A History of Christianity - Complete Series

When I was a small boy,

my parents used to drive me round historic churches

searching out whatever looked interesting or odd.

But soon they realised that they had created a monster.

The history of the Christian Church became my life's work.

For me, no other subject can rival its scale and drama.

For 2,000 years Christianity has been

one of the great players in world history.

Inspiring faith but also squalid politics.

It is an epic story starring a cast of extraordinary people,

from Jesus himself and the first apostles,

to empresses, kings and popes.

From reformers and champions of human conscience

to crusaders and sadists.

Religious belief can transform us for good or ill

It has brought human beings to acts of criminal folly

as well as the highest achievements of goodness and creativity.

I will tell the story of both extremes.

Christianity has survived persecution, splits,

wars of religion, mockery, hatred.

Today there are two billion Christians, a third of humanity.

Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox,

Pentecostal and many more.

Deep down, the Christian faith boasts a shared core.

But what is it?

In modern Europe, Christianity seems threatened

by the apathy of a secular society.

Will it survive? Can it?

I'm chasing the story of Christianity across the globe,

coming face to face with people who have got their own take

on this 2,000-year-old adventure.

And where better to start

than in the city which first knew Jesus the Christ, Jerusalem.

I'm in Jerusalem for a very good reason.

But it's probably not what you think.

We've all heard something of the Christian story.

Jesus, the wandering Jewish teacher crucified by the Romans.

Paul, who had hunted down Christians

until, on the road to Damascus, he experienced a blinding vision

of Jesus Christ, resurrected from the dead.

Paul's newfound zeal focused on people beyond the Jews, Gentiles.

It took him far from Jerusalem to Rome,

and it reshaped not just the faith of Christ

but in the end, all Western civilisation.

That's the familiar story of the origins of Christianity.

But I'm here in Jerusalem because I want to look for something else.

You can find clues here in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The church is said to have been built where Jesus was crucified and buried.

At its heart is what's believed to be his tomb.

Somehow, the followers of Jesus became convinced

that he rose from here to new life.

The belief that Jesus can overcome death is the most difficult

and troubling affirmation of the Christian faith.

Over 20 centuries it's made Christians act in

heroic, joyful, beautiful, terrible ways.

It's made this one of the holiest sites on earth.

You see, at heart, Christianity is a personality cult.

Its core is the unprecedented idea that God became human,

not in a pharaoh, a king or even an emperor,

but in a humble peasant from Galilee.

And the conviction that you can meet Jesus, the son of God,

and transform your life, is a compelling message.

It's what drove Christianity's relentless expansion.

But the church built around the tomb of Jesus

is also the starting point for a forgotten story,

a story that may overturn your preconceptions about early Christianity.

Pride of place in this building goes to two churches.

This chapel belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Orthodoxy is a large part of the Christian story.

The other church with a strong presence here

is actually the biggest in the modern world, Catholicism.

Orthodoxy and Catholicism dominated Christianity in Europe,

in the West, for its first 1,500 years.

But as you walk around the edges of the church,

you can't fail to notice other curious little chapels.

They're not Western or European, they're Middle Eastern or African.

And they tell a very different story about the origins of Christianity.

Around the back of Christ's tomb is Egypt's Coptic church.

There are plenty of other churches represented here,

but you need to know where to look.

Now, this is the chapel of the Syriac Orthodox Church

which the Greek Orthodox, of course, would call unorthodox.

Back outside and through a side door leading up to the roof,

you'll find the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Many versions of Christian history would make this unorthodox, too.

And yet it's far older than better known versions of Christianity,

like Protestantism.

It's easy for tourists

to dismiss these ancient churches as quaint, irrelevant even.

But that would be a big mistake.

These chapels contain vital clues to the story I want to tell

Because the origins of the Christian faith are not in the West,

but here in these ancient churches of the East.

For centuries, Christianity flourished in the East.

And indeed at one point it was poised to triumph in Asia,

maybe even in China.

The headquarters of Christianity

might well have been Baghdad rather than Rome.

And if that had happened,

Western Christianity would have been very different.

I will trace that huge voyage,

from Jerusalem to Syria,

through Central Asia

to the far reaches of the Asian continent

In my journey I'll discover how the Christian faith survived

worlds away from Jerusalem.

I'm not giving you a history of Christian theology,

though I won't be afraid to plunge you into many ancient arguments

about Christian faith.

The main character here is not Jesus or the gospels.

It is, in fact, the church,

the institution of Christian faith that has fought its way through history.

It all started here in Jerusalem

when the first followers of Jesus formed a Jewish Christian church.

It was led by James,

whom the gospels call the brother of Jesus.

Here in the Old City is the Armenian Cathedral of St James.

His tomb is said to lie below the High Altar.

The Jerusalem church probably would have remained

the headquarters of a single, unified Christianity.

But in the year 70 disaster struck.

A rebellion of Jews against the Romans ended in a siege of Jerusalem.

As troops finally broke into the city, the temple went up in flames.

Today its Western Wall is all that remains.

Christians quit the city before the siege.

Now the fledgling faith would have to survive outside its Jewish homeland.

But could it adapt?

That's the big test facing any world religion.

With Jerusalem gone, where would Gentile Christians look now?

Well, you might think obviously west to Rome,

because that's where Paul had gone.

But at the time it would not have seemed obvious at all.

Paul had been killed in Rome, so had the Apostle Peter.

What if you take the other road out of Jerusalem, east?

Today, this is Urfa, in southeast Turkey.

In the first century it was called Edessa,

capital of a small kingdom,

and wealthy because it controlled part of the main trade route East.

Edessa is special because its ruler, King Abgar,

set an important precedent here.

He chose to show his personal devotion to Jesus

by adopting Christianity as the kingdom's official state religion,

at least a hundred years before the Romans did.

For the last 17 centuries,

Christianity has been repeatedly linked with the state.

So, in the United Kingdom,

the monarch is still supreme governor of the Church of England.

And this is where it all started,

in the ancient Eastern Christian kingdom of Edessa.

And Edessa pioneered something else

that has become inseparable from Christianity.

Church music.

Christian Edessa has long since disappeared.

After the First World War it became a community in exile,

over the border in neighbouring Syria.

This is the only surviving descendent of that ancient church.

But its liturgical chant is still based on the distinctive tradition of Edessa.

These hymns are derived from the poetry

of the great fourth century Syrian theologian, St Ephraem.

And he was building on an even earlier tradition from these lands,

echoing the music of the Roman Empire.

I found that service very touching because what we were hearing

was the ghost of the music of the streets and market places,

seized by the church, turned into psalms and hymns,

taken across the western Mediterranean,

turned into the music of the whole church.

Latin Gregorian chant, Johann Sebastian Bach,

even the tambourines and guitars of the Pentecostals.

All come from here.

But at the start of the 4th century,

hymn singing would have been the last thing on the minds of Christians

in the western half of the Roman Empire.

In the West, most Christians wouldn't be singing the public praises of God

because it was too dangerous.

Successive Roman Emperors from Nero onwards persecuted Christianity.

They hated it. And I expect that most Romans would have agreed with them.

In the early 4th century, a betting man might have put his money

on Christianity becoming a major religion here in the East.

But then something completely unexpected happened in the West.

A new Roman Emperor, Constantine, made Christianity his own.

Out went the old gods and goddesses of pagan Rome,

in came the one God of the Christians.

It was a turning point in the history of the Christian faith.

It was more than 100 years after the King of Edessa

had made Christianity his official religion.

But to be the state religion of a whole empire

was something else altogether.

The ability to reinvent itself would become a hallmark of Christianity.

But this was the greatest reinvention of them all.

It meant an end to persecution, it brought power and wealth.

It gave the Christian faith the chance of becoming a universal religion.

From this moment, a church of the Roman Empire emerged.

In theory, it embraced Christians in the Eastern Empire as well as the West.

But in the East, many Christians were unimpressed by the new alliance,

even hostile.

At stake were fundamental disagreements

about the direction the faith should take.

Jesus had told people to abandon wealth, not to ally with the rich and powerful.

Remember his joke about a rich man wanting to enter the kingdom of heaven

was like a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle?