fantastic course and insight to Christianity

Excellent course, well delivered and really interesting stories with references throughout. This lecture has provided answers to many questions I had about Christianity in general.

4 people found this helpful

Very informative but loses momentum

Would you consider the audio edition of From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity to be better than the print version?

I have not read the print version but I suspect that some of the courses benefit from being in print

Would you be willing to try another book from The Great Courses? Why or why not?

Yes very much so and I already have many of them on my list

Any additional comments?

This course contains many fascinating insights into the early Christian community and is an ideal starting point for the amateur student of the early church. However, about three quarters of the way into the course the emphasis changed from the development of the Christian community in its social and economic context to a very detailed examination of the canon. While a detailed examination of proto-orthodoxy is doubtless essential it seemed to come at the expense of a detailed exposition of the philosophical and social needs that this new religion served in the context of the world that existed at the height of the Roman Empire. The final chapter provides a clumsy end point and I felt that there should have been 4 or 5 more lectures looking in greater detail and demographics and the dialogue between sophisticated pagan philosophies and Christianity,At the very end the speaker seemed to out himself as a person of faith and this seems to have created some blind spots and a certain sense of bias. As it happens I then started another course in this series entitled The fall of the Pagans and the Origins of Medieval Christianity By Professor Kenneth Hart and this latter series works as a perfect follow-on to this course. I highly recommend buying them together and listening to this one before Professor Hart's course.

6 people found this helpful

Easy to listen and learn

Really good set of lectures to listen and learn from will listen again soon. Will happily buy next in series.

1 person found this helpful

Knowledgable but skewed.

I have no doubt that the lecturer has many years of academic excellence behind him, many fine letters after his name, and many well researched and published books and papers, but... he couldn't help his malignant atheism from coloring his views and presenting what is essentially a skewed view of the early church.

His "one sided" presentation of Jesus Christ, and in particular The Apostle Paul, I thought were full of sweeping assumptions and generalities, backed up by woolly statements that began often with "Many academics..." and "Many scholars..." and completely ignored the other "many scholars and academics" who held equally valid, but opposing views to the lecturers own. In other words, plainly he wanted to present his own skewed views, independent of the whole body of evidence, and marshalled his unnamed "scholars and academics" accordingly.

If you have an open mind about church history (and by that I mean, a willingness to go where the evidence leads rather than starting from a preconceived position), then I wouldn't bother with this. I was just irritated by the continual attempt to undermine,"rubbish", and discredit all things Christian. I was disappointed that an apparent academic could be so skewed in his views.

2 people found this helpful