A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

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But MacCulloch resists the glib narrative of decline and fall which is always going to tempt the sceptical historian of the church. Augustine evolves and analyses his past with all the resources of the reading which shaped his mind: Virgil and Cicero,. The chance to introduce undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame to Canadian history provided a regular stimulus to think about a common subject (Christianity) taking somewhat different shapes in the two nations. If you’re in the United States or in Australia, you’re still in a sense the heir to this man’s book.

Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. This thoroughly revised and substantially updated edition contains the best scholarship informed by recent discoveries and anchored in the solid Study Bible tradition. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

Jamie Clarke based his binding designs on three different crosses: an 18th-century Ethiopian Cross, an early Christological monogram and a reliquary cross from c. More than a century ago, a popular, independent religious movement began to take hold and continues today through “house churches” that operate beyond the control of the central government. Forgeries, heresies, martyrs, even unfamiliar texts featuring women (who was Thecla and why was she hanging around with Paul?

Lewis, who was once an atheist, has been on both sides of the table, and he approaches the notion of God with accessible, clear thinking.Destined to be His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize; Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (2004) won the Wolfson Prize and the British Academy Prize.

When all the African states became independent in the 1960s, all the bien pensant liberals across the world said, ‘Oh, this is the end of Christianity – it’s associated with colonialism.

In this delightful and illuminating look into a crucial but little-known "hinge" of history, Thomas Cahill takes us to the "island of saints and scholars, " the Ireland of St. If you’re like me, it will lead you to read Brown’s other works, such as his epic 2012 study , Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Byzantium is Judith Herrin’s masterful and often surprising history of a 1,000-year empire, in a Folio Society edition sumptuously illustrated with imperial treasures, plus a new introduction by the author. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

His Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh were published in 2013 as Silence: A Christian History. Freeman’s analysis of the “Greek-ification” of Christian thinking is very sharp, and he tells the story of Theodosius well, even if he sometimes seems to be reading elements of modern dictatorial leadership back into that emperor’s character. But they represent a much more authentic leadership than some of the terrible, corrupt leaders of the 1960s and 70s. Diarmaid MacCulloch sets out to be a ‘candid friend’ of Christianity – never shying away from its darkest episodes, and tackling its many controversies with the measured judgement of a master historian.

He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, and Fellow of St Cross College and of Campion Hall, MacCulloch is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London.