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00:00The Lone Ranger
00:30THE END
01:00I must tell you, my friends, that the good news that you have heard me preach is no human invention.
01:11I didn't take it over from any man, but I heard it directly as a revelation from Jesus Christ.
01:17It's a typical blast from one of Paul's missionary letters, the oldest Christian documents in the world.
01:24And the letters seem authentic enough, too.
01:26In the last hundred years, archaeologists have dug up all sorts of circumstantial detail that Paul mentions in his letters.
01:33And the style, too, is exactly right, exactly right for a Roman letter of that period, with one essential difference.
01:40Paul's vigorousness has actually twisted the rather elegant classical form into a sort of unique tirade,
01:47because the man's got a message. He's in fact got the first Christian message to the West.
01:51Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
01:59Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
02:05For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
02:16shall be able to separate us from the love of Christ.
02:19Paul and the apostles took their message to almost every town of the Roman Empire,
02:30and certainly to here, the suburb of Herculaneum, in the shadow of Vesuvius.
02:34Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love,
02:44I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
02:48I may have faith strong enough to move mountains, but if I have no love, I am nothing.
02:55There is nothing love cannot face, no limit to its faith, its hope, its endurance.
03:00Well, this hardly looks like a tired and hungry world searching for a new faith,
03:13as the Christian explanation of how their religion managed to conquer the Roman Empire so often goes.
03:18And this is a house from St. Paul's time, urban Italy, house of a small merchant.
03:24It's got enough money to get in Greek mosaic artists, nice fresco painters.
03:28This is a little courtyard, you couldn't afford much room in a town,
03:31but you could fill it full of goodies, and that's what the guy has gone.
03:35Now, his society, and that's the society really of all the Roman Empire,
03:39is of small people, small groups of people, each with their own gods,
03:43and each with their own interests, a very, very busy place.
03:46Everybody's working very hard.
03:48It's the sort of society, in fact, that inevitably,
03:51you're going to get people who are discontented in it.
03:53People who are running along and saying,
03:56Why am I having to run so hard? Where am I going? There's a vacuum there.
04:00And in a sense, it's that vacuum which Paul is going to fill.
04:04He preached Christian love from the rooftops.
04:07And he got a big following.
04:09Not a majority, but enough in a couple of centuries,
04:12so that the emperors themselves, realising the strange power of a religion
04:17that seemed to cement people into new alliance,
04:19would use it for the empire.
04:21It became the imperial religion, the Bible, the imperial book.
04:26So the story is, then,
04:28how this arch, this great shrine,
04:30which for so many centuries had housed the gods,
04:33gods like this, and the pagan emperors themselves,
04:36ended up housing the Bible and the cross.
04:39Sunday morning, in one of the oldest churches in Rome,
04:54the Bible is carried to the high altar.
05:03This beautiful ritual is much older than the Christian church.
05:07Almost everything here,
05:10the great arch above the altar,
05:12the incense, the chanting,
05:14all have their origins in the court of the pagan Roman emperors.
05:25In those days, though,
05:27it was the emperors, the great persecutors of the Christians,
05:30and not the Bible that sat at the building's centre.
05:34These same pagan emperors put the Bible to work,
05:47part of their remedy for a failing government.
05:51They came down from the throne,
05:53joined the congregation and worshipped Jesus Christ.
05:56And they took the Bible and set it at the heart of their empire.
06:02And this was the beginning of the Bible's most extraordinary journey
06:06from ancient East to modern West.
06:09The Bible's journey started around 300 AD,
06:27when the pagan emperor Diocletian,
06:29that most terrible of all the Christian persecutors,
06:33had ruled for about 20 years,
06:35and was living here at Split,
06:37in a huge palace on the Yugoslav coast.
06:52In Diocletian's time,
06:54when you came to see that great old emperor,
06:56as you walked through these palace gates
06:58and into the courtyard of the imperial audience chamber,
07:02you'd have been feeling very, very frightened.
07:08Diocletian wasn't a man, he was actually a god.
07:11And this is as near as you would have got to him.
07:15This really cathedral-like building
07:18is actually the courtyard of his palace.
07:21And that arch there in the middle,
07:23well, that's the focus of it all.
07:24Under that, he would have sat in his throne.
07:26I wouldn't have seen him
07:27because there'd have been great silk curtains hanging down.
07:30There'd have been lots of other people
07:31waiting for the audience here.
07:33I expect you'd have been shuffling a bit nervously.
07:35And then suddenly, from inside the royal apartments,
07:38which were the other side of that archway,
07:40you'd have heard the chinking of the soldiers
07:41as the emperor moved into his position.
07:44And then suddenly, as the chamberlain gestured,
07:45the curtains would go back, bang,
07:47and there would be the emperor,
07:49stiff as a board,
07:50absolutely covered in white makeup,
07:53rigid on a golden throne.
07:54This beautiful silver plate shows it all.
08:01There's the emperor, sitting under the arch,
08:03all wrapped up with a cloak of the finest purple silk,
08:07with clasps of gold, emeralds, and pearls.
08:13All around him, a choir is singing of his heavenly power,
08:17and attendants hold flaming torches
08:19and waft incense all around the throne.
08:24All this ceremony, the Roman church would take for itself.
08:30This Diocletian wasn't only a god,
08:51he was an administrative genius.
08:53In 20 years' rule, he completely reorganized the Roman Empire.
08:58When he started, it was in a terrible state.
09:00The army wasn't getting paid,
09:02nobody was paying their taxes,
09:03the whole place was disrupted.
09:05The Diocletian was a very moral man,
09:07and he involved this new civil service
09:09with an amazing moral structure.
09:11He divided up his huge empire into brand-new provinces,
09:16which he called diocese.
09:18And to run them,
09:19he appointed administrators called vicars.
09:22And they wore robes just like those of modern priests.
09:25And they worked, Diocletian told them,
09:27for the good of the empire.
09:31Finally, Diocletian made more emperors,
09:34little Caesars,
09:35to help him administer this brand-new empire.
09:38And the entire machine was built up
09:42around the image of imperial divinity.
09:46Naturally enough,
09:47any other universal religion inside the empire,
09:51one that wasn't centred on Diocletian,
09:53would be persecuted.
09:55This isn't because of some imperial ego trip.
09:58This is actually because it seemed to be attacking
10:00the very centre of the structure which Diocletian had set up.
10:04One by one, lots of faiths were cut to pieces.
10:07In 302, it was Christianity's turn.
10:11The persecution was so severe and so sustained
10:14that some of the eastern churches
10:15still actually date their calendar
10:17from the year of persecution,
10:19rather from the birth of Jesus Christ.
10:21Many of our most famous legends of saints,
10:24like St George and things like this,
10:25are actually legends of martyrdoms
10:27that took place in that time.
10:30From the imperial side,
10:31all the records are completely gone.
10:33There's just one little letter
10:35of a magistrate from North Africa.
10:36It's a very interesting letter.
10:38It tells how he and his colleagues
10:40turned up at a little church
10:41in the Libyan countryside.
10:44And there they asked the church vergers
10:45who were in charge
10:46whether they would hand over the treasure
10:48or you are dead men.
10:50So the vergers handed over their treasures.
10:53And then the magistrates wanted
10:55the centre of the religion,
10:56the book, the Bible.
10:57Now, these were kept on shelves
10:59outside the church,
11:00but the bookshelves were completely empty.
11:02Where were the books,
11:02the magistrates asked.
11:04Well, I'll explain the vergers.
11:05We've lent them to people,
11:07but we actually can't remember
11:08their names at the moment.
11:10And the magistrates then threatened them
11:11with death.
11:12And then the report goes
11:13that one of the vergers got up and said,
11:15here we are.
11:16We are not traitors.
11:17Kill us.
11:19Now, we don't know
11:20whether those men were killed or not.
11:22But just think of that.
11:241,600 years ago,
11:25in North Africa,
11:26a brave, lonely Christian,
11:28we don't even know his name,
11:29was protecting his Bible.
11:35But even gods got tired, it seemed.
11:39The work of running the huge empire
11:41exhausted Diocletian.
11:45That's why, in his old age,
11:46he built his palace at Split,
11:49by the side of a trout stream
11:50that he'd fished in when he'd been a boy.
11:53And after he moved in,
11:54he took up gardening.
11:58These great aqueducts
12:00spanning across the landscape,
12:02the great road network
12:03that still runs around here,
12:04that was all part of a sort of nervous system
12:06that fed the old man's palace
12:08and his nursery gardens
12:10for his food.
12:12So he lived in this great palace
12:13by the sea then.
12:15The old man seemed to see
12:16his empire fall apart.
12:18All those little Caesars he created
12:20suddenly started little wars
12:21all over the empire.
12:23One of his old generals wrote to him,
12:25suggesting that the great god,
12:26Diocletian himself,
12:28should take the field again.
12:29Do you know what the old man said?
12:31He wrote an extraordinary letter.
12:33He said to his colleague,
12:34if you could come to Split
12:36and see these splendid cabbages here
12:38that I've grown with my own hands,
12:41you'd never ask such a thing.
12:44It's a very strange thing for a god to say, isn't it?
12:48It's as if the old man had succumbed
12:50to that sort of loathing
12:51that was generally present in that age,
12:53a loathing for authority,
12:54a sort of desire to retreat from the world.
12:57If you were a Christian middle-class person,
12:59you might become a hermit
13:00and go to the desert.
13:00If you were Diocletian,
13:02you'd build a palace by the sea
13:03and live in it all alone.
13:05So that idea of the great imperial god
13:08that was sold like soap flakes
13:10all over the empire
13:11wasn't really on, was it?
13:12I mean, Diocletian is just a tired old civil servant
13:16doing his thing.
13:17So at the end,
13:18that wonderful structure he'd made,
13:20that wonderful imperial machine,
13:22really had no centre
13:23that people could believe in.
13:25It took one of his successors,
13:27Constantine,
13:28to actually find some glue
13:30to stick all that together,
13:31to sort of put the spirit in the machine.
13:33And he did it in an extraordinary way.
13:35He did a deal with Christianity.
13:36To me,
13:47To me,
13:52Bits and pieces of Constantine the Great, what a man.
14:22That's exactly what he is, not a god any more, a vast imperial man.
14:40When the emperors had been gods, they'd been quite content to have their portraits made life-size,
14:47and in them, they appear as relaxed as other men.
14:52But as soon as Constantine gave up being a god, his imperial portraits became colossal, domineering and very tense.
15:02The bizarre relics of a strange man.
15:05Constantine's always been idolised by Christian historians, distrusted by pagan ones.
15:15Even just recently, a professor said that, in his opinion, Constantine had been entrusted from a mission from God himself.
15:22Whereas, given, that lovely old pagan, in an elegant way, suggests he's a bit of a wheeler-dealer, dexterous, intrepid and affable, he calls him.
15:29I think he's probably a bit of a mixture of the two.
15:32A bit of a wheeler-dealer and a lot of a Christian.
15:34One thing I do know about him is Korea.
15:37He was crowned, believe it or not, in Yorkshire after his father died.
15:41They were in battle together, and he was crowned as one of the emperors of the Western Empire.
15:45Seven years later, he conquered the whole Western Empire, entered Rome in triumphs.
15:49Twelve years after that, he'd conquered the whole Eastern Empire as well.
15:53And then he called a conference, almost immediately, he didn't call a conference of his generals, however, he called a conference of Christian bishops.
16:07The bishops came from all over the Roman Empire, rich and poor alike, travelling by river, land and sea, to gather at a city that today is close to modern Istanbul.
16:20The persecutions had finally stopped, and the great old engine of the Roman Empire was filled with a new fuel, the Christian faith.
16:30In this little town, in the year 325, state Christianity, imperial Christianity, was born.
16:41This is the legendary location where the bishops came to answer Constantine's summons.
16:49This is the place where the first universal council of the Christian church took place.
16:54Nicaea, in Turkey.
16:57And that word, Nicaea, has given us the Nicene Creed.
17:01That basic statement of Christian belief, which is really shared by all Christian churches today.
17:06That is why you could say that in this very field, the Christian church has its real beginnings.
17:12Every church that is presently in the world, you could say, had a member of this council.
17:19We're all descended from it, if you like.
17:21I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.
17:36Can you imagine this incredibly diverse gathering of splendid people, all gathered in this hall.
17:42You can see them sitting in serried ranks, chattering and talking, dozens of different languages.
17:49Constantine hadn't convened his council to come here and talk about church business of the day.
17:54He'd come to talk about the nature of power and where the demarcation was.
18:00Power in heaven and, of course, his alternative power on earth.
18:05The creed, that creed which we still use today, fluffed up a bit and everything, but that essential creed,
18:11was proposed to the council by Constantine's own secretary.
18:14He'd been the bishop of Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem, since the earliest days of Christianity,
18:19this basic creed had been recited at baptisms.
18:23And it was that, with just a few alterations, that Constantine managed to encourage the majority of bishops here to accept.
18:29Doubtless, they actually believed it as a serious theological statement.
18:34They felt deeply about the nature of God.
18:37But I can't help feeling that Constantine was after something more than just abstract theology.
18:42Look, I'll show you what I mean.
18:45It's to do exactly with the shape of God.
18:48If you have God as a father, a great power that sits in the sky,
18:52and then you have this divinity that sort of trickles down so that you have Jesus, his son,
18:57and you have saints and holy men and popes and bishops and emperors,
19:00and everybody has this little bit of divine power,
19:03it makes a very muddy picture for Constantine.
19:06He wants to be the main act on earth,
19:09and that means, of course, cutting out all these little trickle-downs of power and stuffing God clearly up into heaven.
19:16This issue comes over very clearly with Jesus Christ.
19:19There were many bishops here who would have died for the belief that Jesus had been a man and a God in one person on earth.
19:28Now that means, of course, that there could be other men who had become gods as well.
19:33And these could then set up as opposition, or as confusers, you might say, to Constantine's supreme position of power.
19:40So, the Holy Trinity, which is, as I said, a deeply believed doctrine,
19:45actually served Constantine to push all this up into heaven.
19:49God, you could say, was composed of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
19:52It's very mysterious, but sure enough, it's way up in the sky, far away from power.
19:57Constantine's down here on his throne.
19:59I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
20:08maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.
20:15And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God.
20:21So, these theological issues, which at first might seem pretty obscure,
20:26can actually have a direct effect on the power of governments and kings.
20:32And that's why, throughout the ages, people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ.
20:38I know all things for me.
20:51So, what did all this imperial politicking do for the books of the Bible?
21:04In short, it made them the guidebooks of the Western world.
21:09Nowadays, Bibles made in the time of Constantine are perhaps the world's most precious books.
21:16And one of them, the Codex Sinaiticus, taken from a desert monastery in Egypt
21:21and held now in the library of the British Museum,
21:24is the most famous single book in all the world.
21:28You know, it's very possible that this Bible here is actually one of the Bibles,
21:47one of 50 Bibles ordered by Constantine for his new church.
21:52He asks for 50 Bibles, easy to read and portable.
21:57And these look like royal Bibles, don't they?
22:00This beautiful, calm, clear Greek.
22:04Practically the oldest complete Bible in the world today.
22:07It was written by three scribes at dictation.
22:11Each of them took a third of the book.
22:14And in it, there's a rather rare little memoir, right at the Book of Esther,
22:19jammed in between the elegant prose.
22:22There's a little text written by somebody who checked the Bible,
22:24because these Bibles were checked and checked.
22:26There's 14,500 checks in this Bible alone.
22:31So careful, were they, about the text.
22:33Anyway, this man, writing at the end of the Book of Esther,
22:36says that he checked this Bible against another Bible against a yet older Bible.
22:42And we know this man's name because he's written it.
22:45It's called Pamphilius.
22:46And Pamphilius was a martyr in the time of Diocletian.
22:50And he shared a prison cell with Constantine's secretary,
22:54the same man who, 20 years later, made the first draft of the Council of Nicaea
22:58and probably saw to the making of these Bibles as well.
23:01So think of that. Think how the Bible has triumphed, how it's come through.
23:05And that care is astonishing.
23:07There is no other ancient book in the world which is so perfectly preserved.
23:12The text in this Bible is exactly the same as the text in earlier Bible fragments
23:17two centuries before.
23:19And there it is, this strange book, burnt and persecuted by Diocletian,
23:23is now right at the heart of the empire.
23:41Asia Minor, at the very centre of Constantine the Great's new empire,
23:46was the natural site for a new imperial capital.
23:50A new Rome, set halfway between East and West,
23:53between the Danube and the Euphrates,
23:55where Europe meets Asia and where modern Istanbul now stands.
24:03It would be the first Christian capital of the Roman Empire.
24:07With his usual modesty, Constantine called it Constantinople.
24:13Like Constantine himself, the city was filled with superstitions,
24:18ancient signs and symbols, memories of much older gods.
24:29This beautiful stone actually stands in the centre of what used to be
24:34Constantine's Imperial Racing Stadium.
24:37It's for chariot races. You see, they started off over there,
24:41galloped down the street, round the end of the stadium,
24:44and then roared down the street down here for the finish.
24:48It was always at the centre of the city life of Constantinople.
24:51It was a great favourite.
24:52The Imperial Palace was just over there,
24:55and there was a special little covered way by which the emperor
24:57could come into his box to watch the chariot races.
25:01Everybody thought it was a fabulous city,
25:03with the water all around it and everything,
25:05but it was also a pretty gym-crack affair.
25:07Constantine had had it built too quickly,
25:10and the buildings were badly made,
25:12and some of them were pretty ill-designed too.
25:14But what he did to compensate was quite a clever thing.
25:17He actually plundered the Western Empire of his treasures.
25:20All the great statues and lots of beautiful things
25:22and famous historical things from the West
25:24were brought here to Constantine's new Rome.
25:27Just look at the things that had gathered up even in his stadium.
25:30This obelisk is ancient Egyptian,
25:33made thousands of years before Constantine's time,
25:36came from Thebes.
25:37Over there is a very famous object,
25:40a funny old collar made of three snakes,
25:42which celebrated a victory of the Greeks over the Persians, 500 BC.
25:47The great horses of St Mark's in Venice,
25:50they were taken from this square.
25:52I suppose Constantine had this thing about relics.
25:55He loved old things.
25:56He loved things that were filled with history and religion.
25:59holy objects, relics.
26:02But the greatest of all of Constantine's relics
26:04wasn't any object but an entire country.
26:29The Bible told that Jesus had lived in Palestine.
26:38Constantine now turned his attentions to this poor province of his empire.
26:44In a few years, the literary landscapes of the Bible
26:47were marked out upon the earth.
26:50Constantine made Palestine into a holy land,
26:56the birthplace of his new imperial religion.
27:03The Nicene Creed had said that Jesus was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.
27:10Constantine now built a Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem,
27:13an ancient sacred spot, selected by Constantine's bishops, controlled by his imperial church,
27:20and sacred still today.
27:22The Nicene Creed
27:30The Nicene Creed
27:32The Nicene Creed
27:41The Nicene Creed
27:42The Nicene Creed
27:43On every spot where Jesus' life on earth had touched with heaven,
27:59his place of birth, of death, of resurrection and ascension into heaven,
28:04Constantine built a church, and these today are Christendom's most sacred shrines.
28:11The Nicene Creed
28:23The Nicene Creed
28:24The Nicene Creed
28:25The Nicene Creed
28:26Constantine built the biggest of his churches
28:55at Jerusalem, at the place of Jesus' crucifixion and in tomb.
29:00Most of it's gone now.
29:02Its ruins are filled with monasteries and an Arab bazaar.
29:25It's a very good place.
29:32How are you?
29:33What's up?
29:34What's up?
29:35What's up?
29:36What's up?
29:37What's up?
29:38Oh, thank you.
29:40Oh, thank you.
30:03This isn't just an ordinary baker's store room.
30:05Look at the walls.
30:07Look at those huge stones.
30:09Only Herod the Great of the Emperor Constantine ever made walls in Jerusalem with such big blocks of stone.
30:16In fact, that's the end wall of Constantine's church.
30:19Even in his day, there were little shops along here.
30:23You could walk down through the street, through the market, look into the church.
30:28Into its great glittering nave.
30:33Isn't that extraordinary?
30:37The doorway of Constantine's church has ended up as the basement in a Coptic monastery.
30:43Bits of it are still here, though.
30:45Look, there's part of the great door frame.
30:47Would have sailed on up into the air much higher than that.
30:50Had great cedar doors that creaked open.
30:53Bit of the bolt still there, even.
30:59There's an extraordinary letter which was written from this very spot where I'm standing.
31:03Right from the middle of the doorway.
31:05Looking out from the little marketplace, looking in towards the great church beyond.
31:10It's written by Constantine's secretary and he thought it was the marvel of the age.
31:13He describes rows and rows of columns going back hundreds of yards.
31:17And above it all, was the coffered roof that Constantine had wanted.
31:21And the coffered roof, his secretary said, had so much gold on it,
31:24that it seemed to flash and fill the church with its light,
31:26coming right down through the lights and running across the pavement.
31:30CHOIR SINGS
31:45CHOIR SINGS
31:55Today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands on the site of Constantine's great church.
32:05It's changed a lot, but underneath you can still see the arrangements that Constantine made for the holy sites.
32:10Up there is Calvary.
32:13You can't see the rock anymore.
32:15It's all covered up in balustrades and beautiful mosaics.
32:18Constantine's day, it had a great golden cross on it, bejeweled, symbol of the new faith, the resurrected Lord.
32:26I'm standing approximately on the side of the road which once ran round the walls of Jerusalem.
32:32And over there is the site of Christ's tomb.
32:36CHOIR SINGS
32:531,700 years on, and the pilgrims still visit the place which Constantine's bishops had decided,
33:00was the tomb of Christ.
33:03CHOIR SINGS
33:22You may well wonder whether that strange old monument really is on the site of the real tomb of Jesus Christ.
33:29Well, there's some remarkable indications that it is quite close by.
33:34This sooty little chapel is still sooty from a fire a hundred years ago,
33:39and nobody's decided what colour to paint it again yet.
33:41But this sooty little chapel is immediately behind the tomb.
33:45The tomb stands in the main building over there.
33:48This wall here is the original back wall of Constantine's great church.
33:54And through here, there's something hundreds of years older.
34:01These are ancient tombs.
34:07And ancient tombs with this little round top looked a bit like ancient ovens.
34:13And in Hebrew they're called chochim, oven.
34:16And these tombs are constructed according to the traditional ritual measurements of Jewish tombs.
34:22That is, six hand-breadths wide.
34:24One, two, three, four, five, six.
34:30And seven high.
34:32One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
34:39Now, traditionally, this is part of the family tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
34:44It's the man who gave his own tomb up to Jesus.
34:47What they are for certain is a Jewish, part of a Jewish cemetery from around the time of Jesus.
34:55So, that proves conclusively that Constantine's site in which he built Christ's tomb was really in the middle of an ancient Jewish graveyard.
35:09Not only that, the fact there's an ancient Jewish graveyard here shows that something that's now in the middle of Jerusalem was in those days outside the walls.
35:17And that shows that Calvary is in a probable site for the real event itself too.
35:22But Constantine's bishops had a bit of a problem.
35:25Because, all right, they've got this traditional site and they've got a Jewish graveyard in it.
35:29But how do they know that the tomb they pick was real and not these little ones over here?
35:34How do they know which tomb to pick?
35:36Well, the records say that the workmen were clearing the rubble away and the priests were watching them.
35:42And suddenly they saw the tomb of the risen Lord and it was risen like the Lord himself.
35:47They found the tomb in the dirt. It was an identification by tradition and by faith.
35:53Now, you might get done under the Trade Descriptions Act, but in those days, faith and tradition were the Trade Descriptions Act.
36:00They were as important and real to them as that level of truth in trade is to us today.
36:06Anyway, it was real enough for Constantine to build his huge church right over the top of the site.
36:12Christ's tomb became the centre of Jerusalem.
36:25And Jerusalem, for a thousand years, the centre of the Christian world.
36:30The place where the point of God's compasses had touched the earth and scribed out the circles of the universe.
36:41And Constantine, it's said that he was baptised finally on his deathbed.
36:47His ministers had been so scared of him that no one would touch his corpse for months.
36:53The man had still ruled as he had rotted on his throne.
36:57Now, notice that Constantine built the heart of his empire in the Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean,
37:09far away from Rome and Latin Italy.
37:12So the Church of Rome was no longer the church, the emperor's church, at the centre of the empire.
37:20This made life very difficult for the bishop, the Pope of Rome, for this was still not a truly Christian city.
37:33Constantine could turn Palestine into a holy land.
37:36He could build great Christian capitals for his empire in the east.
37:40But he couldn't make old Rome Christian, even though he left his name over monuments all over its forum.
37:47The old city was a pagan city.
37:49And it had such prestige, it was essential for the Christian church to dominate the place.
37:56Yet even emperors were afraid to come here. Not Constantine, but the great Diocletian.
38:01After he'd built the senators, that pretty shrewd, hard body of pagans, their new senate house,
38:08he wouldn't even turn up for the opening of it.
38:11And still, 50 years after Constantine's death, these same tough old individuals would turn up for their debates.
38:19An offer to an altar of victory with a little goddess in the back, right in the back of their senate house.
38:26And, of course, it annoyed the Christian bishops.
38:29They wrote to Rome and protested,
38:30How dare you sacrifice to these pagan gods?
38:34No emperor is so friendly with the barbarians as not to require an altar of victory, they said.
38:40And they started to produce a whole lot of very good and clear arguments
38:44about why Rome should stay a pagan city forevermore.
38:47Intellectually, they were very smart people.
38:50And why shouldn't the city stay pagan after all?
38:53It was saturated with gods and history and had been for 500 years.
38:58What did Constantine's church have to offer after all?
39:01Well, a lot of new churches, a lot of money.
39:03But none of the richness of tradition and deity that Rome had.
39:07Of course, Christianity had its own world, had its own riches.
39:11And those images were in the Bible.
39:13But that, the Romans told the pope, was written in such barbarous Greek
39:16that nobody would ever want to read it unless they were Christian.
39:19There were few enough of those about the place.
39:21So, in 382, the pope got his secretary, a man called Jerome,
39:26to translate the Bible into good Latin.
39:28And that, he hoped, would conquer this sinful city.
39:36Jerome was born in 342, in Aquileia, on the Italian Adriatic,
39:42just up the coast from Diocletian's palace.
39:45Jerome must have walked on these floors, must have known all these pictures.
40:06He'd have known them when he was a little boy,
40:08coming in with his father from the family estates into the big town of Aquileia.
40:12He'd known them later on in his life, too,
40:15when he came back to his hometown to live after he'd been a student in Rome.
40:19I don't suppose he thought much of them, though.
40:21All these big, fat fish ears.
40:23All the Aquileia mosaics seem obsessed with food.
40:26Jerome actually says the Aquileians were obsessed with it, too.
40:29Even more, he says, their love of food and the love of God.
40:32There's one thing here I think he would have really liked,
40:36because in the middle of this great pagan seascape,
40:39you've actually got the story of Jonah and the whale.
40:43There's the prophet being fed into the mouth of the whale,
40:47and here's the people in the boat all around him.
40:49The little boat, of course, is just like the ones that skim around in Aquileia harbour.
40:53The people dressed like Jerome's contemporaries.
40:56Now, he would have liked this story, as a lot of Christians did at the time,
41:00because it seemed to them to be a prophecy of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
41:04Jonah was fed into the whale to save the little boat,
41:08and he spent three days in hell, he calls it, in the belly of the whale,
41:12just as Jesus spent three days in the tomb before his resurrection.
41:15And over here is Jonah's resurrection, popping up onto dry land out of the belly of the whale.
41:25And just as Jesus had his day in paradise, so Jonah had his, too.
41:31The Lord built him a wonderful bower of gourds outside Nineveh,
41:35and there's the Old Testament prophet, splendidly relaxing.
41:38Aquileia turned out to be far from a paradise for poor old Jerome.
41:43All his life, he was sort of dogged by scandal.
41:46It sent him out of all the places he loved, really.
41:50It sent him out of Aquileia, it sent him out of Rome.
41:52He never quite tells you what it is.
41:54There's sort of sexual innuendos going on.
41:57He says at one point that the virgin nuns closed their doors against him.
42:01And certainly people still feel very powerfully about Jerome.
42:05He, for himself, defends himself vigorously, defends his freedom to act in the way he wants.
42:10He said, yes, I've been guilty, but I've done nothing wrong.
42:13And it's that sort of cloud of unknowing, cloud of mystery, that still hangs around the man.
42:18One thing's certain, those scandals sent him into exile.
42:22And they sent him into exile in the East for year after year after year.
42:26In fact, for a man of Latin background and Latin character, he lived most of his life away from his native language.
42:33Jerome spent much of his time travelling.
43:01traveling he went to the holy land and lived in bethlehem he went to egypt and studied with the
43:07most eminent of theologians he went to constantinople to attend a general council of the church
43:14he almost died of fever once in syria
43:21and as he traveled he was learning languages greek perfect greek and hebrew from a palestinian jew
43:28and aramaic the very language of jesus from the syrian monks
43:34for many years he lived as a hermit in a desert cave
43:43this is how so many artists like to see jerome assailed by demons and fortified by god
43:50in the deserts of the soul he's such a favorite subject i think because his writings are so human
43:59the candor of his letters is amazing he's a henry miller of a monk as much in love with a child's
44:05smile and the curve of a woman's knee as with fine latin prose what a great scholar what a worker he
44:12was the only man of his day who could read the bible's books in all their original languages
44:18jerome spent 25 years translating the bible it was a colossal enterprise and one i think to which his
44:30whole attitude can be summed up in just a little story remember that lovely scene of jonah sitting
44:36under his bower of gourds well when jerome was working on the book of jonah right from the original hebrew into
44:43latin he realized the word wasn't good at all but ivy and he translated it as ivy now that scene was a
44:51favorite amongst early christians it was all over pictures in the churches and all over everywhere
44:56nonetheless ivy went in the bible now when the translation was read out in a north african
45:02church his friend saint augustine wrote him a letter saying that actually been a riot people had
45:08and run out of the church saint augustine also suggested that perhaps jerome should lay off the
45:14novelty because the book as it was was perfectly good for guiding the faithful but jerome would
45:19have none of it he once said some of his critics have porridge for brains he was after the truth he
45:25said he was after separating the mud from the water he said you should look at the bible text like a
45:31hunter looks for game in the forest for the truth alone and what a man that amazing
45:37honesty almost naivety his actual desire for a fight all that gives that prose an amazing bounce his bible
45:45was a superb bible some people in fact think it's the very word of god itself
45:59in 395 the great empire of constantine which had long been under attack from northern gothic tribes
46:09was divided in two east and west
46:12in 410 the goths arrived at rome itself what will be left to us the senators asked of the goths when they
46:31demanded an impossible ransom your lives came the reply old rome was looted and burnt
46:43jerome an old man now in bethlehem was inconsolable it seemed to him that rome the distant city for
46:52whom he'd worked all his life had simply disappeared
46:55when rome had been plundered and half destroyed by the northern tribes he said the world the universe
47:13had been quenched in a single city so you can imagine to be quite pleased to see rome today
47:18actually in those days this part of rome jerome's time was vineyards lovely big vineyards stretching
47:25up the hill with just a few rather exclusive villas dotted in between them he knew the area quite well
47:32he certainly knew that church his day of course was very plain simple brick building enormous but quite
47:39plain now 1700 years later decorated by generations of faith is one of christendom's most beautiful
47:47churches santa maria maggiore
47:59they say that the high altar of santa maria maggiore contains the bones of
48:2040 saints including saint jerome his bible called the valgate bible is now the latin bible of the roman
48:29church
48:59Constantine the Great would feel at home in here.
49:15The priests are still dressed like his courthouse.
49:18The church is like the throne room of his palace.
49:20He would, perhaps, be amazed by the Christian piety of the modern Romans.
49:38And the prestige of their church, too.
49:40Most of all, he'd be astonished by the sweet majesty of the Latin Bible.
49:53The book that he had used to join his empire to the hearts of men.
49:58To join the kingdom of heaven to the kingdoms of earth.
50:10To join the kingdom of heaven.
50:40To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:10To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:12To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:13To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:14To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:15To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:16To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:17To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:18To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:19To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:20To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:21To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:22To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:23To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:24To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:25To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:26To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:27To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:28To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:29To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:30To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:31To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:32To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:33To join the kingdom of heaven.
51:34To join the kingdom of heaven.
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