A new history of early Christianity /

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Freeman, Charles, 1947-
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2009.
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Part one: Beginnings
  • A trial
  • The seedbed : Judaism in the first century AD
  • Jesus before the Gospels
  • Breaking away : the first Christianities
  • From history to myth, from Jesus to Christ : what did Paul achieve?
  • The letter to the Hebrews
  • Fifty years on the Jesus of the Gospels
  • John and the Jerusalem Christians
  • Creating a New Testament
  • No second coming : the search for stability
  • Part two: Becoming Christian
  • Toeholds in a wider empire : infiltrating Greek culture
  • Open borders : the overlapping worlds of Christians and Jews
  • Was there a gnostic challenge?
  • The idea of a church
  • To compromise or reject
  • Celsus confronts the Christians
  • The challenge of Greek philosophy
  • Origen and early Christian scholarship
  • New beginnings : the emergence of a Latin Christianity
  • Victims or volunteers : the problem of Christian martyrdom
  • The spread of Christian communities
  • Part three: The imperial church
  • The motives of Constantine
  • Debating the nature of God
  • Theodosius and the stifling of Christian diversity
  • The assault on paganism
  • 'No one is honoured before him' : the rise of the bishop
  • An obsession with desire : Jerome and the temptations of the flesh
  • The end of optimism : Augustine and the consequences of sin
  • Divine but human
  • The closing of the schools, Justinian and the silencing of debate
  • A fragile church : Christianity and the collapse of the western empire
  • Faith, certainty, and the unknown God.