The Pokey Finger of God

Philip occupies a rather unusual corner of the canon. On the one hand, he’s one of the first people Jesus recruits[1] and he’s shown recruiting other apostles[2] as well as bringing the early Church to Samaria[3]. On the other hand, he’s very much a bit part: he does not appear as a significant actor in [...]

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The Rodney Stark book had a set of maps that easily decomposed into a chart of data that I have proudly appropriated as the basis for a much larger database. Admittedly, it was in the search for much of this data that I discovered Stark’s book, so he saved me a lot of time. I [...]

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First, two biographies on the emperor Constantine. Constantine the Great: The Man and his Times, by Michael Grant, and the ingeniously named Constantine the Great, by John Holland Smith. These are followed by a review of Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome, by Rodney Stark
Constantine
I [...]

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Probably the most difficult aspect of studying the origins of Christianity is that there is so much history to plow through. If you pick just one place, you can spend lifetimes exploring the peoples and families that had just been there over the centuries.
We know something about the peoples who lived in Mesopotamia in the [...]

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Fourth Century Christianity
The History Department of Wisconsin Lutheran College under the direction of Dr. Glen L. Thompson, presents a number of hard-to-find texts, insightful charts, and much relevant documentation regarding the first century of Roman Christianity.
Awesome stuff.

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The latest series of programs on the cable science channels about Christianity have been generally pretty good lately. The percentage of time I spend railing about how some antiquated dogma was being passed off as fact has gone down to about 20%, as opposed to the 75% I spent last season or two. Last night’s [...]

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Okay, so I’m a total geek, but I just found a translation of the complete writings of Flavius Josephus online. I’ve seen this stuff referenced almost as much as the bible itself, but I’ve never taken the time to actually look for it. Nifty.
If anyone has any references to the apostle Bartholomew descent from any [...]

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