Arts

05 Nov 09

This Thursday sees the first episode of Oxford theology professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new six-part BBC4 series A History of Christianity.

Professor MacCulloch, who is Professor of the History of the Church in the Theology Faculty and a fellow of St Cross College, goes in search of Christianity’s forgotten origins, overturning the familiar story that it all began when the apostle Paul took Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome.

The series, which will also be repeated on BBC2 next year, instead shows the true origins of Christianity lie further east and Professor MacCulloch suggests that at the end of the first eight centuries of Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome.

‘When I was a little boy, my parents took me out looking at old churches – but soon they realised that they had bred a monster,’ says Professor MacCulloch. ‘My appetite for churches was insatiable; no ecclesiastical building was safe from my probings. Eventually I went into therapy for the mania by taking up my role at Oxford. Now the BBC is contributing further to rehab by giving me my own TV series on the history of Christianity, having got wind of the fact that Penguin publishers had commissioned a book from me on that very theme.’

Professor MacCulloch, whose book A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years was recently published, calls his series 'glorious fun' and ‘the biggest road movie ever, crawling the churches of the world’.

He said: ‘The drawback is that we get up early, but as a result, we have some of the most memorable places in the world entirely to ourselves. Think of the Grand Mosque of Damascus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem or the Forest of Stelae in Xi’an entirely free of tourists.’

According to Professor MacCulloch, the crew even provoked a riot in rural central China as they attempted to film some reputed eighth-century Christina sculptures in the inaccessible upper storeys of a pagoda. Local Buddhist villagers who were disputing with the Chinese government over the site refused to let the team climb the scaffolding that had been put in place 'but our attempts to climb the pagoda were scotched by the fearsome old grannies of the village'.

Professor MacCulloch’s book has been described as 'the most comprehensive and up-to-date single-volume work in English'. It describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.

He presents the development of Christian history in a new way, giving the first ‘truly global history of Christianity’. Professor MacCulloch’s research ranges from Palestine in the first century, to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. He is described as one of the ‘most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas’.

The Theology Faculty and St Cross College will be celebrating the launch of Professor MacCulloch’s book and television series at an event on 2 December in the University Church, attended by the University’s Chancellor The Rt Hon Lord Patten of Barnes. 

St Cross College is holding a ‘gala screening’ tomorrow evening with an introductory talk from Professor MacCulloch attended by the Heads of House from Blackfriars, St Benet’s & Regents Park, as well as members of the college.