Product Description

Christianity, one of the world’s great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. 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. 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. He presents the development of Christian history differently from any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observes that at the end of the first eight centuries of Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. This is the first truly global history of Christianity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1216 pages

Review
'A triumphantly executed achievement. This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader' --Rowan Williams, Guardian

'a prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book. MacCulloch is to be congratulated for his accessible handling of so much complex, difficult material' --John Cornwell, Financial Times

'Magnificent ... alive with detail and generous in judgement ... MacCulloch is at his most moving when he fills in one of the gaps in the West's understanding of history'
--Richard Holloway, The Times

About the Author
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490 - 1700 (2004), which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Prize. His six-part television history of Christianity airs on BBC television this autumn.

Customer Reviews

An excellent overview
This book goes with a TV series, but it is not the over-illustrated coffee-table type book you might expect. On the contrary, it is long (1150 pages) and scholarly, though not dauntingly so. The style is readable and engaging, and the book provides an excellent overview of the history of Christianity. It begins with Judaism and Greek philosophy, giving the background to religious thought in the Roman period. It then covers the origins of Christianity, before going on to trace its development and the varying forms it took as it spread over the world. The mainstream of Catholic / Protestant /Orthodox Christianity is well covered, but the book is particularly good on the odd corners of Christianity, such as the sects that took hold in China and India.
The tone is mildly sceptical, but respectful, so believers and non-believers will find nothing to object to, and both will learn much about what Christianity actually is.
Highly recommended.

Diamond Diarmaid.
Breathtaking in its sheer audacity and scope and obviously the product of decades of deep research and learned scholarship this study is likely to become the definitive single volume "History of Christianity" for many years to come.
It covers all the major historical episodes, dates and personalities one would expect to find up to the modern era, from Augustine to Calvin, from 'the Desert Fathers' to the Reformation. MacCullochs history is truelly global in vision, avoiding a narrow eurocentric context, the author does full justice to the developement of the world-wide church; for example those interested in Eastern Orthodoxy (as I am) will find that not only do the major branches of this communion,such as Greece and Russia, recieve the authors full attention and careful research, but also the lesser known communities of the Coptic, Armenian, Serbian and Georgian churches.
Every continent and practically every major country is covered; form the new Evangelical churches in Africa and Latin America to the Dalijt missions of India, to the underground 'House' Movements of China. This is an objective academic study with no Christian gloss or triumphalism and with no appeals to 'Providence' (in this sense it is not a Christian history), that Christianity could look radically different to the shape we see and experience is made emphatically throughout the text, to choose an obvious example; the profound effect of the rise and expansion of Islam on the North African and Asian Churches. Even the "Three Thousand Years" of the subtitle is not ment to be provocative but merely indicates that Diamaird includes in his history chapters on Isreal, Greece and Rome BC,;the three geo-cultural forces that would have the most profound formative influence on the shaping of the new faith.
Richly illustrated with colour plates and with a faultless index and fullsome bibliography, any library, especially academic library, that does not include this volume has a whacking great Black Hole at the centre of its collection! Students will find this book a rich mine of information and essential reference and jumping off point for more specialised study.
A major new BBC series based on this volumes research is to be shown in the Autumn/ Winter 2009.

Modified rapture
I know Diarmaid personally and love his incisive wit and humour which manages to show through the rather dismal story he has to tell. His erudition and knowledge are staggering and only he could have made such a complex story so readable. Would he, I wonder, have written such a weighty tome (I need a cushion to rest it on and certainly can't carry around in my suitcase) if it was not going to be linked to a BBC series? Reading straight through is a bit daunting but one can skip and browse without losing the plot, so to speak. Could he have made the story less dismal? After all, underneath all the squabbling and political manoeuvring, not to mention the downright cruelty, there must have been (must still be) lots of ordinary Christian folk quietly living rather saintly lives in spite of the negative weight of institutional churches. Is this a book for the 'layman' (historically or theologically speaking)? Being theologically trained, I would be interested to hear from folk who are not. For me, the book reminds me just how partial western Christianity is and how accidents of history enabled it to become dominant. Some of us are discovering there are other ways of responding to the message of Jesus. Diarmaid offers glimpses of some of them.