The Pokey Finger of God

Since discovery of PRF Brown’s site[1], I have burned a good many hours both reading and thinking. It’s clear that the “Eusebian Fiction Postulate”[2] has forced me to re-examine what I thought I understood about early church history. I have been relatively pleased, so far, to find that it seems to make more sense, given [...]

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I just got pointed to P.R.F. Brown’s amazing site. He has posted quite a bit of research to his site — including a few projects I had started myself and am right glad I don’t have to finish them, now, like the list of all known writers in the ancient Western world, categorized and dated. [...]

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I was looking to see what content wiki had on early Christianity, when I found a link to a digital version of papers written by Martin Luther King, Jr, when he was in divinity school. Most immediately, I’ve enjoyed his study of Mithraism and his paper on Mystery Religions in Christianity. It is at this [...]

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I mentioned Dungan’s Constantine’s Bible the other day before I had finished reading it. I fear that I made it sound like a lame book, and I’m glad I didn’t let my waning enthusiasm sour me on it before I was done. Dungan didn’t go on and on about Eusebius like I had expected. Instead, [...]

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Yes, another book. David Dungan’s Constantine’s Bible has an amazing reach, starting from the beginnings of civilization, through the development of Greek philosophy and its distribution through the ancient East. Only a third of the way through, but I’m pretty sure I know how this one ends. Actually, I’m having such a severe case of [...]

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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 [...]

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This whole Constantine series has been riddled with errors, and the more I re-read them, the more problems I find. In this first one, I totally trash the Roman Emperors portion of the quiz. 1. Big C was the last Tetrarch of the Roman Empire In a sense, he was never really an official Tetrarch, [...]

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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 [...]

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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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