Draws on new scholarship and statistical information to challenge popular beliefs about early Christianity, addressing such topics as the purpose of Gnosticism, Paul's efforts to convert Jews, and the dissolution of paganism.

In The Triumph of Christianity, Bart Ehrman, a master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, shows how a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries. The Triumph of Christianity combines deep knowledge and meticulous research in an eye-opening, immensely readable narrative that...

"How did a community that was largely invisible in the first two centuries of its existence go on to remake the civilizations it inhabited, culturally, politically, and intellectually? Beginning with the life of Jesus, Robert Louis Wilken narrates the dramatic spread and development of Christianity over the first thousand years of its history. Moving through the formation of early institutions, practices, and beliefs to the transformations of the...

This publication of this revised edition of a masterwork by Princeton University's celebrated scholar of the late antiquity marks the book's tenth anniversary. A central volume in the Wiley-Blackwell series, The Making of Europe, the book has undergone a thorough redesign and includes a new preface covering academic developments in the last ten years, revised common opinions, a fully updated bibliography, and additional color images.

Looks at the history of the rise of Christianity as experienced by the adherents of the traditional religions of the ancient world who directly experienced the major disruptions brought about by the rise of what they viewed as an upstart cult.

"Flavius Claudius Julianus, or Julian the Apostate, ruled Rome as sole emperor for just a year and a half, from 361 to 363, but during that time he turned the world upside down. Although a nephew of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome, Julian fought to return Rome to the old gods who had led his ancestors to build their vast empire. As emperor, Julian set about reforming the administration, conquering new territories, and reviving...

"From the creative minds of the scholarly group behind the groundbreaking Jesus Seminar comes this provocative and eye-opening look at the roots of Christianity that offers a thoughtful reconsideration of the first two centuries of the Jesus movement, transforming our understanding of the religion and its early dissemination"--

A lost history revealing that, for centuries, Christianity's center was actually in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with significant communities extending as far as China.