The Relevance of Religious History for Today
I recently argued that, contrary to our usual assumptions, many of the old Gnostic gospels remained accessible long after the Roman Empire accepted orthodox Christianity. However much church authorities might have wanted to eliminate them, they circulated quite widely. One puzzling piece of evidence comes from Nicephorus, the ninth century Patriarch of Constantinople. Appended to [...]
I have been writing about the Other texts that shaped Christian thought through the long Middle Ages, all the alternative gospels and apocryphal texts that literate people read with almost the same veneration that they paid to the canonical scriptures. One problem with finding such materials is that we often don’t know exactly the point [...]
Whenever I teach a course on Christian history, I always use samples of music, whether medieval chants or modern hymns, because that was commonly the means by which believers heard and absorbed their doctrine. In recent posts, I have been discussing some of the alternative scriptures that so powerfully shaped Christian thought, and one at [...]
I posted recently about how the wide range of alternative gospels and scriptures disappeared from the Christian mainstream after about 400 – or rather, how they did not disappear. In reality, these Other Gospels were lost only in the sense that they dropped out of mainstream use for some churches, at some times, in certain [...]
Any book on Christian history by Diarmaid MacCulloch is likely to be an important contribution. I was delighted then to read news of his latest book, Silence in Christian History (London: Allen Lane, 2013. To be published in the US in September). Lucy Beckett’s review in the Times Literary Supplement is particularly full. I stress [...]
In recent years, lost or hidden gospels have generated huge public interest, and every few years brings some new discovery: the Gospels of Mary and Judas, even (questionably) the tale of “Jesus’s Wife.” But the whole narrative of those alternative scriptures is based on a false assumption, or rather a myth. According to the common [...]
I have been posting recently about the apocryphal gospels, remarking on their vast influence on the lived Christian faith over many centuries. The amount of modern scholarship on these “Other” gospels is immense, but I find one earlier historian makes some excellent points about just why these texts became as popular as they did. He [...]
The British newspaper The Independent has an article by Matthew Bell on the Alpha Course, which it describes, interestingly, as “British Christianity’s biggest success story.” Being the Independent, and standing at the far distant extreme of secularism, there are some inevitable digs. We learn, for instance, that “Twenty years ago, evangelical Christianity [in Britain] was [...]
I have been writing on some quite diverse topics recently, including “faith on the borderlands,” and Christianity in Early Britain. I hadn’t actually intended to bring them together, but they appear to be merging of their own accord. This may be a dumb question, but has anyone written a book on current and former slaves [...]
Felices Pascuas, Joyeuses Pâques, Buona Pasqua, Glad Påsk… Around the world, Christians use very similar words to wish each other a happy Easter, and with a couple of glaring exceptions, they call the feast by a variant of pascha, Passover. Even Tagalog uses pasko. The odd-tongues-out are of course English itself, and its close ally [...]
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