No figure in the religious history of the West has been studied as intensely as Jesus of Nazareth, and no figure has given rise to so many incompatible portraits. The library holds the whole range of them. At one end…
Part 6. Early Christianity and the Empire
Part 6 opens with the historical-Jesus debate, from Dunn's "Jesus remembered" to the mythicists, Atwill, Heisman and Keshe. It follows James and the Jerusalem community, Paul, the making of the canon and the persecutions together with the dispute over their scale. The apologists and their pagan critics come next.
Chapters 48–57
- The Quest for the Historical Jesus: Sources, Methods and the Mythicist Challenge
- James, Peter and the Jerusalem Community: Jewish Christians and the Ebionites
- Paul and the Gentile Mission: The "Second Founder" of Christianity
- Gospels, Gnostics and Marcion: The Making of the Canon
- Persecution and Martyrdom: From Nero to Diocletian
- Apologists and Church Fathers: Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and the Pagan Critics
- Constantine: Vision, Edict and the Imperial Church
- Nicaea and the Arian Controversy: Defining God by Council
- Theodosius and the Christian State: Edicts, Temples, Hypatia and the End of Paganism
- Christological Councils and the Oriental Churches: Ephesus, Chalcedon and the Great Schisms of the East
Chapter 49. James, Peter and the Jerusalem Community: Jewish Christians and the Ebionites
The first followers of Jesus after his death did not see themselves as founders of a new religion. They formed a group in Jerusalem that kept the Temple, the Torah and the hope of Israel’s restoration. Peter led it at…
Chapter 50. Paul and the Gentile Mission: The “Second Founder” of Christianity
If the Jerusalem community of James was a messianic sect inside Judaism, Paul of Tarsus is the figure most often credited, or blamed, with turning it into a universal religion. He was a zealous Pharisee who persecuted the new sect,…
Chapter 51. Gospels, Gnostics and Marcion: The Making of the Canon
The New Testament did not arrive as a finished book. For roughly three centuries after Jesus’ death, Christian communities read, copied, revised and argued over a large and growing body of writings: the four gospels that later became canonical, sayings…
Chapter 52. Persecution and Martyrdom: From Nero to Diocletian
Between the fire of Rome in 64 and the Edict of Serdica in 311, the Roman state and the Christian communities went through cycles of indifference, local violence, legal procedure and, at three points, empire-wide coercion. How this history is…
Chapter 53. Apologists and Church Fathers: Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen and the Pagan Critics
While magistrates questioned Christians and mobs attacked them, a small number of educated converts took the faith’s case to the empire in writing. In the second and third centuries the “apologists” and the first great Fathers argued that Christianity was…
Chapter 54. Constantine: Vision, Edict and the Imperial Church
Between the battle at the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 and his death in May 337, Constantine moved Christianity from a persecuted minority cult to the patronised religion of the emperor. The sources for this change are uneven. The…
Chapter 55. Nicaea and the Arian Controversy: Defining God by Council
The first great doctrinal war of the imperial church began as a quarrel among the clergy of Alexandria. It was taken up by an emperor who called it a trifle, and it was settled, in the short term, by a…
Chapter 56. Theodosius and the Christian State: Edicts, Temples, Hypatia and the End of Paganism
Constantine had made Christianity the emperor’s religion. Theodosius I (379-395) made it the religion every subject was required to profess. Within about fifteen years came an edict defining orthodoxy for “all the various nations” of the empire, laws forbidding sacrifice…
Chapter 57. Christological Councils and the Oriental Churches: Ephesus, Chalcedon and the Great Schisms of the East
Once Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) had settled that the Son is fully God, the fifth century faced the next question: how do the divine and the human belong together in the one Christ? The quarrel began over a title…