This is part two of my series on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book and BBC series A History of Christianity, or as the book is sometimes titled, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, referring to the fact that Christianity evolved out of trends that began a thousand years before it arose and so “its” history really goes back three thousand years, not just two. Here I’ll only be assessing his coverage of the “first three hundred years” of Christianity itself. Last time I reviewed the corresponding parts of the BBC series, independently from the book. Now I will tell you about the material in the book on which that series was supposed to be based.

My Goals & Method for This Review

As I said last time, though I do of course know a lot about it, I do not know well enough the history of Christianity after its first three hundred years to weigh in on the accuracy of anything MacCulloch says after that point, so I’m really only interested in his material about those three centuries (covered in pp. 76-188 of Christianity). So that’s all I’ll comment on here. I also didn’t review his preceding chapters on the Greco-Jewish background setting the context for the rise of Christianity (at a quick skim I didn’t see anything there to critique).

And I will only evaluate statements that are questionable or false; everything else you can assume I believe to be reasonably correct as presented. Which means, his exact wording matters. For example, anytime MacCulloch says something like “it is said…” or “the legend is…,” such statements I regard not as declarations that what follows is true, but that it describes stories that at some point were indeed told—even if I think those stories are false, I may well agree those stories existed, and that’s all I’ll query when that’s all MacCulloch claims. Likewise when he uses the subjunctive (that something “might” be the case or “perhaps” happened), unless for some reason I think the ensuing speculation is not even credible; otherwise, as it is not presented as a known fact, it stands really as just opinion (his own or that of enough mainstream scholars to be notable), and that’s fair enough. I also won’t be weighing in on the significance of any of this to any particular sectarian belief system; I’m only interested in what is and is not historically true (or uncertain, or unknown).

Overall Take

MacCulloch’s book is much better than the series. It is mostly a history of doctrinal disputes explaining sectarian schisms (and thus a history of beliefs more than whether any of those beliefs are true). It contains most of the qualifiers, contexts, and adequate sourcing I found often lacking in the show. MacCulloch also admits he has done no original research, that all he aims to do in his book is relate what other historians today have reported (“[this] book is self-evidently not a work of primary-source research; rather, it tries to synthesize the current state of historical scholarship across the world,” Christianity, p. 12). And I find that to be a fair and accurate statement. As I have said of Bart Ehrman’s books Jesus Interrupted and Misquoting Jesus: even where I might disagree with them, they do at least correctly describe what the prevailing opinions are in mainstream scholarship today (or at least at the time those books were written), and that has value in and of itself. MacCulloch’s Christianity meets the same standard; in fact possibly even more reliably than Ehrman’s work does.

When I combed the relevant sections for errors to dock, I really didn’t find much that was serious. Certainly nothing that would warrant dissuading people from reading it. It is rife with questionable or erroneous statements, but not rife with apologetics or disinformation. And even if not always, MacCulloch’s reading in the scholarship is usually wide, deep, responsible, and up to date. His notes and bibliography are as sound as any college course would need.

Even what I would call MacCulloch’s mistakes are typical for any scholar. If you’ve ever taught a college course using anything other than a committee-written textbook (and perhaps on occasion even then), you’ll well know there will always be a scattered collection of things about it you need to correct or qualify to the class in lecture; no scholar’s work is entirely free of mistakes or misleading exposition, especially in a thousand page treatise covering three thousand years of history (no one can really master all of that material). And when those things are few enough relative to the whole, a corrective is all one need, to arm yourself against the occasional slips in what is otherwise a sound (if selective) account.

For the pages I’m looking at, this blog article can serve that very function for you. Read this, and then the book, and likely you’ll do alright. Even for the remaining sections of the book, which I don’t critique here, you will know what critical caution to employ, as the kinds of minor mistakes I find throughout the section I surveyed you can expect will also exist everywhere else in the book, and all you need do is be aware that’s possible—so for anything you might want to depend on, you should double-check (as really you should always do anyway, with any work, by any scholar).

Indeed, to test for substantive apologetic angles, I picked two other topics elsewhere in MacCulloch’s book where Christian revisionism of history is common even in some mainstream scholarship, and I found none of it here. The first of those tests was his coverage of the Dark Ages. Though he adopts the Christian apologetic line (popular in Medieval history departments today) that the Dark Ages weren’t “so dark,” he does not carry this to any of the absurd lengths of actually altering history that we usually find such claims pressed into the service of (see, for example, my discussion in Yes, the Dark Ages Really Were a Thing). He does avoid chronicling some aspects of the contrary (the Christian destruction of knowledge and scientific and democratic values: see, for example, No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West). But at least he does not replace that silence with any bogus narrative of Christian Triumphalism. And he is otherwise pretty frank about the history of Christian savagery, injustice, and foolishness (including the destruction and doctoring of evidence, e.g. p. 112).

The other test case I used was MacCulloch’s treatment of Hitler and Nazism, where I found he honestly traces their origins in Christian ideology, and documents Christian complicity (as well as resistance). Though he does not discuss the purest and most influential Nazi sect of Christianity (so-called Positive Christianity; for a full history of which, as well as other sects’ involvement, see Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich), he does not attempt to hide widespread Christian enthusiasm and support for Nazism. So in this as well as the other case, MacCulloch tests reasonably well. MacCulloch even honestly relates the role of Christianity in the rise and dominance of Stalinism, contrary to the usual tropes found in Christian apologetics. I’d say he comes across as slightly too kind to Christianity in every case, but on balance not so much as to eclipse, hide, or rewrite the truth. He may be somewhat deferential; but he is no apologist. The same comes across in his treatment of the first three centuries of the religion.

One side point I should make is that MacCulloch’s focus is mostly on the history of Christian beliefs, and though he addresses heresies and rebellions, he is sometimes over-focused on official creeds and doctrines, more than the beliefs of the actual Christians themselves. This can create a filter of distortion you should be aware of when reading his book. As one example to illustrate what I mean, MacCulloch correctly reports that the official position of all Eastern Orthodox traditions is against universal salvation (p. 153); but he fails to mention that nevertheless universalism remains to this day a popular position among many Eastern Orthodox practitioners, and with the support of many leading intellectuals (a prominent example currently is David Bentley Hart). Yes, technically that makes them heretics within their own traditions; but so are most Catholics, for instance. What sectarian leadership says does not always align with what their adherents do, and a history of Christian belief should not neglect actual beliefs in this way.

Catalog of Errors: The Trivial

There are a ton of minor errors in MacCulloch’s book that one must be aware of, to head off your continuing to repeat them, thus creating new “legends” about ancient Christianity. Most aren’t serious mistakes, and concern relatively unimportant things; but truth still matters, so they need correcting. However, I won’t catalog all the instances in which MacCulloch just presumes this or that story or detail in the Gospels is true; that’s already embarrassingly common in this field of study, and I expect any reader is already smart enough to be skeptical every time he does that. I’ll only flag here what a common reader might not know.

The least of these include:

• MacCulloch is skeptical of the Nativity narratives, but still assumes Luke intended or understood the king he said Jesus was born under was Herod the Great (p. 79) rather than Herod’s successor, also named Herod (see Hitler Homer Bible Christ, p. 217); but since that confusion has no effect on any point MacCulloch makes, it is probably his least consequential mistake (and it is only a mistake insofar as he seems unaware this is a possibility).
• MacCulloch assumes the Nativity Narratives were constructed “to accommodate the rapidly growing conviction of Christians” that Jesus was born of a virgin (p. 80), evidently not entertaining the contrary possibility that they were constructed to create that conviction, and not in response to any already-existing belief in the matter—of which prior conviction there is, in fact, no evidence.
• MacCulloch assumes the Gospel tale of Jesus meeting a Canaanite woman “seems to indicate” Jesus could speak Greek (p. 93), when in fact Aramaic was the lingua franca across Syria and most of the Middle East at the time (as even MacCulloch knows: p. 178), and that tale never mentions any other language being spoken.
• MacCulloch assumes Paul’s “first” language was Greek (p. 97). We actually don’t know that. We only have some of Paul’s letters to Greek communities; that does not mean Greek was his first language. Paul claims to be a “Hebrew of Hebrews” and a trained “Pharisee,” which together would suggest he was raised and educated in Hebrew, and Acts imagines his natural language was Aramaic.
• It’s not actually as clear as MacCulloch claims that Paul thought “salvation…comes through Christ alone” (p. 100). I explore the extent Paul might have believed old-covenant Torah observance could still be effective in The Incompetent Crankery of the Israel Only Movement.
• MacCulloch does not seem aware that the passage in Corinthians where Paul insists women not speak in church (pp. 117-18) is widely regarded, on reasonably good evidence, to be an interpolation; Paul never wrote it (see Hitler Homer Bible Christ, pp. 208-11).
• MacCulloch does not seem aware that many scholars think Clement’s letter to Corinth was actually written in the 60s, not “about 100” A.D. (p. 132). I am quite certain they are correct (see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 271-73). This changes some of what MacCulloch argues about it there.
• MacCulloch states as if it were a fact that “the Corinthians listened and restored their old leaders” as Clement instructed, making this “the first known occasion that a Roman cleric had successfully influenced the life of another Church” (p. 132). We actually have no evidence they complied. Scholars simply assume so, for some reason (?); in fact the Corinthian church disappears from history after this. A “church” in Corinth is never mentioned again for over a hundred years. IMO, this would sooner suggest Clement’s plea was actually not effective.
• MacCulloch inexplicably doubts the existence of Emmaus in the time of Jesus (p. 95); in fact it is well attested by Josephus as an active town near Jerusalem.
• MacCulloch trusts leading scholarship on its identification of inscriptions as Christian, which is fair enough, as for example the 290s A.D. funerary epitaph honoring the soldier Aurelius Mannos (p. 157), but it’s not clear to me why scholars assume such inscriptions are of Christians when they make no mention of the fact. All that inscription says, for example, is that anyone who cares for its associated shrine is “with God,” which can signal any form of henotheism of the day. The Inscription of Abercius similarly lacks mention of all the things claimed for it (p. 165) and I see no evidence it is actually Christian, despite scholars’ insistence. (One can similarly question the Christian provenance of the supposedly “Valentinian” inscription of the second century recently claimed, but MacCulloch never mentions that.)
• MacCulloch inexplicably chooses to quote the most misleadingly inaccurate translation of Galatians 1:16, “[God] revealed his son to me” (p. 98), rather than the correct (being faithful to the actual words Paul wrote), “[God] revealed his son in me.” This does affect how you understand Paul thinks Jesus appeared to people.
• Though it is popular to say so, there is actually no evidence that the Chrestus riots had anything to do with Christianity (p. 159); to the contrary, Suetonius well knew what Christians were, so he would have said so were that the case, and he doesn’t; and Acts, which refers to this event, would also have mentioned Christians were involved had that been the case, and it doesn’t (see Blom on the Testimonium Taciteum).
• It is unclear what MacCulloch means us to understand when he says that after James was killed “his place was taken by another ‘kinsman’ [sic] of the Lord, Simeon” (p. 105). We have no real evidence of this; only late, unsourced, implausible legends (as even MacCulloch admits: pp. 135, 165). And even in those the Simeon in question is not a relative of Jesus (but the son of Cleopas).
• It is not so certain that Emperor Commodus’s “mistress Marcia” who conspired to kill him was a Christian (p. 167, 172); many scholars suspect this of being a Christian legend (Christians were fond of inventing such legends, e.g. the Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius, which even MacCulloch admits is fake, pp. 156-57; the tales of Jude & Domitilla; the Seneca correspondence; etc.).
• Contrary to MacCulloch, leading scholars actually doubt Emperor Severus issued an edict against converting to Christianity (p. 172); see the fundamental work of T.D. Barnes, “Legislation against the Christians,” in The Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968), pp. 40-41. The notion only exists in a fake history (the same one MacCulloch charitably calls “a patchily reliable source”), and contradicts the evidence of the era.
• The online Ancient History Encyclopedia gives a more believable account of the Christianization of Armenia than MacCulloch (pp. 186-87), who gullibly over-trusts Christian legends.
• Though commonly repeated in the literature, it is not the case that “virtually all meat sold in the non-Jewish world” came from pagan sacrificial cult (p. 106). In fact most was ordinary pub food cooked on site; next after that, family meals cooked at home; and kosher meat was sold in most major cities (serving sizable Jewish communities). Avoiding sacrificial meat, just as with eating kosher, was more a social problem than a dietary one (see 1 Cor. 8 & 1 Cor. 10).
• Neither the Talmud nor the Mishnah is a “commentary on the Tanakh,” i.e. Jewish Bible (p. 108). The Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah. And the Mishnah is a separate oral law that was in legend handed down by Moses in parallel to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Tanakh containing the written laws of Moses). There were also early Targums, which are paraphrases, not commentaries, of the Tanakh. The earliest commentaries on the Tanakh are all Medieval.
• Though one might get the false impression from the way MacCulloch uses it, the phrase religio licita (“a licensed religion”) was not an official Roman legal term (p. 109), though it did capture the sense of the Roman law of licensed assembly, which only incidentally included religious assemblies, and had nothing to do with licensing belief (there were no laws against any religious beliefs, only behaviors).
• MacCulloch wrote before the Westar Institute published its report finding that Gnosticism did not exist and was never a thing, a conclusion with which I concur (see Gnosticism Didn’t Exist). So he can’t be faulted for relying on that paradigm a lot in his book; but you should consider all of that as now void. There was no meaningful distinction between “orthodox” and “gnostic” Christianity; there were just many diverse sects with various different ideologies and extensive overlap.
• The word barbaros did not mean “barbarian” in the modern sense. MacCulloch thus might mislead the reader when he says, without explanation, that Paul “divided the people of that world into Greeks and barbarians” (p. 113, citing Romans 1:14). A better translation in that context would be something more like “foreigner,” which in American usage (or even Brexit English) often carries the same neutral-to-pejorative flavor today: it did not mean uncivilized or savage, but something more like “not versed in the most elite of cultures; outsider.”
• And a “talent” was never a “coin” as MacCulloch mistakenly thinks (p. 87), but rather it referred to fifty-to-sixty pounds of silver or gold (and that fact might change how you understand Jesus’s Parable of the Talents).

These are examples of assumptions replacing facts, a mistake common in the field. But none are all that consequential.

Some of his mistakes are just errors of editing. For example, MacCulloch says “all four” Gospels were “probably written not less than half a century after” the death of Jesus (p. 78), which absurdly means even the Gospels of Luke and John were written before the early 80s (when we know for a fact Luke can be no earlier than the 90s, and possibly even a decade or two later, and John was written partly in response to Luke so must date even later still: see On the Historicity of Jesus Chapters 7.4 and 10.7). But he then refers you to a later page where he more correctly says the three Synoptics were most likely written in “the last three decades of the first century,” so 70-to-100 (not “before” the 80s), “around” half a century after Jesus died (not “not less than”), and that John was written “a decade or two later,” so 100-to-120 A.D., which is nearly a hundred years after Jesus died, not fifty (pp. 85, 102-03). Evidently MacCulloch simply forgot to correct page 78 to align with page 85. Likewise at one point MacCulloch seems to imply the phrase “Son of Man” is original to Jesus (p. 86), but he doesn’t actually say that; his account just confusingly forgets to mention its derivation from the fundamental Jewish source text for original Christianity, the Book of Enoch.

More substantively, when discussing the dating of the Gospels, MacCulloch falsely claims the Synoptic Gospels are “quoted in other Christian texts datable not much later than 100” A.D., but I have no idea what he could be referring to. He mentions no example anywhere in the book. No such texts exist. The earliest we get of anything even resembling awareness of the contents of the Gospels that can be at all dated would be the letters of Ignatius, which purport to date around 110, but even MacCulloch admits (though only in an endnote you might miss) that many experts think they date decades later, and I concur (MacCulloch’s doubts are in p. 1029, n. 54; cf. p. 133). But even 110 is not 100; and Ignatius shows no knowledge of the Gospel of John.

A similar confluence of mistakes occurs when MacCulloch says early on that in the Gospels “ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus” (p. 77) but later on correctly says none of the Gospels were written by anyone who ever met Jesus (p. 96); this is apparently another editing error, failing to adjust a careless early sentence to align with what he actually concluded in his final draft. He likewise will throw out a line like that John “records arguments among people in Jerusalem,” as if true (p. 78), while later conceding the author of John often had no real sources for such material (pp. 85-86). Here MacCulloch leans on that Johannine debate over Jesus being born in Nazareth as evidence Jesus really was (familiar to atheists as the Hitchens Argument); but I think John is most likely fabricating that debate (Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 63-75), and the earliest evidence does not support Nazareth ever really being associated with Jesus before Mark mythically contrived the notion (Proving History, pp. 142-45; OHJ, pp. pp. 400-02). Again, MacCulloch is correctly representing mainstream scholarship here; it’s just that that scholarship is probably wrong.

But these are still all trivial issues that relate at least plausible scholarly opinions.

Catalog of Errors: The Substantial

However, by over-trusting the scholarship he reads, rather than fact-checking it, he is led to more substantive mistakes, like when MacCulloch repeats a common claim in mainstream scholarship that before Paul attests its usage in Christian baptism ritual the Aramaic word Abba, “Dad,” “had never been used to address God before in Jewish tradition” (p. 81). But this has been repeatedly refuted in the peer reviewed literature (for example, by both Mary Rose D’Angelo and Joachim Jeremias: see Proving History, p. 311 n. 3). A persistent problem in Christian studies is that scholars all too often don’t read their own literature, and thus never discover that some of the assertions they keep making have already been abundantly disproved. The consequence of this neglectful practice is that it results in a literature widely filled with already-refuted assumptions, that then mislead popularizers like MacCulloch, continuing a chain of bogus lore like this.

A similar mistake arises when MacCulloch claims “there is nothing like the parables” of Jesus “in the writings of Jewish spiritual teachers” before Jesus, that they only “emerge as a literary form in later Judaism,” leading him to speculate whether Jesus actually influenced later Rabbinical Judaism (p. 87). This is again often claimed, but there is no actual evidence it’s true, and in fact it’s demonstrably false. The parabolic “literary form” is attested as common already in the Book of Proverbs, and is explicitly found in the books of Ezekiel and Judges. It is found many other places in pre-Christian Jewish writings; in fact we have no reason to believe all the examples even MacCulloch has in mind in “post”-Christian writings like the Mishnah and Talmud do not derive from pre-Christian sources, as many are indeed attributed to Rabbis of and before Jesus’s time (MacCulloch is thus confusing when the texts that survive contain a parable with when that parable was composed).

Parables as a teaching form definitely predate Jesus in all cultures, Jewish and Greek (see Joanna Jaromin’s “A Parable in Greek-Roman, Old Testament and Rabbinic Literature” in Scriptura Sacra 2014) and were even claimed to be what the future messiah would use for instruction—thus inspiring, say, Mark to reify that scripture by having his messiah do exactly that. By contrast, there is no evidence in Paul—or in 1 Peter, 1 Clement, Hebrews, or any pre-Markan text at all—that Jesus ever taught in parables. MacCulloch may have been taken in by a common Christian apologetic that Jesus’s parables are authentic and unique because they are somehow “better” than any that came before, but that is a subjective faith belief, not an objective historical fact. Too much scholarship is tainted by this.

This over-trusting gullibility also explains MacCulloch’s relatively trivial assertion that “one date alone” relating to Jesus “looks fairly secure” (pp. 82-83), that Luke precisely dates the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist, and says this “immediately preceded” the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. But neither is true in any relevant sense; though both are common mistakes to make. As I recently pointed out in Crucifixion Quake!:

[T]his assumes John the Baptist and Jesus ever really met (that is actually doubtable; there are several fairly obvious reasons why their interaction would have been mythically invented: see Proving History, index, “John the Baptist”) and it assumes Luke is telling the truth when he says John the Baptist began his ministry in the year 29 (but no one else tells us this, not even Josephus in his account of John the Baptist, and Luke is a known fabricator, and cites no source for how he supposedly even knows this). These are all highly dubious assumptions.

In other words, MacCulloch confuses Luke constructing a precise date for a thing, as that date being “secure.” That’s gullible. Luke-Acts is rife with chronological errors, distortions, and fabrications (see OHJ Chapter 9). We therefore don’t have good reason to trust it on any such detail. It’s also not the case that Luke dates Jesus’s ministry to the same year. His manner of presentation can mislead one into thinking that, but it is conspicuously not what he actually says. As I wrote in Hitler Homer (p. 217):

Luke never says the two ministries began the same year, and for various reasons it’s unlikely they did. Luke clearly didn’t know the year Jesus started his ministry, since he didn’t know how old he was [only that he was “about thirty”], despite claiming to know exactly when he was born. Luke also claims to know the precise year John’s ministry began…yet doesn’t claim to know the precise year Jesus’ ministry began.

Here as elsewhere MacCulloch is often overly trusting of Luke-Acts. Such as when MacCulloch says Paul set his sights on culminating his mission at Rome (p. 109), a myth wholly contrived by Acts; in fact the real Paul had little interest in Rome, and said he was only going to stop by there briefly on his way to Spain (Romans 15:23-29). Or when MacCulloch says Paul was a Roman citizen, a tent maker, and from Tarsus—none of which is actually attested by Paul himself (p. 96). These claims appear only in Acts. His citizenship is at least plausible (Paul is a Latin name, and he appears to be treated with the lenience of a citizen when hosted in detention at a praetorium). But he more likely hailed from Damascus (Galatians 1:17; 2 Corinthians 11:32) and though he was apparently a Rabbi and thus must have known a trade (see Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 55-57), he never mentions practicing any (he more implies he didn’t work for a living; he also struggled with suspicions of mooching and skimming church returns: 1 Cor. 9; cf. 1 Cor. 16, 2 Cor. 8, Rom. 15:25-28, Phlp. 4:10-19). Making tents could be a metaphor for building new resurrection bodies (2 Cor. 5:1-3; 2 Peter 1:13), so Acts may have contrived Paul’s profession symbolically. A more unacceptable over-trust of Acts is when MacCulloch believes Paul watched the martyrdom of Stephen in Jerusalem simply because that’s the story Acts tells—but Paul himself tells he us was never there.

Another example of over-trusting select scholars he just happens to have read is MacCulloch’s claim (again in line with most mainstream scholarship) that the Synoptic Gospels “reveal distinctive quirks of speech in Jesus’s sayings which suggest an individual voice” (p. 85), when in fact this is only adduced through circular logic. This refers to the Criterion of Discourse Features, and similar criteria, that have actually been exposed as fallacious by several scholars to date (see Proving History, pp. 186-91). The Synoptics share similar “quirks” for Jesus because they are all copying and emulating Mark. These are thus the quirks of Mark, not Jesus. They are how Mark chose to have Jesus speak. There is no evidence Mark had any source for any of this. To the contrary, the evidence suggests Mark is inventing this character and his idiom to reify the teachings of someone else: Paul (see Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles). Insofar as Matthew and Luke share Jesus material not found in Mark, and insofar as any of it even has idiomatic parallels to Markan Jesus material (not all does), we cannot rule out Matthew simply having spun out Mark’s style into further fiction. There just isn’t any way to really “get at” the authentic wording of Jesus. I know mainstream scholars keep insisting they can, and all that MacCulloch is doing is gullibly trusting them, but there is literally no logically sound way to do what they claim, as every dedicated peer reviewed study of their methods has concluded (see Proving History, Chapters 1 and 5).

This gullibility appears again when MacCulloch repeats the fallacious albeit mainstream argument that Jesus definitely did tell a guy to “let the dead bury their own dead” because “Gospel writers felt bound to preserve it even though it outrages” public “sentiment” regarding obligations to bury one’s kin (p. 90). This is wrong twice over. It is wrong methodologically. The Gospel authors did not feel “bound” to record anything; if they included something, it was because they agreed with it or needed it to be there, and all evidence confirms this fact, for the Gospels as well as ancient literature generally (see Proving History, pp. 124-69). It is also wrong factually. The abandonment of natural family relations in exchange for the Christian family was a fundamental feature of the Christian evangelical mission, and thus precisely the thing they would invent their man saying (see Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 154-56, 264-65; other fringe Jewish sects enjoyed a similar model: p. 260).

Indeed this Christian proverb is only the more obvious as an Evangelical invention given that its actual meaning (that putting worldly concerns like funerals before one’s own salvation, when the world is about to end, is only the concern of the unsaved, who are for that very reason “already dead”) is completely lost the way Jesus is depicted as using it in the story, where it is unrealistically assumed the “disciple” he told this to would understand his point without asking what it meant, as any real human being would have. This is how we know that exchange never happened in the real world. Its complete lack of realism tells us it is an obviously fictional story. It’s just another deliberately cryptic saying invented for Jesus to say, to conceal the mysteries of the faith from the uninitiated behind a veil of awe-inspiring paradoxes. I won’t press this point, though, as it requires rejecting the bankrupt paradigm of mainstream scholarship that refuses to accept that this is what the Evangelists were doing. But I mention it to illustrate how lost modern scholars are in their failed attempts to really understand these texts and why they were written (I go into this point more directly in my latest book Jesus from Outer Space).

In a related gaffe, MacCulloch thinks the Gospels say Jesus “made crowds laugh” (p. 90), as if Jesus had a sense of humor. This is deeply off in two ways. First, the Gospels absolutely depict Jesus as having no sense of humor. He is never funny, and is frequently angry, rude, and easily triggered (the Gospel character of Jesus is, in any honest assessment, an asshole). And indeed the sole reference to Jesus ever making a crowd laugh is not by being funny, but by being crazy: they laugh when he claims he can raise a girl from the dead, and then he shames them by succeeding. Which we know never happened. So even the one instance the Gospels even tell of people mocking Jesus with their laughter is not even plausibly historical. It was more likely a parable reifying Paul’s teaching that the dead are merely asleep and that by the spirit of Jesus they will awake to become the New Israel (OHJ, pp. 410, 417-18, 434); and likewise reifying Paul’s report that many people found Christian teachings foolish or crazy. In any event, MacCulloch is simply here repeating modern fabricated versions of a “nice, funny” Jesus who doesn’t actually exist in the Gospels.

A different example of this same kind of gullibility might be when MacCulloch treats a legend told of Origen’s conversion to Christianity as if it were a historical fact, rather than attaching some historical distance to it, as he more usually does (p. 149). It’s not so ridiculous as to be certainly false (unlike some conversion tales), but it also does not come from a reliable source, and it suspiciously reads like an inversion of a pagan conversion story: Archimedes’ discovery of the law of buoyancy. Christians liked to invert pagan stories like this, for instance coopting the reverent pagan legend that Thales was so concentrating on the astronomy of the stars that he fell down a well, as a parable of how scientists are damned to fall into hell (Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 484, 524).

In Archimedes’ story (which also might be a mere legend), once he realized that solid volumes displace an equal volume of water while immersing himself in a bath, he sprang up and ran through town naked, shouting Eureka! (“I have found it!”), so intent he was on getting back to his lab to start working on the idea. In Origen’s story, once he realized Christianity was true, he was going to spring up and run through town naked declaring his discovery, but his mother thwarted him by hiding his clothes, thus “rescuing” his modesty from eternal shame (possible echoes of the Garden of Eden story here). I don’t know if this story is true or false, but I have enough doubt to be uncertain. We also can’t know, even if invented, whether it derives from Origen himself or someone later. Many a preacher, after all, has fabricated a personal life story for the edification of his flock.

Less significantly, MacCulloch speculates that Paul “had probably not experienced a conventional advanced education” because “there is no trace of it” in his letters; but this is false. No one could compose letters like Paul’s who had not completed the ancient equivalent of a college degree (there were no “other” schools one could attend, and the advanced skills he employs were only taught at the highest levels: see my Science Education in the Early Roman Empire for a full survey; likewise the extensive introduction on this point in Thomas Brodie’s The Birthing of the New Testament). And in fact Paul’s letters do exhibit skilled knowledge of ancient rhetorical conventions (see Paul and Ancient Rhetoric), adapt several Greek philosophical concepts to his theology and soteriology (see OHJ, p. 173, n. 46), and employ the Septuagint with the same art and erudition as Gentiles employed their own literary classics (see “Paul the Paraphraser or Paul the Septuagint-Quoter?” and Paul’s Use of the Old Testament). He more credibly avoids flowery prose and pagan literary allusions because he is writing to a mixed audience (Jew as well as Greek; educated elites as well as illiterate commoners), and deliberately avoiding the appearance of vanity and pomposity and “worldly wisdom.”

A similar mistake may be afoot when MacCulloch says “Apollonius [of Tyana] was intended to upstage Christ” (p. 169), where I think he has succumbed to a confusion. The reason, as MacCulloch notes, Apollonius’s turn-of-the-third-century biographer “Philostratus never once mentions Christianity” in any of his books is that Christianity was never on his radar; and his biography of Apollonius has no evident links to it. It was a completely different person who tried to use Philostratus’s biography of Apollonius to “upstage Christ”: the anti-Christian author Sossianus Hierocles, who composed a treatise called The Lover of Truth comparing Christ to Apollonius almost a century after Philostratus. Which we only know about because Eusebius wrote a rebuttal to it later in the 4th century. This is an important distinction. There is no evidence Philostratus ever intended Apollonius to be compared to Jesus, or even knew anything about the mythology of Jesus; and this changes how we see what he thought he was doing when he wrote that biography and what it says about his times.

And finally, at one point (p. 156) MacCulloch mentions that the “usual” explanation of the Christian use of the word “pagan” for non-Christians was that the pagani, “villagers, yokels,” were the most resistant to new-fangled urban religions like Christianity, and the most prone to continuing pagan cult and its associated superstitions (in fact, quite defiantly even after those things were outlawed: see Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, and David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance), but MacCulloch then says “more likely” the word in Christian usage was intended as a military metaphor, since soldiers would for obvious reasons refer to “villagers” (pagani) as civilians, non-combatants (even modern day veterans might notice this is still the case), and “non-Christians had not enrolled in the army of Christ.” This is bullshit, though. MacCulloch read this speculation in recent history books, mistook it as proved fact, fact-checked it not one whit, and then asserted it’s “more likely.” It is not even likely.

No less than Orosius, the 4th-5th century student of Saint Augustine himself, writing to Augustine, tells us, quite plainly:

You bade me reply to the empty chatter and perversity of those who, aliens to the City of God, are called “pagans” [pagani] because they come from the countryside [ex…pagis] and the crossroads of the rural districts, or “heathen” [gentiles] because of their knowledge of earthly matters.

Orosius, Histories against the Pagans 1.pref.

If Orosius and Augustine had never heard of this “they are called pagans because they aren’t in the Army of Christ” nonsense, we can well be sure no such nonsense existed. Christians did use a lot of military metaphors (see Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 224-29), but there is zero evidence this was one of them; and ample evidence it wasn’t. Indeed, ironically, historians who promulgate this false claim insist Tertullian evinces it, but though he was indeed very fond of military metaphors for Christianity, he never once uses pagani to mean non-Christians. In fact he even uses it of Christians, thus was in no way aware that “pagan” even means “non-Christian” (Tertullian On the Military Crown 11.4; On the Pallium 4.8). Such notions had not yet arisen in his time; this use only arose once state-supported rural missions began in earnest and met resistance there.

To be fair, MacCulloch just trusted his fellow historians in nearly all these points I’ve listed. Since he says he did no “original” source research, we know he fact-checked little. He just counted on peer reviewed scholars to reliably convey the truth. It’s just that in the history of Christianity they often don’t. As we see here throughout.

Besides these more intelligible slips, there are several stranger mistakes:

• MacCulloch weirdly thinks “the Romans” adopted “the Jewish division of the week into seven days” rather than eight “in the same century that they destroyed the temple” (p. 109). That would have been really bizarre of them to do. In fact the use of a seven-day week coexisted alongside the eight-day week long before then, and originated from the Greeks, who adopted it from Babylonian astronomy and calendrics, not Judaism. The Christian Emperor Constantine decreed adherence to the Judeo-Christian version of the seven-day week centuries later. The reason the Jews and Babylonians separately employed a seven day week is that they both employed a lunar calendar matching one week to each lunar phase.
• MacCulloch spends half a paragraph wondering why Jesus is made to say what he does about the Sabbath (p. 90), evidently somehow never having come across the fact that everything the Gospel Jesus says about the Sabbath maintains the party line of the liberal wing of the Pharisees, more commonly known as the Hillelites (see sources in OHJ, pp. 175-76). That the Gospels don’t know this (or pretend not to) is more evidence of their content being deliberate fiction rather than history (there is nothing realistic about Jesus’s encounters with the Pharisees of his day).
• MacCulloch says “Paul” endeavored “to contradict” (the Gospel) Jesus’s absolute prohibition on divorce (p. 91). I have no idea what he means; Paul is as unconditional as Jesus: he commands absolutely no divorce. Mark in fact crafts the words he puts into Jesus’s mouth out of the teaching of Paul, carefully saying just what Paul does: married couples can leave each other (as long as they are celibate), but if they remarry they commit adultery. Matthew is the one (as MacCulloch also mentions) who alters this teaching, adding an exception clause to Mark’s text. Luke rejects Matthew’s alteration and sticks with Mark—and Paul.

I can’t explain those mistakes. They don’t derive from any peer reviewed scholarship I know.

Catalog of Errors: Apologetics

Some errors are more understandable as MacCulloch simply being duped by apologetics in the guise of legitimate scholarship. Like when MacCulloch simply believes the popular line that “the Passion narratives” are “the earliest” compositions about Jesus (e.g. predating Mark) and were “first formulated for public recital” (p. 92; for the “celebration” of “Easter” even, p. 93). There is literally, absolutely no evidence for either claim. But scholars do keep asserting this. Or when MacCulloch assumes Paul’s account of what he “received from the Lord” about the Eucharist is a “reminiscence of the actual earthly life of Jesus” (p. 91) and assumes Paul is talking about the Last Supper tale told in the Gospels. That is what most mainstream scholars assume. But I must mention that many aren’t this taken in by Christian faith tradition. For example, Antonio Piñero and Gerd Lüdemann both realize Paul is describing a vision, and not something ever reported as having happened. They notice what I do (OHJ, Chapter 11.7): Paul’s language entails he learned this by revelation, which means there were no witnesses to have confirmed it by; Paul never mentions this being a “last” supper or anyone being present at it; and in Paul’s account, Jesus interacts with no one, and speaks instead to future Christians the world over, not to specific witnesses. Mark simply converted this into a historical tale; and later authors simply adapted his contrivance. Still, MacCulloch is repeating what scholars repeatedly assert.

In the same way, MacCulloch says Mary Magdalene was “a close associate of Jesus in his public ministry,” which is indeed commonly claimed in the literature, but in all honesty there is no real evidence of that; it is contrived only in much later Christian myth (see Bart Ehrman’s Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene). In the Gospels this Mary is never present during the ministry of Jesus and is completely absent from the history of the Church in Acts. She only appears in a triad of women to ceremonially witness the triad of closing symbolic events: crucifixion, burial, and empty tomb. During Jesus’s ministry she never shows up and never has a single conversation with Jesus; and no account is ever given of when or how she even came to know him. There were other women named Mary in the Gospels’ mythology (not surprising, as one in four Jewish women of the time were so named; it is in fact the symbolically resonant name of the sister of Moses, whose place in Jewish scripture is far larger than the Magdalene’s in Christian scripture). For example, Mary the sister of Martha. But that’s not the Magdalene. Nor is the Woman Taken in Adultery, despite much later legend fabricating that association.

Matthew does add a generic resurrection appearance to “the women” as a group (not duplicated by Luke), but that comes to nothing; we hear nothing more about it and they have zero role in promulgating the gospel. John elaborates on this myth (while deleting the other women from the scene), but his tall tale also comes to nothing; Mary’s experience is communicated to no one, and she has zero role in promulgating the gospel. And as no such account exists in any prior Gospel, we can be confident it’s fiction, as most of John’s Gospel we know is (OHJ, Chapter 10.7). But it doesn’t matter, as this did not occur during his ministry, when Jesus was alive, so it won’t have been a real Jesus she imagined talking to anyway. So there is no basis whatever for MacCulloch’s assertion. He is merely repeating dubious Christian faith tradition as if it were somehow a credible historical fact.

Even more in line with modern Christian apologetic mythology, MacCulloch claims the Gospels “give a prominence to women in the Jesus movement unusual in ancient society” (p. 116). This isn’t even remotely true. One might say, perhaps, unusual in Jewish society, though there is counter-evidence even there: the number of prominent, influential, heroic, and even centered female characters in the Old Testament is not small, nor likewise in Jewish novels and apocrypha and even historical narratives, and inscriptional evidence is rife with women of power, wealth, and influence in Jewish religious society. Philo’s account of the Egyptian sect of Jews he calls the Therapeutae makes a positive point of the significant role of women in its ranks. And in Greco-Roman society women’s place was even greater still: a vast number of high-ranking priesthoods were held by women; women played major roles in politics, as diplomats, lobbyists, and patrons; and myths of all varieties featured them in important roles (see Chapter 11 of Not the Impossible Faith and the section in my critique of Groothius titled “What About Women?”). They were even widely worshiped (lest you forget that goddesses were a thing). In fact, the position of women in the Gospels is markedly muted compared to all this. It is also simply false that, as MacCulloch claims, “in Jewish law women could not be considered as valid witnesses” (as I’ve demonstrated, again, in Chapter 11 of Not the Impossible Faith). These are familiar Christian apologetic fabrications; it is disappointing to see a historian like MacCulloch duped by them.

Another example of falling victim to apologetic tendencies, MacCulloch cites the positive things Origen and Clement of Alexandria said about classical Greek knowledge (e.g. pp. 148-49), but completely omits all the very negative things they said. They were not in fact as fond of it as MacCulloch represents, and anyone who wants to understand ancient Christianity must know both. For a corrective, see my summary of Christian attitudes toward education in Science Education in the Early Roman Empire (Chapter 9) and my extensive survey of early Christian anti-intellectualism in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (Chapter 5). Similarly, MacCulloch writes about Origen’s promotion of allegorical readings of the Bible (p. 151), but fails to mention that in fact even Origen (and pretty much all Christians whose texts would come to be preserved by the Medieval Church, including Augustine) was an adamant literalist most of the time, and only approved allegorical readings when they were necessary to rescue the text (see Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians).

I think MacCulloch also, like many scholars (usually apologists), misreads Pliny the Younger’s statement about declining public religion as somehow being connected to Christianity and thus indicating its early high numbers (though MacCulloch admits “Christian communities were probably quite small,” p.164); in fact Pliny makes clear Christians were rare and very hard to find and most who had ever even been one had long since left the religion (see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?). Even after we correct for Pliny’s hyperbole (his claims about declining public religion do not match any other evidence, archaeological or otherwise), at most his statement about a resurgence of public displays of faith reflects the impact of his pogrom on the public wanting to emphasize they were not Christians, and not on Christianity ever having had any real impact on the religious economy. Pliny was really complaining about growing secularization.

This point can be illustrated with a historical analogy: Joe MacCarthy ranted hyperbolically about armies of communists plaguing American government and society, and harassed countless suspects, resulting in a surge of public displays of Christian nationalism, just so people could “prove” they weren’t these elusive communists MacCarthy was hunting—even though in fact almost no actual communists existed. Thus one cannot cite MacCarthy’s rants about a resurgence of patriotism resulting from his harassment campaign as evidence communists were everywhere; for the same reason one cannot cite Pliny’s rants about a resurgence of displays of paganism resulting from his harassment campaign as evidence Christians were everywhere. It is, rather, evidence that they weren’t.

The Most Significant Things

To illustrate my point that the book is much better than the series, in the sections I read MacCulloch never claims:

• That an incarnated god was unprecedented (never comes up);
• Or that King Abgar had declared Christianity the state religion of Edessa (compare pp. 181-82);
• Or that all Christian music comes from there (compare pp. 182-84);
• Or that Western Christians had no music because they were too busy hiding from persecution—probably the most wildly false claim he makes in the videos (in the book he says the opposite: “persecutions…were extremely episodic” and catacombs “were not refuges from persecution,” p. 160; he frequently admits most persecution tales are “inauthentic,” e.g. p. 161, and Roman authorities usually left Christians alone, e.g. pp. 163-64, and “few died,” p. 173);
• Or that we’ve found an ancient Christian home (as well as ancient churches) in Ostia (never comes up);
• Or that “crosses were appearing everywhere” and scaring pagans (in the book he says public symbols of Christianity only appeared after the third century, after all persecutions had ended, p. 164);
• And he is more admittedly circumspect about his catacomb claims (p. 111, w. n. 91 on p. 1027; and p. 135, w. n. 61 on p. 1029).

But some of the BBC series’ questionable claims do remain in the book, where MacCulloch repeats as fact the late dubious legends that James “the brother of Jesus” was the first head of the Jerusalem Church (pp. 93, 98, 105, 106, 130), and that the Jerusalem church community all fled to Pella before the Jewish War (pp. 106-07), and that Peter and Paul were executed in Rome (pp. 98, 110, 135, 137, 290; though MacCulloch here admits to doubts about Peter: pp. 110-11). I already covered those mistakes last time, so follow those links to compare the facts with what you find in Christianity.

These are again all examples of MacCulloch being duped by Christian legends; although with the excuse that he is following real experts who were likewise duped. Gullibility is a common disease among actual historians of Christianity. But for that very reason you need to be extremely critical and careful before “trusting” any historian of Christianity. For example, in Christianity MacCulloch claims as fact that a High Priest executed James the brother of Jesus in Jerusalem (pp. 93, 105) and that this is the same James Paul mentions being apostled by Christ (p. 105), without explaining why he believes these things. He is presumably relying on the popular mainstream conflation of a dubious passage in Josephus with a wildly implausible legend recorded a century later by the Christian propagandist Hegesippus, which stories contradict each other in nearly every particular—and the one in Josephus was probably not about this James at all (on all of which see OHJ, Chapters 8.8 and 8.10, and Hitler Homer Bible Christ, Chapter 19), combined with the pure faith-assumption that the James of 1 Corinthians 15:7 is this same James (Paul never says it is, and even grammatically denies it in Galatians 1:17: see OHJ, pp. 589-90).

A last point of more serious error relates to MacCulloch’s fawningly feeble treatment of the resurrection (p. 95), which betrays a complete failure to read any of the pertinent mainstream scholarship on the subject. He ends up claiming “historians are never going to make sense of” the “reports” of Jesus’s resurrection in the Gospels, and bloviates a wobbling, ostrich-necked wonderment “whether through some mass delusion, some colossal act of wishful thinking, or through witness to a power or force beyond any definition known to Western historical analysis” his followers came to believe Jesus was raised from the dead. MacCulloch’s list of options is exactly that of Christian apologetics. If he had read actual historians on this point he’d have known we actually have pretty good explanations of what happened, and it’s none of those three things.

Two Exemplary Errors

There are, however, two points on which MacCulloch substantially fails as a historian by acquiescing to the rhetoric of Christian apologists in a manner no historian should have allowed. The first relates to a point of mere trivia, which nevertheless belies a larger problem of being too easily manipulated by Christian apologetics (because one must worry that any historian so susceptible in this case, may likewise be in others). The second relates to the overall aims, methods, and capabilities of historians generally.

Early in his “Introduction” MacCulloch throws out this gratuitous assertion:

Pentecostalism has centered its appeal on a particular form of communication with the divine, speaking in tongues, which was severely mistrusted by Paul of Tarsus and which…has very little precedent in Christian practice between the first and the nineteenth centuries.

Christianity, p. 6

Here MacCulloch has evidently fallen victim to modern sectarian apologetics. There is actually no evidence whatever that glossolalia was “severely mistrusted by Paul” or “has very little precedent.” In fact there is abundant evidence against these conclusions. What MacCulloch should have said is that the sect that eventually controlled the preservation of texts and doctrines and suppressed evidence of views and practices it did not like had abandoned tongues along with, as even he admits, all other forms of popular ecstatic access to knowledge (no more prophecies, revelations, and spirit communications from congregants; only the church elite could have a line to God’s will). Instead, MacCulloch fell prey to apologetic “fake history” rather than checking the facts and realizing just how tall this tale is.

Even Wikipedia gives examples that would have corrected him: Celsus writing in the late second century had witnessed the Christian practice himself (Against Celsus 7.9), and Irenaeus (Against Heresies 5.6.1) and Tertullian (Against Marcion 5.8.7-12) both positively mention its ongoing presence, though in the same generation Apollinarius denounced it as heretical (thus still attesting to its popularity: Eusebius, Church History 5.15.6-9). The book of Acts had already enshrined and exaggerated speaking in tongues as a proof of Christian faith (and not just once; it features frequently in its narrative); and this was reaffirmed in the late second or early third century by the added ending appended to the Gospel of Mark that included tongues as one of those very ongoing proofs.

Most Christians are embarrassed by this fact, leading to a growing bogus apologetic assertion that it was a peculiar feature only of Paul’s Corinthian church (there is zero evidence of that; and as we just saw, it’s demonstrably false), that Paul was against it (he was not; in fact he practiced it himself, recommended Christians do likewise, set rules of order for it, and assigned it a rank among the gifts of the church that all should admire), and that it was largely an invention of ‘those embarrassing Pentecostals’. It was not. Not only was it a fixture of many first and second century churches (and likely continued in Montanist services well into the sixth century, if MacCulloch is correct on how long that sect survived, p. 139), but its revival began as early as the fifteen century, not the nineteenth—well before Pentecostalism. In fact, the phenomenon predates Christianity, is well attested in world religions generally, and has been scientifically studied: see my survey of scholarship and evidence regarding it in On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 124-25.

What alarms me is not so much that MacCulloch misleads people as to the actual history of Christian glossolalia, a relatively obscure factoid, but that he got this so wrong, and more importantly, did so exactly in alignment with modern Christian propaganda. It proves that he is sometimes not fact-checking what he was told or read, and overly trusting of Christian scholars to tell him the truth. That bespeaks a methodological defect that could poison the entire remainder of his book with doubt. After all, how many other fake historical claims pushed by sectarian dealers does he credulously replicate without a clue? The good news is that from my vetting of his material on Christianity’s first three hundred years I found these kinds of slips are very few and far between after all. He usually is not that taken in by the fake narratives of modern Christian apologists. But be aware, occasionally, he is. This was merely the biggest such goof I found.

This does connect, though, to the second big problem statement I found in MacCulloch’s book: his pandering assertion that “historians do not possess a prerogative to pronounce on the truth of the existence of God itself, any more than do (for example) biologists” (p. 11), indeed historians “have no special capacity to be arbiters of the truth or otherwise of religion” (p. 12). These statements are understandable for a mainstream scholar who desperately wants not to offend Christians; but to translate his own personal desire for a misplaced tact into a methodological rule binding on historians is an abrogation of the moral responsibility of a historian.

It is simply false that historians cannot ascertain the truth of a God’s existence from their survey of history, or the truth of any other claim a religion makes about the history of the world. That’s what history does: ascertain what is and is not real about the past. A historian can confidently ascertain that Apollo and Satan and wizards and faeries and demonic possessors and angelic armies do not exist and did not affect human history. No other entity wins any special immunity from this discernment. With respect to evaluating the historical record there is no meaningful difference between Apollo and Yahweh.

Historians always evaluate history on a basis of known scientific evidence; they are not compartmentalized from that background knowledge. It is as much a part of history as records and artifacts. As such they are in fact more qualified to weigh in on the existence of gods than mere biologists, who at most can ascertain the absence of supernatural agents in the history and operation of biology. Historians, by contrast, cover the whole range of human memory and knowledge; the absence of any gods in which is as ascertainable as the absence of wizards or demons or magic in the affairs of humankind. (On this methodological point see Miracles & Historical Method and Proving History, index, “miracles.”)

Needless to say, we can trace a direct line from this error to the first: because MacCulloch asserted and adopted this false claim about historical methodology, the inevitable consequence—being duped by fake apologetic histories of the world—bit him in the ass. Historians must not be timidly deferential to religious truth-claims. They have a moral duty to be skeptical of what believers tell them, and honest about what there actually is evidence of in the history of the human race, and what there is not; and their entire profession is in fact tasked with determining that. It is literally the one thing historians are for. See my chapter on the social role of historians, and the many chapters on how historians are one of the most qualified arbiters of religious truth claims, in Hitler Homer Bible Christ. Likewise, to see how in fact it is history, including the history of science, by which any religion’s truth stands or falls, review the ten top examples in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics, and, regarding the indispensable pillar of Christian faith, Resurrection: Faith or Fact?

Fortunately I found MacCulloch avoids the pitfalls of his stated position more often than not, and often enough that I can still recommend his book. Just do be aware that occasionally he can fall into this trap of his own making, as in all the cases I have documented. So do approach the remainder of his text with the same critical acumen.

Conclusion

I covered those points last because I didn’t want them to color the rest of my critique. As worrying as those two catastrophic failures would be by themselves, I did actually find that—for the period I surveyed his discussion of—MacCulloch did as good a job as any mainstream secular historian might. He is only slightly or occasionally deferential to Christianity’s myths and traditions; more often he is skeptical and honest, and suitably critical. And, beyond what I listed, his facts generally check out, in accord with any of his qualifiers, statements of uncertainty or historical distance. The kinds of mistakes he otherwise makes are relatively minor and incidental, and don’t reflect any particular or deliberate apologetic agenda, and are no more frequent than one can expect from any scholar attempting so vast a survey as he has, particularly in an area outside his specialization.