Apologies, but no apologetics

This is a massive work, 1,132 pages long, not counting the index. This is partly because the author, Professor of the History of the Church, at Oxford, seems anxious to downgrade the importance and uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth in founding the religion which bears his name, and therefore deals first with the millennium which preceded his birth, tracing the roots of the religion in Greek and Hebrew culture. This takes up 73 pages, but is too cursory to be effective and should be skipped. The section on Jesus is not much more than 20 pages, and reflects all the most irritating aspects of modern Anglican New Testament criticism. The personality of Jesus never emerges, and one is left with the thought that if so little of it is true, what was all the fuss about? This section should be skipped too. There are also otiose appendices, giving the text of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and chronological lists of the popes, the patriarchs of Constantinople and the archbishops of Canterbury. These take up 20 pages and add nothing to the value of the book. (On the other hand the source notes are often more interesting than the text, and the bibliography is thorough and up-to-date, the most useful part of the entire work.)

Once the author gets into his story with St Paul and the founding of the church, the narrative becomes more interesting and fruitful. The great strength of the book is that it covers, in sufficient but not oppressive detail, huge areas of Christian history which are dealt with cursorily in traditional accounts of the subject and are unfamiliar to most English-speaking readers. These include the evolution of the early Christian sects, the Eastern Church in its entirety, the rise of Orthodoxy in both the Greek world and Russia, and the special cases such as Bulgaria and what has become Serbia.