Original subtitles

(TURKISH MUSIC)

This is the untold story

of the making of the modern world.

A fresh perspective,

charting the spread of civilisation

across the globe.

From the dawn of mankind

and the first cities and empires...

to the belief in one God.

(Sings call to prayer)

We follow the flow of civilisation

from the Middle East...

An extraordinary place that has been a vital link

between the continents of Asia, Africa and Europe for millennia.

An economic, scientific and cultural centre of the world.

(DRAMATIC, SOARING MUSIC)

It will be an epic journey of discovery...

from the east

to the west.

This is the story of the birth of religion.

Here in the Middle East it inspired the journey of civilisation.

In this programme we explore early man's struggle

to understand and explain nature,

life and death, and the world beyond.

They are not ancestors, they are not priests.

They are beings from another world.

We discover the first temples of the Middle East

and how the pantheon of pagan gods

that ruled from Mesopotamia to Egypt, and Greece to Home,

were overthrown by a revolutionary idea -

monotheism.

It's absolutely a watershed moment in history.

It's the story of the difficult birth, and eventual growth

of this idea that came from the East to dominate the West

and much of the rest of the world.

Monotheism - the belief in one universal God.

The idea of one universal God is so integral and familiar to our culture

that we forget that in a world of many gods

it was once a radical idea.

Where did it come from,

how did it grow, why did it succeed?

Judaism, Christianity and Islam

all look to Abraham as their founding father.

The story of Abraham first appears in Genesis,

the first book of the Jewish Bible.

When you open the Bible, you very quickly come to Abraham

and basically the whole Bible from then on

is the story of one man's family

and that one man is Abraham.

Everything is about his encounter with God, his experience with God.

MAN'S VOICE: And I will make of thee a great nation,

and I will bless thee, and make thy name great.

According to the Bible, Abraham spent much of his life

in an ancient city in Mesopotamia called Harran,

believed to be in what is now Turkey.

In Harran

people worshipped many gods.

Like the rest of the ancient world, polytheism ruled.

The defining moment in Abraham's story,

why he is synonymous with monotheism,

came with a command from God.

Take your only son, your beloved son,

and go to the land of Moria

and there you will sacrifice him to me.

The basis of the story

in the Old Testament and Koran

almost the same, but different in details.

The story is that God

would like to test the true beliefs of Abraham.

When they come there

it is clear now to both of them

that the sacrifice is going to be the son,

the only son,

the beloved son is going to be sacrificed.

But on the crucial moment there is a voice from heaven.

“Don't touch the child.

“I don't want him to be sacrificed.

“You have proved yourself to be loyal to God."

Judaism, Christianity and Islam

share a belief in Abraham

as the founding father of their faith.

But some details of the story differ.

In the Jewish tradition Abraham's intended sacrifice

was in Jerusalem.

Jews erected a temple here to commemorate the spot.

It was said to be one of the greatest buildings in antiquity.

(Person ululates)

The temple was destroyed by the Babylonians,

rebuilt, then destroyed again by the Romans.

The surviving western wall

is one of the holiest places in Judaism.

Above it today is the Dome of the Rock,

the oldest surviving Islamic building in the world.

Muslims believe it is the site of the Mi'raj

where the prophet Mohammad was taken to heaven to meet with God.

In Islamic tradition the sacrifice of Abraham took place not here

but near Mecca in modern Saudi Arabia.

It's impossible to be precise about Abraham.

Biblical chronology suggests he lived nearly 4000 years ago.

But there is no hard proof of his existence.

There's no archaeological evidence of Abraham.

He didn't leave a monument somewhere in the desert saying

“Abraham was here."

(FAST-PACED PERCUSSION MUSIC)

There is a growing distance between what people think

about history of this region, according to the Biblical text,

and what archaeology shows.

So it is extremely difficult and tricky

to reconstruct even the germs of history from these myths.

In recent years an incredible series of archaeological discoveries

have revealed the real story of the development of religion

and, ultimately, the idea of one God.

The story begins thousands of years before the biblical time of Abraham.

Over 11,000 years ago

something extraordinary happened here

in a place known as Göbekli Tepe

on the Upper Mesopotamian plains of southern Turkey.

These mysterious stone pillars

give an amazing insight into the birth of organised religion.

They were erected here right at the dawn of civilisation

before the birth of agriculture when man was a hunter-gatherer.

Religion springs from the timeless human need

to understand the world,

explain natural disasters, life and death.

Professor Klaus Schmidt,

who leads the excavation and study of Göbekli Tepe,

believes these T-shaped pillars represent human beings.

Here we have the proof that the meaning of the pillars

is really a meaning of anthropomorphic beings.

You can see it's a big arm coming down here

and we have here the hands, fingers like this.

These strange human-shaped monuments

appear to represent supernatural humans,

visitors from an imagined spiritual world.

There is never a face depicted on these T shapes.

They are faceless, without eyes, without nose, without mouth.

I think it's a clear indication they are not from our world.

They are not ancestors, they are not priests.

They are beings from another world,

mee... gathering here in an eternal meeting.

These structures are not done for daily life, so...

is a sacred sphere we have here on this mountain.

There are no houses here at Göbekli Tepe.

This is a special place.

Man built this gathering of supernatural beings

to make a connection with the afterlife.

This pillar in the north of Enclosures D

maybe is showing us what's going on here in these enclosures,

what the purpose had been for those enclosures.

We have here vulture, a very big vulture,

with its wings in such a position.

There are more birds, there are snakes, there are other symbols,

but there is a very big scorpion depicted here

and there are other animals

and here below there is clearly a human

and clearly there is no head on top of this body.

And this complete image looks like a illustration of the netherworlds,

not of our world here,

and so maybe it's leading us to the function of these enclosures

being made for burial customs.

Professor Schmidt believes that in these enclosures

early man practised a ritual ceremony

to mark the passing of their dead.

(MYSTERIOUS VIBRAPHONE MUSIC)

The monumental structures of Göbekli Tepe

are a landmark in human development.

Here, 11,000 years ago, a revolution occurred.

Hunter-gathers paused

to build a special place to commemorate the journey

from one world to the next.

The Stone Age people of Göbekli Tepe

witnessed death, the power of nature and the changes in the seasons

and created a belief system to help them comprehend

their bewildering world.

The whole region is a treasure trove of discoveries,

evidence showing that death and burial

were central to mankind's developing beliefs.

Near to Göbekli Tepe is the ancient settlement of Qatalhöyük.

It's a remarkable window into our ancestors' lives and beliefs.

Archaeologists made an amazing discovery here at Qatalhöyük.

The people who lived here buried their dead in their own homes.

When people died, they were buried literally under their beds.

So a hole would have been dug through this platform

and the body placed inside.

So literally these people were living,

sometimes 1O centimetres, 2O centimetres,

above their lost ones.

In some houses we found one, some houses have none,

but then other houses have, you know, 15.

The most we've found is something like 67 in one building.

(OMINOUS MUSIC)

The dead of Qatalhöyük were buried with great care.

The body is placed in a crouched position,

in a foetal position like this,

so they're quite tightly contained within the burial cut.

Bodies appeared as if ready for rebirth.

And they were given precious items to take into their new lite.

We find a range of beads,

stone, clay, shell and bone beads.

And these we might find

scattered in the burial around the neck area of a burial.

But burials aren't the only evidence emerging of early religious practice.

We are starting to get closer to our ancestors' gods.

(SERENE MUSIC)

(FAST PERCUSSION MUSIC)

In northern Israel, compelling evidence has been discovered

of this giant leap in religious thinking.

I mean, there was nothing special, just excavated,

then it came out, you see that it's a figurine

but it was covered with dirt and mud.

We didn't clean it cos if you start cleaning it

it interfered, you may destroyed it.

So it was taken, you know, as a big dirty lump of sediment

but you saw the general shape of a figurine.

It went to the lab, and only after the cleaning

it's turn out to be the most beautiful figurine ever found

in their culture.

We believe that this was a mother goddess figurine,

a kind of goddess that the entire tribe worship.

What is really very prominent are the eyes,

the eyes are usually 3 or 4 times bigger

than the usual eyes on human face,

so the eyes are very emphasised on our figurines.

So it's something not natural, it's supernatural.

Many more mother goddess figurines have been found in Sha'ar HaGolan.

They are vital evidence of a seismic shift in religious thought.

For the first time we can really talk about a kind of goddess

because this is the first time in human evolution

that you can see all the figurines are exactly the same.

In our site we have about 120 clay figurines.

They always has elongated head,

they have diagonal eye, very prominent eye,

they have nose, they have ear and earrings,

you can see the navel, you can see fat fold.

It was probably a central figure, a goddess,

which were worship by this community,

and everybody when he was thinking about this goddess

knew that she has this specific type of eyes and specific head

and there was probably whole mythology about it.

The people of Sha'ar HaGolan revolutionised religion.

They didn't perceive their mother goddess as the one God,

they were not monotheist,

but they were the first people in history

to create a uniform idea of God.

They were the first one to crystallise a concept

that we are worshipping a specific figure

and not everybody can do it as he wished.

You must do it in this way, there was right and wrong.

The idea of a uniform image of God

came hand-in-hand with the birth of organised established religion.

The establishment of central places of uniform worship

was one of the first steps in the long journey to civilisation.

As people gathered in ever greater numbers around their temples,

they built bigger and bigger communities to live in.

A process that began in the East

transformed the West and the rest of the world.

Today almost every part of the world has a place of worship -

churches, mosques, temples - at their heart.

That was the same in the world's first cities in Mesopotamia

when they began to emerge around 6000 years ago.

Mari in modern day Syria was one of the largest

and was built to a grand and deliberate plan.

A walled circular city, with the river Euphrates diverted through it

and at its heart a temple.

The temple and worship were central to life

in the first cities of Mesopotamia

and the organisation of religion

had a profound and lasting influence on society.

We have here in Mari the first signs of a real society,

or real organised society.

In the middle of the city you have the palace

and you have the temples around,

which is clearly the sign of a hierarchy.

You have the power, you have the religion

and it's on the top of this kind of pyramidal society.

Fabulous statues have been discovered in the temples of Mari.

They bring the religion of this ancient culture vividly back to life.

This is a statue of a worshipper.

It's a typical kind of a statue that we found in a temple in Mari.

They are typically bald,

the beard is often represented like this

and the eyes is also very typical.

You have this lapis lazuli disc inside shell

and the eyebrows are made of bitumen.

The hands are gathered on the chest,

which is a devotion, a sign of devotion.

And so most of the time they have an inscription

on the shoulder on the back, where he put his name.

Now we know who he is. His name is Shivune.

And this is the typical representation of worshipper.

Wealthy citizens commissioned statues of themselves

and placed them in specific temples

dedicated to particular gods and goddesses.

Each god has a specificity

and it depends on what you want, you will go to this god or that god.

This is why you put your statue inside a specific temple.

Gone was the idea oi a uniform image oi a goddess.

In Mari there was a whole host of gods and goddesses,

each looking very different, each with a particular role.

The gods and goddesses of Mari were worshipped across Mesopotamia.

They are amongst the first named gods in human history.

We know that there were many goddess and gods.

We know them by their myths,

there's a lot of history about those gods.

You have Ishtar, for instance,

she's the goddess of love and also the goddess of war.

You have the sun god, you have the god of the agriculture.

This Mesopotamian pantheon is the beginning

of all the other pantheon of gods

and we always have the main god, his wife,

and through the Greek, the Romans,

we have the exact same...

panel of gods.

The Parthenon -

the temple to Athena on the Acropolis in Athens -

survives as a fabulous reminder

of the enduring power of the ancient gods.

Many of the statues and friezes that once adorned the Parthenon

are now in the British Museum in London.

The Greeks thought the gods were like humans

but just a bit bigger, a bit brighter, a bit shinier.

Here you have Dionysus and Selene, the god of the moon,

and Aphrodite, the god of sexual love.

So although the Greek gods didn't always get on with one another-

they drank a lot, they had affairs with one another,

they had arguments the whole time -

but they were nonetheless godlike.

You have to realise that the ancient Greeks,

gods and demi-gods and spirits were everywhere in the world.

This was how they explained what was going on around them.

So when they saw the tides rise and fall,

when they saw the grain ripening in the fields,

they knew, they didn't think,

they knew that this was the power of a god or gods

who would make this all happen for them.

The whole ancient world's view of deity

was that there is one overall force

but it's manifested, that force,

it's not a personal force you would necessarily talk to.

It's manifested by all the powers of nature.

So the sky, the sea,

all the different phenomena of the world are respected.

It was seen as a positive thing, they're respected, they're honoured.

Let's honour the powers of the wind, of the sea.

The Romans adopted the Greek pantheon of Gods,

adapting their names.

Zeus became Jupiter,

Dionysus became Bacchus,

Aphrodite became Venus.

The Greeks and Romans had hundreds of gods,

one for every eventuality.

If you were sick or you were dying,

you needed health, you need prosperity,

you're going on a journey, you need guidance on your journey, safety.

It made sense to the Romans, to the Greeks,

to honour that specific deity

both in terms of effectiveness

because you're going right to the source

but also the sense of giving respect to that god

at that temple where those priests are concentrating

on this particular idea.

In some ways this meant it was very exhausting being a Greek

because you had to rush around

keeping all these various gods on side.

But it also meant you always had a chance of success.

So if Apollo hadn't heard your prayer

then maybe Aphrodite would.

And I think actually it encouraged men and women to be very tolerant.

So ii they had a visitor from Egypt, for instance,

they were quite ready to believe that that Egyptian

might bring an Egyptian god who also had power

and therefore became embraced as a new cult.

The many gods of the ancient world co-existed peacefully for millennia

until one man challenged the idea of polytheism.

Not Abraham,

but the ruler of one of the oldest civilisations of the ancient world -

Egypt.

Egypt was polytheist, a land that seemed full of gods.

At the top of the Egyptian pantheon

Ra the sun god headed a group of nine gods

known as the Great Ennead.

But 3500 years ago

Pharaoh Amenhotep launched a revolution in thinking.

Egypt's many gods and the idea of polytheism itself

were under attack.

As far as we can tell, Amenhotep is the first Egyptian

to be able to look critically at the religion of his own society,

to step outside it and to judge it.

And he seems to have judged it as being very largely empty.

Instead, he could see only a single god,

a single source of power,

which is what you can see up there in the sky, the sun,

and that's all that matters, that's all there was.

Amenhotep's revolutionary idea

was to dismiss Egypt's many gods

and worship just one - Aten the sun god.

He wanted to honour the immediate power of the sun

as it is after all the only source of non-terrestrial energy and power

that you can actually see, everything else is imagination.

And that seems to have been his drive towards simplicity.

Nothing matters except the immediacy of the experience of the sun

as it appears in the horizon and warms you

and brings, obviously brings life to everything.

Amenhotep's devotion to his new god

and his commitment to change Egypt's centuries-old polytheism

made him change his name.

He began his reign with the name Amenhotep,

a name that honours the traditional god of Thebes.

But the king changed his name to Akhenaten,

which honoured the disc of the sun, the Aten.

Akhenaten even built a whole new city to honour the one god

and moved his entire court there.

He called it Akhetaten, meaning “the horizon of the sun...

This is the mansion of the Aten,

one of the two main temples, places of worship.

In some respects, the temple was laid out quite traditionally.

It's a series of courtyards arranged along a central axis.

But what is most distinctive

is that there are no roofed buildings inside.

The courtyards are open to the sky because they're there

so you can appreciate and make offerings and prayers

to the visible disc of the sun.

The statement that Akhenaten is trying to make

is that God, the divine essence, is visible,

the power of the sun is up there

and it's there directly to be appreciated.

You don't need the elaborateness

of enclosed temples with their many statutes.

Akhenaten's devotion to one god

was quickly taken up by his royal entourage.

This is the tomb of one of the most powerful figures at the court.

His name is Aye,

he's the fan bearer on the right hand of the king,

and behind him is shown his wife, her name is Tey,

and they're both kneeling with their arms raised

in adoration to the rising sun

and above them comes the columns of hieroglyphs

of a long hymn, which is directed at the Aten.

It celebrates the rising of the Aten each day.

MAN: You created the earth by your will.

You alone existed.

You set every person in his place.

The Hymn of Aye is a remarkable statement of Akhenaten's monotheism.

For him there is only one god.

There's no reference to other gods. Akhenaten sweeps all that away.

There's no interest in the other forms of divinities

who you might imagine are actually parts of the sun.

So it's a great simplification.

They're not damned, they are just excluded.

Akhenaten died in 1336 BC

believing he'd changed religion in Egypt for ever.

But an archive of nearly 400 cuneiform tablets

discovered here in the 19th century

reveal his experiment with monotheism died with him.

When he died Egypt returned

to the traditional worship of Amun Ra at Thebes

and all the other many divinities of local places.

Akhenaten's son, Tutankhaten, meaning the living image of the Aten,

came to the throne.

During his short reign,

the worship of the Aten declined

and older gods like Amun were restored.

To recognise this reversal Tutankhaten changed his name...

to Tutankhamun,

the living image of Amun.

Egypt's brief experiment with monotheism was over.

Polytheism was too deeply rooted

in the religious culture of the ancient world

to be swept away so lightly.

The modern belief in one god, monotheism,

would have to overcome massive resistance if it were to succeed.

The idea of one true god

would have been an extraordinary and shocking idea.

Because how can you have just one god

when these men and women have known for thousands of years

that the world was inhabited by many spirits

and gods and demi-gods.

Would have been heart-stoppingly radical.

But monotheism wasn't finished.

The Middle East was still to play a central role

in the story of its growth.

The next radical transformation a short distance from Egypt

in Canaan.

Polytheism was deeply rooted in this part of the world

for many millennia.

Well, this in fact exemplifies the whole thing.

I am standing on the steps to the altar.

This altar was constructed in the third millennium BC,

early Bronze Age,

and it served the temple,

which is on the right-hand side and behind us.

Canaan was the Promised Land the Bible says God promised to Abraham

but scholars today look beyond the Bible

for evidence of Abraham's people, the early Israelites.

When we get to the formative period in Israelite history

archaeology is the queen of the battle

and archaeology is the centre

because archaeology provides you with real-time evidence.

If I take a spade now and in front of the camera,

you know, start excavating here,

in this same very moment I am into the real historical layer,

archaeological layer, whatever you wanna call it.

This is not the case with the Biblical text.

So we all need to remember that.

The excavations here in Megiddo in the centre of Canaan

seem to show that the early Israelites

continued to worship the same polytheistic gods

as the Canaanites.

When we we speak about the transition from Canaanite life,

let's say in the second millennium,

to Israelite in the late second

and beginning of the first millennium BC,

I think from the cultic point of view nothing happened.

There is continuity.

Other sites also point to the worship of many gods in this region.

7O kilometres away archaeologists are excavating Tel Hazor,

the ancient capital of Canaan.

It is the largest site in the country, more than 200 acres,

with a population of some 15-20,000 people,

which makes it comparable to Paris, London, New York of today.

It's a major site.

There is clear evidence here of the many gods of Canaan.

We are in a place of worship of the Canaanite period.

You can see first of all by the standing stones,

which were worshipped.

We have the names of the different gods and their functions

and this and that and the other, like Ado - he is the weather god -

was a very, very important god here at Hazor.

He was definitely not the only one. The god Sin was worshipped.

The moon god was worshipped, the god El was worshipped.

The Canaanites worshipped a pantheon of gods headed by El,

his wife Asherah and Baal.

And when the Israelites emerged in Canaan

they appear to have worshipped the same Canaanite gods.

The chief god of the Canaanites is called El,

so is called the chief god of the Israelites, is called El or Elohim.

There is no question that a lot of cult practices and ideas

were taken over.

The Bible confirms

that the Israelites worshipped these Canaanite gods.

The prophets keep complaining,

why are you worship this god, why are you worship Baal,

this, that and the other, you're not supposed to do it,

you're supposed to stay away from Canaanite,

you have to separate yourself from the Canaanite people

as well as the Canaanite religion and so on and so forth.

The early books of the Bible are full of the struggle

for the hearts and minds of the Israelites,

a battle between the old pagan Canaanite gods

and the one God who revealed himself as Yahweh.

(MAN READS IN HEBREW)

MAN READS IN ENGLISH: I am Yahweh, your God.

You shall have no other gods before me.

It's the first of the Ten Commandments

given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai.

So this is what we have in the time of Moses.

A commandment of worshipping the One

without negating the existence of the others.

The Israelites had Yahweh as their god

but they didn't yet conceive of him as the only god.

Despite the Commandments and the warnings of Moses and other prophets,

the Israelites still persisted with the worship of other gods,

including females...

This little clay figurine was found in my excavations in a site,

a large site in northern Israel south of the Lake of Galilee,

called Tel Rehov,

a place not mentioned in the Bible but yet it was a very important city

during the 10th and 9th and 8th centuries BC.

In the field, one of our volunteers just picked her up

and ran and showed it to me.

I was very pleased, you know, it's always a pleasure.

The figurine is nearly 2900 years old.

It's an example of thousands of female figurines

discovered throughout the region in the Israelite period.

She's holding here a young baby,

she's holding a baby.

So she is a mother, she's a mother goddess in this case.

We think that this is Asherah,

this is one the nice examples of this type of figurines

from around 900 BC

when Israelite religion was not yet completely monotheistic,

that's for sure.

The Israelites were still worshipping

the Canaanite goddess Asherah.

They imagined her as the wife of their god Yahweh.

We have, for example, inscriptions on jars

which say, “To Yahweh...

“and his Asherah."

Okay, so there is Yahweh and is you want to say, Mrs Yahweh, Asherah.

The Israelites worshipped many gods,

unlike what is more or less common belief

that all Israelites worshipped Yahweh.

So there is clear evidence

that Yahweh had to fight for a long time

and quite a fierce battle

until he was accepted as the one and only.

It took several centuries before the Israelites

finally embraced Yahweh as the one and only God.

And to make that happen needed a catastrophe.

(MEN SHOUT, WEAPONS CLASH)

2600 years ago

Jerusalem is attacked by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.

The city is sacked,

the House of Yahweh, the temple, is destroyed

and thousands of Jews are taken as slaves into exile.

Yahweh seemed defeated.

It was a theological catastrophe

because the simple fact was that the god of Israel

was defeated by the god of the Babylonians.

This was the way people looked at it at that time

and they had to explain what had happened.

They had either to yield and forget all about this

and be part of the Babylonian culture

or they had to come up with this, with an explanation.

In captivity in Babylon

the Israelites developed a revolutionary explanation

for the defeat of their god Yahweh.

And they came up with an amazing, you know, way of...

philosophical idea, explanation of what exactly had happened

and how it came about that the god of Israel

was supposedly defeated, but in fact he won, you know.

They say well, let's think about this.

The god of Israel is so powerful

that he is universal,

that he rules everything, that he decides everything,

that he sent the king of Babylonia.

The king of Babylonia was no more than a little pion

in the hands of the god of Israel to be sent to punish

the apostasy of the Israelites, no more than that.

The winning god wasn't the Babylonian god.

He was Yahweh, using the Babylonians to punish the Israelites.

So Yahweh is not just the Israelites' god,

he's the Babylonians' god, he's everyone's god.

An unknown prophet given the name Isaiah

created the first defining statement of monotheism

and changed the course of human history.

(MAN RECITES INDISTINCTLY IN HEBREW)

There is no other god besides me.

I am the creator of good and evil.

I am the creator of light and darkness.

There is no one beside me.

(MUSIC CLIMBS TO CRESCENDO)

it's absolutely a watershed moment in history.

There's a sense in terms of religion

that it's maybe the greatest idea,

if you judge greatest ideas

by the ideas that really had lasting impact.

The Persians under Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon

and allowed the Israelites to return to Jerusalem.

They took their new idea of one universal God back with them.

But the Jews didn't spread their brilliant new idea

to the rest of the world.

That was the work of another religion

built on the foundations of Judaism.

(Priests chant)

Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem.

The Church of the Nativity marks the spot

where it's believed he was born.

At the Jewish festival of Passover

Jesus came to preach in Jerusalem.

(Monk speaks in Latin through microphone)

Seen as a threat to the Roman peace,

he was arrested, tried and sentenced to death.

Today pilgrims still walk the route Jesus is supposed to have taken

to his crucifixion.

MAN: The Third Station. Here Jesus falls the first time.

(Crowd chants)

Here Jesus meets the holy women of Jerusalem.

A great crowd of people followed Him,

including women who beat their breasts and lamented over Him.

The route ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

the traditional site of his crucifixion and burial.

Weep for yourselves and for your children...

(Crowd sings) Hallelujah.

2000 years later, Christianity has two billion followers.

But how did the Christian version of monotheism

finally overcome polytheism

to be the largest religion in the world?

Jesus Christ himself didn't invent a world religion.

He lived a life and he was an exemplar of his faith.

It was others who came after him who developed his ideas,

the personal relationship

that he was said to have had with his father, God,

into a belief system, into a world faith.

Jesus didn't spread Christianity and monotheism.

That was the work of another man -

Saul of Tarsus.

Blinded by a vision of Jesus, then miraculously healed,

Saul took up the faith and changed his name to Paul.

(UPLIFTING MUSIC)

Paul believed that Jesus' message of spiritual renewal

should be preached to Jews and non-Jews - Gentiles.

Both could be baptised and follow Jesus.

What Paul says is, you know,

if Gentiles, non-Jews, have faith

in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,

and they believe in the Messiah, Jesus,

aren't they really children of Abraham in a spiritual sense?

Paul's missionary journeys took him from Syria to Cyprus

and Asia Minor to Greece.

So what he starts doing

is missionising, travelling,

first of all through Asia Minor or Turkey,

and he goes to little towns and villages.

He crosses over into Greece

and he preaches not to the Jews

or the syna... often he'll go to a synagogue

but he'll end up street-preaching or he'll rent a hall

like he does in one case, a kind of a school,

and people come to hear him give lectures.

Paul travelled to one of the greatest cities on earth.

Ephesus was the capital of Roman Asia,

the second largest city in the world.

Nearly half a million people lived here.

It was full of buildings

celebrating the many gods of the Greco-Roman world...

including the massive temple of Artemis.

If Paul could convert the Greek and Roman pagans of Ephesus

to Christianity

then the new religion could spread through the empire.

If you think about the achievement of Paul

and what he did in bringing Christianity to the world,

it's just staggering to think about it,

because when Paul lands

in every city are dozens and dozens of temples,

beautiful buildings, edifices

to all of these gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome and Egypt.

That's not gonna go away very easily.

Here in Ephesus, Paul and his fellow missionaries

wrote and preached the new Gospels of Christianity,

a religion distinct from its roots in Judaism

that would eventually take the idea of monotheism

beyond its Middle Eastern home.

Paul took the Christian message to Rome,

the capital of the empire and the heart of paganism.

Here Christians worshipped in secret

but soon Paul incurred the wrath of the pagan authorities.

Paul is believed to have been executed in Home

in the reign of the emperor Nero.

The Abbey of the Three Fountains

marks the spot where Paul was beheaded.

So this is really the spot.

That's, the pillar's commemorating the execution of Paul,

he was beheaded traditionally in this spot

and the pillar not necessarily marks where it happened

but as a commemoration that it was in this area.

And then the three fountains

where his head, according to the tale,

bounced and bounced and bounced again

and God gave kind of witness to his greatness.

(WATER SPLASHES)

Christianity continued to be a persecuted religion

in the Roman Empire.

Christians were regularly martyred

for their refusal to accept the Roman gods.

It would take another 250 years

and one final battle

for monotheism to triumph.

(URGENT MUSIC)

On this bridge where I'm standing, the Milvian Bridge,

this great battle took place.

It basically had to do with the control of Rome...

Who's going to be the next emperor?

But looking back on it, it really had to do

with what will be the future of the entire western world.

There's a sense in which you could say

monotheism hung in the balance on this bridge.

In the year 312

two armies met here outside Rome at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

On one side the army of Constantine,

the emperor of Rome's eastern provinces.

Opposing him, Maxentius, a usurper.

Maxentius's army was driven into the Tiber,

where Maxentius drowned.

In the great forum of Rome, Constantine erected a triumphal arch

as a symbol of his victory.

The following year, the new emperor proclaimed religious toleration

in the Roman Empire.

(CHRISTIAN CHORAL MUSIC)

7O years later

Christianity became the official religion of the Roman world.

It's the triumph of an idea, the belief in one God,

an idea that came from the Middle East

and now dominates the West.

It's also an idea that has been taken on by other religions.

In the next program we will discover

how a new monotheist religion, Islam,

embodied and adapted the faith of Abraham,

spreading at extraordinary speed across the Middle East and beyond.

(Sings) Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!

It's a continuation

of the Middle East's extraordinary influence on beliefs.

From the earliest beginnings in Göbekli Tepe...

through the evolution of the great pantheon of ancient gods

to the earliest experiences of monotheism...

right through to the world religions of today.

Subtitles © SBS Australia 2012