A History of Christianity Season 1 Episodes

Episode 1

The First Christianity

60 mins

Diarmaid MacCulloch 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. Instead, he shows that the true origins of Christianity lie further east and that at one point it was poised to triumph in Asia, and perhaps even in China.

Episode 2

Catholicism: The Unpredictable Rise of Rome

Over one billion Christians look to Rome, more than half of all Christians on the planet. But how did a small Jewish sect from the backwoods of first-century Palestine, which preached humility and the virtue of poverty, become the established religion of Western Europe - wealthy, powerful and expecting unfailing obedience from the faithful?

Episode 3

Orthodoxy: From Empire to Empire

Today, Eastern Orthodox Christianity flourishes in the Balkans and Russia, with over 150 million members worldwide. MacCulloch charts Orthodoxy's extraordinary fight for survival. After its glory days in the Eastern Roman Empire, it stood right in the path of Muslim expansion, suffered betrayal by crusading Catholics, was seized by the Russian tsars and faced near-extinction under Soviet Communism.

Episode 4

Reformation: The Individual Before God

The Amish today are peaceable folk, but five centuries ago their ancestors were seen as some of the most dangerous people in Europe. They were radicals - Protestants - who tore apart the Catholic Church. In the fourth part of the series, Diarmaid MacCulloch makes sense of the Reformation, and of how a faith based on obedience and authority gave birth to one based on individual conscience.

Episode 5

Protestantism: The Evangelical Explosion

Diarmaid MacCulloch traces the growth of an exuberant expression of faith that has spread across the globe - Evangelical Protestantism. Today, it is associated with conservative politics, but the whole story is distinctly more unexpected. It is easily forgotten that the evangelical explosion has been driven by a concern for social justice and the claim that one could stand in a direct emotional relationship with God. It allowed the Protestant faith to burst its boundaries from its homeland in Europe. In America, its preachers marketed Christianity with all the flair and swashbuckling enterprise of American commerce. In Africa, it converted much of the continent by adapting to local traditions, and now it is expanding into Asia. But is Korean Pentecostalism and its message of prosperity in the here and now an adaptation too far?

Episode 6

God in the Dock

MacCulloch explores a distinctive feature about Western Christianity - skepticism - which has transformed both Western culture and Christianity. He challenges the simplistic notion that faith in Christianity has steadily ebbed away before the relentless advance of science, reason and progress, and shows instead how the tide of faith perversely flows back in.