"This story is enormously unlikely."
Elaine Pagels, Professor
of Religion, Princeton University Pagels is right on the mark:
what began two millennia ago as a Jewish sect has grown into the most
widespread religion in history, despite unbridled oppression in its
early years and countless denominational splits ever since. The last few
years have seen a resurgence of interest in church history, and
A&E's documentary Christianity: The First Thousand Years is a
splendid example of solid scholarly research meshed with entertaining
production values that speaks to this interest. The result is a resource
with equal appeal for the historian and the theologian alike.
The issues that confronted the early church seem now quite strange since
there are 2,000 years of tradition behind them today:
- Should Gentile converts to the Jesus movement have to adhere to the laws of
kashrut?
- What authority did Paul have as an apostle as he
never personally knew Jesus?
- What is Jesus' relationship to
God?
- How can a tripartite Christian theology be resolved with
Judaism's strong tradition of monotheism?
- Which texts should
form the Christian scripture?
- What relationship do the
apostolic bishops at Jerusalem, Damascus, Rome, Constantinople, and
elsewhere have to each other--and how should the church be structured?
- What
should be the central statement of faith of Christians?
Most
of these issues were solved at the Council of Nicaea and at other early
church councils--though authority of the papacy at Rome is a persistent
divider both between the Eastern and Western churches and between
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.
Christianity: The First Thousand
Years provides background and the original perspectives that led to
the East-West split--a split whose basis we hardly question today.
The rapid spread of the church from the controversial conversion of
Constantine to the conquests of Otto is tied closely to the history of
the Roman Empire itself. Without the empire as its catapult, it is
unlikely that Christianity would have spread even to remote Iceland and
Finland by the year 1000. The early church modeled itself structurally
on imperial institutions, and it integrated itself into the fabric of
imperial life. Indeed, the central role of Christianity in Byzantine
life is one of numerous often-overlooked but fascinating historical
perspectives that A&E manages to cover here.
The four-part
set features Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, whose unusual but pleasant voices
will be well known to viewers of A&E's TV series Mysteries of
the Bible. Like the TV series, Christianity: The First Thousand
Years is marked by thorough scholarship, including interviews with
many highly regarded scholars such as Pagels. Snippets of these
interviews are interspersed with photography from the Holy Land and some
reenactments, leading to an informative and revealing exploration of
the early church. --Erik J. Macki