I’ve been asked a lot about Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a thousand years before it arose and so “its” history really goes back three thousand years, not just two. Today I will tell you what I think of part of the first two episodes of the BBC series, treating that independently from the book. Next month I will tell you about the book.

My Goals & Method for This Review

Though I do of course know a lot about it, I do not know well enough the history of Christianity after its first three hundred years to weigh in on the accuracy of anything MacCulloch says after that point, so I’m really only interested in the first fifteen minutes of episodes one and two, and that’s all I’ll comment on here (this means roughly the history of Christianity up to the Edict of Milan in 313 AD). And for all of that, I will only evaluate statements that are questionable or false; everything else you can assume I believe to be reasonably correct as presented. Which means, his exact wording matters. For example, anytime MacCulloch says something like “it is said that…” or “we have heard the story that…,” such statements I regard not as declarations that what follows is true, but that it describes stories that at some point were indeed told—even if I think those stories are false, I may well agree those stories existed, and that’s all I’ll query when that’s all MacCulloch claims. I also won’t be weighing in on the significance of any of this to any particular sectarian belief system; I’m only interested in what is and is not historically true (or uncertain, or unknown).

When it comes to claiming “the story is” such-and-such, however, I must note a general but minor problem I do have: MacCulloch does usually leave unsaid when any of the stories he thus references first appeared, and that in and of itself can be misleading to an audience, who may think such stories are therefore older than they really are. But unless he actually says when, it does remain the responsibility of any critical viewer not to assume the stories he means are early. A responsible viewer should know that anytime an unsourced “story” is being cited and not actually affirmed as true or even dated, that it should be regarded as an unproven assertion, and can therefore be doubted. After all, if there were evidence establishing a story is actually true, MacCulloch should have said so. Ergo, when he doesn’t, you can safely infer he couldn’t, because there isn’t enough evidence to establish that story is true. It is therefore just something the faithful “say.”

Episode One: “The First Christians”

Around minute 2:30 of Ep. 1 MacCulloch says “the city that first knew Jesus the Christ” was “Jerusalem,” and one might ask how that can be if Jesus had earlier visited polities like Capernaum and Bethsaida (at least, according to the Gospels), but those localities are more accurately described as villages or towns. Even when the Gospels say Jesus toured the “region of Tyre and Sidon” for example, it does not say he entered or was known in Tyre itself, a flourishing city. This is somewhat weird historically—why would a preacher aiming to get his message to the masses never preach in any of the cities he walked right past? The Gospels clearly keep him in the outer districts, talking only to villagers and travelers (though somehow groups of Pharisees and Scribes, even ranking military officers, still managed to always be in these outback rural places). But nevertheless, that’s what the mythology says Jesus did, and one could contrive plausible reasons for it. But for the purposes of fact-checking MacCulloch, there is indeed no evidence Jesus entered any city until his visit to Jerusalem—which, legend has it, eventually got him killed.

Similarly, over minute three MacCulloch summarizes what he calls “the story” of Christian origins that everyone has “heard,” and as such he’s right: what he relates is “the story” we’ve all “heard.” He doesn’t claim any of it is historically true, only that these stories exist and are well known. He then tells us he wants to look for “something else” beyond those “familiar” stories, and at this point he says “you can find clues here in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher” which “is said to have been built” where Jesus was “crucified and buried.” Notice his qualifier: “is said.” He isn’t saying this is true; he is merely relating the historical fact of what is said about this place. Likewise when he says “at its heart” this church contains “what is believed to be” Jesus’s tomb, and “somehow” Christians “became convinced” Jesus rose from the dead here. These uses of “somehow” and “what is believed” and “became convinced” all express a historian’s distance from the legends of faith. He is not acting like a Christian apologist and asserting these things happened or that evidence supports them. He’s just telling us what local and international Christian beliefs are. That’s fair enough.

Is Christianity Unprecedented?

Things only start to get slightly inaccurate when approaching minute five in Ep. 1 MacCulloch says the Christian notion of a god becoming incarnate is “unprecedented.” It actually isn’t. He does carefully use the present tense—speaking of subsequent, not original Christianity. Which is important, because the idea that Jesus was God was not original to the faith; it evolved as a doctrine later (and went through several stages getting there). This is well enough covered by Bart Ehrman in How Jesus Became God (for a scholarly-precise summary and bibliography see my account in Element 10 of Chapter 4, and Element 40 of Chapter 5, in On the Historicity of Jesus, hereafter OHJ). Jesus was originally believed to be a created being, an archangel, albeit the supreme one, tasked with standing in for God on important missions and tasks (like actually creating the universe). But he was from the earliest time believed to have become incarnate—temporarily putting on a body of mortal flesh (Philippians 2:6-11).

However, that divine beings, whether angels or gods, could wear mortal bodies that die was actually a well-established trope in ancient thought. So it cannot be said to have been “unprecedented.” Before Christianity even arose the Jewish theologian Philo was already describing the philosophical mechanics of it (Philo, On the Giants 6-16; cf. OHJ, pp. 187-88). There were many gods in the ancient world who in their myths had mortal bodies that died (and most of them in myth subsequently rose from the dead as well: see Dying-and-Rising Gods). And some began as heavenly immortal beings and then became incarnate mortal men specifically to die and return to heaven. The clearest example is Romulus, who declared in the original “Emmaus”-style narrative that “it was the pleasure of the gods, from whom I came, that I should be with mankind only a short time, and that after” founding an eternal (albeit in this case earthly) Kingdom “I should dwell again in heaven” (Plutarch, Life of Romulus 28.2; cf. OHJ, Chapter 4.1). This is basically the Christian thesis regarding Jesus. The only substantive difference being that Jesus was said to have founded a spiritual Kingdom, and would return later to establish a physical one, which were already Jewish apocalyptic ideas (e.g. Amos 9:11-15 & Psalms of Solomon 17.33-36).

Even the bit about this “god” being an ordinary man was not new. For a significant time Romulus was, like Jesus, a humble peasant (literally a poor sheepherder). Several gods experienced a humble existence in pagan mythology. Hephaestus was a blacksmith, Orpheus a musician, Pollux a boxer; Apollo became a shepherd and Poseidon a bricklayer (see Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 55-62). And counter-cultural peasant wise men hailed as religious heroes, even favored by God, was also a known trope in antiquity (see Element 46 in Chapter five of OHJ); all Jewish prophets and sages, in history and myth, already conformed to that model. And the idea of angels posing on earth as ordinary, humble people, even beggars, was likewise a well known trope—Jewish and Pagan. Likewise of divinely chosen men being persecuted by the powerful and haughty (OHJ, pp. 430-32 and Element 46 of Chapter 5). So there wasn’t anything unique about these aspects of Jesus either.

However, MacCulloch might have meant what was unprecedented was the specific idea that the Jewish God Supreme, Yahweh, should assume a mortal body on earth. That is, so far as I know, true. Judaism was ideologically opposed to such notions as contrary to the holiness of God, who needed angels as intermediaries to interact with men on Earth precisely because it was absolutely (and literally) beneath him to descend there himself (see Element 36 in Chapter five of OHJ). So deviating from that notion was a first. No one ever went that far before. But that idea also didn’t come to Christianity until long after it had abandoned Judaism. So that development isn’t all that peculiar. As soon as Christianity started to look less Jewish and more Pagan, it began assimilating ideas into their theology that a Jewish sect would not have abided, but which were already popular and normal in Pagan society. Like an increasingly elaborate and illogical QAnon conspiracy, the “theology” of Jesus Christ became increasingly bizarre and thus unique over time.

So I don’t think we can ding MacCulloch over this. It’s a slight mislead, but not a serious one, and though it supports a popular apologetic theme of the alleged “uniqueness” of Christianity, I doubt that was intentional. MacCulloch’s book devotes a whole section to the thousand years of developing ideas leading to Christianity and even reckons them as part of Christianity’s history. So he clearly does not believe Christianity is especially unique; its conjunction of attributes may be, but not the individual attributes apart (as even he points out in his own book), which is not apologetically significant because it’s true of every religion—by definition: if any religion were not in some sense unique, it would not be a distinct religion, but some other already-extant religion. “Christianity is unique” is simply a tautology; every religion is unique. Unless you mean “has no precedents for any of its attributes or claims,” in which case Christianity is no more unique than any other religion (I survey this point in detail in Not the Impossible Faith).

Did the Brother of Jesus Run the Church?

Around minute 5:30 MacCulloch says the Church of the Sepulcher is “the starting point” for “another” story that might “overturn your preconceptions about” early Christianity. He means the existence of several Middle Eastern sects of Christianity that maintain chapels or shrines there (Egyptian Coptic, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian, and so forth), which have different teachings about the origins of Christianity than the more familiar narratives of Western sects. He doesn’t at this point give any examples of what teachings these “Eastern” churches promulgate that might “overturn” anything, but this only sets up the pretext for the next several minutes, wherein he will linger on some of the “different” things some of these sects claim about their origins.

He starts by saying “it all started” in Jerusalem, where some followers of Jesus formed a movement around their teachings about him. As they were indeed all at that time still Torah-observant Jews, MacCulloch rightly identifies this first community as a “Jewish Christian church.” It is common in the academic field to use “church” to mean any unified community that gathers anywhere; it does not mean a physical building called a church. The first “churches” were just groups of people, who met in private homes or public spaces. The group, not where they met, is what is meant by the word “church” in this context. And in that respect MacCulloch is correct.

But then MacCulloch slides out of history and back into church “tradition” when he says the first church “was led by James, whom the Gospels call the brother of Jesus” (around minute 9). This is factually incorrect. It may be what some sect or other today, or maybe even within a century of Christianity’s origin, “has said,” but there actually is no evidence it’s true, and in fact the earliest evidence we do have indicates it is not. And since MacCulloch presents it as a fact, rather than as something some sect “says,” I have to call him out for this as a mistake; by contrast to when he says the body of this James “is said” to lie below the altar of the Armenian Cathedral of St. James: there he is clearly indicating this is a legend, not an established fact of history. But MacCulloch does not take this care when claiming this James ran the original Jerusalem church. In actual fact no James identified as the brother of Jesus in the Gospels is recorded anywhere in the New Testament as ever leading any church. Like later Christians did, MacCulloch might be confusing this with a different James, the brother of the Apostle John according to the Gospels, not Jesus; or James ben Alphaeus. Or he might be confusing centuries-late legends with evidence-based history.

The head of the first church was, according to Paul and Acts, Peter (or Cephas—both names meaning “Rock,” which is Peter in Greek and Cephas in Aramaic, and since no such name existed in Aramaic this was most likely a nickname he adopted rather than his actual name, but that doesn’t matter for our purposes here: OHJ, p. 524; his real name according to the Gospels and Acts was Simon). Otherwise the New Testament only ever identifies two Apostles named James, neither of them the brother of Jesus: James the son of Zebedee (the brother of John) and James the son of Alphaeus. According to Acts the former James was beheaded by Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:1-3); leaving James ben Alphaeus (also possibly known as Levi: cf. Mark 2:14 & 3:18) as the only James that Acts names who is a prominent (but still subordinate) leader within the church after that (Acts 12:17, Acts 15, Acts 21:17-19; the chronology of Acts contradicts the eyewitness testimony of Paul’s Epistles often enough that we cannot trust it: OHJ, pp. 362-63).

At no point in Acts is either James identified as the brother of Jesus; to the contrary, after listing all twelve Apostles (including those two men named James) Acts says “they all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers” (Acts 1:13-14). So Acts has no knowledge of any brother of Jesus even being an Apostle, much less a leader of any church. Acts also never says any James led the Jerusalem church; he is only depicted as presiding over its affairs when Peter is away. In fact no New Testament book (not even the Epistle of James) identifies any James (or any brother of Jesus) as the leader of any church.

The Gospels depict Jesus’s topmost Disciples as Peter, James and John, the latter brothers, the sons of Zebedee (Mark also claims this James and John were known peculiarly as the Sons of Thunder). According to our earliest Gospel, at key moments Jesus “did not let anyone follow him” except these three men (Mark 5:37; cf. Mark 9:2, Mark 14:33; with the rare exception of Andrew, per Mark 1:29 & 13:3, whom Mark identifies as Peter’s brother: Mark 1:16; Acts 1:13 maintains this order, listing the first Apostles as a group of four: “Peter and John and James and Andrew”). This James and John are the ones who ask Jesus to sit at his right and left in his glory (Mark 10:34-36) at which they get a humility lesson much the same as Peter did (Mark 8:33-35). All of which suggests all three were known as the highest ranking Apostles in the subsequent church.

There is evidence Mark composed his myth to reify the teachings of Paul (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles), so he may have gotten this idea from Paul. Because Paul singles out what appears to be the same three men—Peter, James, and John—as “the pillars” of the church whom he had to gain sanction from to be accepted as an Apostle (see Galatians 2). By contrast, the James Paul refers to in Galatians 1:18-19 as “the Brother of the Lord” is grammatically in the Greek there declared not an Apostle, and therefore cannot be one of the “pillars” named in the next chapter (OHJ, pp. 589-90). And that’s the case even if you believe this is referring to a biological brother of Jesus. Even in 1 Corinthians 15:7 Paul does not say the James there named an Apostle is the brother of Jesus.

So there is no evidence anywhere in the New Testament that any brother of Jesus ever led any church. It repeatedly says the Jerusalem church was led by Peter; and even the men named James in the New Testament who are depicted as taking leadership roles under Peter are clearly indicated as not being the brother of Jesus. So where did the idea that a “brother of Jesus” ran any church come from? Even Papias had never heard of such a thing. In a now-lost work we know he claimed the Apostle James ben Alphaeus was at some point a bishop, and thus head of some church somewhere, but he doesn’t say Jerusalem, and this is again the wrong James, and even if he ever had been made bishop of Jerusalem, it would only have been after years or even decades of Peter holding that position.

The first time anyone claims James “the Brother of the Lord” had taken charge of “the church” (by which we can assume in context would mean “in Jerusalem”) is in a wildly implausible legend from the late second century repeated by Hegesippus (see OHJ, Chapter 8.8); but even he says this James only succeeded to that position of leadership later. Nor can we trust that this legend he records was originally about a brother of Jesus, rather than that detail being an elaboration by Hegesippus himself, or anyone transmitting the legend to him. Half a century later, relying on Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria (or so we’re told) recorded that “they” say (we are never told who “they” are) that “Peter and James and John after the ascension of our Savior…strove not after honor, but chose James the Just bishop of Jerusalem.” And half a century after that Eusebius was relying on these same legends when he wrote in his Church History 2.1.2 that this James “is recorded to have been the first to be made bishop of the church of Jerusalem,” but he and Clement may only have meant when the position of bishop was then invented; neither actually says this was the first leader of the church in Jerusalem.

The first time anyone has gotten these myths and legends so garbled as to confusedly think that a James “Brother of the Lord” was “immediately” made the leader of the Jerusalem Church (rather than Peter, the one whom Matthew 16:8 claims Jesus declared would be “the rock” on whom the church would be built) is in Jerome (On Illustrious Men 2), who (like the others) cites no sources for this specific detail, and is writing centuries later, clearly the victim of a long telephone game by that point. So this is most evidently an implausible legend, not a historical fact. The earliest evidence makes clear no brother of Jesus ran the Jerusalem church—ever, much less from the start. Nor did any James. There were other men named James who appear to have taken “a” leadership role there, but not “the” leadership (no source who would know, says any such thing); and they weren’t the brother of Jesus.

MacCulloch should have said the first church “was led by Peter, who was known as Cephas,” or else have said “some say” it was “led by a James whom the Gospels call the brother of Jesus” (or better yet, told us who says that). That would have been more accurate and less misleading.

What Happened to the Jerusalem Church?

Shortly after minute ten MacCulloch says the “Christians quit the city before the siege” of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.; again, stating this as a fact and not a story told by some sect or other. In actual fact we have no knowledge of this. It is an unsourced legend told only by Eusebius (and others subsequently, relying on his account alone) centuries later. There are no actual sources (as in, people who would actually be in a position to know) telling us whether any (much less all) Jerusalem Christians fled before the siege or died in it.

Later legends appear to imagine all the Apostles left to go on missions to distant places, or otherwise dying, well before the war began (e.g. we’re told Peter went on a mission to Rome before the war and died there; James the Just, whether actually the brother of Jesus or not, we’re told was killed in Jerusalem before the war; etc.). Eusebius says all the Apostles had left before then (Church History 3.5.2), and then says the remaining Christians of Jerusalem were advised “by revelation” to flee to Pella in order to evade the war—an event we can be certain is impossible: not only because miraculous revelations like that never really happen, but more crucially because Pella was destroyed in that very same war and only rebuilt later—hardly the place any generous God would have advised them to flee to, nor any place they could have survived. Few scholars believe any of these legends are all that historically reliable. But it remains the case that there is no real source that says any Christians fled the siege, or even survived it.

This is important because MacCulloch then implies Christianity only then left Jerusalem, leading (he says) to the question “could it adapt” to conditions outside Jerusalem; but Christianity already had adapted to conditions outside Jerusalem decades before the war. In fact already in the Epistles of Paul, written a decade or more before the Jewish War even began, shows us a widespread diaspora church well settled across the Roman Empire, spanning Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. And there is no reason to doubt it had not also settled across North Africa and beyond the Roman Empire altogether. At the very least it must have been thriving in Egypt, if it was already thriving in Greece, though no early sources survive about that (see How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity); and Paul mentions having spent an early mission to Arabia, outside the Empire (Galatians 1:16-18).

Regardless, Paul’s letters show us a church that appears hardly at all dependent on its Jerusalem center; Paul indicates the Jerusalem churches did exert some leadership and influence beyond the borders of Judea, but equally indicates Christianity’s foreign mission was already doing quite fine without them (e.g. Paul is the one bringing money from his foreign churches to Jerusalem, not the other way around: see J.D.M. Derrett, “Financial Aspects of the Resurrection,” The Empty Tomb).

This doesn’t seem to be a doctrinally relevant error. It is actually in Christian apologists’ interests to emphasize the opposite: that Christianity was quite successful without any dependence on Jerusalem. Which also happens to be true. So I cannot think why MacCulloch would incorrectly frame the story this way. It is evident he wants to push the angle of how surprising it is that Christianity’s base of power would move to Rome, but that does not require incorrectly implying that Christianity was only located in and dependent on Jerusalem before that city was destroyed. In fact Christianity was already flourishing outside Judea and had been for decades before Jerusalem was left in ruins. That still leaves unpredictable where it would center its leadership afterward; and it would even play into MacCulloch’s next story-move, which is to examine Christianity’s early success outside the Roman Empire in the Kingdom of Edessa (more on that shortly). Instead, he makes this weird claim that it’s surprising that Christianity could flourish without its Jerusalem power-center, even though early Christianity is notable for having a very weak power structure, with highly independent communities under only informal leadership beyond.

Was Paul Actually Killed in Rome?

Also after minute ten MacCulloch says Rome was an unlikely place for Christianity’s center of power to move because “Paul had been killed in Rome” and “so had the Apostle Peter.” This is not so certain to be true. But I’ll be fair to MacCulloch by noting it is still the common assumption of scholars today that Paul was killed in Rome. So I don’t think he can be dinged for saying it matter-of-factly as he here does. It is a rather obscure fact that our earliest source, 1 Clement (traditionally dated to the 90s A.D. but more likely dating, in the opinion of myself and many other scholars, to the 60s A.D.; see OHJ, Chapters 7.6 and 8.5) says Paul had recently died in Spain (“at the end of the Western world”; literally, where “the sun sets”).

And this is the only source regarding Paul’s death that would have been in a position to even know where Paul had died. After this, all we have are late, implausible, unsourced legends about Peter and Paul both being killed in Rome by Nero—legends that may be the output of a telephone game confusing the fact that Clement mentioned the deaths of Peter and Paul in the same passage as somehow meaning they died in the same place, then combining that with a later legend of only Peter’s execution at Rome in the Acts of Peter, an apocryphal and certainly fictional source with no historical credibility (likewise a separate account of Paul’s execution in the Acts of Paul). Historians today really need to reexamine these sources and stop repeating this dubious legend as if it were a known fact. In his book, MacCulloch admits he has done no original research, that all he aims to do is relate what other historians today have reported (“[this] book is self-evidently not a work of primary-source research; rather, it tries to synthesize the current state of historical scholarship across the world,” Christianity, p. 12). And in this case, historians today are still just repeating Christian faith-tradition rather than fact-checking it. But MacCulloch is nevertheless reporting what many historians today say and even think, and he probably does not even know their opinion is dubious.

MacCulloch might actually agree that this belief does not hold up after examination of the actual sources. Look at what Clement of Rome actually said, after he has pointed out that he is now discussing events of his own generation:

Let’s put before our eyes the good Apostles: Peter, who because of an unjust rivalry endured not one, not two, but many burdens, and thus having given his testimony went to the place of glory he deserved; and Paul, who because of rivalry and conflict demonstrated the prize of endurance: seven times in chains, banished, stoned, a messenger in the East and in the West, he received the noble renown of his faith. Having taught the whole world righteousness, having reached the farthest bounds of the West, having witnessed to those in power, so he was removed from the world and went to the holy place, having become the greatest model of endurance.

1 Clement 5:3-6

Notice Paul is here said to have died “at the farthest bounds of the West” after Peter’s death is described. Indeed the sentence is causal, precluding any Easterly return. It is also clear that Clement does not think Peter, his own contemporary and Paul’s, had died in the same city as Paul. Nor does he say Peter (or Paul) died in Rome, the very city Clement lived in and is writing this from. It seems odd that he would not mention that Peter had died there, of all places. And he definitely does not imagine Paul did. Paul died somewhere else, far West of Rome and where Clement himself resided. The farthest West one could go within the Empire was at that time most commonly thought to be Spain’s greatest city, Cadiz (ancient Gades).

Here MacCulloch could not have relied on saying this was only a story, because he is trying to explain an actual historical sequence of events, so he should have simply conceded the uncertainty of whether Paul and Peter really did die in Rome and bitten the bullet on that.

Was Edessa the First Christian Nation?

Around minute 11:30 MacCulloch again asserts as fact (rather than as a mere legend) that King Abgar of the Kingdom of Edessa is known for “adopting Christianity as the kingdom’s official state religion” a hundred years before Constantine; he even insists this is where the long history of Christianity being made a state religion started. But as even Wikipedia puts it, “There is an apocryphal legend that Osroene [a.k.a. Edessa] was the first state to have accepted Christianity as a state religion, but there is not enough evidence to support that claim.” When even Wikipedia outperforms you in accuracy, you are really not doing well as a historian. Again to be fair, MacCulloch is repeating what some historians today do say. But they, too, are conflating a dubious legend with a historical fact, seduced by a popular tradition they neglect to fact-check.

In fact historians who want to believe this legend can’t even agree on which King Abgar this is supposed to mean (there are five kings of Edessa so named at various times across the first three centuries of our era). Most usually it is said to be Abgar the Great (Abgar VIII), around 200 A.D. But the prolific Christian apologist Julius Africanus served under this Abgar (and did describe him as “a holy man”) but fails to mention his being a converted Christian much less making Christianity a state religion (Africanus, Kestoi frg. 7, or 1.20 in Vieillefon’s Les “Cestes” de Julius Africanus). Others have said the Christian heretic Bardaisan converted the subsequent Abgar (Abgar IX), but the evidence for that tale is, well, nonexistent.

Really the “Abgar Legend” is more absurd than that. Eusebius reproduces an obviously forged correspondence between Abgar V and Jesus himself (Church History 1.13). But being a forgery, this is certainly no evidence that that, or any, Abgar even converted to Christianity. Eusebius says these forged letters were part of an equally dubious (and wholly unsourced) tale about Christian Apostles converting that Abgar to belief in Christ. In fact, this being the only evidence Eusebius has even pertaining to Edessa (or any Abgar, ever) is itself evidence against any such tale ever having been true. Otherwise, Eusebius would surely have exploited real evidence of an actual Abgar converting to Christianity had any existed. The more so if he had not only converted, but declared Christianity the state religion of Edessa! Eusebius would not have had to resort to quoting only forged documents featuring only a much earlier Abgar.

The basis for thinking it was a later Abgar who converted is even less impressive. As summarized by James Corke-Webster in “A Man for the Times: Jesus and the Abgar Correspondence in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History,” Harvard Theological Review 110.4 (October 2017):

[A] conversion of Abgar VIII in the later 2^nd cent. [is] itself a doubtful proposition. This later conversion [i.e. after the legend of Abgar V’s conversion in the Apostolic era] is largely based on the 3rd cent. Book of the Laws of the Countries [by the Christian heretic Bardaisan]. But both the identification of this text’s Abgar with Abgar VIII (based on the fact that the author seems to speak of a contemporary) and the conversion itself (based on a phrase absent from Eusebius’s own quotation of the passage in his Preparation of the Gospel 6.10.44 and therefore likely a later interpolation) are problematic. The Byzantine chronographer George Syncellus quotes [the Kestoi of] Sextus Julius Africanus as describing his contemporary Abgar VIII as “a holy man,” but that phrase need imply nothing about either a conversion or its date.

So that’s it. We in fact have no actual evidence of any Abgar ever even converting to Christianity, much less declaring it the state religion of Edessa. Just late interpolated passages, and forged documents about a much earlier Abgar. There is also of course no physical evidence whatever to back any version of this tale (no coins, no inscriptions, no architecture or statuary). Some claim cross imagery on some coins of one or another Abgar is indicative, but such imagery was ubiquitous, and there is no evidence the cross was even a Christian symbol at that time. Actual evidence of Edessan Christianity begins to appear only in the 4th century. Though Christianity had probably long been preached there and had its followers before that (the Christians Bardaisan and Africanus were, it does seem, prominent there), these grandiose claims about King and Kingdom do not seem to have any basis in fact. And since Edessa had ceased to be a kingdom (and the Abgarid line had long since ended) before Eusebius, making up tall tales about its once-supposed “Christianity” was a safe play.

This is a strange gaffe for MacCulloch, for I could not find this claim anywhere in his book. So why did he contrive it for the BBC? In his book MacCulloch makes no mention of Christianity being declared the state religion of Edessa, and he has only one single sentence about the alleged Christian faith of Abgar the Great, where after relating the legend of Abgar V he adds merely the speculation that “if the story of the Edessan monarchs’ favour to the Church has any plausible chronological setting, it was probably Abgar VIII ‘the Great’ (177-212), not the first-century Abgar V,” by comparison with the royal house of Adiabene converting to Judaism. But here MacCulloch admits he is only speculating (“if” the Abgar tale has “any plausible” setting then “probably” it would be Agbar VIII). In the BBC series he instead not only declares this a fact, but goes beyond even what he says in the book, which is merely that “maybe” Abgar VIII “favored” Christianity and thus gave it a “place” in Edessa, not that he made it the “official state religion” of Edessa. Even the absurd legends don’t say that. He would have done better to have said for the BBC that the conversion of any king of Edessa was only at best an unverified legend; and not to have made any claim at all about it becoming a state religion there.

How Persecuted Were Western Christians?

MacCulloch’s additional claim (between minutes twelve to fourteen) that all Christian music originated from Syria and Edessa is even more questionable. I have no idea how he or anyone could know that. The only evidence he cites is that some hymns and musical practices come from Ephraem of Edessa in the 4th century, but that’s a non sequitur. That he contributed something does not mean he originated anything. By contrast, the evidence against MacCulloch’s assertion is clear and extensive.

Christians were already singing hymns under the Roman Empire in the early second century, as attested by Pliny the Younger, who reports around 110 A.D. that Christians “were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing a hymn to Christ as to a god,” essent soliti stato die ante lucem convenire, carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere (Pliny, Epistles 10.96). Well before that Paul himself reports Christians were singing hymns in his churches (1 Corinthians 14:26). The New Testament describes Christians as singing hymns several times (Acts 16:25; James 5:13; Colossians 3:16; Ephesians 5:19). A great deal more evidence of this exists, wholly exploding MacCulloch’s assertion: see A. Smith, “First-Century Christian Singing and Its Relationship to Contemporary Jewish Religious Song,” Music & Letters 75.1 (1994) and Valeriy Alikin, “Singing and Music in the Christian Gathering During the First Three Centuries,” The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering (Brill 2010), pp. 215-27. We even have Western Christian musical notation from the 3rd century, long predating Ephraem and a thousand miles from Edessa: see E. J. Wellesz, “The Earliest Example of Christian Hymnody,” The Classical Quarterly 39.1/2 (1945).

This is important because MacCulloch uses this false statement to segue into claiming Christians didn’t sing in the West for fear of being caught and persecuted (starting around minute 13:50). There is exactly no evidence for that; and as I just cited, plenty of evidence to the contrary. Pliny himself reports Christians were singing, and they weren’t turned in for it (he was finding them based on anonymous accusatory lists of names, many of whom weren’t even Christians anymore; and he was prosecuting current Christians for illegal assembly, not singing). And Alikin, for example, finds Ignatius discussing the mechanics of entire Christian choirs—in letters his supposed Roman captors let him write and mail off to his churches! By contrast with MacCulloch’s false narrative, Elesha Coffman notes for Christianity Today that it appears Western Christians avoided using instruments to accompany song only because they were regarded as licentious and immoral, not because Romans would catch them at it, as confirmed by Biblical historian William Woodson in his “History of Instrumental Music” for The Christian Courier. But without instruments the evidence shows Western Christians sang communally in every century before Constantine. There is no evidence it was ever suppressed or avoided.

MacCulloch’s misrepresentation of Christian persecution is perhaps his largest gaffe in this BBC series. A corrective is well in order. They should have had Candida Moss weigh in here, Biblical historian and Professor of Theology now at the University of Birmingham, formerly of Notre Dame. Her book The Myth of Persecution synthesized and extended years of evolving mainstream consensus in the field, that has concluded most of what we popularly think about Christian persecution was, in fact, Christian-fabricated propaganda (Wikipedia offers a decent summary). Persecution was sporadic at best, and only became intensely state sanctioned in the late third century, and then only relatively briefly. As Pliny’s correspondence shows, Christians were rarely found, rarely prosecuted, and then only for crimes unrelated to their religion, and the Emperor Trajan outright told him to leave them alone (unless they flaunted their defiance of political or other laws too egregiously to let it pass).

Christians were more on the receiving end of prejudice than persecution, which only occasionally boiled over into popular or state violence. A closer analogy to how Romans treated them is how the Jews were treated by Christians in the Middle Ages. Neither group “hid” from the authorities. But neither were they immune to occasional violent treatment. A more accurate view than MacCulloch represents to the BBC can even be found in Bruce Eastwood’s summary in “Causes of the Early Persecutions” for History Today 16.8 (1966), which was published literally half a century ago! The field has progressed tremendously since, as evinced in the work of Moss.

In connection with this, MacCulloch descends into a few dubious ancillary statements. Such as when he says (around minute fourteen) that he “suspect[s] that most Romans would have agreed with” successive Roman emperors from Nero on who “hated” Christianity and thus persecuted it for that reason. Though he is only stating his own “suspicion” (which he can’t be wrong about), his suspicion is dubious. Later Christian legends of Nero executing Peter or Paul represented those acts as isolated incidents caused more by political intrigue than any ongoing campaign against the faith—at least according to the anonymous, unsourced, implausible, and probably mythical accounts in the Acts of Peter and Acts of Paul, the only sources Christians seem to have ever had for any of this even happening.

Likewise even if we believe Tacitus wrote the famous account of a Neronian persecution (though there are reasons to doubt it, as I have related under peer review, I won’t assume one must agree: see Chapter 20 in Hitler Homer Bible Christ and my recent article “Blom on the Testimonium Taciteum”), it relates that Nero had to contrive false accusations of arson even to effect his pogrom against Christians, entailing it was a rare and unexpected event, which Tacitus says even the people thought went too far, and that so far as Tacitus relates, was never repeated. That passage does describe Christians as despised popularly, but only in the same sense as Jews were—not only among those selfsame pagans, but among Christian nations in subsequent history. Pliny likewise relates no hatred for Christians, he just found their beliefs to be a revolting superstition that he struggled to find any reason to punish so severely; and the emperor agreed with him that he shouldn’t bother.

On the other hand, contrary to MacCulloch’s careless wording around minute 14:40, Constantine did not banish or abolish pagan gods—there was no “out with” them, but an “inclusion of” the Christian god among them. Constantine continued to allow and even support other religions, and only skewed his favor (legal and financial) toward Christians. Paganism would not be outlawed until half a century later, under Theodosius in the 390s A.D. And even then it took centuries to suppress (see David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance, and Christianity and Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries; indeed even after that, medieval campaigns against witchcraft were in part the last vestiges of suppressing paganism in rural districts).

That ends the relevant part of Episode 1. By minute fifteen MacCulloch has reached the era of Constantine. After that, I have nothing more to assess, as it starts to get at that point outside my specialist knowledge.

Episode 2: “Catholicism: The Unpredictable Rise of Rome”

Once again only the first fifteen minutes of the second Episode deals with Christian history before Constantine. But there are again some questionable statements to address. MacCulloch has now dropped the careful “they say” or “the story is” and simply blurts factual assertions that are in fact questionable legends. At about minute 2:50, for example, he says “as a prisoner of the emperor, Paul came to Rome,” and “then spent years under house arrest” there “until the Roman authorities killed him.” But that is a Christian legend originating in the New Testament book of Acts, the only source anyone thereafter can ever cite for the claim. There is no actual evidence it’s true; and some evidence it’s not. And since we know Acts is highly fictive and unreliable (see Chapter 9 of OHJ for a summary of scholars concurring), we can’t really trust it on this.

In his last surviving Epistle, Paul himself says he is going to Rome on his own initiative, not as a prisoner, and that he plans to continue on from Rome to Spain (Romans 15:23-28). Clement of Rome, writing from Rome itself, verifies this fact: Paul made it to Spain, and died there. Clement has no knowledge of Paul coming there as a prisoner, being under house arrest, and being executed recently in Clement’s own city. So our earliest, eyewitness evidence contradicts the late, dubious, unsourced legend in Acts. Why, then, should we go with what Acts says instead? We shouldn’t. To be fair again, a lot of contemporary experts still buy this myth, or haven’t really fact-checked it. So MacCulloch is repeating what “they say,” as in, what many current historians still say. But what they are saying is not based on the evidence, but more in contradiction to it.

After that, between minute three and four, MacCulloch gets around to discussing the catacombs under Rome. There he says “from very early on Christians were drawn here, to the underground catacombs of San Sabastiano, where Paul’s body was hidden from the authorities” as well as “another martyr’s grave, Simon Peter.” He again omits here any hint that this is really just a dubious legend, something people “believe” rather than anything historians have found any actual evidence of. In fact that is all it is. There is no credible source that says Paul’s body had to be hidden—anywhere, much less there. MacCulloch is very unclear just what he is even talking about. Those catacombs have hundreds of sites with the names Peter and Paul on them; none has ever been identified as their grave, or even dated to the first century. The only “graves” of Peter or Paul a location is known for were actually erected in the 4th century, when some bones were transferred into them from elsewhere.

There is no evidence those bones are actually Peter’s or Paul’s, or that any Christians ever actually had custody of the bones of either (this is especially unlikely for Paul if he actually died in Spain, as we’ve seen the better evidence suggests; or for Peter, if he actually died in Jerusalem as some scholars have speculated). The Vatican has more recently claimed that secret carbon dating of “Paul’s” bones (performed without any controls or blinds and never subject to peer review or even published) shows they “date to the first or second century” and that this proves they are Paul’s. But that would be a non sequitur (“this person might have died in the second century, therefore it’s a person who died in the first century” is not exactly sound logic). Their fourth century fabricator could have procured bones of any ancient date to simulate yet another martyr’s relic, a known industry of grift throughout Vatican history, particularly in the fourth century, when countless “miraculously discovered” relics (from the “true cross” to John the Baptist’s head) exploded in popularity. It’s no accident that Peter’s bones were similarly “rediscovered” and enchurched around the same time.

MacCulloch should have been much more earnest about these things being legends at best. Instead he implies we know the actual catacomb location of Peter’s and Paul’s burial. But we don’t; we don’t even know they were ever buried in any catacomb. And even if MacCulloch was pulling a bait-and-switch, and really talking about the Churches that now claim to house the bones of those men, we still don’t have any evidence that that’s true, either. Fortunately, MacCulloch did not delve into any of the more absurd myths about Christians hiding or worshiping “in” catacombs. But by implying we know where Peter and Paul were buried in them, he is still promulgating a part of that mythology: that Christians were using these catacombs even back to the age of Nero. The evidence tells otherwise: Christians did not begin using the catacombs under Rome until the third century; before that they were occupied with pagan and Jewish burials: see Leonard Rutgers et al., “Jewish Inspiration of Christian Catacombs,” Nature 436 (2005).

Finally, around minute 5:30 MacCulloch refers to some archaeological objects without telling us anything we actually need to know about them. First he says a cup-and-fish mosaic at Ostia “probably” indicates a Christian home because…fish, cup, must be Christians! This is a really mind boggling bout of bad logic. Why would Christians spend considerable wealth funding a mosaic depicting a fish swimming in a chalice? I struggle to imagine. Fish symbolism was common in antiquity, as were fishbowls and depictions of them. At any rate, MacCulloch does not tell us what date the mosaic is from or anything else about it by which we could fact-check his claims. But with some sleuthing you’ll find he’s talking about the Domus dei Pesci, which was built in the late third century, and about which there is no scholarly agreement that it was a Christian home.

MacCulloch then says Christianity started “creeping in,” appearing more publicly, worrying pagans, thus leading to persecutions. And at this point he mentions two Christian churches arising at Ostia as examples of this growing presence (and we see on screen a plaque designating one of them, “Basilica Cristiana Reg. III”). But those churches date to after the accession of Constantine. Indeed the one whose plaque we see was only repurposed as a church in the 5th century! These therefore have no bearing on what MacCulloch is talking about. I think this is quite shady; he is pulling a deception on the audience, something historians must never do. Worse than that, after minute six MacCulloch says in this same context that in ancient Rome “you would notice crosses appearing on floors and walls, and you wouldn’t like it.” We’re at the same time shown some vague floor-tile he is clearing dirt from; we are never told what that is, how we know that, how it’s relevant, or what it’s date was. It’s impossible to tell. But there is nothing particularly Christian about it; it contains a vaguely cross-like decoration, but Christians did not invent that. And if this is something he found in one of those “churches” in Ostia he just mentioned, he is looking at an early Medieval floor tile, not an ancient one. So this in no way illustrates what he is saying. This is another unacceptable deception.

Worse still, it simply isn’t the case that Christians used crosses as symbols at this point in history, much less public ones (“on floors and walls” where non-Christians “wouldn’t like it”). That was a 4th century invention: see Everett Ferguson, “When Did the Cross Supplant the Ichthus (Fish) as a Symbol of the Christian Faith?” Christianity Today (2009) and Steven Shisley, “Jesus and the Cross: How the Cross Became Christianity’s Most Popular Symbol” Biblical Archaeology Society (2021). Christians talked about the cross as a concept, made signs of the cross with their hands, very rarely maybe depicted a crucifixion in private art, but did not use it as a public symbol. As Clement of Alexandria tells us in the early third century, “let our seals be either a dove, or a fish, or a ship…or a musical lyre…or a ship’s anchor” (Paedagogus 3). No cross. So MacCulloch is painting an entirely false picture here. And I don’t know why. He could have covered the third century persecutions without all this dishonest and inaccurate nonsense.

Conclusion

I agree with what MacCulloch says around minute 14:40 of Episode 2: “I don’t believe Peter was bishop in Rome,” not least because “you would be hard pressed to find anyone before Pope Damasus who made that claim.” As MacCulloch correctly puts it, “the list of the bishops of Rome” up to about the year 180 “is just that, a list.” And one compiled much later at that; and wholly unsourced. Historians simply do not trust such things. Much like what MacCulloch says of Damasus’s accounts of earlier martyrs: there is “rather more elegance than evidence in what he wrote.” Amen. But as we’ve seen, the same can be said, from time to time, of MacCulloch for the BBC.

The Christian notion of a god becoming incarnate was not “unprecedented,” nor even was the idea of a god sojourning for a time on Earth as a peasant. There is no actual evidence any brother of Jesus ever ran the Christian church. There is no good evidence anyone named James did, either, but if one did, the earliest and most reliable evidence indicates he was not the brother of Jesus. There is no real evidence the Christians quit the city of Jerusalem before the Jewish War. There is no credible evidence Paul died in Rome (there isn’t even any good evidence Peter did). There is no evidence the Kingdom of Edessa ever “adopted Christianity as the kingdom’s official state religion.” Christians did not live in hiding under the Roman Empire, but worshiped (even sang) openly, and were only occasionally subject to pogroms and prejudice, much like they would subsequently treat the Jews. Constantine did not cancel paganism. We don’t know where Peter or Paul were or are buried. Christians didn’t disturb pagans by plastering crosses everywhere. And fishbowls do not indicate a Christian homeowner.