Brendan’s Reviews > A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years > Status Update
Brendan
is on page 284 of 1016
“Western Christians have forgotten that before the coming of Islam utterly transformed the situation in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, there was a good chance that the center of gravity of Christian faith might have moved east to Iraq rather than west to Rome. Instead, the ancient Christianity of the east was nearly everywhere faced with a contraction in numbers, suffering martyrdom which still continues.”
— Oct 17, 2026 02:43PM
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Brendan
is on page 454 of 1016
“What the Palestinian monasteries offered the Church of Constantinople was a tradition of music and hymnody which has remained at the heart of Byzantine liturgy; it was also in Palestine that the eight musical modes were developed. They were…soon adopted by the Carolingians and Western Church to organize its musical composition and chant, and so they stand at the origin of the whole Western musical tradition.”
— Oct 27, 2026 09:27PM
Brendan
is on page 358 of 1016
“During the early medieval period, the monastic life offered a golden opportunity for talented women of noble or royal families to lead an emancipated, active life as abbesses, exercising power which might otherwise be closed to them and avoiding the unwelcome burdens of marriage. In the privacy of a nunnery with a good library, they and their nuns…might become as well educated as any monk. Working within the
— Oct 19, 2026 08:55PM
Brendan
is on page 299 of 1016
“The Church, particularly after the terminal crisis of the Western Empire in the early fifth century, became a safer prospect than the increasingly failing civil service for those aspiring to serve or direct their communities; often Roman noblemen would become bishops because they saw the office as the only way to protect what survived of the world they loved.”
— Oct 18, 2026 11:02AM
Brendan
is on page 196 of 1016
“Significantly, imperial Christianity came to follow the political division of the empire which had originally been established by its arch-enemy Diocletian, when he split the administration of his empire between east and west…In Europe, that boundary is very largely that existing today between Orthodox and Catholic societies [] Moreover, the Church started using a technical administrative term which Diocletian
— Oct 11, 2026 05:41PM
Brendan
is on page 165 of 1016
“By the late 2nd century, intelligent non-Christians had started to realize the significance of this self-confidence. Christianity was beginning to offer a complete alternative to the culture and assumptions of the Roman establishment, an establishment which had never felt thus threatened by the teeming ancient cults of the provinces, or even by Judaism. Christianity had no national base; it was as open to those
— Oct 11, 2026 11:35AM
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Oct 17, 2026 02:45PM
MacCulloch does well to focus heavily on Eastern (Oriental Orthodox) Christianity, which developed very distinctly from a Syriac base and spread as far as India and China during Late Antiquity.
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I am especially fascinated by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which currently has around 60 million followers and is one of the oldest in the world — it certainly predates the Christianization of Northern Europe. Cut off from the rest of Christendom by Islamic powers to its north, Ethiopia developed a remarkably unique form of Christianity with features including observation of the Jewish sabbath, several distinct books in their Bible, and a form of devotion to Pontius Pilate, who repented of his role in the execution of Christ, became Christian, and was then crucified, in the Ethiopian tradition.
