Category Books

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years »

Authors: Diarmaid MacCulloch
ISBN-13: 9780670021260, ISBN-10: 0670021261
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Date Published: March 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch is the author of The Reformation, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Wolfson Prize, and the British Academy Prize, and of Thomas Cranmer, winner of the Whitbread Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize. Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, he was brought up in a country rectory in East Anglia.

Book Synopsis

The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Reformation returns with the definitive history of Christianity for our time Once in a generation a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read-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 readers 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 book 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.

The New York Times - Jon Meacham

…sprawling, sensible and illuminating…It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive and surprisingly accessible volume on the subject than MacCulloch's. This is not a book to be taken lightly; it is more than 1,100 pages, and its bulk makes it hard to take anyplace at all. Want a refresher on the rise of the papacy? It is here. On Charlemagne and Carolingians? That is here, too. On the Fourth Crusade and its aftermath? Look no farther.

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Introduction 1

Pt. I A Millennium of Beginnings (1000 BCE-100 CE)

1 Greece and Rome (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE) 19

2 Israel (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE) 47

Pt. II One Church, One Faith, One Lord? (4 BCE-450 CE)

3 A Crucified Messiah (4 BCE-100 CE) 77

4 Boundaries Defined (50 CE-300) 112

5 The Prince: Ally or Enemy? (100-300) 155

6 The Imperial Church (300-451) 189

Pt. III Vanishing Futures: East and South (451-1500)