Dimensions
165 x 240 x 38mm
Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire.
This book explores the emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire and challenges our perceptions about what the religion was really like in its early stages, about Jesus, and about the way history is written.
The triumph of Christianity is a tale of struggle, courage and religious obsession. It is also a story of religious innovations which have left their mark even on modern Christianity. Early Christianity, for example, was an illegal sect. Christians were persecuted and martyred, and died horrendous deaths. Martyrs became glorified saints of the Church, new intermediaries between believers and God. In the twentieth century more martyrs have been sanctified than in any previous century.
Hopkins shows that there were numerous early Christianities and not just one version of the religion. He also controversially argues that there were many Jesuses. The human Jesus of the early Gospel is quite different from the mystical Jesus of the Gospel of John, who again is different from the Jesus who teaches in the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas.
Revolutionising the way history is written, Hopkins intersperses conventional "objective" analysis with a TV drama about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the memoirs of two time-travellers sent back to Pompeii, and an invented correspondence between an ingenue Christian and his more sophisticated superior. This exceptionally original and exciting work of history enables you to imagine yourself back in, and to sharpen your own opinions about, a half-remembered world which was once full of harsh realities, dreams, demons and gods.
