The greatest story ever told
Sarah Anderson THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: A.D. 2,000 YEARS OF CHRISTIANITY edited by Christopher Howse SPC1C £20, pp. 192 Iwas puzzled by this book from the moment I started reading it as I had a problem working out who exactly it was for. Is it meant for Christians who know little about the past of their religion or is it directed at those who know nothing about
the last 2,000 years? Some things are explained rather simply and yet there is much substantial and fascinating detail. There are some wonderful illustrations, but when I showed it to a friend who came to dinner, he was horrified that a book on 2,000 years of Christianity should, under the title 'Christianity Today', have a photo- graph of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. I argued that this was no doubt a bait to entice people to read on and to want to find out more about the traditions of Christianity; and A. D. on several levels does achieve this.
Music, painting and literature based on Christianity are part of our heritage in the west; whether or not you are a practising Christian — and there are about 1,760 mil- lion in the world today — it would be almost impossible to appreciate our civili- sation without some knowledge of Chris- tianity.
One of its great strengths is that its fun- damental doctrines do not alter and yet there is constant growth and change. A. D. is good on the early origins of Chris- tianity and its evolution through the cen- turies into what it has become today. Charles Moore reminds us in his foreword that Hollywood called Christianity The Greatest Story Ever Told'. The book charts the first 2,000 years of its epic yet paradoxi- cal history, while encouraging us to remem- ber what we are celebrating in the millennium.
'St Catherine of Siena before Pope Gregory XI' by Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1448. Catherine persuaded him to return to Rome from Avignon in 1377, but he died before making the journey.
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