Christianity has been a passionate argument, periodically escalating to bloody conflict, since its inception. There were disputes amongst the disciples even before Jesus died. Then came Paul, who directed his fury at his fellow Christians in Jerusalem. Several of the theologians who came next were first heralded as brilliant, only later to be declared heretics. All in all, the first five centuries, up to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, saw an extraordinary flourishing of theological imagination and religious antagonism. Christians were persecuting each other within two years of the emperor Constantine’s conversion, a fact that is doubly arresting since that was easily within living memory of the period during which Christians suffered their severest persecution under Diocletian.<\/p>\n
Work through the centuries since, as Diarmaid MacCulloch does in his new book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, and it’s clear that few facets of human nature have been left unexplored in this struggle. Equally inventive are the authorities that have attempted to unify their bit of Christianity. That creativity continues to the present day too: the teaching authority, or magisterium, of the contemporary Roman Catholic church is an invention as recent as the 19th century.<\/p>\n