EDMONTON, Canada, August 16, 2002 — Western society in the twenty-first century is a society largely unaware of its own roots, and that's a danger, says Canadian journalist, author and editor Ted Byfield, because a society unaware of its roots can too easily be cut off from them.
Christian History Project
Ted Byfield, Canadian journalist, author and editor.
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Byfield's answer to the problem is to tell a story, but not just any story. He believes people need to recognize the profound impact Christianity has had on shaping western civilization. So in 1999, he began to assemble a team of more than two-dozen multi-denominational academics, researchers, writers, illustrators, map makers and consultants, and called them the Christian History Project. Their task is to tell the 2,000-year history of Christianity.
'People are very deficient in knowing how we got here'
"I'm a journalist, and one of the things you observe (as a journalist) is that people are very deficient in knowing how we got here -- culturally, politically and spiritually. They simply are not aware of how it happened and secondly, they are aware that they don't know. They don't know how these attitudes came about. Almost every assumption behind our culture derives through Christianity, through three different sources: the ancient Hebrew civilization, which gives us the idea of religion, the second is our idea of government, which comes from the Greeks, and third is our idea of the law which we get from the Romans. Christianity combined these three things, and produced what we call our western culture," said Byfield in a recent telephone interview.
"Where other cultures have been extremely careful to implant their history in the next generation -- we weren't doing any of this. Therefore, there was a responsibility to try to restore what was taken away that was essentially Christian -- and by that I mean the combining of these three great heritages," he added.
Byfield is well qualified to take on such a responsibility. A journalist for 55 years, and a western Canadian magazine publisher since 1973, he has an innate love for history, and for telling it well. Inspired by the Time Life series on the Second World War, Byfield recognized there was a way that complex histories could be made eminently readable for the average person. Almost as a trial run for the Christian History Project, he acted as founding editor of Alberta in the Twentieth Century, a 12-volume history of his province.
Byfield enlisted the talents of an impressive group of journalists and illustrators
Taking what he learned from the Alberta project and building on it, he spent a year travelling throughout North America to enlist the talents of an impressive group of Christian journalists and illustrators. Represented among the editorial group are Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic and Evangelical Christians, to ensure a well-rounded approach to the subject. Their plan calls for the history of Christianity to be detailed chronologically in 15 volumes, released one at a time, over the next three years. The team in place, businessman and entrepreneur Robert W. Doull, joined the project as President and CEO to manage the multi-million dollar fundraising effort.
The first volume in the series, The Veil Is Torn, AD 30 to AD 70, covers the period from Pentecost to the Destruction of Jerusalem. At $49.95 Cdn. or $39.95 US, it is not inexpensive. It is, however, an excellent value.
Link: http://www.christianhistoryproject.com/
The book is written in a style that makes the actual historical information easy to absorb, and makes the people who made the history come alive; all without the type of overly dramatic or imaginative embellishment of facts we westerners have come to accept as commonplace from sources such as Hollywood.
Reading through this book is a delight
Photo: Christian History Project
Saul on the road to Damascus
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Reading through this book is a delight -- and each page holds new discoveries; primarily, details that may have been read in the Bible or heard preached before, but which have never really taken hold or sunken in. The reader is sent scurrying for his Bible to verify his findings regarding the early church and her people, with thoughts of "I didn't know that!" only to find the detail in question right there in Scripture.
According to Byfield, that was exactly the team's intent. "These things really happened. We had to get that across. You can paint the New Testament in such magnificent stained glass colours that it loses its sense of reality", he said, "but these things really happened, and these were real people."
By way of example, he sites Thomas -- one of the twelve -- and, according to The Veil Is Torn, a pessimist:
"The character of Thomas portrayed in the New Testament, chiefly in the Gospel of John, is absolutely consistent. He is by nature the quintessential pessimist and skeptic.
Unless he sees the print of the nails in Jesus' hands, he says, he will not believe that he is alive. Jesus thereupon shows him the nail marks, and chides him for lack of faith. Similarly, when Jesus announces he's heading for Jerusalem and the other apostles urge caution, Thomas responds in character. 'Let us go and die with him,' he says, cheerlessly. When Jesus tells the disciples they know where he is going and the way he is going to take, Thomas protests: 'We don't know where you're going and we don't know the way either.' (John 14:5) 'I am the Way,' replies Jesus.
Yet the Gospel accounts subtly disclose another side to his nature. Thomas, after all, is prepared to go to Jerusalem, however gloomy the prospects. And once shown the print of the nails, Thomas responds: 'My Lord and my God!' It's the only place in the Gospels where the term 'God' is applied to Jesus without qualification.
Volume One is rich in photographs and illustrations
Volume One in this series is not just well researched and written. It is rich in photographs of Bible lands and archaeological finds that provide an education in and of themselves. It is also beautifully illustrated, with original, realistic representations of the events described in each of the nine chapters. Assembling a group of fifteen top-line illustrating artists was, according to Byfield, one of the more challenging, practical aspects of pulling the project together.
"With Christian history, there's no art that comes into being for about 300 years. So we went into the National Geographic archives, to see who was doing their pictures. Illustrating artists are hard to find. But they know each other's work -- so one would lead to another," he said.
The Christian History Project could be Byfield's greatest legacy
The Christian History Project could very well turn out to be Ted Byfield's greatest legacy. But speaking with the man, one quickly gets the sense that his motivation in creating the project was not to leave something great behind -- as much as it was to use the knowledge of our past to guide our culture forward in a new and better direction. As he wrote in the foreword to The Veil Is Torn, "The purpose of this series is to say who we are and how we got here. That is, to establish our real roots. It has been a long journey, two thousand years, and neither it nor we have been uniformly benevolent. But this is our past, this is our family, and knowing who it is and what it has done is the first step in finding our way home."
Source: Patricia L. Paddey, Bible Network News
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