The Many Biases of Diarmaid MacCulloch

Or "Seeing Church History With Disillusioned Eyes"

Not too long ago I cracked open Diarmaid MacCulloch’s award-winning tome (and I mean tome), Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The title is intended to mildly confuse the reader, to peak curiosity: Christianity? Three thousand years!? Of course, even the moderately informed Christian—Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox— will understand that MacCulloch’s title is entirely reasonable, beginning his history of the Christian Church with its more ancient roots in the religion of Israel and in Greek philosophy. Ironically, perhaps, MacCulloch starts not with Israel but with Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, the title is fitting to the content. Christianity does predate Jesus in many significant ways.

However, the point of this article is not to sketch on outline of the book, or discuss various choices the historian made with regard to its structure. My goal here is to expose something about the biases of writers, even very well-educated ones, like MacCulloch. Fortunately, and perhaps to his credit, MacCulloch reveals his own bias at the outset:

This is emphatically a personal view of the sweep of Christian history, so I make no apology for stating my own position in the story: the reader of a book which pontificates on religion has a right to know. I come from a background in which the Church was a three-generation family business, and from a childhood spent in the rectory of an Anglican country parish, a world not unlike that of the Rev. Samuel Crossman, of which I have the happiest memories. I was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and I remember with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the sacraments of Christian belief. I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity. I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems. I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be captivating to millions of members of my species. It is in part to answer that question for myself that I seek out the history of this world faith, alongside those of humankind’s countless other expressions of religious belief and practice.¹

If we take MacCulloch at face value, for which there is no reason not to, we notice a few important assumptions of the historian. First, this book is personal to him. He writes as a kind of “insider” to the Christian faith. However, his description of his long association with Christianity sounds less than religious or devout when he calls that association "a three-generation family business.” As someone who has grown up in a multi-generational family business, I can understand the analogy. However, at the same time, it is a rather flippant way to address one’s relationship with religious faith. I doubt many Muslims whose fathers or father’s fathers were Imams would describe their faith as a “family business.” Perhaps, but I doubt it. Thus, the personal relationship that MacCulloch has had to Christianity, and, as such, to his book about Christianity, seems less reverential and more cynical or suspicious in nature.

Further he “remembers with affection” holding to dogmas of the Church, and admits to being a “candid friend of Christianity.” But just a few moments later, he says that he is captivated at how millions of members of his “species” can be so “apparently crazy” as to believe those things he once affectionately held to. I think this is a very problematic tension to hold. After all, if one admits to thinking that those who believe in the dogmas and doctrines of Christianity are “crazy” then one might wonder how such a person can hold any genuine emotional affection for the thing itself. I admit, I struggle to see how I could have an affection for something that I think is “crazy.”

As I’ve forged through MacCulloch’s book, I have noticed stylistic choices, ways of articulating an event or an act of famous characters in Church history, that make me wonder if MacCulloch’s affection for Christianity is as genuine as he claims. It is to a sampling of these stylistic choices and interpretations I now turn. My goal is not to diminish MacCulloch’s great achievement. It is merely to demonstrate that even academic texts by accomplished authorities in the field need to be engaged with critically.

Worth Reading?: Yes, But…

Being Biased: Choosing the Worst Ways to Represent God’s Church

Before I give some examples from MacCulloch’s text, let me say up front that I haven’t finished the book. I am only 257 pages into the 1,184 page doorstop (that, by the way, is an example of my own biased writing— notice my word choice). Nevertheless there is already plenty to comment on in those 257 pages, and, enough head-scratching stylistic choices in the first fifth of the book to tell me that I shouldn’t expect much different going forward.

Here, then, is a brief list of things I think show an anti-christian bias in the first few hundred pages alone. I cite the book and page number, then give a brief comment about each. I will also italicize and bolden the words, phrases or sentences that explicitly demonstrate bias. To be fair to MacCulloch, I cannot give the extended context for each quote, otherwise, at some point, I would have to reproduce the entire book. Readers will have to go and check for themselves to see if I quoted out of context.

Quote #1:

The Epistle to Philemon is a Christian foundation document in the justification of slavery.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, 115

Comment: Here, MacCulloch simply asserts that Philemon “is a Christian foundation document” for justifying slavery. He does not qualify that with anything like “Philemon was used by so-and-so to justify slavery,” which may be a real historical fact. Instead he simply claims that Philemon is “a Christian foundation document” for slavery. Yet he makes no argument for that being true. The only thing he mentions, in the line prior, is “There is no suggestion that he [Onesimus] should be freed, only that now he could be ‘more than a slave’ to Philemon; and certainly there is no question of consulting Onesimus about his own wishes” (115). But this is nothing more than an argument from absence. If Philemon is a Christian foundation document for slavery, then the author making that claim, here MacCulloch, has to show how that is. Where does Paul endorse slavery in the letter? Answer: he doesn’t.

MacCulloch shows his bias here.

Quote #2:

"Previously [prior to Nag Hammadi] we had known of gnosticism through the hostile filter of such biased commentators as Bishop Irenaeus, now we can meet it in its own words."

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, 122

Comment: Here Irenaeus is called “biased” and “hostile.” In one sense this is true, especially that Irenaeus is hostile toward Gnostic theological views. As someone who has read every word of Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, books I-VI, Irenaeus’ extended (to put it mildly), tedious treatment on Gnosticism, it is true that Irenaeus is hostile toward the heresy. However, the way MacCulloch characterizes Irenaeus here is somewhat misleading. Those who read Against Heresies for themselves will quickly see that Irenaeus is not unfair or unwarranted in his critique. His bias is based on evidence and argument, not on some visceral or sub-rational hatred of the heretical position.

Irenaeus knows the Gnostic material and he knows it well. Much of AH is simple exposition with hardly any judgement or evaluation. Long, tiresome, yet thorough, descriptions of Gnostic ontology, symbology, and epistemology are presented with agonizing detail. There is little reason to think Irenaeus is presenting the material unfairly or strawmanning the Gnostic views. Such detail can only come from the Gnostics themselves.

Moreover, when one “meets Gnosticism in its own words,” it is just as crazy as Irenaeus presented it. So it really is not that shocking to encounter Gnosticism in its own right, as if one were to suddenly recognize that Ireneaus is a kind of ancient, heresy-hunting rube—the Jack Chick of the early church. He isn’t. That said, I imagine Karen King would be very please with MacCulloch’s phrasing.

Quote #3:

And there is an extra consideration, connected to the Pastoral Epistles' insistence that Church leaders be beyond reproach outside the community as well as inside it. The Church is worried about its public image and concerned to show that it is not a subversive organization threatening the well-being of society, 'that the word of God may not be discredited'. As we have seen...the only dissident voice against this frank quest for respectability is to be found in that very unusual entrant into the Christian New Testament, the Book of Revelation.

MacCulloch, Christianity, 119.

Comment: MacCulloch’s claim here is that the Church was concerned to make itself look good before Roman social assumptions and social structures, to include assumptions about the family. In this particular case, Paul’s claim that “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church” (Ephesians 5:23) is, for MacCulloch, only an appeal to Roman notions about hierarchy and patriarchy, but not an inspired word from God let alone a doctrine congruous with the Old Testament. As such, for MacCulloch, the Church in the early centuries was not subversive enough with regard to the reigning pagan paradigm or its authorities. The implication seems to be that Christianity needed to be more political than it was and more revolutionary.

What MacCulloch seems to reject, again without argument, is the idea that the Church was not trying to save face, but was genuinely in agreement with certain aspects of Roman society, ones that, given general revelation and common grace, were acceptable and even commendable. The implication of this would be, of course, that the Church today should also maintain those same views and structures as the Romans. This would be done not to save face, which certainly wouldn’t be the case in today’s progressive culture, but because the views and structures are true. The Romans simply didn’t get everything wrong, and the early Church recognized that.

MacCulloch shows his bias again interpreting the Church as trying to have a “public image,” as opposed to simply agreeing with those aspects of Roman culture.

Quote #4:

Christianity was not usually going to make a radical challenge to existing social distinctions. The reason was that Paul and his followers assumed the world was going to come to an end soon and so there was not much point in trying to improve it by radical action.

MacCulloch, Christianity, 114

Comment: This is a standard line by many theological liberals: that Paul and the other Apostles didn’t care about the world because they thought it was coming to an end. Of course, MacCulloch fails to take into account Paul’s explicit calls for charity, monetary charity, to be given to those Christians suffering in poverty ( Rom 15:23-32; 1 Cor 16:1-4; 2 Cor 8:1-14) and, although they will be mentioned later in the book, the early attempts and successes of Christians to build and operate the first sanitariums and hospitals. Here it is simply stated that Christians weren’t going to upset the apple cart too much, because, as liberals often claim about conservative Christians today, “they were too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good.”

One wonders if MacCulloch would be on board with contemporary “Christian Nationalism” movements with such an attitude, and the theonomy they often advocate?

I highly doubt it.

Quote #5

In the fourth century, Epiphanius/Epiphanios, an energetically unpleasant Cypriot bishop and heresy hunter, described gnostic rites parodying the Eucharist with the use of semen and menstrual blood. In fact, the austere, ascetic strain in gnosticism is far more reliably attested than any licentiousness, and that makes it unwise to rebrand gnostic belief as a more generous-minded, less authoritarian alternative to Christianity which eventually became mainstream.

MacCulloch, Christianity, 124

Comment: This is where MacCulloch makes some real cheap errors. He seems to suggest that Bishop Epiphanius of Cypress makes up the gnostic parody of the Eucharistic meal. He also poisons the well in doing so, calling Epiphanius "unpleasant" and a "heresy hunter,” terms that would make the modern reader think of the worst kind of street-corner delinquent.

First, just because some forms of gnostic asceticism are better attested to than their more licentious counterparts, doesn't mean that the licentious counterparts didn't exist. Second, in chapter six of his book Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashion, Mircea Eliade details several types of pagan rituals that incorporate (excuse the nature of this) the drinking of menstrual blood and semen into their sacred rites. Eliade also reference Epiphanius, but he [Eliade] seems to take him at his word while MacCulloch calls into question Epiphanius’ accuracy. I would suggest that when it comes to pagan rituals, Eliade is the more astute scholar than MacCulloch. And in chapter six of Occultism, Eliade shows that this practice migrated from India into Greek culture. In fact, this is something that MacCulloch also mentions with regard to the origins of Gnosticism, just a few paragraphs prior to his claim about Epiphanius' witness to the gnostic texts and their rituals. So why doesn’t he make the connection and give Epiphanus the benefit of the doubt?

Could it be bias? Methinks so.

Quote #6

Even then, we have to remember that the vast majority of early Christian texts have perished, and despite many new archaeological finds, there is a bias among those that survived towards texts which later forms of Christianity found acceptable. One expert of the period has recently estimated that around 85 per cent of second-century Christian texts of which existing sources make mention have gone missing, and that total itself can only represent a fraction of what there once was. The documents which do survive conspire to hide their rooting in historic contexts, this makes them a gift to biblical literalists, who care little for history.

MacCulloch, Christianity, 112.

Comment: This paragraph is so bad it is hard to know where to begin a critique. I would think imbuing inanimate objects, here biblical manuscripts, with human agency is bad enough to chastise the author. Notice that for MacCulloch the existing manuscripts "conspire" together to "hide" their historical rooting. I don't care how highly acclaimed MacCulloch's book is, or how well-regarded he is, that is just bias, and, honestly, quite bad writing. Manuscripts don’t act with bias, they don’t choose to be destroyed or to be saved from destruction. Nor do they conspire to hide anything. Human beings do that. This is an inappropriate use of anthropomorphism. If anything, what MacCulloch seems to be implying is an ancient conspiracy on the part of the Church. But, again, he subtly suggests without making any argument for. That is poor scholarship. And, what is the end goal of this paragraph? Basically, to make those biblical “literalists” look like mindless drones.

Quote #7:

The attractive feature of a martyr's death was that it was open to anyone, regardless of social status or talent. Women were martyred alongside men, slaves alongside free persons. The necessary ability was to die bravely and with dignity, turning the agony and humiliation into shame and instruction for the spectators.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, 161

Comment: This is just shameless on the part of MacCulloch. A tell-tale sign of a bitter soul is the one who demeans the witness of the martyrs. MacCulloch treats those who died for their faith in Christ as something like characters in a Bildungsroman or piece of theatrical didacticism. He doesn’t acknowledge them as real, flesh and blood people who faced down tremendous evil, and great pain. This is the problem with people who reject Truth (capital “T”). Everything becomes a mere social-psychological phenomenon, rather than a witness to the transcendent. Consider MacCulloch's word choices here: "attractive feature," "talent," "necessary ability," and "instruction for the spectators." As if these things were on the mind and hearts of those being torn to pieces in the arena. I wonder if MacCulloch would say the same about modern-day martyrs, like the twenty-one Coptic priests?

This is severe, almost pathological, bias on display by the author.

Quote #8 (paraphrase):

Early Christians are consistently construed in psychological terms, they are "obstinate" (157) in their separation from the world, and the main attraction of early Christianity was its "secretiveness" (157). Morally Christians are hardly different than their Greek or Roman counterparts, yet the early church fathers are "notoriously crotchety moralists" (157). Gnostics and Marcionites are misunderstood interpretations of Christianity that "would have bred immense diversity of belief"as they were "generally hospital to mixtures of doctrine" (127). These, of course, were admirable characteristics, unlike the dogmatism of the catholic Church which "emerged in reaction to them" and used "canons and creeds" to develop a synthesis that "left many casualties along the way" (128).

Comment: Reading MacCulloch's Christianity, it is hard not to sense the mind of a man who resents his upbringing in the Christian faith, in spite of his testimony to the contrary. It's too bad that a book with this much detail and information has to be riddled with so many rhetorical decisions aimed at skewing the readers sentiments about Christianity. Of course there is never any mention of whether gnostic or Marcionite heresies left any casualties behind them, only the orthodox canons and creeds did that.

This seems biased.

Quote #9:

Implicit in most gnostic systems was a distrust of the Jewish account of creation. This suggests that gnostic beliefs were likely to emerge in places with a Jewish presence and gnostics were people who found the Jewish message hard to take.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, 122

Comment: Hmm, that is putting the Gnostic view of Judaism mildly, let alone Marcion’s view of Yahweh, which one can read here. I’d say the primary gnostic sources, and Marcion, are a bit more than just “distrustful” of the Old Testament, and that their posture toward “the Jewish message” is more aggressive than just being “hard to take.” Likely, what MacCulloch is trying to massage here, is the idea that the Gnostics and Marcion were anti-Semites.

Quote #10:

Among his [Constantine's] many other donations were fifty monumental copies of the Bible commissioned from Bishop Eusebius's specialist scriptorium in Caesarea: an extraordinary expenditure on creating de luxe written texts, for which the parchments alone would have required the death of around five thousand cows (so much for Christian disapproval of animal sacrifice).

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, 191.

Comment: Oh brother! The anachronistic environmentalist interpretation of history. We’ve seen this one before. I would say that in a time and place where animals were far more necessary than today—for food, for clothing, for labor and warfare— this was hardly a sacrifice for the animals. If anything, it was a tremendous human sacrifice! But you wouldn’t get that sense from MacCulloch’s snark, who likely considers the creation of more durable biblical manuscripts as the folly of those “crazy members of his species” who believe such nonsense.

Quote #11 (paraphrase):

MacCulloch, in his 1,184 page tome on Christianity, mentions the death of the Neoplatonist philosopher, Hypatia, three times in his book (220-221; 224, 232), making sure to pin her death on radical orthodox Christians each time she is referenced.

Yet he makes zero reference to St. Telemachus' martyrdom or the Emperor Honorius' elimination of gladiatorial games.

Comment: What one chooses not to say also speaks volumes. Bias much?

Quote #12:

Christianity was now thrown into confusion as Julian, whom Christians subsequently angrily labelled 'the Apostate', startlingly abandoned the Christian faith. He had been brought up a Christian under the tutelage of Eusebius of Nicomedia, but had come to be sickened by what he regarded as Christianity's absurd claims, and he discretely developed a deep fascination for Neoplatonism and the worship of the sun; he may have been initiated in to the worship of Mithras. He was a subtle and reflective man, perhaps too much of a philosopher for his own good, and he employed the devastatingly effective strategy against Christianity of standing back from its disputes to let it fight its internal battles without a referee, a mark of how quickly the emperor had become a crucial player in the Church's disputes. There was widespread support for his reversing the humiliation of traditional cults, and some violence against Christians, which seem to have included the lynching of George, the recently arrived Bishop of Alexandria, although it is not clear whether partisans of the previous bishop, Athanasius, were in fact the main perpetrators of this outrage.

Only Julian's early death on campaign on the empire's eastern borders in 363 restored the alliance of imperial throne and imperial Church. Not everyone said that the spear that killed him had been wielded by enemy forces, and there was indiscreet rejoicing in the city of Antioch, whose Christian majority had been a particular source of distress to him.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, 217.

Comment: This is by far the most favorable, almost fawning, portrayal of Julian the Apostate (d. 363) I have ever read. Not only does MacCulloch seem to favor Julian over those pesky Christians, commending him in both character and belief (apparently worshipping the sun is less absurd that Christianity’s claims), but in every other church history I have read, there is always mention of Julian's ban of Christian educators teaching in the Roman schools. But MacCulloch makes zero mention of this. Zero. Julian was not a source of distress to Christians, clearly the distress was only one-way for MacCulloch.

This seems to be a clear pagan bias, which makes one wonder.

Quote #13

Sergius came habitually to be associated in partnership and iconography with his fellow soldier-martyr Bacchus, in a union so close as to be described as that of 'lovers,' which has bequeathed an interesting image of same-sex love to Eastern Christianity, even though it has rarely felt able fully to explore the possible implications.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity, 238.

Comment: You knew it was coming from page one: the defense of homosexuality was bound to emerge in the course of MacCulloch’s text. I would love for an Eastern Orthodox historian to weigh in on this one. The bias is obviously in the last sentence itself, which assumes there are no good, and utterly obvious, reasons for why the same-sex relationship wasn’t able to be fully explored.

Quote #14:

The origins of Christianity in this remote and mountainous area [Ethiopia] are not clear, beyond a mysterious self-contained story in the Book of Acts of an encounter in Judaea between Philip, one of the first Christina leaders in Jerusalem, and a eunuch servant of the 'Queen of Ethiopia', who was fascinated to hear that Jewish prophecy had been fulfilled in the coming of Christ. The first historical accounts are from the fourth century, and make it clear that Christian approaches came not southwards from Egypt but from the east across the Red Sea, via Ethiopia's long-standing trade contacts with Arabia and ultimately Syria.

MacCulloch, Christianity, 240

Comment: Well that is one way to dismiss the book of Acts as non-historical without any argumentation.

Conclusion: Reading Well and Avoiding Unnecessary Deference to Scholars

Diarmaid MacCulloch is no slouch when it comes to Church History. His book is a true achievement of scholarly scope and depth. However, it is incumbent upon us as Christians, and as non-Christians, to not give unwarranted deference to scholars. Even a book of the magnitude as Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years needs to be engaged with critically.

I have only highlighted a few examples of what I think are clear biases on the part of the author. I am sure I will find more as I go along. These are not factual errors. MacCulloch is too careful for that, too scholarly in the right way. However, there are stylistic choices, judgments about content, and interpretations about events that show that even the best scholars are not neutral when it comes to Christ and his Church. MacCulloch is no exception.

1. MacCulloch, Christianity, 11 [emphasis added].