In The Triumph of Christianity, Bart Ehrman, a master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, shows how a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries. The Triumph of Christianity combines deep knowledge and meticulous research in an eye-opening, immensely readable narrative that...

Explores the early development of Christianity after Jesus's death, discussing such topics as leaders and opponents, ideas that survived, persecutions, and how the average Christian worshiped.

How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus's prophecy - "The Kingdom of God is at hand!" - they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians. In this electrifying social and intellectual...

"For many, the medieval world seems dark and foreign-a miraculous, brutal, and irrational time of superstition and strange relics. The pursuit of heretics, the Inquisition, the Crusades and the domination of the "Holy Land" come to mind. Yet the medieval world produced much that is part of our world today, including universities, the passion for Roman architecture and the emergence of the gothic style, pilgrimage, the emergence of capitalism, and...

The Bible is teeming with monsters. Giants tromp through the land of milk and honey; Leviathan swims through the wine-dark sea. A stunning array of peculiar creatures, mind-altering spirits, and supernatural hitmen fill the biblical heavens, jarring in both their strangeness and their propensity for violence--especially on God's behalf. Traditional interpretations of the creatures of the Bible have sanded down their sharp, unsavory edges, transforming...

"In Jesus Is Risen, #1 bestselling author David Limbaugh provides a riveting account of the birth of Christianity. Using the Book of Acts and six New Testament epistles as his guide, Limbaugh takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the sorrow and suffering, as well as the joys and triumphs, of the apostles and other key figures as Christianity bursts through the borders of Judea following the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ....