TV series on the Christian story

Professor MacCulloch visited four continents during the making of his series

In a new series for BBC Four the Oxford Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch will show that the true origins of Christianity are around three thousand years old.

He believes it was born out of much older Jewish and Greek beliefs.

During his six television programmes he travels East to explain how Christianity was poised to triumph in Asia, maybe even in China.

Amongst the stories from the four corners of the world Oxford makes a number of appearances.

Professor MacCulloch completed his Ph.D. in Tudor History - a particularly turbulent time for Christianity in England - and his series encompasses the reformation in its sweeping march towards the modern era. The Martyrs' Memorial is one of the major landmarks in that story.

"Oxford's really important. In the English Reformation it tended to be more conservative than Cambridge," explains Professor MacCulloch.

The three Cambridge men Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were burned in the centre of Oxford by Mary I of England. "They were brought from their various places to Oxford because the authorities knew that Oxford would be rather sympathetic to seeing them burned," says Professor MacCulloch.

The story of this flashpoint isn't the only time that Oxford appears in the footage of Professor MacCulloch's television journey. "You see a lot of Oxford incidentally alongside central China, alongside Rome," he explains.

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford

The Natural History Museum in the city also makes a cameo when modern themes are addressed and Professor MacCulloch examines the clash between Christianity and Darwinism and how the church adapts to theories of evolution.

It is the evolution of a different kind - an evolution of thought - that underlies the whole story of the religion as seen by Professor MacCulloch:

"Christianity is just so varied, it talks a lot about unity but the reality is that Christianity has never been united. Right from the start it was splitting and splitting and splitting.

"The point is that person in the middle of it. Whatever you make of that person, God, human, that huge puzzle that Christians have argued about all through the two thousand years of the church - there is a core."