FROM JESUS TO CHRISTIANITY

The path from Jesus to Christianity is not as straight as we might think. Now for the first time L. Michael White one of the world's foremost scholars on the origins of Christianity provides the complete astonishing story of how Christianity grew from the personal vision of a humble Jewish peasant living in a remote province of the Roman Empire into the largest organized religion in the world.Many take for granted that the New Testament is a single book representing God's coherent unwavering word on Jesus and his church. A closer reading reveals not one story but many. The New Testament is a collection of books -- the result of a variety of influences on a number of faithful but very human visionaries preachers and storytellers. The texts contain a wealth of biographies histories novels letters sermons hymns church manuals and apocalypses providing a spectrum of views of Jesus his message and his movement.Given this diversity of people stories and drastically different points of view how did Christianity ever become what we know it as today? White draws on the most current scholarship to bring alive these ancient people and their debates showing in depth how their stories were formed into what the world has come to know as the New Testament.Rather than reading the New Testament straight through in its traditional order -- Matthew Mark Luke John and so on -- White takes a historical approach looking at the individual books in the sequence in which they were actually written. He explores what these books divulge about the disagreements shared values and unifying mission of the earliest Christian communities. White digs through layers of archaeological excavations sifts through buried fragments of largely unknown texts and examines historical sources to discover what we can know of Jesus and his early followers.It is this early hidden history that shaped Christianity as it grew from an errant messianic movement to a state religion and then into a world religion that has lasted for over two thousand years. White shows how the early debates spurred the evolution of Christianity as we know it. He delves into the arguments over how to understand Jesus as both human and divine the role of women in the church the diversity of beliefs among Christian communities the Gnostic influences and the political disputes that raged over which books would ultimately be included in the New Testament. Complete with illustrations photos charts and maps From Jesus to Christianity presents the fullest picture yet of the beginnings of what became the most popular religion on earth.