About the Sources

Bruce Shelley — Church History in Plain Language

Bruce Shelley (1927–2010) taught church history for decades at Denver Seminary. His book first came out in 1982 and has gone through several editions; the most recent was revised by his son, Marshall Shelley. Its goal is in the title. It tells the whole story in short, readable chapters for people with no background in history. Shelley writes from an evangelical Protestant point of view, but he treats Catholic and Orthodox Christians with sympathy.

How this site uses it: Shelley divides church history into eight "ages," and this site borrows that structure for its eras: Jesus and the Apostles, Catholic Christianity, the Christian Roman Empire, the Christian Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Age of Reason and Revival, the Age of Progress, and the Age of Ideologies. His knack for telling history through people and their decisions sets the tone here too.

Diarmaid MacCulloch — A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

Diarmaid MacCulloch is a professor of church history at Oxford. His book came out in 2009 (published in the US in 2010 as Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years). It is huge, more than 1,000 pages, and it won major prizes. The "three thousand years" in the title is deliberate. MacCulloch begins a thousand years before Jesus, with Greek philosophy and the religion of ancient Israel, because Christianity grew out of both. He describes himself as a "candid friend" of Christianity, writing as a historian rather than a believer.

How this site uses it: MacCulloch supplies the Background era (Greece, Rome and Israel). He also gives much more space than most Western histories to Christians outside Europe: the Church of the East, which reached China, plus the Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian and Syriac churches and Eastern Orthodoxy. He traces the rise of Pentecostalism and the shift of Christianity to the Global South as well. The "How the historians see it" boxes often contrast his wide-angle, sometimes skeptical view with Shelley's.

John McManners (ed.) — The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity

Published in 1990 and edited by the Oxford historian John McManners (1916–2006), this book collects chapters by leading scholars of each period. Among them are Henry Chadwick on the early church, Robert Markus on the passage from Rome to the barbarian kingdoms, and Henry Mayr-Harting on the conversion of the West. Kallistos Ware writes on Eastern Christendom, Colin Morris on medieval Christian civilization, and Patrick Collinson on the late medieval church and its reformation. McManners himself covers the Enlightenment and the expansion of Christianity. Later sections survey Christianity since 1800 around the world and look ahead to its future.

How this site uses it: These expert chapters add depth on specific periods. Ware's work on the Orthodox world and the chapters on art and global Christianity were especially useful.

Peter Marshall (ed.) — The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation

Published in 2015 and edited by Peter Marshall of the University of Warwick, this book has seven essays by leading Reformation historians:

• Bruce Gordon on late medieval Christianity
• Lyndal Roper on Martin Luther
• Carlos Eire on Calvinism and the "reform of the Reformation"
• Brad Gregory on the Radical Reformation
• Simon Ditchfield on Catholic Reformation and renewal
• Peter Marshall on Britain's Reformations
• Alexandra Walsham on Reformation legacies

It sums up recent scholarship, which sees the Reformation as messier, longer and more global than older accounts did. It also treats religious conviction as a real motive in its own right, not just a cover for politics and money.

How this site uses it: Era 5 (The Reformation) follows its chapter plan closely. That is why the era has separate pages on the late medieval background, the Radical Reformation, Britain's several reformations, Catholic renewal as more than a "Counter"-Reformation, and the Reformation's long legacies.

How the pages were written

• Original words only. Nothing on this site is copied from these books. The text summarizes widely accepted history in fresh language, with at most one very short quotation per page.
• Plain language. The target is roughly a ninth-grade reading level. Technical words are underlined with dots and explained in the glossary. Hover over or tap them for a quick definition.
• Fair to every tradition. Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Oriental and Pentecostal Christians all appear on their own terms. The tone is historical. It is neither devotional nor dismissive.
• Honest about uncertainty. The site was written without the books' full text open. Wherever it says what a particular author argued, and that needs confirming, it carries a yellow [check] tag. A full list is in the project file CHECK-ITEMS.md.
• Dates are the ones most historians use. Where scholars disagree, the text says "about" or "c." (circa).

Going further

If this site whets your appetite, the four books themselves are the next step. Shelley is the easiest place to start. MacCulloch is the richest. The two Oxford volumes are beautifully illustrated, with expert chapters you can dip into one at a time.