1976 after what?
George Gale A History of Christianity Paul Johnson (Weidenfeld and Nhcolson £7.00)
One of the central difficulties about Christianity is its claim to be an historical religion: it bases its claims upon the assertion that certain events happened in the world of historic activity, which were themselves supernatural, and which miraculously revealed God to men through the divine and human Jesus, who was born of a woman, who lived and suffered and taught on this earth at a precise time and place, who was crucified and who was then resurrected and carried into the arms of his heavenly father.
These very large claims, which flout hatUral laws and common sense, are probably strengthened rather than weakened by the total lack of historical evidence with which to sustain their possibility, let alone their probability. There is no first-hand evidence of the historical existence of Jesus. It is. however, most probable that an hisitoric Jesus existed. Unfortunately we have no direct knowledge of his life and death. What we have are accounts of that life and death, and versions of his teachings, written down several years after his death by men who themselves had no direct knowledge of the matter. There is. that is to say, an oral tradition codified by: different men in different ways for different purposes; and this we call the New Testament.
Of these codifiers, who were also the organisers of the new cult. Paul is undoubtedly the chief: and Paul Johnson is right to start this prodigious work of synthetic historiography with Paul travelling to Jerusalem to meet the surviving followers of Jesus. in the middle of the first century. Paul's letters to the infant congregations, scattered around areas of the Roman Empire, not only held the cult of Jesus together but provided it with the basis of a theology, a morality and—for those without faith—an historicised myth. Those with faith assert that something historical happened which was a revelatory act of God, a divine discontinuity and suspension of nature, to make way for the redemption of mankind. It has always struck me as odd that, should a God choose thus to intervene, He did so obscurely and without literate eye-witnesses.
But once the cult gets established, we do not lack evidence of its growth and success. Indeed, the history of Europe andothe history of Christianity are inextricably mixed from around 250 AD to 1650; even now. Christianity in one form or another remains the official religion of most of Europe and its former dependencies. And, because of Christianity's claim to be historic. Paul Johnson—himself a Roman Catholic—is able to claim that 'Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach—and, properly understood, does teach—that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith,' he goes on, 'has nothing to fear from the facts.' A Christian could have something to fear from the facts if—for the sake of argument—new discoveries were to establish Paul's letters, or the Gospels, to be forgeries designed to perpetrate a conspiracy; but Johnson is right to pour scorn on Christians who have feared to tell the truth, as they know it, of the history of their church and religion. Johnson himself has no such fears, and plunges into his history of Christianity with all the verve of an eighteenth century Encylopaedist equipped with the discoveries of nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship.
He divides his book into parts, rather than chapters; and the technique works. The first two sections, dealing with 'The Rise and Rescue of the Jesus Sect, 50 BC– AD 250' and 'From Martyrs to Inquisitors. AD 250-450', are, I think, masterly. These were the crucial centuries, when Christianity first struggled to survive, to shed itself of its
Jewishness, to prepare itself as the orthodox monotheism, and then to become the official religion of Rome. Had Rome survived, the Church might not: no imperial power could indefinitely put up with the latent claims of Christianity.
The book's two central sections, the first, covering the so-called 'dark' or early middle ages from 450 to 1054 and oddly titled 'Mitred Lords and Crowned Ikons', and the second, 'The Total Society and its Enemies, 1054-1500', seem to me to be the weakest. This was the millennium of 'Christendom', when the Church advanced its greatest claims, scored its greatest victories and earned everyone's gratitude for preserving the culture of Greece and Rome. But it did this very largely as part of a vast effort to secure some degree of social and political stability after the collapse of Rome. The success of the Church in adapting itself to the slow growth of a sophisticated feudal system is not explored; nor is the inability of the Church to come to terms with the tribal impulses and traditions of the Franks and Germans which resulted in nationstates whose very existence challenged continuously the idea of a Roman imperium and of a Church universal.
But into the Reformation and Counterreformation, and Johnson is back into familiar territory and form; he marches splendidly into what he calls 'Faith, Reason and Unreason', taking him forward from 1648 to 1870. These were the years when the Church suffered what may yet prove to be its mortal blows. But those who find it difficult to understand how it still lingers on. largely impotent and still hopelessly divided, must nevertheless recognise that the majority of Europeans and the descendants of white colonists still would call themselves and their societies 'Christian'. Christianity never permeated the East; and its African manifestations are unimpressive. It has remained a white man's religion, confined very largely to an expanded Europe. It is the heir to Rome: it has never established its universality.
In his epilogue. Johnson claims that the freedom men find in Christ 'is the father 01 all other freedoms'. It is a difficult claim to make on behalf of a faith whose Church, whenever it has had the opportunity, has not failed to impose, often by methods of the utmost savagery, the tyranny of its own dogmas and rules and sanctions. It is one uf the great strengths of this book that those who would wish to dispute with Johnsott the sentiments in his fine ,concluding logue will find plenty of ammunition in his pages. It is a tremendous piece of work- filled, incidentally, with some marvellous anecdotes. It is the sort of history which Pr°' fessional historians seem unwilling, or to° frightened, to attempt. But it is in no sense an apologia. I see n° reason to suppose—as Johnson does—that without Christianity the past two thousafid years would have been even more horrific than they have been, although I will con" cede that Christianity 'is not withoUt beaqty'. Though his book does nothing whatever to disturb my lack of faith, I eon, gratulate Paul Johnson not only on Pr° ducing this work, but also in apparentb; keeping his faith in the process: a noble anu_ notable double which itself smacks of 01' miraculous.
Previous page
