were those who had been marginalized: nomads, semi-nomads, the dispossessed who now began to find ways of settling down and building new lives. While such people were not unique to this area, something remarkable seems to have happened to the groups of Habiru who massed in Canaan from the late thirteenth century BCE, whether from Egypt or elsewhere: they constructed a new identity, sealed by a God who was not necessarily to be associated with older establishments or older shrines. It would be natural for the worshippers of this God to begin a long process of refashioning a patchwork of ancient stories from their varied previous homes into a plausible single story of common ancestors, among whom may be numbered Abram/ Abraham and Jacob/ Israel. It was significant that these Patriarchs had experienced their God changing their names. Perhaps the Habiru felt that this was what was happening to them: God was giving them a new identity." (pp. 52-53)
"Around such a personal god, who announced a new identity for himself, the dispossessed, the migrants, the Habiru, could themselves find comfort and a new identity." (p. 54)
#4 The Bible distorted truth about the virginity of Mary
"Whoever added Matthew’s infancy narrative shared the agenda of the main creator of the Gospel. The messages would be understood and appreciated by the Christian congregation which first heard Matthew’s text recited or chanted in its worship. Furthermore, Matthew’s and Luke’s ancestor lists are in their present form pointless. They claim to show that Jesus could be described as the Son of David; in fact Luke goes further, taking Jesus back to Adam, the first man. Yet they do this by tracing David’s line down to Jesus’s father, Joseph. Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus. Matthew does it by abruptly ending the genealogical mantra ‘father of’ after the generation of ‘Jacob the father of Joseph’, continuing ‘Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born’. Luke is more directly indecorous by calling Jesus ‘the son (as was supposed) of Joseph’. 10 These rather lame phrases cannot be other than emendations of the rival texts, designed to accommodate the rapidly growing conviction of Christians that Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a virgin in human terms and became with child by the Holy Spirit." (pp. 79-80
"A proclamation of Mary’s perpetual virginity meant commentators clumsily making the best that they could of clear references in the biblical text to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit." (p. 80)
"The birth and infancy narratives in the Gospels therefore provide an excellent example of the way in which those biblical accounts which are hardly historical in themselves reveal a great deal about the historical circumstances in which they were created." (p. 81)
MacCulloch dashes a little sugar over his biased work by saying the following in the introduction:
"I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity." (p. 10)
Realistically, I remember the old saying, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
August 15, 2021
Sem dúvida, o livro mais bem pesquisado que li na vida. O historiador inglês Diarmaid é minucioso, detalhista ao contar sobre a história do cristianismo, indo da igreja no ocidente para a igreja no oriente, sem esquecer a igreja africana. São mais de 1200 páginas de pesquisa exaustiva sobre fatos pouco retratados em outros livros de história eclesiástica. Para quem é estudante da história da igreja, uma obra recomendadíssima.
March 1, 2015
Exactly three months later, I'm done! Review obviously to come.
July 19, 2025
Fantastic introduction to the long and complicated history of Christianity. MacCulloch does a good job balancing breadth and depth, never getting too bogged down in any particular area, while still giving attention to often under-discussed variants of Christianity. Those who notice my "to-read" list on Goodreads will see that this opened up an interest in Medieval Christianity, especially monks.
March 23, 2011
I'm what you might call a slightly bewildered agnostic, but I've always had a particular interest in Christianity. So much of its own history - fragmented, argumentative and hypocritical - has always seemed to be at odds with much of Christ's core message, and I've never quit understood how so many Christians can fail to see that contradiction in their own faith's history. But this book, which is surely destined to become a classic in the field, goes a long way to explaining why Christianity has had so many schisms, so many sects and splinter groups, reformations and counter-reformations.
It is an immense book, and justifiably so - such a complicated history, ranging across the entire globe and spanning more than two thousand years, could scarcely be anything less, but it rarely flags or fails. It is a difficult history to tell, particularly when the major Churches begin to establish themselves - the early African churches, the Ethiopian Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church - and it becomes impossible to tell the full history in any meaningfully chronological way.
But it's well-worth the challenge, particularly in the areas not usually focused upon in the West - such as the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. I personally found it particularly interesting to see the history of Christianity as a whole and how all the different Churches that seem so far apart relate and respond to one another; and particularly how the various trends in religious attitudes and behaviour have evolved and changed over the centuries.
It's hard to tell MacCulloch's own position from this book, and that's another mark in its favour. If I had to tell, I'd say the overall tone is one of fond and perhaps somewhat bemused affection, tempered with a healthy dose of enlightened scepticism. It makes for a lively and engaging read, although not one to be entered into lightly.
It is an immense book, and justifiably so - such a complicated history, ranging across the entire globe and spanning more than two thousand years, could scarcely be anything less, but it rarely flags or fails. It is a difficult history to tell, particularly when the major Churches begin to establish themselves - the early African churches, the Ethiopian Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church - and it becomes impossible to tell the full history in any meaningfully chronological way.
But it's well-worth the challenge, particularly in the areas not usually focused upon in the West - such as the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. I personally found it particularly interesting to see the history of Christianity as a whole and how all the different Churches that seem so far apart relate and respond to one another; and particularly how the various trends in religious attitudes and behaviour have evolved and changed over the centuries.
It's hard to tell MacCulloch's own position from this book, and that's another mark in its favour. If I had to tell, I'd say the overall tone is one of fond and perhaps somewhat bemused affection, tempered with a healthy dose of enlightened scepticism. It makes for a lively and engaging read, although not one to be entered into lightly.
December 23, 2017
Christianity is complex. After having had read this book two years earlier, I had to reread this book in order to understand why I didn't understand it the first time I read it. The first time I had read this book I was trying to make sense of the Trinity and how it developed and caused differentiation between sects of the Christian faith. I realize now that was a mistake. Whether it be one person, one nature, and one will; or two people, one nature, and one will; or ....... doesn't make sense and never will and trying to understand that is a wasted effort and anyone who doesn't believe in my narrow interpretation is deserving of death (j/k, but historically that is what happened).
Once I got past trying to make sense of the religion qua religion, I got to concentrate on the history qua history and found the story worth understanding. The author excelled at telling the story from the reformation onward, and there is no easy way to tell the early church story in an easy to digest format without leaving out major parts in a one volume work such as this one.
The book does not really dwell on the theological thought and always tries to focus on the history. Therefore, sometimes the relevance of some of the characters are not fully understandable from this book alone. The significance of Pelagius in relation to Augustine and the importance of 'free will' and our reliance on Grace may be lost on the reader of the history alone and how this will lead to St. Thomas Aquinas' rational argument for a 'necessary' universe until reinstated by Martin Luther with his absolute certainty of a contingent universe (similar to William of Ockhem, who would say that God is all powerful so nothing is necessary to an all powerful being). The author will mention Pelagius, for example, but all the relationships and the importance of what he means gets lost with the history story telling. That's okay, because after all this is a history book most of all.
Once I got past trying to make sense of the religion qua religion, I got to concentrate on the history qua history and found the story worth understanding. The author excelled at telling the story from the reformation onward, and there is no easy way to tell the early church story in an easy to digest format without leaving out major parts in a one volume work such as this one.
The book does not really dwell on the theological thought and always tries to focus on the history. Therefore, sometimes the relevance of some of the characters are not fully understandable from this book alone. The significance of Pelagius in relation to Augustine and the importance of 'free will' and our reliance on Grace may be lost on the reader of the history alone and how this will lead to St. Thomas Aquinas' rational argument for a 'necessary' universe until reinstated by Martin Luther with his absolute certainty of a contingent universe (similar to William of Ockhem, who would say that God is all powerful so nothing is necessary to an all powerful being). The author will mention Pelagius, for example, but all the relationships and the importance of what he means gets lost with the history story telling. That's okay, because after all this is a history book most of all.
December 2, 2021
This was a brilliant overview of the Christian religion in all of its many historical manifestations. It’s a bit long on classification but contains reasonable amounts of analysis too. It deals with diverse topics, including Jewish origins, Jewish revolts against Rome, Jewish reform movements, Jesus’ life, Paul and Peter, the Church fathers, the spread of Christianity, the Nestorian Christians, monks, Ethiopian Christians, Augustine, debates over the nature of Christ, Greek philosophy, Byzantine Christianity, the Russian church, Old Believers, the papacy, the Inquisition, monasticism, Cluny, St. Benedict, the Cistercians, Scholasticism, Aquinas, North African Christianity, Iranian Christians, Chinese Christians, the crusades, the Hussites, the Vikings, missionaries, colonialists, North American religion, Henry VIII, the Reformation, Islam, slavery, Puritanism, Luther, Zwingli, Wycliffe, Calvin, the Spanish Armada, Mormonism, the Gray Awakening, the Coptic Church, Wesley, Methodism, the Baptist’s, race, Communism, evangelicalism, speaking in tongues, iconoclasm, the fall of Constantinople, the Huguenots, religious toleration in Poland and Lithuania, christian church attendance figures, Irish independence, the Scottish Kirk, Monophysites, Unitarians, cathedrals, the divine right of kings, Cromwell, Thomas Moore, the Indian church, Voltaire, the Enlightenment, saints, the Troubles, the fall of communism, etc. and so on.
Read
July 2, 2020I have a feeling that 'currently reading' may stay the status of this book for quite a while. It's not only huge, it's pretty overwhelmingly erudite. One fifth of the way in, I've concluded I'm a 'cultural' Christian. My Christ is obviously English and he, like me, loves churchyards and cathedrals, waits every year with eager anticipation for a decent carol service so he can join robustly in the old, familiar favourites, and if it ever snows at Christmas, likes to read Elliot's Journey of the Magi and ponder the whole mystery of the thing.
I don't like being informed by Diarmaid MacCulloch that Jesus probably wasn't born in Bethlehem at all. His parents didn't take part in a Roman census. No little donkey. No stable. No star. No Magi. And as for the shepherds...
I will persevere. I don't have to believe every thing that's in this book, after all. MacCulloch uses the ludicrous modern terms BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE instead of BC and AD, so that sort of hints at some of this author's agenda... No little donkey on a dusty road? As if.
Well, I got to chapter 4 and I've concluded I'm probably not the intended reader of this book. Great for scholars. Casual, interested readers? Not so much. Given up.
I don't like being informed by Diarmaid MacCulloch that Jesus probably wasn't born in Bethlehem at all. His parents didn't take part in a Roman census. No little donkey. No stable. No star. No Magi. And as for the shepherds...
I will persevere. I don't have to believe every thing that's in this book, after all. MacCulloch uses the ludicrous modern terms BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE instead of BC and AD, so that sort of hints at some of this author's agenda... No little donkey on a dusty road? As if.
Well, I got to chapter 4 and I've concluded I'm probably not the intended reader of this book. Great for scholars. Casual, interested readers? Not so much. Given up.
November 25, 2021
‘A History of Christianity: The First 3,000 years’ is a book written by Diarmaid MacCulloch detailing the history of Christianity from Ancient Greece to Today. There were, in a very pleasurable read, two flaws: one is the introduction to Nietzsche, the other is when heading towards an overview of Who found America, it would of been nice to have alternative theories about who found this great land first. However, I enjoyed every moment of the book despite having taking me so long to finish. What I found most interesting was the Reformation, 1800’s, and the two world wars which comes with a discussion about whether the dictators and evil men were religious or not.
If you are a philosophy or a theology student this is a must read. If you are a lover of wisdom this would be up your alley, and for the layman this is a nice thing to consider reading.
If you are a philosophy or a theology student this is a must read. If you are a lover of wisdom this would be up your alley, and for the layman this is a nice thing to consider reading.
April 13, 2018
A thorough history of the christian religion from an Oxford don and the son of a Church of England parson whose background and upbringing give the whole book a flavour of what has made the Anglicans or the C of E such a distinctive part of Christanity. His deep learning and understanding of his subject are set with an elegant and flowing prose style so the book is both a pleasure to read and a means of understanding most of the hows, whys and wherefores of Christianity. It is a large book but if you persevere you will be rewarded. Doubtless anyone wishing to find fault can do so in a work of this breadth; this is not difficult but for me it should be taken as a whole and its worth becomes self evident.
October 29, 2021
MacCulloch nicely organizes his narrative to explore topics. He generally favors political explanations.
November 5, 2014
An ambitious and massive work. The title alone should tell potential readers that they are in for an interesting journey.
Three thousand years in even 1000+ pages is pushing the limits for any topic. For the history of Christianity and its pre-history (the other 1000 years) in many places it is eclectic and only mars, not scratches the surface. MacCulloch does bring a lot of interesting if not probably important nuggets to the surface. The decisions about what to include and not alone are worth thousands of more page of writing!
Obviously this is a work of breadth and not depth. The evolution of various doctrines, the complete geographic scope, and most of the social interface of religion during its various glory periods is only briefly examined. As a survey of the topic alone this work could rate much higher if not for several flaws.
Diarmaid MacCulloch in a valiant attempt to leave out as little as possible, leaves out important and essential elements from various eras. There is a definite English/Anglican historical bias in places that minor additional research would quickly answer or allow for a better history to have been written. One example is that of the 'failure of the Mission in India'. The British missionaries never did really understand their role on the sub-continent. Whether from a Roman/Latin Catholic perspective or a different Protestant group far better and very succinct analysis of what MacCulloch skips over is widely available. This points out a stylistic flaw in the book.
The word processor and a lack of thorough editing led to single sentences being the only reference to various important events. They are treated as just big historical facts that don't need any further commentary or interpretation. Ranging from issues at the time or the first Christian Emperors to the Christian movement in China to modern dichotomies in theology such as Law v Gospel a lot is left not merely unexplored but in cases just stated incorrectly. This is due to the lack of a few essential details where depth was needed beyond the scope of the general breadth of the subject.
There are some flaws in the chronology of the early Popes that reminded me of Gibbon (and I am entertained highly by the "Decline and Fall") in not a positive way. There are some biased or incomplete views of the modern world, i.e. 20th Century, certainly in the Americas as to location of events and their relative importance. That combined with the China problems, and the subcontinent problems flaw this work in the last 200 or so pages.
Finally there are reference works used that are either so esoteric that outside of the authors academic circle or being cited for promotional reasons don't seem to have much traction with other authorities in the field. Some rather obscure evaluations of the evolution of the two World Wars that don't settle on a particular era of scholarship or research lend an air to this work of flippancy.
Many readers will still find a lot of value in this work. They should proceed with caution and do some additional research in most of the main topics covered. This is not to say that there are reasons for all of the authors historical evaluations, just that one or two sentences that might change how the much of this history is recorded and evaluated isn't enough even in a broad survey work.
It might not be my first recommendation to someone wanting to explore these topics, but there are some excellent sections and it one of the more readable works on this topic I've had in my hands in some time.
Three thousand years in even 1000+ pages is pushing the limits for any topic. For the history of Christianity and its pre-history (the other 1000 years) in many places it is eclectic and only mars, not scratches the surface. MacCulloch does bring a lot of interesting if not probably important nuggets to the surface. The decisions about what to include and not alone are worth thousands of more page of writing!
Obviously this is a work of breadth and not depth. The evolution of various doctrines, the complete geographic scope, and most of the social interface of religion during its various glory periods is only briefly examined. As a survey of the topic alone this work could rate much higher if not for several flaws.
Diarmaid MacCulloch in a valiant attempt to leave out as little as possible, leaves out important and essential elements from various eras. There is a definite English/Anglican historical bias in places that minor additional research would quickly answer or allow for a better history to have been written. One example is that of the 'failure of the Mission in India'. The British missionaries never did really understand their role on the sub-continent. Whether from a Roman/Latin Catholic perspective or a different Protestant group far better and very succinct analysis of what MacCulloch skips over is widely available. This points out a stylistic flaw in the book.
The word processor and a lack of thorough editing led to single sentences being the only reference to various important events. They are treated as just big historical facts that don't need any further commentary or interpretation. Ranging from issues at the time or the first Christian Emperors to the Christian movement in China to modern dichotomies in theology such as Law v Gospel a lot is left not merely unexplored but in cases just stated incorrectly. This is due to the lack of a few essential details where depth was needed beyond the scope of the general breadth of the subject.
There are some flaws in the chronology of the early Popes that reminded me of Gibbon (and I am entertained highly by the "Decline and Fall") in not a positive way. There are some biased or incomplete views of the modern world, i.e. 20th Century, certainly in the Americas as to location of events and their relative importance. That combined with the China problems, and the subcontinent problems flaw this work in the last 200 or so pages.
Finally there are reference works used that are either so esoteric that outside of the authors academic circle or being cited for promotional reasons don't seem to have much traction with other authorities in the field. Some rather obscure evaluations of the evolution of the two World Wars that don't settle on a particular era of scholarship or research lend an air to this work of flippancy.
Many readers will still find a lot of value in this work. They should proceed with caution and do some additional research in most of the main topics covered. This is not to say that there are reasons for all of the authors historical evaluations, just that one or two sentences that might change how the much of this history is recorded and evaluated isn't enough even in a broad survey work.
It might not be my first recommendation to someone wanting to explore these topics, but there are some excellent sections and it one of the more readable works on this topic I've had in my hands in some time.
November 3, 2014
After reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's brilliant "Reformation" or his equally remarkable "Thomas Cranmer" this book was quite a come down. It offers an acceptable history of Christianity for someone new to the subject but precious little to anyone who has already done some reading in the area.
MacCulloch is a specialist on the birth of the Church of England. He is able to explain how at the time of the conflict between Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism the Church of England took the best of all three and created the greatest of all Christian Churches. I am a practicing Roman Catholic who does not agree with this point of view but I do admire how brilliantly MacCulloch is able to make his case.
Outside of his main area of interest MacCulloch is a very average synthesist. His perfunctory treatment of Orthodox Christianity was in my view a major shortcoming of this book. His treatment of American protestant churches such as the Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist and Mormon churches also lacks substance.
This is an adequate introductory history of Christianity but it falls far short of what MacCulloch can do when he is in his comfort zone.
MacCulloch is a specialist on the birth of the Church of England. He is able to explain how at the time of the conflict between Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism the Church of England took the best of all three and created the greatest of all Christian Churches. I am a practicing Roman Catholic who does not agree with this point of view but I do admire how brilliantly MacCulloch is able to make his case.
Outside of his main area of interest MacCulloch is a very average synthesist. His perfunctory treatment of Orthodox Christianity was in my view a major shortcoming of this book. His treatment of American protestant churches such as the Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist and Mormon churches also lacks substance.
This is an adequate introductory history of Christianity but it falls far short of what MacCulloch can do when he is in his comfort zone.
October 24, 2013
A massive book--over 1000 pages. It was not easy to finish just because of the size of the book, though the style was very readable and engaging. I didn't get bored throughout; quite the opposite--I was eager to read and learn more. This history helped connect lots of other historical events and developments for me, as if the religious aspect provided a key element to understanding the past two millennia of Western history, an aspect that has been neglected in other histories.
Other than providing me with the religious background that illuminated the rest of history, the great lesson that I gleaned was the immense diversity of the Christian family, over time and space. There are many, many ways that the Christian message has been taught, lived, and understood.
I would also recommend this book to any skeptic who thinks Christianity is personified by the modern evangelical or fundamentalist movement. This is a recent innovation of Christianity, and far removed from most of Christian history.
Other than providing me with the religious background that illuminated the rest of history, the great lesson that I gleaned was the immense diversity of the Christian family, over time and space. There are many, many ways that the Christian message has been taught, lived, and understood.
I would also recommend this book to any skeptic who thinks Christianity is personified by the modern evangelical or fundamentalist movement. This is a recent innovation of Christianity, and far removed from most of Christian history.
November 14, 2013
This is probably the best one-volume history of Christianity that you can find. So if you want an overview of church history, and don't mind wading through a 1000 page book (though, with 2000 years of history to tell, how much shorter could such a book be?) this book is for you.
I have to admit, MacCulloch almost lost me in the early part when he said the biblical book of Philemon was later used to support slavery by Christians. Admittedly, me disagreeing on this is like a flea barking at a pit bull, but I have never heard of anyone using Philemon in this way. My understanding is that Philemon is one book of the Bible that questions slavery.
That aside, it is a fantastic book. Perhaps the best thing is that MacCulloch does not forget about non-Western Christians after 450 AD but tells the story of Christians in Asia and Africa, eventually in Muslim dominated lands (Nestorians, Monophysites). This gives the book a more worldwide and less western focused feel.
I have to admit, MacCulloch almost lost me in the early part when he said the biblical book of Philemon was later used to support slavery by Christians. Admittedly, me disagreeing on this is like a flea barking at a pit bull, but I have never heard of anyone using Philemon in this way. My understanding is that Philemon is one book of the Bible that questions slavery.
That aside, it is a fantastic book. Perhaps the best thing is that MacCulloch does not forget about non-Western Christians after 450 AD but tells the story of Christians in Asia and Africa, eventually in Muslim dominated lands (Nestorians, Monophysites). This gives the book a more worldwide and less western focused feel.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 599 reviews