From Jesus to the Internet

Peter Horsfield is Professor of Communication at RMIT University, Australia. From 1987-1996, he was Dean of the Uniting Church Theological Hall and Lecturer in Applied Theology in the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne, Australia. His early study, Religious Television: The American Experience (1984) was influential in assessing the impact of the emerging phenomenon of televangelism in the U.S. From 1997-2005 he was a member of the International Study Commission on Media Religion and Culture. He has researched and published extensively in the area of the interaction of media and religion, with a particular focus on Christianity. He is the co-editor of several books, including Emerging Research in Media, Religion and Culture (2005) and Belief in Media: Cultural Perspectives on Media and Christianity (2004).

"This is a book I've wanted to read for a long time, and I find it both enlightening and thought provoking in a positive sense. The book represents a way of writing the history of Christianity in a rather novel multi-perspective and contextualized manner. Technology, politics, economics, demographics, and scientific discoveries all play a role in how religion is transformed – but at the center of this transformation, according to Horsfield, is media." (Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 1 November 2015)"Horsfield's compelling and nuanced scholarship of integration traces the evolution of Christianity from an oral Jewish movement in the 1st century through epochs dominated by written, printed, electronic, and now digital media to become the world's largest religious faith with 2.2 billion followers." (Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 2016)

• Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1What’s this book about? 1What do we mean by Christianity? 2What do we mean by media? 4Media and the historical development of Christianity 71 In the Beginning 10The social and media context 11Jesus in his media context 14Remaking Jesus in speech and performance 222 Making Jesus Gentile 28Context: the media world of the Roman Empire 28Early Christian writing 30Paul and letter writing 32The end of the beginning 393 The Gentile Christian Communities 42The appeal of Christianity 42Multimedia communities 43Christian writings 45The reception and circulation of Christian writings 56Resistance to writing 584 Men of Letters and Creation of “The Church” 62The Catholic]Orthodox brand 63Tertullian 68Cyprian 70Origen – the media magnate of Alexandria 72Writing out women 745 Christianity and Empire 80Imperial patronage and imperial Christianity 80Councils, creeds, and canons 84Constructing time – Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History 90The scriptures as text and artifact 936 The Latin Translation 99Latin roots 99After the fall 106Monasteries and manuscripts 110Written Latin and the consolidation of medieval Christendom 1177 Christianity in the East 125The Church of the East 125Islam 130Writing the voice 132Regulating the eyes 1348 Senses of the Middle Ages 141The medieval context 142Making time 143Seeing space 145Rituals and hearing 150Nice touch: relics, saints, and pilgrimage 1549 The New Millennium 162Marketing the Crusades 163Scholasticism and universities 168Cathedrals 173Catholic reform 175The Inquisition 18010 Reformation 187Printing and its precursors 187Martin Luther 191John Calvin 195Reworking the Bible 198The changing sensory landscape 200Catholic responses 207Ignatius of Loyola 20911 The Modern World 214The legacy of the Reformation 214Catholic mission 216The impact of print 219Evangelical Revivalism 223Protestant mission 23212 Electrifying Sight and Sound 237The technologies of the audiovisual 237Christianity and the twentieth]century media world 240Mainline mediation 242The Evangelical Coalition 246Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism 25413 The Digital Era 261The empire of digital capitalism 261Digital practice 264Global Pentecostalism 270Media and Christian sexual abuse 276Tradition and change 279Conclusion 285References 293Index 311