Second paragraph of third chapter:

Yet just as the books of the Tanakh reveal the process of creative responses to disappointment when they refocus prophecy, rethink the afterlife and steadily enrich their meditation on God’s purposes, there is much to recover from the history of second-century Christianity. It is a period in which Christian communities recovered from their trauma and reshaped themselves for new circumstances. We can gather enough fragments of evidence to show how radically diffetent from the first-century Christian groups the later Christian Church came to look: it created a canon of Scripture, credal statements and an institutional clerical ministry for its community life. The closing of the canon involved the exclusion of much of the apocalyptic literature which had formed the matrix of Judaism in the time of Jesus and his first followers; but the process was slow, and Christians never quite forgot this body of texts, or the climate of thought that it had created.

I enjoyed two previous books by Diarmaid MacCulloch, his magisterial History of Christianity and his collection of essays on the Reformation, All Things Made New. I’m sorry to say that this left me rather cold and I abandoned it after fifty pages. The problem is that the Bible itself is not about silence as such, and delving for what is said and meant about silence seems to me to be looking for something that isn’t really there; still more so when we get to the early Christian church and many patristic and earlier writings that I am unfamiliar with. MacCulloch is entitled to write the book that he wants to write and that his core readership wants to read. You can get Silence: A Christian History here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine.