Part one: Beginnings. A trial ; The seedbed : Judaism in the first century AD ; Jesus before the Gospels ; Breaking away : the first Christianities ; What did Paul achieve? ; The letter to the Hebrews ; Fifty years on : the Gospel writers reflect on Jesus ; 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 ; Open borders : the overlapping worlds of Christians and Jews ; Was there a gnostic challenge? ; The idea of a church ; To compromise or reject : confronting the material world
Interlude one: the earliest Christian art
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 : Christian martyrs
The spread of Christian communities
Part three: The imperial church. The motives of Constantine ; Debating the nature of God ; The stifling of Christian diversity ; The assault on paganism ; 'No one is honoured before him' : the rise of the bishop
Interlude two: the art of imperial Christianity
An obsession with the flesh
The end of optimism : Augustine and the consequences of sin
Divine but human
The closing of the schools
A fragile church : Christianity and the collapse of the western empire
Faith, certainty, and the unknown God.
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A new history of early Christianity by Charles Freeman. ISBN 9780300125818. Published by Yale University Press in 2009. Publication and catalogue information, links to buy online and reader comments.
