Dimensions
130 x 196 x 26mm
Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was a society full of gods. So how is it that Christianity came to predominate in this marketplace of competing religions? Why, in just three hundred years, did Christianity go from being an illegal minority faith to being the official religion of the Roman Empire?
Keith Hopkins' brilliant new book explains why Christianity triumphed, and challenges our perceptions about what the religion was really like in its early stages. There were numerous early Christianities, for example, and for orthodox Christians, heretics were at least as much trouble as Romans. It was heretics who first created a Christian "bible" out of Paul's letter and Luke's Gospel. The New Testament was a later imitation, its components gathered together only towards the end of the second century. Hopkins also argues that there were many Jesuses, as shown by the different ways he is portrayed in the Gospels.
