Ten years ago, Robert Wilken published The spirit of early Christian thought: seeking the face of God. This was an immensely engaging introduction to early Christian theology, presented not simply as history, but as an inspiration for theological thinking today. He now follows it up with The first thousand years. Robert Wilken is a distinguished patristic scholar; the first of the books mentioned displayed the mature fruits of his many years of engagement with the Fathers of the Church, through teaching and research. In the course of his life Wilken has moved from being a Lutheran to becoming a Roman Catholic, and one wonders if the choice of the first millennium for his most recent book may not have something to do with Pope Benedict's suggestion that in discussion with the Orthodox, Catholics should explore with sympathy and attention the first thousand years of Christian history, which they shared. Whether that is the case or not, Wilken's account of the first thousand years is very even-handed, and could even be thought to make much more of the history of the Greek East than the Latin West.

This is intended as a popular history. There are no notes (either foot or end) and the bibliography lists suggestions for further reading; it gives no indication of the wealth of reading and research on which this book is based. We are presented then with an uncluttered account of the history of the Church, easy to read and highly reliable. Although it has a narrative thread, the chapters are organised topically, so that the reader takes on board important themes without getting lost in details of dates and suchlike. The early chapters discuss the ministry of Jesus, and his death and resurrection, and the apostolic mission and the emergence of a Christian community that very quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean world. Early divisions, especially connected with ‘Gnosticism’, are discussed, and – focused on the catacombs and their art – the engagement of the Church with the society in which it lived. The beginnings of Christian scholarship are ably discussed in relation to Origen, and the nature of persecution, and the problems it posed for the Church, in relation to Cyprian. We then move rapidly to the change brought about by the conversion of the emperor Constantine, the signal importance of the Council of Nicaea in the emergence of the sense of a universally defined faith (eventually backed by organs of the state), and, parallel with the gradual assimilation of Empire and Church in the fourth century, the emergence of monasticism. In this Christian world Jerusalem came to occupy a central role as a Christian city, the site of the sacred events of the history of salvation. Jerusalem and the attitude of Christians to the Jews have been the subject of several books by Wilken: this is reflected in the chapters that deal with Jerusalem, the attempt by Julian the Apostate to encourage the Jews to rebuild the Temple, and the problems faced by the appeal of Judaism to Christians in the late fourth century, problems reflected in a series of sermons by John Chrysostom that were to have disturbing consequences in later centuries. Wilken's fairness and wisdom are radiant in these chapters. There follow chapters dealing with the relationship between episcopal and imperial authority, highlighted in the actions of Ambrose; Christian art and architecture; music and worship; care for the sick, the poor and the aged, and the emergence of the hospital; the place of the bishop of Rome; canon law; the exceptional place of Augustine in the West; and the controversies over Christology. Then we find something quite exceptional: a series of chapters on the Church on the edge of the empire and beyond – Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Central Asia, China and India. These chapters give a breadth to the account of Christianity in this book that adds immensely to its value. The consolidation of the Christian empire under Justinian; the spread of Latin Christianity in the lands lost to the empire (Gaul, Spain and beyond): treatment of these leads to the overriding significance for the history of the Church in the first millennium of the rise of Islam, shortly after the sacking of Jerusalem by the Persians, all of which led to a mood of apocalyptic despair. Iconoclasm is treated briefly, and then the concern for Christians outside the categories of Greek East and Latin West is renewed. There is a series of chapters that deal with the way in which Christians coped with the experience of being subject to Islam – in Syria and Palestine, where a vigorous Arabic-speaking Christianity asserted itself; in Egypt and North Africa; and in Spain. There was enormous variety in the ways Christians responded to Muslim rule: Wilken's treatment is masterly. We are now very nearly at the end of the book, which closes rather hastily with accounts of Charlemagne and the conversion of the Slavs. These are treated rather too quickly, and with less assurance than in the rest of the book: the creation of the Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonians is scarcely mentioned and its attempt to achieve a final Christianisation of the West as the millennium approached gets mixed up with the parallel events connected with the spread of Slav Christianity.

Overall, Wilken gives us a fine, authoritative account of the spread of Christianity in the first millennium. What faults the book has are parasitic on its strengths. The lack of notes makes it very difficult to register alternative views: there is real disagreement as to the speed with which Christianity spread throughout the empire before the peace of the Church which is hardly registered here. The account of the rise of monasticism sees it as a lay movement with few intellectual pretensions – a view being increasingly called in question. These are, however, a small price to pay for the sheer accessibility of the account that Wilken has given us. This is a very fine book indeed.