Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
The Rise Of Christianity Through The Eyes Of Gibbon Harnack And Rodney Stark
Download The Rise Of Christianity Through The Eyes Of Gibbon Harnack And Rodney Stark full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Rise Of Christianity Through The Eyes Of Gibbon Harnack And Rodney Stark ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis The Rise of Christianity Through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark by : Jan N. Bremmer
Download or read book The Rise of Christianity Through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Barkhuis. This book was released on 2010 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of Christianity up to the victory of Constantine has often been studied and remains a puzzling phenomenon. In this valedictory lecture Jan N. Bremmer concentrates on the explanations adduced, focusing in particular on the works of three iconic figures from the last two hundred and fifty years: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of Edward Gibbon, the most famous ancient historian of all time, at the end of the eighteenth century; Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums of Adolf von Harnack, the greatest historian of early Christianity of all time, around 1900, and The Rise of Christianity of Rodney Stark, the most adventurous sociologist of religion of our times, at the end of the twentieth century.Bremmer locates their concerns and explanations within their own times, but also takes them seriously as scholars, discussing their analyses and approaches. In this way he shows both the continuities and the innovations in the evolving view which scholarship presents of early Christianity. Bremmer's exceptional knowledge of the huge range of scholarship and his humane and balanced judgment make this lecture the ideal introduction to the many problems raised by Christianity's displacement of paganism
Book Synopsis The Rise of Christianity Through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark by : Jan Nicolaas Bremmer
Download or read book The Rise of Christianity Through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark written by Jan Nicolaas Bremmer and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Rise of Christianity by : Rodney Stark
Download or read book The Rise of Christianity written by Rodney Stark and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1997-05-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "fresh, blunt, and highly persuasive account of how the West was won—for Jesus" (Newsweek) is now available in paperback. Stark's provocative report challenges conventional wisdom and finds that Christianity's astounding dominance of the Western world arose from its offer of a better, more secure way of life. "Compelling reading" (Library Journal) that is sure to "generate spirited argument" (Publishers Weekly), this account of Christianity's remarkable growth within the Roman Empire is the subject of much fanfare. "Anyone who has puzzled over Christianity's rise to dominance...must read it." says Yale University's Wayne A. Meeks, for The Rise of Christianity makes a compelling case for startling conclusions. Combining his expertise in social science with historical evidence, and his insight into contemporary religion's appeal, Stark finds that early Christianity attracted the privileged rather than the poor, that most early converts were women or marginalized Jews—and ultimately "that Christianity was a success because it proved those who joined it with a more appealing, more assuring, happier, and perhaps longer life" (Andrew M. Greeley, University of Chicago).
Book Synopsis The Triumph of Christianity by : Rodney Stark
Download or read book The Triumph of Christianity written by Rodney Stark and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrated religious and social historian Rodney Starktraces the extraordinary rise of Christianity through its most pivotal andcontroversial moments to offer fresh perspective on the history of the world’slargest religion. In The Triumph of Christianity, the author of God’sBattalions and The Rise of Christianity gathers and refines decadesof powerful research and discovery into one concentrated, concise, and highlyreadable volume that explores Christianity’s most crucial episodes. The uniqueformat of Triumph of Christianity allows Stark to avoid densechronologies and difficult back stories, bringing readers right to the heart ofChristian history’s most vital controversies and enduring lessons.
Download or read book Cities of God written by Rodney Stark and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the preaching of a peasant carpenter from Galilee spark a movement that would grow to include over two billion followers? Who listened to this "good news," and who ignored it? Where did Christianity spread, and how? Based on quantitative data and the latest scholarship, preeminent scholar and journalist Rodney Stark presents new and startling information about the rise of the early church, overturning many prevailing views of how Christianity grew through time to become the largest religion in the world. Drawing on both archaeological and historical evidence, Stark is able to provide hard statistical evidence on the religious life of the Roman Empire to discover the following facts that set conventional history on its head: Contrary to fictions such as The Da Vinci Code and the claims of some prominent scholars, Gnosticism was not a more sophisticated, more authentic form of Christianity, but really an unsuccessful effort to paganize Christianity. Paul was called the apostle to the Gentiles, but mostly he converted Jews. Paganism was not rapidly stamped out by state repression following the vision and conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 312 AD, but gradually disappeared as people abandoned the temples in response to the superior appeal of Christianity. The "oriental" faiths—such as those devoted to Isis, the Egyptian goddess of love and magic, and to Cybele, the fertility goddess of Asia Minor—actually prepared the way for the rapid spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire. Contrary to generations of historians, the Roman mystery cult of Mithraism posed no challenge to Christianity to become the new faith of the empire— it allowed no female members and attracted only soldiers. By analyzing concrete data, Stark is able to challenge the conventional wisdom about early Christianity offering the clearest picture ever of how this religion grew from its humble beginnings into the faith of more than one-third of the earth's population.
Book Synopsis Who Were the First Christians? by : Thomas Arthur Robinson
Download or read book Who Were the First Christians? written by Thomas Arthur Robinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the consensus view of the urban character of early Christianity Demonstrates that almost every scenario in reconstructing early Christian growth is mathematically improbable and in many case impossible unless a rural dimension of the Christian movement is factored in Points to the likelihood that the marginal and the rustic made up a larger part of its membership than is generally recognized.
Download or read book Words written by Ernst van den Hemel and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is said that words are like people: One can encounter them daily yet never come to know their true selves. This volume examines what words are—how they exist—in religious phenomena. Going beyond the common idea that language merely describes states of mind, beliefs, and intentions, the book looks at words in their performative and material specificity. The contributions in the volume develop the insight that our implicit assumptions about what language does guide the way we understand and experience religious phenomena. They also explore the possibility that insights about the particular status of religious utterances may in turn influence the way we think about words in our language.
Book Synopsis Resilient Faith by : Gerald L. Sittser
Download or read book Resilient Faith written by Gerald L. Sittser and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our Western, post-Christendom society, much of Christianity's cultural power, privilege, and influence has eroded. But all is not lost, says bestselling author Gerald Sittser. Although the church is concerned and sobered by this cultural shift, it is also curious and teachable. Sittser shows how the early church offers wisdom for responding creatively to the West's increasing secularization. The early Christian movement was surprisingly influential and successful in the Roman world, and so different from its two main rivals--traditional religion and Judaism--that Rome identified it as a "third way." Early Christians immersed themselves in the empire without significant accommodation to or isolation from the culture. They confessed Jesus as Lord and formed disciples accordingly, which helped the church grow in numbers and influence. Sittser explores how Christians today can learn from this third way and respond faithfully, creatively, and winsomely to a world that sees Christianity as largely obsolete. Each chapter introduces historical figures, ancient texts, practices, and institutions to explain and explore the third way of the Jesus movement, which, surprising everyone, changed the world.
Book Synopsis Christology in Mark's Gospel: Four Views by : J. R. Daniel Kirk
Download or read book Christology in Mark's Gospel: Four Views written by J. R. Daniel Kirk and published by Zondervan Academic. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gain Insights on Mark's Christology from Today's Leading Scholars The Gospel of Mark, widely assumed to be the earliest narrative of Jesus's life and the least explicit in terms of Christology, has long served as a worktable for the discovery of Christian origins and developing theologies. The past ten years of scholarship have seen an unprecedented shift toward an early, high Christology, the notion that very early in the history of the Jesus movement his followers worshipped him as God. Other studies have challenged this view, arguing that Mark's story is incomplete, intentionally ambiguous, or presents Jesus in entirely human terms. Christology in Mark's Gospel: Four Views brings together key voices in conversation in order to offer a clear entry point into early Christians' understanding of Jesus's identity: Sandra Huebenthal (Suspended Christology), Larry W. Hurtado (Mark's Presentation of Jesus; with rejoinder by Chris Keith), J. R. Daniel Kirk (Narrative Christology of a Suffering King), and Adam Winn (Jesus as the YHWH of Israel in the Gospel of Mark). Each author offers a robust presentation of their position, followed by lively interaction with the other contributors and one "last-word" rejoinder. The significance of this discussion is contextualized by the general editor Anthony Le Donne's introduction and summarized in the conclusion. The CriticalPoints Series offers rigorous and nuanced engagement between today's best scholars for advancing the scholarship of tomorrow. Like its older sibling, the CounterPoints Series, it provides a forum for comparison and critique of different positions, focusing on critical issues in today's Christian scholarship: in biblical studies, in theology, and in philosophy.
Book Synopsis Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine by : Terence L. Donaldson
Download or read book Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine written by Terence L. Donaldson and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally an ascribed identity that cast non-Jewish Christ-believers as an ethnic other, “gentile” soon evolved into a much more complex aspect of early Christian identity. Gentile Christian Identity from Cornelius to Constantine is a full historical account of this trajectory, showing how, in the context of “the parting of the ways,” the early church increasingly identified itself as a distinctly gentile and anti-Judaic entity, even as it also crafted itself as an alternative to the cosmopolitan project of the Roman Empire. This process of identity construction shaped Christianity’s legacy, paradoxically establishing it as both a counter-empire and a mimicker of Rome’s imperial ideology. Drawing on social identity theory and ethnography, Terence Donaldson offers an analysis of gentile Christianity that is thorough and highly relevant to today’s discourses surrounding identity, ethnicity, and Christian-Jewish relations. As Donaldson shows, a full understanding of the term “gentile” is key to understanding the modern Western world and the church as we know it.
Book Synopsis History and the Study of Religion by : Stanley Kent Stowers
Download or read book History and the Study of Religion written by Stanley Kent Stowers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is religion? How is religion constituted as a social entity? Is religion a useful category for historians, anthropologists, and sociologists? In History and the Study of Religion Stanley Stowers addresses these questions and discusses examples from ancient Greek, Roman, Judean and especially early Christian religion to illustrate a theory of religion as a social kind. He explains how ancient Mediterranean religion consisted of four sub-kinds: the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion, the religion of literate and literary experts, and the religion of literate experts with political power. Through these categories he shows how Christianity arose and succeeded.
Book Synopsis Reconceiving Religious Conflict by : Wendy Mayer
Download or read book Reconceiving Religious Conflict written by Wendy Mayer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconceiving Religious Conflict deconstructs instances of religious conflict within the formative centuries of Christianity, the first six centuries CE. It explores the theoretical foundations of religious conflict; the dynamics of religious conflict within the context of persecution and martyrdom; the social and moral intersections that undergird the phenomenon of religious conflict; and the relationship between religious conflict and religious identity. It is unique in that it does not solely focus on religious violence as it is physically manifested, but on religious conflict (and tolerance), looking too at dynamics of religious discourse and practice that often precede and accompany overt religious violence.
Book Synopsis The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by : Alan Kreider
Download or read book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church written by Alan Kreider and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why did the early church grow in the first four hundred years despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution? In this unique historical study, veteran scholar Alan Kreider delivers the fruit of a lifetime of study as he tells the amazing story of the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Challenging traditional understandings, Kreider contends the church grew because the virtue of patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians. They wrote about patience, not evangelism, and reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship, yet the church grew--not by specific strategies but by patient ferment.
Book Synopsis The Urban World and the First Christians by : Steve Walton
Download or read book The Urban World and the First Christians written by Steve Walton and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of The First Urban Christians by Wayne Meeks, this book explores the relationship between the earliest Christians and the city environment. Experts in classics, early Christianity, and human geography analyze the growth, development, and self-understanding of the early Christian movement in urban settings. The book's contributors first look at how the urban physical, cultural, and social environments of the ancient Mediterranean basin affected the ways in which early Christianity progressed. They then turn to how the earliest Christians thought and theologized in their engagement with cities. With a rich variety of expertise and scholarship, The Urban World and the First Christians is an important contribution to the understanding of early Christianity.
Book Synopsis Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity by : Jan N. Bremmer
Download or read book Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity written by Jan N. Bremmer and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, Jan N. Bremmer aims to bring together the worlds of early Christianity and those of ancient history and classical literature - worlds that still all too rarely interlock. Contextualising the life and literature of the early Christians in their Greco-Roman environment, he focusses on four areas. A first section looks at more general aspects of early Christianity: the name of the Christians, their religious and social capital, prophecy and the place of widows and upper-class women in the Christian movement. Second, the chronology and place of composition of the early apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and Pseudo-Clementines are newly determined by paying close attention to their doctrinal contents, but also, innovatively, to their onomastics and social vocabulary. The author also analyses the frequent use of magic in the Acts and explains the prominence of women by comparing the Acts to the Greek novel. Third, an investigation into the theme of the tours of hell suggests a new chronological order, shows that the Christian tours were indebted to both Greek and Jewish models, and illustrates that in the course of time the genre dropped a large part of its Jewish heritage. The fourth and final section concentrates on the most famous and intriguing report of an ancient martyrdom: the Passion of Perpetua. It pays special attention to the motivation and visions of Perpetua, which are analyzed not by taking recourse to modern theories such as psychoanalysis, but by looking to the world in which Perpetua lived, both Christian and pagan. It is only by seeing the early Christians in their ancient world that we might begin to understand them and their emerging communities. (Publisher's description).
Book Synopsis Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions by : Annelies Lannoy
Download or read book Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions written by Annelies Lannoy and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph studies the professionalization of History of religions as an academic discipline in late 19th and early 20th century France and Europe. Its common thread is the work of the French Modernist priest and later Professor of History of religions at the Collège de France, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), who participated in many of the most topical debates among French and international historians of religions. Unlike his well-studied Modernist theology, Loisy’s writings on comparative religion, and his rich interactions with famous scholars like F. Cumont, M. Mauss, or J.G. Frazer, remain largely unknown. This monograph is the first to paint a comprehensive picture of his career as a historian of religions before and after his excommunication in 1908. Through a contextual analysis of publications by Loisy and contemporaries, and a large corpus of private correspondence, it illuminates the scientification of the discipline between 1890-1920, and its deep entanglement with religion, politics, and society. Particular attention is also given to the role of national and transnational scholarly networks, and the way they controlled the theoretical and institutional frameworks for studying the history of religions.
Book Synopsis The Manichaean Church in Kellis by : Håkon Fiane Teigen
Download or read book The Manichaean Church in Kellis written by Håkon Fiane Teigen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Manichaean Church in Kellis presents an in-depth study of social organisation within the religious movement known as Manichaeism in Roman Egypt. In particular, it employs papyri from Kellis (Ismant el-Kharab), a village in the Dakhleh Oasis, to explore the socio-religious world of lay Manichaeans in the fourth century CE. Manichaeism has often been perceived as an elitist, esoteric religion. Challenging this view, Teigen draws on social network theory and cultural sociology, and engages with the study of lived ancient religion, in order to apprehend how laypeople in Kellis appropriated Manichaean identity and practice in their everyday lives. This perspective, he argues, not only provides a better understanding of Manichaeism: it also has wider implications for how we understand late antique ‘religion’ as a social phenomenon
