Christianity

The First Three Thousand Years

By: Diarmaid MacCulloch

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

Length: 46 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

Once in a generation, a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read and heard - a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Breathtaking in ambition, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith.

Christianity will teach modern listeners things that have been lost in time about how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. We follow the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling in often neglected accounts of conversions and confrontations in Africa and Asia. And we discover the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the rise of the evangelical movement from its origins in Germany and England. This audiobook encompasses all of intellectual history - we meet monks and crusaders, heretics and saints, slave traders and abolitionists, and discover Christianity's essential role in driving the enlightenment and the age of exploration, and shaping the course of World War I and World War II.

We are living in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers and non-believers are deeply engaged by questions of religion and tradition, seeking to understand the violence sometimes perpetrated in the name of God. The son of an Anglican clergyman, MacCulloch writes with deep feeling about faith. His last book, The Reformation, was chosen by dozens of publications as Best Book of the Year and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This awe-inspiring follow-up is a landmark new history of the faith that continues to shape the world.

©2010 Diamaid MacCulloch (P)2010 Gildan Media Corp

Critic reviews

"Assuming no previous knowledge on the part of readers about Christian traditions, MacCulloch traces in breathtaking detail the often contentious arguments within Christianity for the past 3,000 years. His monumental achievement will not soon be surpassed." ( Publishers Weekly)

"A work of exceptional breadth and subtlety." ( Booklist)

good book

well written, interesting, thought provoking eye opening. I gained new insights into the history of my beliefs.

Good Overview Marred by Poor Narration

A very interesting broad overview of the history of Christianity. The author writes with clarity, command of his subject, and a wry style that is utterly lost on the narrator. In addition to being unable to recognize a witty aside, the reader is unable to pronounce an astounding variety of names, place names, and words. Even the mispronunciations are not consistent, making the text harder to follow. It is still possible to listen to the book, but it is far less enjoyable than it might have been.

Too Much and Yet Too Little

This book is extremely hard to follow. It is not really chronological and is too much information with too many players to present it in the manner in which the author does. Perhaps it would be better read than listened to . . . I'm not sure. I would not recommend this book. The parts in which I found tidbits of interest were just that, tidbits. The overall theme is that the history of Christianity is a history of power struggle and politics. While I am certain that is true it could be far more interestingly written.

Christianity The First Three Thousand Years

This book cover a great deal of history. The timeline jumps over and over again backward to cover a different trail and that is very confusing. However the book is very good and I would recommend it.

Not as 'biased' as other reviews state

The author comes from a Christian background. He makes digs, but not unfairly or uncritically. He admits his viewpoint at the beginning in the introduction. He has a skeptical outlook which is the ideal for a scholarly work on Christianity. And his intent behind challenging or denying the authenticity of scripture is not done as an attack, it's done because it is important to the narrative to understand the cultural, historical, and literary context the writers and scribes were working from. Reviewers who have said he speculates a lot are correct, but that's a given when working with early Christianity; there are not a lot of primary sources.

I am an atheist/buddhist. I grew up Christian. I am not into polemics against a religion for their own sake. People who think this author has "an axe to grind" are ignoring the many places where he speaks very favorably about the sincerity and faith of various figures. They are also ignoring that most of the digs are clearly made from a friendly, if not loving, place from someone who was raised in the faith.

Detailed, expansive, and memorable

MacCulloch uses a huge canvas for this book: all continents, all times, and (if there weren't so many of them) you could say all sects and denominations as well. The book is a remarkably good listen, considering the amount of detail it includes, a tribute to Walter Dixon's steady pace and his clear and pleasing voice. Because Christianity has been so tightly bound with the West for the last 2000 years, it becomes in places a "Western world history" as well.

One of the hardest areas of Christian history to grasp is the centuries-long debate about the nature of the Trinity, and its equally long-lasting partner, the debate about the exact nature of Christ. (Human? Divine? Both? If both, what percentage of each, and how mixed or not mixed?) It's a story of determined attempts to fashion a creed and equally determined attempts to resist credal formulations. MacCulloch navigates this territory well, giving plenty of time to each viewpoint and noting that many of the viewpoints, assumed by many Christians to be long dead, are in fact alive and thriving in one or another sect to the present day.

MacCulloch is writing as a friendly outsider, which pretty well sums up my position as a listener. His attempts to describe Christianity's romance with temporal power, and its frequent turning of a blind eye to social injustice, may offend some people. My own impression is that his account is balanced and largely non-judgemental. Highly recommended.

Required reading

It is hard to tell, given the vast range of time and place covered by this text, whether it is a solid historical account. The level of detail, specificity of attention and shear number of people, places, ideas, beliefs, heresies and orthodoxies would require a fact checker to spend as much time verifying the book as was taken to write it.
This is not to say that the book is cumbersome or weighed down by minutia, it is not. The story is told in a brisk, efficient manner, logically laid out and well written. The history is given according to epoch, region and spiritual movement. There is no jumping between places and people or ideas.
For me the material and its treatment makes clear that, in essence, every religion is the same. Most if not all of the early religions were polytheistic and essentially consisted of a cast of characters that sprang from a creation myth. There was a head god, one or more lieutenants, a throng of other characters responsible for the various actions of the earth, environment or mysteries of existence that needed explaining. There is human relating, human/deity pairings, blended offspring and drama. There are exceptions, the early religions of Asia, for instance, which have features of the the others but other ideas, consistent with the needs of the culture or the peculiarities of geography or circumstance in the region of origin.
Later religions too have a similar pattern. All generally descend from the ideas one charismatic individual, whose work is eventually codified, politicized and overtaken by the power dynamics of all human enterprise. I am tempted to say that Buddhism is an exception, but an investigation of various iterations around Asia make clear that that is not so.
Christianity is no exception. In its bare bones it is a cult of personality, built around a poor rabbi trying to reform his religion and prepare his people for the coming end of the world. The spread of the religion is primarily due to the work of Saul (Paul) of Tarsis, the only disciple who advocated teaching Christ’s message to non-Jewish congregations
This is all a a gross simplification of almost 50 hours of material, but I do it to make the point that the book’s presentation covers the material in a way that is short on miracles and long on group dynamics, politics and human desire for power, in addition to the drive for transcendence that all humans share.
The book is required reading for any person seeking to understand Christianity today.

Nothing is left out..

To understand the history of the World, one must understand the history of religion, for religion provides the background color over which the rest of civilized history is painted. In Europe and the Americas, the most influential religion from 1492 on was Christianity. The varying Christian beliefs of the Spanish, French, British, Germans, Russians and Muslims was the single most important driving force behind the politics which created each distinct civilization.

I find it amazing that mankind put so much effort and resource into the promotion of what, in the end, is just a unique vision - fantasy actually - of something he/she thinks of as his god. When I sit back to reflect on this, I can not help to wonder WHY so many have believed it to be a life or death matter that all must worship the exact same creation fantasy in the exact same manner. To this end thousands of wars have been fought. Millions of people have been killed tortured and deprived of all that makes life worthwhile. Empires have been made and empires have been toppled. Thousands of churches and other "holy" places, at an enormous expense, have been built. Entire societies and nations have been created and destroyed. Nearly all of this happened simply because of teachings that were "reported by unknown chroniclers" of an illiterate man who lived in a remote area of the world and who preached for only three years.

MacCulloch's reporting of all of this is thorough and professional. I seriously doubt that one need to read any book but his to understand the history of each and every flavor of Christianity throughout the last 2,000+ years.

The Evolution of a Religion

Anyone who thoroughly enjoys Medieval and Renaissance history as I do can tell you that the history of Christianity is so bound up with it as to be inseparable. The thing is, a great many history books will give you only what's necessary specific to the topic at hand and very little else. Even books on the Crusades, which presumably center around religion, will leave the underlying faith as an accepted and understood issue, touching upon the heretical issues as they come up.

This book is specifically geared towards pretty much anyone who wants the details as well as the broad strokes. It covers the history of Christianity from the onset of Judaism as an offshoot of earlier traditions, Christianity's beginnings as an offshoot of that, and covers its evolution not just in Western Europe, but also in Greece, Russia, Africa, Korea, and all parts of the globe where the cross is held high. It goes even further as Islam splinters from that, and the history of the Middle Eastern faiths are examined as an intertwined whole. As it goes, the reader is given another portrait to absorb as the beliefs evolve in the various corners of the globe, across time and through politics or scholarly pursuits.

In short, this is the most complete picture of Christianity that I've certainly ever encountered, and it's helped my understanding of history considerably. Special kudos not only to what it covers and why, but also how, as the outline for this book is nothing short of daunting. To cover this topic so completely is nothing short of a feat.

As one might expect, a history of this depth and magnitude will likely call into question the faith of a devout individual reading this book as not everything is as tradition holds to be true in our day and age, and as that tradition may vary depending on which sect you follow. I would challenge that the scholarly will find a great deal of wealth here, and the religiously-minded will be confronted with questions fundamental to their faith. How those questions are answered will ultimately be determined by individual willingness to see past the rigid and into the changing waters of history. Some are more readily accepting of this than others, obviously, everyone has to approach the question their own way. Being a hefty monster of a tome, however, this one is most definitely aimed at the serious scholar, regardless of the historical or spiritual approach.

Too thorough for audio perhaps?

I tried to make it to the end of the audio, out of sheer stubbornness, but about 2/3 of the way through I bailed, and finished the print (e-book) version. The history, and even the theology, were fine, but the Middle Ages/Renaissance begins a heavy emphasis upon philosophy; I tried fast forwarding through that, which proved ineffective. The historical aspect resumes after the French Revolution (for those interested).
Narrator does a good job with material that becomes highly technical (I won't quibble with "dry") at times, but he just couldn't carry the conversational tone for several dozen hours.
Recommended on audio only for those truly into theology and philosophy, rather than history and sociology. Perhaps because I agree with the author's point-of-view, but I didn't have trouble with "bias", not minding his asides particularly.