Church History E-Book

Christopher Catherwood

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 334

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

In this concise, accessible guide, author Christopher Catherwood takes his readers through the history of the faith, educating them about the uniqueness of Christianity from its birth to the diverse, global Evangelical Church we know today. Church History is the perfect place to start for anyone who wants to know where to begin this quest for knowledge. Enjoy discovering more about the lives of men and women from various times and places, not only to better understand the church, but also to know how to live wisely in this age. These are some of the many reasons why history is so important. From those who desire to learn more about their fellow followers of Jesus Christ throughout history to those who want to learn more about church for themselves, this book will test you to dig deeper in your faith.

Leseprobe

CHURCHHISTORY

A CRASH COURSE FOR THE CURIOUS

CHRISTOPHER CATHERWOOD

CROSSWAY BOOKS

WHEATON, ILLINOIS

Church History

Revised edition copyright © 2007 by Christopher Catherwood

Originally published as Crash Course in Church History in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton, copyright © 1998 by Christopher Catherwood.

Published by Crossway Books

a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Jon McGrath

First printing, 2007

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version®.

Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Catherwood, Christopher. Church history : a crash course for the curious / Christopher Catherwood.—Rev. ed. p. cm. ISBN 13: 978-1-58134-841-5 (tpb) ISBN 10: 1-58134-841-X 1. Church history. I. Title. BR145.3.C365          2007 270—dc22                              2006100050

VP     17    16    15    14    13    12    11    10    09    08    07    15    14    13    12    11    10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2

To my parents

Fred and Elizabeth Catherwood

who nourished my love of church history,

and to their wonderful daughter-in-law,

my wife Paulette

who has kept that love alive

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 From Christ to Constantine

2 Creeds, Councils, and Conversions

3 Medieval Christianity

4 The Reformation—Martin Luther

5 The Reformation—Succeeding Reformers

6 The Age of Expansion and Revival

7 Awakening and Evangelicals

8 The Dawn of Global Mission and Social Responsibility

9 The Great Century: Christianity Becomes Global

Conclusion: Where Next?

Acknowledgments

While most authors end their acknowledgments by thanking their patient spouse, here in Cambridge the fashion seems to be to begin that way. I think that this is an altogether more biblical approach since anyone fortunate enough to be married knows that no two people are as close as those whom God has joined together.

I therefore follow the Cambridge pattern and gratefully begin these acknowledgments with the profoundest of thanks, love, affection, and gratitude to my wife Paulette, the ideal helpmeet, companion, and soul mate whom God has provided me with these many years past. Paulette is the embodiment of the woman in Proverbs 31 and living proof that such women can and really do exist. She has been a constant muse and inspiration for everything that I write, and my gratitude to her can never be enough.

I am also profoundly thankful for editors. Having once been one myself, I know what hours of work they put in to make sure that what authors write is in a fit state to be published. Here I have been deeply blessed by having one of the most legendary, well-liked, and widely respected editors in Christian publishing, Allan Fisher, stand behind this book. He and I have known each other for many years now, and it is such a pleasure and privilege to be one of his authors at last. I was delighted to have Ted Griffin as the copy editor for this book.

All Crossway authors are also more than grateful to that splendid and godly couple Lane and Ebeth Dennis. I first stayed in their home over twenty years ago, and they have been a marvelous source of inspiration and encouragement ever since. Their ministry has transformed countless lives, and so too has the English Standard Version, much of which was translated just a few miles from where I am writing this. Thank God that Lane and Ebeth have kept the faith through their loyal service at Crossway Books.

These words have been written in the attic in the fifteenth-century part of my parents’ home, a lovely old house a few miles outside of Cambridge, England. I am most grateful to them for providing this facility when my eighteenth-century office in Cambridge itself fell through. But they also deserve the dedication, along with my wife, of this book, since both of them have nurtured my interest in Christian history, and in history in general, ever since I was young (and my mother’s father, the late Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his lifetime as well). My thanks to them, too, cannot ever be enough.

This is the first book that I have written since that wonderful church historian, the Rev. John S. Moore, died in early 2006. Thankfully he knew the contract would be signed just before he passed away. He spent over three decades editing a church history magazine, and his library was comparable in scope to that of my grandfather, Dr. Lloyd-Jones, whom he will now have met at last in heaven. John Moore was a great example of how to write accurate church history, and he passed all of his skills in precision and accuracy on to his daughter, my wife Paulette.

I have been so fortunate in the institutions with which I have been affiliated these past years. The first, most important of all for a church historian, is my own church, St Andrew the Great in Cambridge. This has many historical links in itself, not least with the great Cambridge Puritan Richard Sibbes, who was closely associated with it in days past. Thankfully the current staff has maintained that Puritan devotion to godly life and preaching, and my thanks to the current incumbent, the Rev. Mark Ashton, and his team over the past sixteen years are considerable. For most of our time there Paulette and I have been small group Bible study leaders and have been consistently encouraged and blessed by those in our group. Members while I wrote this book included Mark Cardwell, Derek Wright, and Richard and Sally Reynolds, and their prayerful support of my writing has been wonderful.

St Edmund’s College Cambridge has been my academic base in Cambridge since 1994, and I have been associated with it in various roles since then. Here again numerous people have been encouragement itself, including, among many others, the former Master, Sir Brian Heap, who is as enthusiastic a fellow evangelical as he is eminent as a scientist; Dr. Brian Stanley, the distinguished missiologist and Baptist historian; the vice-master Dr. Geoffrey Cook; the treasurer Dr. Simon Mitton; the bursar Mrs. Moira Gardiner; and the numerous members of the Senior Common Room, permanent and visiting (usually from literally all over the world) who make my lunchtime visits always so intellectually stimulating and personally enjoyable.

I also teach church history, among other subjects, for the Institute of Economic and Political Studies (INSTEP) here in Cambridge. This is a Junior Year Abroad program—not part of the university but linked to many well-known American universities and colleges, including Tulane, Wake Forest, Villanova, Trinity College in Connecticut, and several similar places. Here my warmest thanks go to that highly well-regarded and quintessentially Cambridge couple Professor Geoffrey Williams and his wife Janice, who direct the Institute, for giving me pupils to keep body and soul together. This is especially the case when those students choose to subsidize my writing by wanting to study something about which I am also writing a book.

I had the privilege of receiving a doctorate from the University of East Anglia while writing this book, and my gratitude to my legendary supervisor, Professor John Charmley, is correspondingly profound.

I also have the enormous annual pleasure of teaching and writing at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. I have been an annual teacher at the Summer School of their School of Continuing Studies for many years now and also, equally helpfully, the Annual Writer in Residence for the university’s History Department. Everyone in both departments has been consistently wonderful to their annual visiting Briton, and I am deeply grateful to all of the people involved both there and in the International Program. The Boatwright Library has also been a superb place in which to do research since its resources are much more generous than those of most university libraries. John and Susan Gordon, Fred and Nancy Anderson, John Treadway and Marina Scheidt, Pat and Dewey Johnson, David Kitchen and Michele Cox, Hugh West, Bob Kenzer, Cheryl Genovese, Jim Narduzzi, Douglass Young, Roger Brooks, Victoria Halman, Krittika Onsanit, Jane Dowrick, and countless other people, from the Heilman Center to the Boatwright, have been American hospitality personified. I am most grateful to all of them.

My in-laws have been great during my visits to the USA. Let me give warmest thanks and gratitude to all the splendid members of the Moore and Paulette families for many years of kindness, down to little Tyler Crabbe, my first great-nephew, who was born in 2005 on his great-grandfather John Moore’s last and eighty-seventh birthday. I thank them most warmly for their effortless hospitality and love over numerous visits.

My in-laws have been consistently supportive of all my writing and kindly tolerant of a non-Virginian interloper in their midst. The Moores and Paulettes are too numerous to mention individually. But I can say that knowing them has been a joy and pleasure these many years of married life, and I am profoundly grateful to each and every one of them, and to those fellow in-laws who share the joy of marrying into so splendid a set of families. You know who you are and how thankful I am to all of you, not least in providing the most ideal wife possible in Paulette.

Many thanks go too to some wonderful Christian friends in Vir-ginia: Lamar and Betsy Brandt (and her mother Bettie Woodson Weaver), Claude and Leigh Marshall, and Larry and Beth Adams. Equal gratitude goes to those at Second Baptist Church of Richmond, the Moore family church, who have been so kind to me and to my wife and in-laws since I first appeared in their church back in 1991. As with my in-laws, they are too numerous to mention, but they know who they are.

This is the new and completely revised edition of a book first published in the United Kingdom in 1998 by Hodder & Stoughton. Many thanks go to all those involved in that first edition. I also taught a course for Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education based upon that book, and warm thanks go to Graham Howes and Linda Fisher who made those lectures possible and to those who attended the course itself in Cambridge.

Finally, thanks to all of you on my e-mail prayer list—here again, there are far too many to mention individually—who have consistently prayed for me and my writing over many years. Your prayerful support and encouragement, often from thousands of miles away, show what a wonderful thing both prayer and Christian fellowship really are.

Christopher Catherwood

Cambridge, England

Richmond, Virginia

2006

Introduction

As evangelical Christians we are people who believe in the historicity of a book, the Bible. This is, as Francis Schaeffer reminded us back at Lausanne in 1974, one of our distinctive features as evangelicals, something that separates us from other professing Christians.

But for how many of us does our knowledge of the history of God’s people end where the New Testament finishes, in the first century? Perhaps we remember hearing about the Reformation and recall that things of which we approve happened, but even there we forget most of the details; even there our memories are often hazy. But events took place then that five hundred years later still define us as evangelical Christians. We remain children of the Reformation even today.

Sometimes we know a bit about the history of our own denomination or of heroic figures of the past such as John Knox, Thomas Cranmer, John Wesley, George Whitefield, or John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, Jan Hus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldreich Zwingli, and Menno Simons, depending upon the part of the church from which we come. But even there our memory is often shaky, and with so many evangelicals now attending independent churches, with no denominational affiliation, only just a few years old in many cases, that historic denominational memory no longer applies.

Yet cutting ourselves off from the past is a very dangerous thing to do.

We know that Christians alive today are our brothers and sisters in Christ. But so too are those fellow true believers who lived in the two thousand years of church history before us. We are all God’s children, regardless of the century in which we lived or live. They loved the same Savior, read (especially after the Reformation) the same Bible, and shared all the spiritual ups and downs through which we go today. Technology may have changed, but God’s truth and the human condition never change, and we see that clearly through the unfolding patterns of Christian history.

Why do we do many of the things we take for granted? Why is Scripture so central to the lives of God’s people? It is easy today to go into a bookstore and pick up the English Standard Version (or the Evangelically Sound Version as some people call it). But in the past our fellow Christians were prepared to sacrifice their own lives, often in barbaric ways, such as being burned alive at the stake, simply so ordinary people could read the Bible in a language they could understand.

Prior to 1989 and the fall of the Iron Curtain I used to spend quite a large amount of time with Christians living on the Communist, totalitarian side of that barrier. We always had the impression that anyone who survived persecution must be some kind of extra-holy super-Christian. But in fact most of them were just like us, which made their Christian faith in often appalling circumstances all the more amazing, because they survived such terrible times without being special or exceptionally holy.

It is the same with the Christians who lived before us.

One of the things that shows that the Bible is truly God’s Word is that it does not hide human frailty—God alone is righteous. Peter denied Jesus out of fright and confessed he found Paul’s epistles a little hard to understand sometimes. Paul and Barnabas fell out and parted company. We can all identify with the very human people we read about in Scripture. Yet look at what amazing things they did! It is the same throughout history—God uses often remarkably ordinary individuals to achieve extraordinary things.

Most modern heresies, for example, are not new but are recycled versions of errors long past, simply presenting themselves in updated guise. If we know our church history, we can compare present to past and arm ourselves against false teaching accordingly.

In the twenty-first century we are always trying to reinvent the wheel and behave accordingly, as if nobody has ever tried to do what we are now attempting to achieve. History shows that this is almost never the case. The mechanism might change—we could not fly before 1900, for example—but the principles remain exactly the same. We can now cross the Atlantic in a matter of hours, not weeks. But human nature is no different in the twenty-first century than it was in the first.

Put first-century Jews or Romans in jeans and sweatshirts and place them on a subway in a twenty-first-century modern city and you would not notice the difference. Read, for example, the letters home from soldiers from Italy or North Africa, garrisoned at the Roman frontier fortress of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall in freezing northern Britain, and you could be reading letters home from American troops in Iraq today.

In other words, Henry Ford was wrong. History is not bunk. It is our connection to our fellow human beings who just happened to live in the centuries before us.

When we read the Bible, especially the historical narratives, from Genesis through Acts, we also see that there is a learning or didactic purpose to history. Again, God’s Word does not hide the frailties of His people—for example, Abraham pretending that Sarah is his sister or Thomas having doubts. Yet God accomplished great things through such people.

It is my purpose to be equally didactic, to write a history from which we can all learn something of what God has done through His church over the centuries.

However, as is obvious, there is one rather large difference. I am not writing an infallible, inerrant book of Holy Scripture. As we shall see, Christians have differed with each other over the past two thousand years, and often strongly. One of the great tragedies is that even believing Christians have persecuted each other, with one set of Protestants, for example, putting to death another for disagreements over issues such as baptism.

If one takes baptism as an example of divergences, consider your reaction to the statement, usually made as a joke, “You baptize people your way, and I’ll do it God’s way.” I have heard that joke made by both Baptists and Presbyterians, whose theology of baptism is not at all the same.

Obviously as a theologically conservative Calvinist Baptist attending an equally theologically conservative Anglican church (that is also Reformed theologically and prefers to baptize people by believer’s baptism by immersion despite being in the Church of England), I have biases of my own!

In Scripture we get God’s eye view since the authors were writing as inspired by the Holy Spirit. No other authors can claim such inspiration. Were the Christians of the fourth century right to come to an accommodation with the emperor, for example, to take one issue over which genuine Christians have disagreed with each other for hundreds of years? Was the Swiss Reformer Zwingli right to go into battle? The history of such events all take place after the unique revelation of Scripture came to an end, and I trust that we would agree, as evangelicals, whatever our denomination, that God does not reveal to us new things not contained in the Bible. Obviously, therefore, writing a book on church history is not as easy as it looks.

In Britain because evangelicals are, alas, comparatively few in number, we tend to collaborate across denominational lines. I have also been active for my entire adult life in interdenominational evangelical student ministry, especially the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). On my side of the Atlantic, being Reformed and Baptist at the same time (let alone Episcopalian) is not unusual. While in the USA folk such as Mark Dever on the East Coast and John MacArthur on the West Coast (to take two highly regarded Crossway authors) also manage to combine the two, I know that others might regard this as somewhat unusual.

So being a mix of Reformed (on the doctrines of grace) and Baptist (on the issue of baptism) and attending an evangelical church that is both and coincidentally Anglican is fine with me. I hope this means that what follows is free of denominational bias, and I am certainly keen to be as objective as possible.

But being very happily married to an American evangelical of like persuasion, I do know that on her side of the Pond denominational loyalties can be stronger. In addition, as denominations tend to be far larger there, it is not always the case that an evangelical of one denomination meets those from another.

However, Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, that great twentieth-century preacher (and posthumous Crossway author) always said of himself that he was a “Bible Calvinist,” not a “System Calvinist.” This has always been my own motto, and as we shall see when we study the Reformation, it is at the heart of the key Protestant distinctive, sola scriptura, or “Scripture alone.”

As evangelicals we are Bible Christians, believers not in tradition but centered around what we believe God’s Word to us is teaching. Otherwise we are not really any different from the Catholic Church, from which our Protestant forebears split. That Church taught—and still teaches—that the tradition of the Church is equal in authority to that of the Bible. If we put our denominational tradition first, we are being no different, and the Reformation was for nothing. So while for some people being a Reformed Baptist might seem a little strange, for others it is simply following what the Bible teaches.

But I do think, if one looks at the ways in which Christians have put together statements of faith over the centuries, that there are key things upon which all Bible-believing Christians do and have always agreed and united.

That does not mean we believe the same on everything, including issues such as baptism, church government, the continuation of the gift of tongues, or whatever other issues divide us. But as Christocentric Bible believers there are certain core truths, such as the atonement, resurrection, and evangelism, upon which all of us as evangelicals do believe exactly the same thing. It is from that perspective, and how those beliefs unfold through history, that this book will be written.

So what follows will be from a strongly evangelical perspective, written from the theological point of view that what God says to us in His Word is what Francis Schaeffer so aptly called “true truth.” This book is unashamedly cross-centered and takes the Bible to be authentically true.

But it will also not avoid areas in which honest Christians have lovingly—and, alas, in times past not so lovingly—disagreed with one another. This can be a minefield if we let where we differ predominate over where we agree. I can understand this. But being, for example, on Zwingli’s side on the issue of Communion but equally on the side, regarding baptism, of those Anabaptists he had put to death for heresy, I can understand both conflicting points of view simultaneously.

A penultimate point for those who might have seen the earlier edition of this book, published in the United Kingdom in 1998 and just distributed in the USA: that book was designed for what might be called the crossover market, for sales as much in secular bookstores as in Christian. In that edition I had to tread slightly warily of too overtly a partisan perspective, and it was necessary to be as neutral as possible. In this new Crossway edition I still aim to be denominationally neutral, even though I have revealed my own inclinations in this Introduction since many readers would naturally want to know the theological perspective from which I am coming. But as I imagine that most readers will share my evangelical interpretation, a standpoint that is taken by Scripture-believing Christians in many different denominations and independent churches alike, I should say that in this edition those firm evangelical views will be apparent throughout.

One final important theological point needs to be made. As Christians we believe not only that God acts through history and through ordinary people but also that there is such a thing as absolute truth out there. Schaeffer’s “true truth” is not a tautology.

In today’s postmodern world this is not something fashionable to say. Every group has its own “narratives,” none of which might be “privileged” over the other one—unless, of course, you come from a favored group such as Marxists, feminists, a fashionable minority, or whatever is deemed acceptable by those who decide such things.

For science graduates reading this, as D. A. Carson pointed out in a lecture he gave, all this might seem meaningless. Scientists need absolutes to be able to conduct experiments and carry out most of their working lives. This is far from the case in the humanities, however. To be a Marxist historian might be all right—Marxists do believe in absolutes, albeit the wrong ones, but Marxism is an acceptable “narrative.” But writing history that still holds to absolute truth, and especially one that believes that Christianity is completely true, is to be most unfashionable.

Sadly, even some Christian historians I know feel that no one should know they are Christians through what they write. In some areas declarations of faith may not be needed. In my history of how Churchill created Iraq in 1921, for example, Christianity per se does not enter into the story. But on a subject like this one, the story of the Christian church, it is obviously impossible to keep out my own perspectives, and that very much includes a belief in absolute truth.

Thankfully not all universities are plagued with postmodern mush. Here in Cambridge, the Regius (= main; literally “Crown Appointed”) Professor of History, an expert on the Third Reich, has published In Defence of History. Richard Evans makes the telling point that if all “narratives” have equal validity, then so does the Nazi. On their own criteria, the postmodernists have no grounds for saying that the Jewish belief in the absolute moral horror of the Holocaust is preferable as a “narrative” over and above the Nazis who say that to exterminate six million Jews—not to mention twenty million Russians, Gypsies, Lutheran pastors, and others—is perfectly all right.

As a Christian I have no problem at all in saying that genocide is evil! The past is not a series of competing “narratives” or “stories,” all of which are equally valid. There are rights and wrongs, and all Christians should and can see God working providentially throughout history.

To me, people who claim to write “objective” history— that is, history without bias—are almost invariably people who, when writing on religious history, have a strong bias against evangelical belief, the existence of the supernatural, or the guiding hand of God in providence. Our political prejudices are man-made, however strongly we believe in them, and I am always careful to try to weed out such opinions from my analysis of the past. Christianity is God-made, not human, while, say, a Baptist or Methodist bias might be unfair regarding other equally good Christian perspectives. But a strong belief in the truth of the atonement, of God’s very existence, and of a meaning to history because God is in charge of it is surely to adopt a biblical rather than human interpretation of what happens and why. As Christians living in postmodern times, we ought to reclaim the idea that there is a final truth that God has revealed through Jesus Christ on the cross and that we live in a universe of which God is in control, and therefore it has meaning.

On that note, let us now proceed with the story.

From Christ to Constantine

Christianity is a faith named after its founder. We are above all as Christians believers in a person—Jesus Christ. Muslims get angry when they are called Mohammedans since the name of their faith is Islam, which means “submission” in Arabic. Muhammad (or Mohammed) may be that religion’s founder, but he was emphatic in saying that he was not divine. Hinduism is the religion of an ethnic group—the Indians of South Asia. Judaism is also today an ethnic faith, although in times past proselytes, outsiders like Naaman the Syrian, occasionally joined.

Christianity is unique, worshiping a divine founder as God, God the Son, Jesus Christ. We are saved not by good works, as is the norm in man-made faiths, but through the fully accomplished salvation we have in Jesus Christ through His atonement on the cross. Ours is a very personal faith.

So the beginning of Christianity is centered around an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, who we Christians know is God incarnate, come down to live among sinners like us to reconcile us with God.

While there are many precepts, moral codes, teachings, and so on in Christianity, our faith is above all a redeemed relationship. Not only that, but it is God coming down to us rather than humans trying to reach up to God.

As Paul reminds us, if Christ is not risen, our hope is in vain. Ours is also a historic religion, and here it again differs from others, which evolved over the course of time, such as the varying branches of Buddhism and Hinduism. We believe in both a person and in facts connected to that person, things that really happened in what Francis Schaeffer liked to call space and time.

Not only that, but the church itself consists of people. We are not simply an institution, but countless individuals all uniquely related to each other through the special individual relationship we each have with God through Christ. Do remember, when looking at church history, that in Scripture the church is seen as a person, the Bride of Christ, and not as an institution. That is not to deny institutional aspects of God’s church here on earth. But what we are looking at is the unfolding story of people and what happened to them throughout history.

Christianity also arose in the context of a specific historical background, the multinational, multiethnic, and multireligious Roman Empire. To us as Christians this ought to be no coincidence—it was all planned that way by God Himself. The events that led to the large-scale Roman Empire, which stretched from the Atlantic coast of Spain in the west to the borders of present-day Iraq in the east, all having their origins hundreds of years before Christ came to earth, God planned centuries in advance.

Providential History

Are things in our own lives (the small scale) or in history (the large scale) ever purely random events? To use Einstein’s famous phrase in another context, does God play dice? Surely for us as Christians, with a knowledge through the Bible of how God acts, the answer to that must be no. God not only knows what is going to happen but also arranges things so that His will takes place.

On an individual level this is a profoundly comforting doctrine. However odd things may sometimes seem to us, we can have complete faith that our lives are not arbitrary and that God knows what He is doing and is seeking to accomplish.

But while many Christians gain comfort from this at the micro-level, we all too often forget that this is true of the big picture as well, of history itself.

I call this providential history because all that happens, whether simply to us as individuals or on the global scale, to rulers and nations, is equally in the all-loving, omniscient hands of God.

We see this clearly laid out in Scripture because the narrator tells us that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and put it into the mind of Cyrus to let the children of Israel return home. But as we shall see throughout this book, it is evident that God continues to arrange historical events, so that His purposes can be worked out.

So I do not think it presumptuous to say that this is the case for the historical and cultural circumstances into which Christ came and in which early Christianity was able to grow so rapidly over such an enormous geographical area.

The first of these providential circumstances is probably one we know from childhood Bible stories. The Roman Empire is the background to the New Testament. We are aware that God had predicted it many centuries earlier in the visions He gave to Daniel, when Rome was no more than a blip on a very distant horizon, a small and insignificant city-state in a peninsula with little world importance. By Christ’s time it ruled a vast empire from Spain to Iraq, including therefore not only Palestine but also all the other regions around the Mediterranean.

This meant political stability, which enormously helped the spread of the gospel since it was not necessary to cross over unfriendly borders to bring the message to a wide region. It was possible, for example, to go from the Scottish border in northern Europe to the frontiers of Sudan in Africa in the south, all within the safe confines of Roman rule. Never before had one such gigantic political unit existed, and after Christianity had spread throughout it, the Roman Empire split, never again to be reunited on such a scale.

But since the Romans were some of the best road builders the world has ever seen, it also meant that the logistics of travel became much easier. Roman roads were immensely efficient and, thanks to firm political control, also safe.

The other massive help was linguistic/cultural. This is not so evident to us now when reading the Bible. But it is to those who read it in its original language—Greek, or in particular, koine or popular Greek.

Here we can say that God had paved the way over three hundred years earlier through the megalomania of the great Macedonian—and Greek-speaking—conqueror Alexander the Great. He created within a few years an enormous empire stretching from Greece in the west, Egypt in the south, and Bactria in present-day Afghanistan, on the borders of the Hindu Kush in the east. (During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan we probably all read articles about fair-haired Afghans, descendants over two millennia later of the original invading Greek armies.)

The actual empire did not survive Alexander. But the successor states, including those that ruled over Egypt (the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra) and Iran (the Seleucids), remained culturally and linguistically Greek for centuries—look at the references in the New Testament to Greek speakers and Greek cities such as the Decapolis. In Egypt a large Greek population remained down to the twentieth century. In fact the Egyptian city Alexandria was named directly after Alexander himself.

This meant that from Greece to the Indian border there were people who either were Greeks, thought along Greek lines (the Hellenizers of the New Testament), or spoke Greek as a second language. Already, long before Christ, the Old Testament had been translated into Greek—the Septuagint. So when Christ came, the simplest and most widespread common language into which to write the good news, our New Testament, was therefore Greek, not Latin. And all this was because of the mania for conquest of a pagan ruler living three hundred years before the birth of Christ.

This, therefore, is the political and cultural background to the extraordinarily rapid and wide spread of the Christian message in the first century. It reached from Spain in the west to Syria in the east, Macedonia in the north and Ethiopia in the south, all by the end of the book of Acts.

To secular historians, all this is helpful coincidence, as will be the case with many other events in Christian history, such as the Reformation, as we will see. But I do not think we can see it like that. Surely these two extraordinary conjunctions—the size and stability of the Roman Empire and the multinational and equally geographically large use of Greek as a second language—cannot just be accidents. So helpful were they to the easy spreading of the gospel and making Christianity a global faith so early on that they must be seen as part of the providence of God.

As Edith Schaeffer reminds us in her book Christianity Is Jewish, the Jewish background to the origins of Christianity is vital to remember. Jesus Himself was Jewish, as were all His early disciples. Much of the book of Acts is taken up with Jewish-related themes, with Peter realizing that the Old Testament dietary laws no longer applied, and Paul using Jewish synagogues as jumping-off points in his early missionary journeys.

In the entire ancient world the Jews were unique. As I show in my secular history book A Brief History of the Middle East, they alone were monotheists. Nowadays, with the two major global monotheistic faiths—Islam and Christianity—being both monotheistic and multicultural, we forget how extraordinarily unusual this was in ancient times. All the other major religions were polytheistic, believing in vast pantheons of gods and goddesses, as Hinduism does today, or in numerous manifestations of deity, as is the case with Buddhism. Even if your own religion had few gods, people believed that gods related to a particular ethnic group—Jupiter and Neptune for the Romans, for example—and that no one group’s deities were unique. It was the Jews, and the Jews alone, who believed that not merely was their God the God of Israel, but that no other gods existed at all. Furthermore, God related to His people and could be known. Nor was He capricious, like so many of the pagan deities, but profoundly moral. The Jews therefore, to use the phrase of a British writer, Paul Johnson, believed in ethical monotheism.

The Roman emperors basically could not care less what local deities their subject peoples worshiped, since the idea of exclusivity in religion was entirely alien to pagan peoples. However, they did insist on what one might call political religion—you could worship whomsoever you wished so long as you recognized the Roman emperor as being divine. This was essentially not a religious requirement but a political one, a way of ensuring that the vast Roman domains had the glue of common worship of the head of the Empire, the emperor.

Just one group was exempt from this—the Jews. Only they were permitted to worship their own God and no other, and they were not obliged to make religious sacrifices to the emperor.

By the first century Jews were spread all over the Empire and beyond. They could be found in the Persian Empire and as far afield as India. Wherever the Jews went, there were also synagogues where the faithful gathered. These were the Jews of the Diaspora, the beginnings of the spread of the Jewish people all over the world, in our own time in the United States and western Europe as well.

Since the earliest leaders of the infant Christian faith were also Jewish, it was only natural that they would begin by visiting the synagogues to proclaim Jesus as the true Jewish Messiah that He was. But as we see in the book of Acts other Jews rejected the claim, and the early church was persecuted.

Here, as I show in Divided by God, there is already a critical difference between the origin of Christianity and that of Islam, the other major transnational faith. As we shall see in the relevant chapter, Islam began as a religion of political and military power. Islam has always been linked to a state, preferably one under its own rule, the Realm or Dar al-Islam. Christianity, the Jewish writer Bernard Lewis has shown in his many books, is entirely different. For its first three centuries the Christians were viciously persecuted. This was done first by those Jews who rejected the messiahship of Jesus and, secondly, when the Romans, observing this, realized that Judaism and Christianity were actually two quite separate religions.

This Roman realization is important because in discovering the difference between the two faiths, the Romans decided that Christians were not protected by the Jewish exemption to worship the Roman emperor as divine. Christians, from early on, were subject to the full rigors of the Roman state and, refusing to worship Caesar as god, were persecuted most savagely for the next three centuries.

Persecution

Christians have been persecuted from the very beginning. One only has to read the book of Acts, several epistles—which reveal the fact that Paul was writing them from jail—and advice on how to deal with persecution in Peter’s writing to see that being a Christian and being persecuted for that fact often went together in those days.

In other words, if Christians are being persecuted now, which they still are in many parts of the world, this is nothing at all new.

In fact Jesus Himself told His disciples to expect it, and throughout the history of the church in many parts of the world it has been the norm rather than the exception.

However, this has usually increased the church rather than diminished it, thereby doing the exact opposite of what the persecutors wanted to happen. As early church historian Tertullian declared, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Throughout the period examined in this chapter, Christianity was an illegal, oppressed religion, and countless brave early Christians were put to death, often in vicious circumstances such as being burned alive or eaten alive. Yet the church grew rather than becoming extinct.