Silence: A Christian History. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allen Lane; 338 pages; £20. ON SUNDAY March 31st hundreds of millions of worshippers in the Christian West, including the new leaders of the Catholic and Anglican churches, will contemplate their founder's empty tomb: a mystery so great that according to one Gospel account, it left the women who came to anoint their Master's body dumbstruck with fear. Orthodox Christians, whose Paschal cycle falls much later this year, gathered on March 24th for an early Lent service that rejoices in the reinstatement, in 843AD, of icons as an instrument of worship after a century of conflict. Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford historian who is also a prolific broadcaster on Christianity, has new and interesting things to say about both these themes, among many others, in this enjoyable, intelligent meander through Jewish and Christian history, loosely held together by the theme of silence. For example, he thinks the oddly abrupt ending of the oldest version of Mark's Gospel (..."because they [the women at the empty tomb] were afraid") may have been deliberate, not an editorial mistake. Mark may have wanted silently to contrast the women's misplaced fear with the joy of the resurrection, of which his readers did not need reminding. The book attempts to wrap many ideas under one heading. But its coherence could not be anything but loose because it uses "silence" in at least half a dozen almost unrelated senses. The topics include the perceived silence of God, which at times so frustrated the Psalmist, David, and the varying ways, verbal and otherwise, in which the God of the Hebrew scriptures communicated. He said "let there be light" when creating the world, but at other times spoke only through angels, and whispered in a "still, small voice" (possibly a mistranslation) to the prophet Elijah. Also covered is the self-imposed silence of Christian ascetics in search of wordless truth, and the rules of silence that were imposed on Christian monks, not all of whom wanted to be great mystics. Then there is the self-interested silence of organised Christianity about aspects of its own history. Under this heading the author discusses Christian anti-Semitism, and the hypocrisy of the camp Anglo-Catholic culture which emerged in England in the 19th century. His own interest in silence, he candidly explains, began with his experience as a gay teenager, keenly aware of what could not be said and alert to "ambiguities and multiple meanings" in people's behaviour. By defining silence so very broadly, Sir Diarmaid gives himself permission to discuss literally any aspect of Judeo- Christian belief and practice in the six lectures which form the basis of this book. He is a gifted scholar and his ideas are always worth hearing, even when random. What holds the book together are his own sensibilities, which include an intense antipathy for "received" ways of thinking and for doctrines that were upheld with the panoply of ecclesiastical and secular power. In one of his definitions, silence simply means suppressing certain aspects of the past and emphasising or even inventing others - something that is common to many institutions, from families to empires. The author's dislike for the official version can drive him to embrace contrarian theories with more certainty than the evidence warrants. Take the official narrative of the triumph of icons, some 1,170 years ago, which casts the iconoclasts as villains who briefly threw the church off course because they were bad and misguided. The complete story, he insists, is that the central role of images was fully affirmed only because it had been challenged by the iconoclasts; and they, in turn, were responding to the rise of Islam, which seemed to combine military success with antipathy to representational sacred art. That linkage may be well founded, but it is impossible to prove. All that is known for certain is that the legitimacy of holy images was defended with great subtlety by a Christian Arab theologian, John of Damascus, who paradoxically benefited from Islam's protection while the Christian lands to the immediate west were under the control of those intent on destroying icons. Precise connections between geopolitical events and new theological developments provide a fascinating field for speculation, but they are very hard to prove or falsify. Sir Diarmaid's assumption is that Christian doctrine was bent and twisted, and that certain church fathers were airbrushed out of history and then posthumously half-rehabilitated, according to the dictates of imperial expediency. His approach explains part of the Christian narrative but not everything. He is entitled to challenge conventional ecclesiastical wisdom, but that does not mean his alternative theories are demonstrably true. There are issues of religious history (often to do with cause and effect) that can never be settled one way or the other. Various, intriguing possibilities exist, of course, and the rest is silence.