A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

From the front flap of this 1161-page book: "Christianity, one of the world's great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up-to-date single-volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. Diarmaid MacCulloch presents the development of Christian history differently than any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1,400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observes 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. This is indeed the first truly global history of Christianity: MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. Part of the book's originality is to show how different ideas about God, or different interpretations of Christian thinkers, have persisted or developed over many centuries, leading sometimes to the division of civilizations and slaughter on the battlefield. It traces the origins of much of what became Christian thought back to the Greeks and gives due weight to the tangled and often tragic story of Christian relations with its mother-monotheism, Judaism, and its younger cousin, Islam. As well as these stories of conflict, Christianity has produced sublime accomplishments - of faith, prayer, art and music, all an essential part of MacCulloch's story."