Review: Christianity, a history

Channel 4, the channel which blights British TV screens with the nonsense of Big Brother, is in the middle of a documentary series Christianity, A History. It's growing on me.

Part of its genius - and I'm gradually coming to the point of view that it really is genius - is in the choice of presenters (who each clearly wrote the episode they present). Howard Jacobson, a British Jew, presented "Jesus the Jew", wherein he reviewed Jesus' Jewishness, and how paradoxically this turned into Christian anti-semitism. Michael Portillo, a politician and agnostic, described Constantine's conversion, and the subsequent marriage of church and state. And so on.

Today's episode was presented by Rageh Omaar, a British Muslim. He talked about the Crusades, and how the West has largely forgotten them, save as a historical footnote. And how the Muslim world, by contrast, sees them as a present reality (all the more when George Dubya actually described his "War on Terror" as a crusade. Sack the speech-writer!). As an aside, I wrote down a sentence from his introduction to the programme, when he described Jerusalem:

The site of Jesus Christ's resurrection, and of the Prophet Mohammed's ascension into heaven.

What a gloriously paradoxical sentence!

Next week's episode is on the Reformation, presented by an ex-Protestant Catholic convert. I'm looking forward to it! Besides the thought-provoking presentations (in itself quite a challenging thing to do, when you have to deliver rather basic historical facts and interpret them) the high-def video presentation is stunning, and very attractive. A huge amount of on-location filming around the Mediterranean has gone into this series.

Certainly, I disagree with many of the presenters' perspectives and conclusions. But it's rather good to see these things discussed from a distance, by someone who doesn't share my point of view, and isn't simply an even-handed academic, either. The research seems good - and plenty of good quality academics are wheeled in to give soundbites - but the over-all effect is really quite compelling. I thorougly recommend the series.