early christianity

A new published volume of ancient papyri contains sayings, attributed to Jesus, that were previously unknown—including a dialogue with a disciple named Mary.

Walter Scheidel’s tour de force of world history is based almost entirely on counterfactuals.

How early Christians thought about bodies and how we do

Paula Fredriksen challenges popular assumptions about the first generation of Christians.

Gabriel Said Reynolds puts the two sacred texts into respectful, honest conversation.

The aqueduct. The roads. An enforced peace to allow a young faith to spread.

“One second-century pagan critic of Christianity was willing to tolerate everything else about Christians if they would only worship the gods.”

The "Fall of Rome...is not a historical event; it's more akin to a theological idea." So proclaims Douglas Boin, sacking the understanding of early Christian identity that has prevailed since at least the second century.

By the third century, the gesture of giving became miniaturized.

Chris Keith sets out to answer two questions. What lay at the heart of the conflict between Jesus and some of the religious authorities of his day? And how, if at all, did Jesus read Israel’s scriptures?

In The Sea and the Mirror, W.H. Auden audaciously wrote new poems in the voices of each character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, all set after the action of the play concludes. The result is a work both wonderfully reverent and plainly modern—you might even call it modern in its reverence.

I would have hoped that anyone presuming to put out a book called A New New Testament would borrow Auden’s approach and give us a genuine literary and theological invention.

When black theologians focused on nontraditional and extra-Christian sources, white theologians had an excuse to ignore them. Not anymore.