A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Diarmaid MacCulloch |
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| Language | English |
| Subject | Church history |
| Publisher | Allen Lane |
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Publication date
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2009 |
| Pages | xvii, 1161 p. |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 2009379999 |
| 270 | |
| LC Class | BR150 .M33 2009 |
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009) is a book by British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of Church history at Oxford. It is a survey of Christianity from its earliest lineages.
The first American edition was titled Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, published in 2010 by Penguin Books from Viking.
In a review at the London Review of Books, Frank Kermode notes that the subtitle of the book, 'The First Three Thousand Years', includes the ancient world of Greece, Rome, and Judaism (c. 1000 BCE-100 CE) that so influenced Christianity.
A review by Rowan Williams for The Guardian describes the book as beginning "with what turns out to be one of many tours de force in summarising the intellectual and social background of Christianity in the classical as well as the Jewish world, so that we can see something of the issues to which the Christian faith offered a startlingly new response.... [MacCulloch] shows an extraordinary familiarity with specialist literature in practically every area." The 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. It will have few if any, rivals in the English language" and provides "crucial testimony to the resilience of the Christian community in a remarkable diversity of social settings."
Eamon Duffy's review for The Daily Telegraph remarks that MacCulloch "tries to write, he tells us, with historical detachment, but also as a 'candid friend’ of Christianity, a movement which he believes still has a long history ahead of it" and that he "has given us a model of lucid and sympathetic exposition, vast in scale, wide in coverage, and conspicuously fair-minded."
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