Production team
The six-part BBC TV series A History of Christianity is an original and authoritative work presented by one of the world’s leading historians, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church and Fellow at St Cross College, Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy and a Whitbread Award winner. His Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 won the 2004 National Book Critics’ Circle Award.
Brimming with new insights, this series will reveal the true origins of Christianity, explore the sheer diversity of its churches, help viewers understand the essence of the different denominations, and explain how and why it’s become the biggest religion in the world.
Most Christian histories start with St Paul’s mission to Rome, but in the first episode on the Oriental Churches, MacCulloch argues that’s a mistake because the first Christianity stayed much closer to its middle-eastern roots. But for an accident of history – namely, the rise of Islam – the headquarters of Christianity might well have been Baghdad rather than Rome.
In later episodes, he explores how a small Jewish sect of the poor and the dispossessed, which preached love and humility, became the Catholic Church - a religion of riches, war and empire, inspiring awe and fear in equal measure. He also tells the remarkable story of the Orthodox Church which now flourishes in Greece and Russia – after surviving attacks by Catholic Crusaders, Muslim armies, Russian tyrants and Soviet Communists.
In the fourth and fifth episodes MacCulloch explains the emergence of the Protestant Reformation and the part played by Evangelical Churches in exporting Christianity to all four corners of the earth.
In the final episode, MacCulloch takes a closer look at Western Christianity in the Modern Period. Its distinctive feature is scepticism and a tendency to doubt, which has transformed both Western culture and Christian faith. Where did that change come from? Equally importantly, where does Christianity go next?
MacCulloch will also delve deep into what it means to be a Christian - what makes a Catholic different from an Orthodox, a Protestant or a Pentecostalist? Diarmaid MacCulloch’s series is an engaging, stimulating and credible guide to understanding why the world we live in today is the way it is – he’ll throw a surprising new light on the so-called clash of civilisations, explain why Europe seems to have given up on Christianity, and show how the religion’s centre of gravity – once in Jerusalem, then Rome and later Spain – is now in sub-Saharan Africa, in Timbuktu.
History of Christianity in more depth:
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History of Christianity
OK - slightly worried.
I am no expert, but I know a bit about the subject and spotted 4 factual errors in the first 10 minutes.
Re: History of Christianity
how can you talk about factual errors when the whole thing is based on a work of fiction and promulgated by wishful thinking?
jedt.
Re: History of Christianity
Well I enjoyed it (having just caught up with part 6): I liked the structure (though I'd have swapped parts 2 & 3), and as a "candid friend" he managed to convey a lot without extremes of obsequiousness or hostility. I'd have liked more on Cathars and Hussites and on the impact of 19th-century socio-economic transformation (having half of your flock uprooted from the countryside in a few generations has to be bad news for any denomination even without wars and scientists). I suppose a few quibbles are inevitable with any such undertaking, but this seemed a very good introduction free of most of the sensationalism that so often ruins TV history.
This programme was of a pretty low standard, fact-wise. In the last episode alone, he spoke of how Newton suggested that God doesn't intervene, when Newton wrote books about Daniel and Revelation and believed in the prophesies those books contain about God's intervention in the future. It claimed that no Christian churches, only individuals, challenged the Nazis, and to support that point he avoided mentioning Jehovah's Witnesses among the multiple groups he spoke of in the concentration camps, they being in there for their refusal to support Hitler. And to make without any supporting argument the statement that the Bible says nothing about homosexual relationships given the plain statements in scriptures like 1 Corinthians 6:9 is just risible.
Other things I wasn't sure about, but given that there were several major points I was inclined to doubt, several on which he was obviously lying (or at least woefully ignorant for 'one of the world’s leading historians') and none that I knew was definitely telling the truth about, one is inclined to wonder whether he was actually lying about every major point he made in the episode.
Re: History of Christianity
This may be rather pedantic, but the issue of errors reminded me that at one point Prof MacCulloch is in San Martino dei Monti talking about an early fresco of St Peter's. I may be wrong, but I thought the fresco depicted the interior of the Lateran Basilica.
Re: History of Christianity
Epistle .... how can you all be right ?
Should we "respect" the suicide bombers and the fundamental christians etc ?
Respecting is about the only thing the moderate religious believers have of keeping the powder or religious hatred dry.
Re: History of Christianity
Well, Lady Macbeth, spill the beans - what were the errors?
For me I found it a well put together and informative programme. Some I knew, but pretty authoritative I would say.
I was particularly interested in the Church of the East and its key role in translating the Greek philosophers in Baghdad - a contribution often claimed by academics as one of Islamic culture
Re: History of Christianity
I also found it very good. But Epistle should not detract from the Muslim contribution, just as we should not detract from the later Christian contribution to philosophy. The Christians were hugely helped by the Muslim university in Cordoba (and elsewhere) and the Muslims were hugely helped by the Syriac university, which was itself the descendent of the Greek Academy. There is a mutuality here - we need each other!
I knew nothing about (for example) the Chinese church, nor did I know that the Syriac church dissented from the Confession of Chalcedon. Perhaps foolishly I took its claim of unanimity at face value!
Thankyou, BBC & OU!
Re: History of Christianity
I am sure you are right, CJ33, regarding the mutuality of contribution to philosophy of Jewish, Christian & Islamic culture, together children of Abraham. Perhaps the lesson of the past, such as at Baghdad and Cordoba, is that it is through mutual understanding and acceptance that we progress. As each faith has its fundamental differences with the others, each has divisions within itself. But we all gain by focusing what we have in common, in respect.
Re: History of Christianity
So what were those errors? All very well finding fault but at least tell us!!
Re: History of Christianity
Sorry what were those factual errors?