100 books like Constantine's Sword

A well-written, well researched book by a prominent American archeologist and New Testament scholar that examines what we can now reliably know about the Jesus of history. Tabor carefully sifts through the conflicting evidence in the gospels, written 40-70 years after the death of Jesus, and illuminates his discussion with contemporary archeological finds. A paradigm changer in our search for the historical Jesus, not the Christ of faith.

If we only had Paul to rely on for our knowledge of Jesus’ life, all we’d know is that he was born, was Jewish, had brothers and died. Written by a British academic, The Mythmaker is a break-through book that shows how Paul created Christianity by developing a mythology/theology about the significance of the death of Jesus as a Christ. Maccoby’s thought is further developed in my book, How Jesus Became Christian (2008) that demonstrates how different Paul’s religion was from that of Jesus.

I don’t always agree with Bart Ehrman, but I do here. Forgeries, heresies, martyrs, even unfamiliar texts featuring women (who was Thecla and why was she hanging around with Paul?) contribute to an engaging read.

Whereas MacCulloch provides the “big picture” of Christian history, Ehrman targets the first centuries of Christianity—those centuries so critical to current debates about gender and lay roles in churches—to help us understand what we don’t understand about holy texts, especially ones that never made it into Christian Bible.

Ehrman takes us into the thought processes of early Church communities to help us see how Christians made decisions that shaped church policies relevant to gendered and lay leadership today.

According to the gospels, Jesus had 4 brothers – James, Jose, Simon, Judas – and at least two sisters (who are not named). What happened to these individuals after Jesus’ crucifixion? Butz explores the Jewish movement that stemmed from Jesus’ brother, James. James led Jesus’ followers from the time of Jesus’ death up until his own death in 62 CE. A leader who knew Jesus his whole life, James regarded Jesus as a Jewish teacher. He differed radically from Paul, who never met the Jesus of history. This book explores the original movement that originated from Jesus.

The historian Peter Brown is the great expert on the late Roman/early Christian era, and he writes like a scholarly poet. I don’t think anyone has done a better job of putting the lives and thoughts of Christian intellectuals and laypeople in the context of a Roman society experiencing convulsive, transformative change. This book will change your views of both Roman and Christian cultures. If you’re like me, it will lead you to read Brown’s other works, such as his epic 2012 study, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

In this lively and knowledgeable history of Christian controversies of the fifth century CE, Philip Jenkins produces a valuable and colorful sequel to the story told in When Jesus Became God. This book reveals what happened after the Council of Constantinople adopted a Trinitarian view of Jesus and Roman power shifted to the Byzantine East. The council “settled” the Arian controversy for the time being but generated an even more ferocious series of battles over Jesus’ divine/human nature and the relationship of Christianity to Greek thought. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Jenkins has a fine time showing how an admixture of imperial politics, Church politics, and theological ideas created “orthodox” Christian thought and practice. 

The year 381 marked the point at which the new Roman emperor, Theodosius, convened the Church council that outlawed Arianism and made Jesus’ role as God incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity, an essential part of Christian orthodoxy. For the historian Charles Freeman, this noxious combination of secular and ecclesiastical power stands as the origin of the development he described earlier in The Closing of the Western Mind (Anchor, 2005). Freeman’s analysis of the “Greek-ification” of Christian thinking is very sharp, and he tells the story of Theodosius well, even if he sometimes seems to be reading elements of modern dictatorial leadership back into that emperor’s character. A stimulating, provocative read. 

Sir Anthony Buzzard, the leader of a self-described “Biblical Unitarian” church, and co-author Charles F. Hunting have written a learned, strongly argued polemic against the Trinitarian doctrine that is still accepted by most believing Christians.  As a non-Christian, I do not take sides in the continuing debate over the relationship of the Son to the Father, but the debate does continue, and Sir Anthony’s book is a must for those interested in it.  It can be read usefully in conjunction with his later study, Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian (Restoration Fellowship, 2007).       

In From Enemy to Brother, John Connelly, observes, “If there was a neighbor needing a Good Samaritan in the 1930s it was the Jew, yet the day’s moral theology placed Jews on the lowest rung of the ‘hierarchy of love’: after family, after other Catholics, and after members of one’s nation and race.” Jews who converted to Christianity failed to advance much higher. As Connelly shows, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, some Catholic theologians taught that conversion did not immediately free Jews of their Jewish heritage. It could take generations before Christianity completely took hold. Catholic anti-Judaic deicide teaching, fueled by centuries of Christian antisemitism, bore and nourished such a negative outlook toward Jews. In the 1930s, Catholic theologians only had to take one step further to link their primitive view of Jews and Jewish converts to the prevailing National Socialist racial teaching. The result produced an… show more.

In the European Middle Ages—the millennium-long era in the West after antiquity and before the modern period—Christianity was the first and last authority for all sources of knowledge and forms of reasoning.  This important book shows in great detail how medieval Christian theology produced arguments and rationales that enabled racism against Jews during the centuries of the long medieval period.