The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland

From the First Century to the Twenty-First

Gerald Bray

• Publisher: Apollos
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789741186
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The history of the British Isles is incomprehensible without an understanding of the Christian faith that has shaped it. Introduced from abroad when the nations of these islands were still in their infancy, Christianity has provided the framework for their development from the beginning.Gerald Bray's comprehensive overview demonstrates how, over time, Christianity in Britain and Ireland has been remarkably creative in adapting to new challenges presented by the need to preach the gospel of Christ to different generations in a variety of circumstances. As a result, it is at once a recognisable offshoot of the universal church and a world of its own. Furthermore, it has impacted the remarkable spread of Christianity world-wide in recent times.Historians have done much to explain the details of how the church has evolved separately in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but a synthesis of the whole has rarely been attempted. Yet the story of one nation cannot be understood properly without involving the others; hence, Gerald Bray situates individual narratives in an overarching framework.A History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland draws on current scholarship and presents it in a form accessible to a general readership; it also serves as a reference work for students of both history and theology.

1

In the beginning (to ad 597)

The shadow of Rome

In the Roman year 802, better known to us as ad 49, the emperor Claudius issued a decree banning Jews from the capital city. They had been rioting over an obscure figure called Chrestus, who was almost certainly Jesus. The incident is known from the Roman historian Suetonius, and is obliquely mentioned in the New Testament, which tells us that two of the expelled Jews turned up in Corinth, where they hosted the apostle Paul on one of his missionary journeys.1 Six years earlier, the same Claudius had authorized the invasion of Britain, an island first visited by Julius Caesar a hundred years before. Caesar had managed to impose a tribute on the tribes living along the southern coast, but had not attempted a permanent invasion. That was left to Claudius, who was able to parade in triumph at this latest acquisition to the still growing empire. As the Romans expanded their holdings in the decades that followed, so the Jewish followers of ‘Chrestus’ implanted themselves more firmly across the imperial provinces, eventually reaching as far as the remote island Rome had half conquered.

Nobody knows when the first Christians reached Britain’s shores. There is a legend that says Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew who allowed Jesus to be buried in his tomb in Jerusalem, made his way there and settled in the south-west, where he supposedly founded the monastery of Glastonbury.2 Given that the legend first appeared more than 1,200 years after the events it narrates, we may assume that it is a fable, but does it contain a tiny grain of truth? It is quite possible that the first Christians in Britain were traders not unlike Joseph, and it may even be that they went to the south-west, where the tin mines of Cornwall had long attracted people like them. Whether they reached such a remote province within the lifetime of the apostles is certainly doubtful. Paul wrote to the Romans about ad 57, telling them he intended to travel westward to Spain, where (we assume) there was still no Christian presence at that time, and Britain was a good deal further than that.3

It is more likely that the first Christians to reach Britain arrived sometime in the second century, although that can only be a guess. Christian traders might well have established themselves in Londinium (London) and worshipped relatively inconspicuously in that tiny metropolis. The church of St Peter, Cornhill, claims to have been founded in ad 179, which may seem improbable but is not necessarily fanciful. By that time there could well have been a Christian community in Britain, doing its best to proclaim the gospel in difficult circumstances. The first mention of Christians in Britain comes from Tertullian of Carthage (around ad 200), who claimed that the name of Christ had already conquered ‘parts of the Britons unreached by the Romans’, although given that this reference appears in a catalogue of distant regions where he claimed that the gospel had been preached, it is hard to know what to make of it.4 Rhetorical flourish or historical fact? We cannot say. Similar statements can be found in Origen, writing in the early third century, although he was more cautious about the success of the mission, if indeed there had been one.5

If Christianity was not brought to Britain by traders, it might have arrived with soldiers in the Roman legions. Britain was a highly militarized province, and some of the soldiers posted there might have been Christians, but it is unlikely that they would have been able to set up a church. As soldiers they would have sworn an oath of allegiance to the emperor as the son of a god, which went against Christian principles. There is also the fact that before Christianity was legalized in ad 313, the church took a dim view of military service and discouraged its members from joining the army.6 But there is a story that tells of how a Roman soldier met a Christian presbyter and was so impressed by him that he became a Christian himself. When the presbyter was arrested and sentenced to death, the soldier took his place, thus becoming the first martyr for the new faith to die on British soil.7

The truth behind this account is hotly disputed, but it has a better claim to historicity than either the Joseph or Cornhill legends do. The tale was certainly embellished over time, but the earliest mention of it occurs only a century or two after the events it describes, by which date a cult of the martyr was in existence. We know him as Alban, or Albanus, and the site of his death is supposed to have been a hilltop just outside the Roman city of Verulamium, a day’s march north-west of Londinium. A shrine to his memory was erected there that became the nucleus of the modern city of St Albans, which preserves his name to the present day. What we do not know is when Albanus might have been put to death. There were periodic persecutions of Christians in the third and early fourth centuries, and his martyrdom could have occurred at any time before ad 313. A date between 251, when Christians suffered under the emperor Decius, and 305, when the great persecution under Diocletian came to an end, would seem most likely, but from this distance in time it is impossible to say for certain. From our perspective it scarcely matters. What counts is that a Roman soldier was put to death for professing the Christian faith, and that he was later venerated – a plausible, if unprovable, historical foundation for the pious legends elaborated later on.

What is certain is that by 313 there were already several churches in Britain organized along lines common elsewhere in the Roman Empire. They could hardly have appeared overnight and might well have been in existence for a generation or two already. What we know is that three British bishops, Restitutus of Londinium (London), Adelfius of Lindum Colonia (Lincoln) and Eborius of Eboracum (York), together with Arminius, described as a deacon from Lincoln, attended a synod held at Arles in 314, where they participated in the condemnation of the Donatists. If we except Albanus, they are the first identifiable British Christians known to us. The Donatists were a new and rigorous North African sect that rejected any compromise with the godless Roman state and insisted that any bishops who had handed over Christian books to the persecuting authorities a decade earlier should be deposed. This was felt to be too extreme, and Donatism was rejected by the wider church. The Synod of Arles also recommended that Easter should be celebrated on the same day throughout the world, an important point that would later become a matter of dispute in Britain, and that every bishop should be consecrated by at least three of his fellows.8

How much of what happened at Arles resonated with the British delegation is hard to say. There were certainly no Donatists in Britain, nor do we hear of anyone there who had handed over sacred texts to the imperial authorities. Perhaps the rule (or canon) that meant the most to them was the one that demanded the presence of three bishops every time a new one was consecrated. Acceptance of this suggests that there must have been more British bishops at that time than the three who went to Arles. If there had not been, the canon would have been inapplicable in Britain and its envoys might have opposed it for that reason. But they did not, and so we must conclude that the British churches were in step with their counterparts elsewhere, although they did not suffer from the internal divisions common among Christians in other parts of the Roman world.

The fourth and fifth centuries were a golden age for Christian theology, as the worldwide church debated the great questions surrounding the being of God as three Persons in one Substance and the Person of Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully man. The Roman Empire was rocked by controversies over these and other matters, and its unity was more than once stretched to breaking point. But, as far as we can tell, Britain stood on the sidelines and merely acquiesced in the great theological decisions taken elsewhere.9 This is hardly surprising. The province was remote from the scene of action, which mostly took place in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, and wandering theological disputants were unlikely to turn up in such a backwater. If any did, they have gone unrecorded and we can safely assume that the British church never experienced the divisions caused by the great Christological debates of the late Roman period.

Pelagius

There is however at least one, somewhat curious, indication that British Christianity might not have been in step with mainstream opinion elsewhere. A well-educated British monk called Pelagius made his way to Rome sometime around ad 400, where he became a popular preacher and teacher.10 He wrote commentaries on the New Testament that were so good they were preserved after his fall from grace and recycled as the work of Jerome or of Cassiodorus. Only in the nineteenth century was their true author revealed, allowing scholars to arrive at a more favourable view of Pelagius than had been possible before that time. Where Pelagius got his learning from is unknown, but if it was somewhere in Britain it shows that the level of theological education available there in the late fourth century was comparable to anything that could be found in the Latin-speaking West.

When Alaric the Goth captured Rome in 410 and sacked the city, a stream of refugees fled to North Africa, among them Pelagius himself and many of his followers. There they encountered the formidable Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who was already well known as a scourge of the Donatists. When Augustine heard what the Pelagians were teaching, he turned his ire on them, and it is largely thanks to his unremitting opposition that we know so much about them today. It seems that Pelagius was saying that fallen human beings were not entirely sinful. Somewhere in the human mind and will there remained an ability to turn to God and to cooperate with him in the process of salvation. Pelagius did not believe that people could save themselves entirely by their own efforts, but he thought they had a free will that could respond to the calling of God and work alongside him to get rid of their sinfulness. Augustine countered this idea by saying that humankind’s fall into sin was total and irreversible. No human being, however good or moral, can voluntarily respond to God or cooperate with him in that person’s salvation. That is possible only by the free gift of God in Christ, which is given to those who have been chosen to receive it. Human beings can do no more than confess their sins, hoping that God will hear their cries and be merciful to them, but even that is possible only if God gives sinners the grace to repent of their wrongdoing.

It was not long before Pelagius was condemned for heresy and had to flee North Africa. He went to Palestine and then to Constantinople, where the controversy he had stirred up was unknown and he could live in relative peace. Perhaps he had no idea why his teaching was wrong, and people in the East appear not to have reacted to it in the way Augustine did. We hear no more of Pelagius after this, but traces of Pelagianism survived in western Europe and they had to be stamped out. Germanus, a fifth-century Bishop of Auxerre, was particularly active in this enterprise, and in 429 he visited Britain in order to eradicate whatever Pelagianism might be lurking there. His mission was successful, but was there much Pelagianism for him to find? That we cannot tell. It is possible that Pelagius was supported by kinsmen and old friends from his youth in Britain, who were loyal to him personally without being consciously committed to his doctrine, which they might not have fully understood. Certainly Germanus did not have to spend long in Britain, so the roots of the heresy could not have been very deep.11

Ireland

Germanus was thorough, and he left nothing to chance. He had heard that there were British Christians in Ireland, where they were surviving like sheep without a shepherd. To remedy that situation, he sent them Palladius, a missionary bishop whose task was to organize the first Christian churches in the emerald isle.12 Who these Christians were, how they had got to Ireland and whether they had been influenced by Pelagianism is unknown. They might have been merchants who had gone there and stayed, or refugees from the Saxon invaders who were raiding the eastern shores of Britain and beginning to settle permanently on the island. Perhaps they were slaves who had been captured by Irish raiders. They might have been a mixed multitude of different origins and even included a few native Irish converts – we do not know. Archaeological evidence and a few place names suggest that whoever they were, they were concentrated in the east and south-east of the country, but even that cannot be proved. All we can say for sure is that Palladius reached Ireland in 431 – the date that marks the beginning of recorded history there. How long he stayed and how successful his mission was is unknown, but for reasons that will become apparent, he was probably not there very long and his efforts were soon largely forgotten.

It was in the twilight years of Roman Britain that Irish raiders stepped up their activities and transported many Britons to Ireland as slaves. One of them was a 16-year-old boy called Patricius (Patrick), who stayed in captivity long enough to learn the language of the country and to develop a passion for evangelizing his captors. After seven years Patricius managed to escape and return home, where he was ordained into the Christian ministry. What sort of training or education he had is unclear, although we know from his surviving writings that his Latin was not particularly good. After his ordination, Patricius returned to Ireland, where he spent the rest of his life preaching the gospel far and wide, although probably not as extensively as later legend would claim. Most of his activity seems to have been in the north and west of the island, although it is impossible to pinpoint his activities with any degree of precision. What we do know is that Patricius was not supported by his British countrymen as much as he might have hoped, and that he had to counter their opposition by explaining his motives to them. Ironically, it is thanks to that unhappy circumstance that we have the first written testimony to the spread of the gospel across the British Isles and we can glimpse the kind of world in which that evangelization took place.13

Who opposed Patricius and why? He himself tells us that when he was 15 he committed a ‘grave sin’, and evidently some thought it serious enough to bar him from ministry in adult life. There were others who apparently believed that he went to Ireland in order to enrich himself, although it is hard to see what basis they had for making that accusation. We know only one side of the story, and at this distance in time it is impossible to arrive at a balanced conclusion, but experience of similar situations elsewhere suggests that what might have happened is depressingly familiar. Patricius might well have been impatient in his zeal for evangelism, and this might have struck his superiors as unjustified arrogance. At the same time it is not hard to detect a spirit ...

Table of contents

• APOLLOS (an imprint of Inter-Varsity Press)
• Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Search items for names and places
• Search items for subjects