This major work draws on current archaeological and textual research to trace the spread of Christianity in the first millennium. William Tabbernee, an internationally renowned scholar of the history of Christianity, has assembled a team of expert historians to survey the diverse forms of early Christianity as it spread across centuries, cultures, and continents.Organized according to geographical areas of the late antique world, this book examines what various regions looked like ...

Death and rebirth was of vital importance to early Christians in late antiquity. In late antiquity, death was all encompassing. Mortality rates were high, plague and disease in urban areas struck at will, and one lived on the knife’s edge regarding one’s health. Religion filled a crucial role in this environment, offering an option for those who sought cure and comfort. Following death, the inhumed were memorialized, providing solace to family members through sculpture, painting, and epigr...

Katharina von Bora. Defiant and determined, refusing to be intimidated. . . In many ways, it was this astonishing woman (not even her husband, Martin Luther, could stop her) who set the tone of the Reformation movement.In this compelling historical account of a woman who was an indispensable figure of the German Reformation—who was by turns vilified, satirized, idolized, and fictionalized by contemporaries and commentators—you can make her acquaintance and discover how Kath...

Whether Jesus was really the Son of God or not is a central question for Christians—and one that has provoked heated debate since the time of Jesus' birth. Dean L. Overman examines the earliest Christian records to build a compelling case for the divinity of Jesus. Addressing questions raised by books such as Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, Overman builds a carefully reasoned case for Jesus truly being the Son of God.

On its release, the seven volume A Peoples History of Christianity was lauded for its commitment to raising awareness of the ways in which ordinary Christians have lived throughout more than twenty centuries of Christian History. Now, the essential material from that important project is available for classroom use.This volume contains careful selections and abridgements of the original content organized to fit ideally into a course in Christian history. It provides a valuable over...

The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England -and also traces newer traditions that emerged downstream in oth...

The twenty-third Psalm seems to break in two at the end of the fourth verse. The first four verses clearly reflect a pastoral scene; the fifth appears to carry us off, without warning, to very different associations. This, however, is only in appearance. The last two verses are as pastoral as the first four. If these show us the shepherd with his sheep upon the pasture, those follow him, shepherd still, to where in his tent he dispenses the desert's hospitality to some poor fugitive from b...

With the spread of Christ's teaching carried by the far-travelled Apostles, the minds of men and women were touched with a great faith, their thoughts were absorbed with visions of heaven and holy life on earth. Many gave up earthly desires and ways and devoted themselves to meditation on sacred things and to zealous missions and pilgrimages. In thought and feeling they lived in a region of their own, difficult now to conceive in its perfect unworldliness.Their clear belief in a he...

The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto was one of the most widely read and disseminated Greek hagiographic texts during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. To this day it remains, alongside Athanasius' Life of Antony, one of the core primary sources for fourth-century Egyptian monasticism as well as one of the most fascinating, yet perplexing, pieces of monastic hagiography to survive from the entire patristic period. However, until now it has not received the intensive...

Paul and the Gentile Problem provides a new explanation for the apostle Paul's statements about the Jewish law in his letters to the Romans and Galatians. Paul's arguments against circumcision and the law in Romans 2 and his reading of Genesis 15-21 in Galatians 4:21-31 belong within a stream of Jewish thinking which rejected the possibility that gentiles could undergo circumcision and adopt the Jewish law, thereby becoming Jews. Paul opposes this solution to the gentile problem b...

The book is an English translation of an award winning German book. The history of social and religious encounter in 18th century South India is narrated through fascinating biographies and day to day lives of Indian workers in the Tranquebar Mission (1706-1845). The book challenges the notion that Christianity in colonial India was basically imposed from the outside. Liebau maintains that significant contributions were made by the local converts and mission co-workers who played an import...