Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years Read Online Free PDF

'Anno Domini' or AD. Dates before 1 CE are given as BCE ('before the Common Era'), which is equivalent to BC. I have tried to avoid names which are offensive to those to whom they have been applied, which means that readers may encounter unfamiliar usages, so I speak of 'Miaphysites' and 'Dyophysites' rather than 'Monophysites' or 'Nestorians', or the 'Catholic Apostolic Church' rather than the 'Irvingites'. Some may sneer at this as 'political correctness'. When I was young, my parents were insistent on the importance of being courteous and respectful of other people's opinions and I am saddened that these undramatic virtues have now been relabelled in an unfriendly spirit. I hope that non-Christian readers will forgive me if for simplicity's sake I often call the Tanakh of Judaism the Old Testament, in parallel to the Christian New Testament. Biblical references are given in the chapter-and-verse form which Christians had evolved by the sixteenth century, so the third chapter of John's Gospel, at the fourteenth verse, becomes John 3.14, and the first of two letters written by Paul to the Corinthians, the second chapter at the tenth verse, becomes I Corinthians 2.10. Biblical quotations are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible unless otherwise stated.

PART I
    A Millennium of Beginnings (1000 BCE-100 CE)

1
    Greece and Rome ( c . 1000 BCE-100 CE)

2
    Israel ( c . 1000 BCE-100 CE)

PART II
    One Church, One Faith, One Lord? (4 BCE-451 CE)

3
    A Crucified Messiah (4 BCE-100 CE)

4
    Boundaries Defined (50 CE-300)

5
    The Prince: Ally or Enemy? (100-300)

6
    The Imperial Church (300-451)

PART III
    Vanishing Futures : East and South (451-1500)

7
    Defying Chalcedon: Asia and Africa (451-622)

8
    Islam: The Great Realignment (622-1500)

THE CHURCH IN CHINA
    The Chinese Empire had been ruled since 618 by the Tang dynasty, which in the years of its power and prosperity was ready to give a place to any religion which did not seem to threaten its security, providing Bishop Alopen with the opportunity for success on his mission of 635 (see pp. 252-3). Christianity's fortunes in China thereafter were mixed, depending on the whims or foreign policies of successive emperors, but in the mid-eighth century, thanks to the patronage of one general victorious in civil wars, Christians found themselves over several decades in a position of advantage in China which would not be repeated for some centuries. It was from this hopeful time that there survives one of the most remarkable and beautiful monuments of the Church of the East: a black limestone stele standing nearly ten feet tall, which caused justifiable excitement among the Jesuits of a later Christian mission when, in the early 1620s, they learned of its rediscovery (on a site now unknown, but very possibly that of the identifiable Ta Qin monastery in Zhouzhi (see Plate 7). Dated 781, surmounted by dragons and a cross and bearing inscriptions in Chinese and Estrangela, it is a silkily expressed commemoration of imperial favour shown towards the Christians since 635, culminating in their present protector, General Guo Ziyi. Besides its detailed if inevitably politically selective account of that history, it boldly recites a statement of Christian faith in Chinese, commendations of the faith, and poetry in praise of the triune God and of Christ 'divided in nature', with allusions to imperial literature which stake a bold claim for Christianity as the best expression of the universe's underlying principle, the Tao. With the stele's proud enunciation of various ecclesiastical dignitaries alongside emperors and imperial officials, there could be no better symbol of the integration of the Dyophysite Christian community into imperial life. The first and last visual impression that it leaves in its present setting in Xi'an's 'Forest of Stelae' is just how alike are all the other monuments around it. 27
    There are many more traces of the Church of the East's real attempt to explain