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Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years
How, over the course of five centuries, one particular god and one particular Christianity came to dominate late Roman imperial politics and piety
The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Christianity—or rather, of early Christianities—through five centuries of Empire, mapping its pathways from the hills of Judea to the halls of Rome and Constantinople. It is a story with a sprawling cast of not only theologians, bishops, and emperors, but also gods and demons, angels and magicians, astrologers and ascetics, saints and heretics, aristocratic patrons and millenarian enthusiasts. All played their part in the development of what became and remains an energetically diverse biblical religion.
The New Testament, as we know it, represents only a small selection of the many gospels, letters, acts of apostles, and revelations that circulated before the establishment of the imperial church. It tells how the gospel passed from Jesus, to the apostles, thence to Paul. But by using our peripheral vision, by looking to noncanonical and paracanonical texts, by availing ourselves of information derived from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology, we can see a different, richer, much less linear story emerging. Fredriksen brings together these many sources to reconstruct the lively interactions of pagans, Jews, and Christians, tracing the conversions of Christianity from an energetic form of Jewish messianism to an arm of the late Roman state.
The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Christianity—or rather, of early Christianities—through five centuries of Empire, mapping its pathways from the hills of Judea to the halls of Rome and Constantinople. It is a story with a sprawling cast of not only theologians, bishops, and emperors, but also gods and demons, angels and magicians, astrologers and ascetics, saints and heretics, aristocratic patrons and millenarian enthusiasts. All played their part in the development of what became and remains an energetically diverse biblical religion.
The New Testament, as we know it, represents only a small selection of the many gospels, letters, acts of apostles, and revelations that circulated before the establishment of the imperial church. It tells how the gospel passed from Jesus, to the apostles, thence to Paul. But by using our peripheral vision, by looking to noncanonical and paracanonical texts, by availing ourselves of information derived from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology, we can see a different, richer, much less linear story emerging. Fredriksen brings together these many sources to reconstruct the lively interactions of pagans, Jews, and Christians, tracing the conversions of Christianity from an energetic form of Jewish messianism to an arm of the late Roman state.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published October 15, 2024
About the author
Paula Fredriksen
25 books110 followersPaula Fredriksen, the Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University, since 2009 has been Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she also holds two honorary doctorates in theology and religious studies. She has published widely on the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity, and on pagan-Jewish-Christian relations in the Roman Empire. Author of Augustine on Romans (1982) and From Jesus to Christ (1988; 2000), her Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, won a 1999 National Jewish Book Award. More recently, she has explored the development of Christian anti-Judaism, and Augustine’s singular response to it, in Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (2010); and has investigated the shifting conceptions of God and of humanity in Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012). Her latest study, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (2017), places Paul’s Jewish messianic message to gentiles within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean culture.
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February 21, 2025This was a fascinating, accessible read about the first five hundred years of Christianity, or as the author says, Christianities, plural, because the main takeaway is how very diverse, fractured, contentious, and fluid the religion was during its formative centuries. One might argue, indeed, that this has never changed. As much as Christians like to think of a universal faith with literally true scripture that has not changed (and I was raised a Christian), the history of the church and the history of its texts tells a very different story -- one that is, I think, more interesting and colorful!
Fredricksen considers the development of these Christianities in thematic chapters, rather than using a chronological approach, and this makes for good reading. As someone who has made a career writing about ancient mythologies, I was especially interested in the interplay between early Christian beliefs and those of other religions -- Judaism, of course, but also the polytheism that was a foundational part of the Roman Empire. How did such a vast, syncretic society become solely Christian, or did it?
Fredicksen makes some interesting points. She argues that non-Christian people who lived during those five centuries would not have recognized themselves as 'pagan,' nor did they identify as such. Pagans "pagani" was a term later applied to them by Christians, in an effort to distinguish believers from non-believers. The term originally just meant the people of a particular place, like the Italian 'paeasani,' especially a rural area, as opposed to Christians who tended to be urban dwellers.
The "pagans" of Ancient Rome made no distinction between religion and politics. Religion was an important part of keeping the state healthy and functioning with the blessing of the gods. The only question was how to make sure religious rites were done in a way that supported society -- religio, versus superstitio.
Fredicksen similarly argues that many Christians of that time saw no contradiction between making offerings to the emperor's cult / following the laws of Rome and their Christian beliefs, as much as these practices made the bishops and church fathers want to pull their hair out.
The book offers a good reminder that the early writings of Christianity that have come down to us were written, read and studied by a very small, highly educated elite. Most Christians had neither the time nor the education to follow all the esoteric arguments about how divine Christ was, or the exact nature of the Trinity, or whether the resurrection would be in a spiritual body or a fleshly body. Most Christians, like most other Romans, were too busy just trying to feed themselves and their families. Christianity might appeal to them because it promised salvation in the long term, and community and charitable support in the short term, but the finer points of heresy/orthodoxy were too esoteric for them to care much about.
I was particularly struck by the chapter on magic. Frediksen suggests that many Christians didn't see any problem with using magic amulets, spells, charms, etc. They simply used established polytheistic formulas for such things while substituting names of saints, and of course Christ, for other gods. Magic was a neutral concept -- a form of communication with the forces of the supernatural world -- that was widely accepted and considered effective, even essential, to living in harmony with the world. The church fathers did not approve, but the church fathers were mostly writing for each other, vying with other bishops for power and influence, and especially the patronage of the emperor, after Constantine. Their arguments and battles about schisms and orthodoxy were acted out on a 'high register,' while the vast majority of Christians lived and believed on a 'low register.' If magic charms could heal -- and almost all Romans believed they could -- why not created a magic charm in the name of Jesus?
Another good reminder for me was the nature of scripture itself, and how many difficulties there are when we talk about scripture as the "literal word of God" in the Christian faith.
Here's one example Fredricksen uses to illustrate the point. One passage in Paul's letter to the Romans 9.5, rendered in English, could read (Fredricksen's translation):
“of their people [meaning Paul’s fellow Jews] according to the flesh is the Christ. God, who is over all, be blessed forever!”
Or it could read:
“of their people according to the flesh is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever!”
As Fredricksen says: "The English translation depends on how the sentence is punctuated, with or without a full stop after 'Christ.' On this issue, there are several things to bear in mind. The first is that Paul’s original letter had neither punctuation nor even space between the letters. Modern readers are the ones whose punctuation shapes Paul’s sentences."
A small thing? Perhaps, but it is the difference between saying that Christ is a man of flesh, or saying that Christ's flesh is a fully divine part of God. All because of punctuation that did not exist in the original text. Religious wars have been fought over less, and *were* fought over less.
The book did not really change my admiration for the teachings of Jesus, as far as we know them in the ways they have come down to us. I have always considered the spirit of his message to be noble, good and worthy of emulation. But it did help me appreciate how woefully short human beings have always been in living up to those ideals, how quickly we turn to squabbling and battling and putting each other into factions of 'us' versus 'them' while professing to be the 'true' Christians, and how much space there is between the Christian philosophers who try to insist on orthodox doctrine and the vast majority of people in Christianity, who are just trying to survive the challenges of human life without worrying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Fredricksen considers the development of these Christianities in thematic chapters, rather than using a chronological approach, and this makes for good reading. As someone who has made a career writing about ancient mythologies, I was especially interested in the interplay between early Christian beliefs and those of other religions -- Judaism, of course, but also the polytheism that was a foundational part of the Roman Empire. How did such a vast, syncretic society become solely Christian, or did it?
Fredicksen makes some interesting points. She argues that non-Christian people who lived during those five centuries would not have recognized themselves as 'pagan,' nor did they identify as such. Pagans "pagani" was a term later applied to them by Christians, in an effort to distinguish believers from non-believers. The term originally just meant the people of a particular place, like the Italian 'paeasani,' especially a rural area, as opposed to Christians who tended to be urban dwellers.
The "pagans" of Ancient Rome made no distinction between religion and politics. Religion was an important part of keeping the state healthy and functioning with the blessing of the gods. The only question was how to make sure religious rites were done in a way that supported society -- religio, versus superstitio.
Fredicksen similarly argues that many Christians of that time saw no contradiction between making offerings to the emperor's cult / following the laws of Rome and their Christian beliefs, as much as these practices made the bishops and church fathers want to pull their hair out.
The book offers a good reminder that the early writings of Christianity that have come down to us were written, read and studied by a very small, highly educated elite. Most Christians had neither the time nor the education to follow all the esoteric arguments about how divine Christ was, or the exact nature of the Trinity, or whether the resurrection would be in a spiritual body or a fleshly body. Most Christians, like most other Romans, were too busy just trying to feed themselves and their families. Christianity might appeal to them because it promised salvation in the long term, and community and charitable support in the short term, but the finer points of heresy/orthodoxy were too esoteric for them to care much about.
I was particularly struck by the chapter on magic. Frediksen suggests that many Christians didn't see any problem with using magic amulets, spells, charms, etc. They simply used established polytheistic formulas for such things while substituting names of saints, and of course Christ, for other gods. Magic was a neutral concept -- a form of communication with the forces of the supernatural world -- that was widely accepted and considered effective, even essential, to living in harmony with the world. The church fathers did not approve, but the church fathers were mostly writing for each other, vying with other bishops for power and influence, and especially the patronage of the emperor, after Constantine. Their arguments and battles about schisms and orthodoxy were acted out on a 'high register,' while the vast majority of Christians lived and believed on a 'low register.' If magic charms could heal -- and almost all Romans believed they could -- why not created a magic charm in the name of Jesus?
Another good reminder for me was the nature of scripture itself, and how many difficulties there are when we talk about scripture as the "literal word of God" in the Christian faith.
Here's one example Fredricksen uses to illustrate the point. One passage in Paul's letter to the Romans 9.5, rendered in English, could read (Fredricksen's translation):
“of their people [meaning Paul’s fellow Jews] according to the flesh is the Christ. God, who is over all, be blessed forever!”
Or it could read:
“of their people according to the flesh is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever!”
As Fredricksen says: "The English translation depends on how the sentence is punctuated, with or without a full stop after 'Christ.' On this issue, there are several things to bear in mind. The first is that Paul’s original letter had neither punctuation nor even space between the letters. Modern readers are the ones whose punctuation shapes Paul’s sentences."
A small thing? Perhaps, but it is the difference between saying that Christ is a man of flesh, or saying that Christ's flesh is a fully divine part of God. All because of punctuation that did not exist in the original text. Religious wars have been fought over less, and *were* fought over less.
The book did not really change my admiration for the teachings of Jesus, as far as we know them in the ways they have come down to us. I have always considered the spirit of his message to be noble, good and worthy of emulation. But it did help me appreciate how woefully short human beings have always been in living up to those ideals, how quickly we turn to squabbling and battling and putting each other into factions of 'us' versus 'them' while professing to be the 'true' Christians, and how much space there is between the Christian philosophers who try to insist on orthodox doctrine and the vast majority of people in Christianity, who are just trying to survive the challenges of human life without worrying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
September 9, 2025
Paula Fredriksen, the Aurelio Professor of Scripture Emerita at Boston University, is best known for her books on the Apostle Paul and Saint Augustine. In “Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years,” (Princeton University Press, 2024) she takes up the question of how Christianity – born into a highly competitive environment of Mediterranean religious pluralism and Roman imperial power – became a theologically cohesive set of beliefs that we recognize today. She’s particularly good at showing how religious change doesn’t always happen in a neat, linear way. Sometimes it’s a messy confluence of factors like (in the case of the early Christianities in question) Christianity’s Jewish roots, themes of martyrdom and persecution, asceticism, the multiplicity of theological viewpoints within early Christian tradition, the Christianization of pagan traditions, and the formidable exercise of imperial state power that take turns shaping the unique Christianity that emerged in around 500 A.D. and began the early Middle Ages.
Reading in our balkanized way about ancient cultures (the Greeks here, the Romans here, et cetera), it’s easy to lose sight of how intensely metropolitan and culturally diverse the first-century Mediterranean world was. Cities, ethnicities, and languages were porous and constantly shifting, just as they are today. “Pagan,” a word that we effortlessly throw around to denote a certain Greco-Roman religious identity, would have been a completely foreign concept. Similarly, the word “heresy” is meaningless in a time when Christianity is still actively working out canon formation and “right” thinking. Consequently, she avoids use of the word “heresy” altogether and adopts the word “Christianities” to describe the various traditions that lived aside one another that all claimed inspiration from Christ. To showcase the competing Christianities of the time, she examines Montanus, Valentinus, and Marcion, all of whom would eventually be pushed out of the emergent Christian proto-orthodoxy and labeled “heretics.”
The most fascinating part of the book is the consideration of Roman imperial power in the formation of early Christian identities. For everyone under Roman rule, worship was a matter of state concern. In fact, Christian persecution reached its height in the decades after it was formally adopted by Constantine – mostly as a way of weeding out ideas that didn’t concur with imperial versions of eschatology and Christology. It wasn’t until the Council of Nicaea in 325 that it was finally agreed upon that Christ was both fully human and fully divine simultaneously (homooousia in Greek), a position totally at odds with the competing position of Arianism that suggested the Son was a created being, subordinate to God the Father. Because Church authority bled into imperial authority, divisions in theology meant state weakness and possible fracture. This is one of the reasons why Manichaeism – the sect to which Saint Augustine belonged throughout his twenties – was attacked as a Persian threat to Roman power.
Lest we think Christianity has stopped changing, we should take a historical perspective that spans more than just a generation or two. The Great Schism of 1054 that split the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches – when Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius excommunicated one another – stayed on the books for over nine centuries. It was only undone in 1965 – well within living memory – when they lifted their mutual anathemas against one another and reconciled. The Church and its theology are organic, dynamic concerns because the people who practice the faith change. The great strength of Fredriksen’s book is how she deftly handles such subtle, shifting questions over five centuries in a way that may send you running to Google to learn about the Filioque controversy despite your better judgment.
This is a stand-out book that hits all the high points of early Christian history while also doing the reader the favor of broadening the scope out to more than just a history of theological ideas. Sociology, culture, identity, coercive state power, and ideologically driven human politicking are all given their due in a book approachable for both the non-specialist reader and someone who already has a background in the subject. She’s not breaking any new ground here (she knows that), but the ease, readability, and insight of presentation Fredriksen brings to this book makes me even more eager to rush to her backlist to see what I’ve missed.
Reading in our balkanized way about ancient cultures (the Greeks here, the Romans here, et cetera), it’s easy to lose sight of how intensely metropolitan and culturally diverse the first-century Mediterranean world was. Cities, ethnicities, and languages were porous and constantly shifting, just as they are today. “Pagan,” a word that we effortlessly throw around to denote a certain Greco-Roman religious identity, would have been a completely foreign concept. Similarly, the word “heresy” is meaningless in a time when Christianity is still actively working out canon formation and “right” thinking. Consequently, she avoids use of the word “heresy” altogether and adopts the word “Christianities” to describe the various traditions that lived aside one another that all claimed inspiration from Christ. To showcase the competing Christianities of the time, she examines Montanus, Valentinus, and Marcion, all of whom would eventually be pushed out of the emergent Christian proto-orthodoxy and labeled “heretics.”
The most fascinating part of the book is the consideration of Roman imperial power in the formation of early Christian identities. For everyone under Roman rule, worship was a matter of state concern. In fact, Christian persecution reached its height in the decades after it was formally adopted by Constantine – mostly as a way of weeding out ideas that didn’t concur with imperial versions of eschatology and Christology. It wasn’t until the Council of Nicaea in 325 that it was finally agreed upon that Christ was both fully human and fully divine simultaneously (homooousia in Greek), a position totally at odds with the competing position of Arianism that suggested the Son was a created being, subordinate to God the Father. Because Church authority bled into imperial authority, divisions in theology meant state weakness and possible fracture. This is one of the reasons why Manichaeism – the sect to which Saint Augustine belonged throughout his twenties – was attacked as a Persian threat to Roman power.
Lest we think Christianity has stopped changing, we should take a historical perspective that spans more than just a generation or two. The Great Schism of 1054 that split the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches – when Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius excommunicated one another – stayed on the books for over nine centuries. It was only undone in 1965 – well within living memory – when they lifted their mutual anathemas against one another and reconciled. The Church and its theology are organic, dynamic concerns because the people who practice the faith change. The great strength of Fredriksen’s book is how she deftly handles such subtle, shifting questions over five centuries in a way that may send you running to Google to learn about the Filioque controversy despite your better judgment.
This is a stand-out book that hits all the high points of early Christian history while also doing the reader the favor of broadening the scope out to more than just a history of theological ideas. Sociology, culture, identity, coercive state power, and ideologically driven human politicking are all given their due in a book approachable for both the non-specialist reader and someone who already has a background in the subject. She’s not breaking any new ground here (she knows that), but the ease, readability, and insight of presentation Fredriksen brings to this book makes me even more eager to rush to her backlist to see what I’ve missed.
December 3, 2024
Good exploration of Christianity (or, the term aptly used by the author, “Christianities”) as it developed in the first 500 years. Organized thematically, this book explores several topics that highlight the diversity of views and practices held by early Christian communities, priests, and common participants during this early period. Perhaps most helpful, was the discussions on how beliefs changed and were developed over time. My favorite chapters were 1. The Idea of Israel, 2. The Dilemmas of Diversity, and 4. The Future of the End.
As Christianity spread from the initial followers of Jesus, who remained in Jerusalem awaiting the second coming of Christ, to the cities nearby in the Mediterranean, different communities held vastly different views on topics such as the incarnation, the mechanisms salvation, the origins of sin, demons and the role of exorcisms, the sacraments, the place of bishops/counsels, women in church life, ascetic practices, and many other topics. What unified all these different communities, as the author puts it, “was the common conviction that ‘salvation’… had been wrought through Christ” (p. 198).
This view of early “Christianities” and its multiplicity of views and practices should, in my opinion, inspire a spirit of humble ecumenism.
As Christianity spread from the initial followers of Jesus, who remained in Jerusalem awaiting the second coming of Christ, to the cities nearby in the Mediterranean, different communities held vastly different views on topics such as the incarnation, the mechanisms salvation, the origins of sin, demons and the role of exorcisms, the sacraments, the place of bishops/counsels, women in church life, ascetic practices, and many other topics. What unified all these different communities, as the author puts it, “was the common conviction that ‘salvation’… had been wrought through Christ” (p. 198).
This view of early “Christianities” and its multiplicity of views and practices should, in my opinion, inspire a spirit of humble ecumenism.
September 20, 2025
I picked up this book because I read Fredriksen's book on Augustine and the Jews a few years back and I thought well of the author. So, I wanted to see what she'd do with this much broader topic. It was well worth reading, although she tends to right from a rather secular religious studies perspective on Christianity. That is fine, really, because her scholarship is excellent and it is bracing to see her general suspicion of how powerful or right prot0-orthodox or orthodox voices were in the Christian movement as a whole. The focus is the diversity of the Christian experience, which makes it a more wide-ranging book than one which identifies the orthodox movement with the Christian movement.
As a Christian, it is really easy to just accept a view of Christian history which is a march from obscurity to persecution to triumph, but Fredriksen's alternative makes me consider the rivals within Christianity, who were displaced in the formation of orthodox in the fourth and fifth centuries. Given the expansion of both resources and research in this area, that is an important consideration to make.
This is well worth the read. Fredriksen's book is well researched and well-argue throughout.
As a Christian, it is really easy to just accept a view of Christian history which is a march from obscurity to persecution to triumph, but Fredriksen's alternative makes me consider the rivals within Christianity, who were displaced in the formation of orthodox in the fourth and fifth centuries. Given the expansion of both resources and research in this area, that is an important consideration to make.
This is well worth the read. Fredriksen's book is well researched and well-argue throughout.
December 1, 2024
A genuinely great semi-popular level work on early Christianities and the gradual formation of an imperial “orthodox” Christianity.
July 26, 2026
Refreshingly brisk, but too speculative. Why do you keep asking me questions? You're the "expert". The author has something of an irritating prose (so the collocation) style.
January 7, 2026
1.5
The book is blurbed as
"But by using our peripheral vision, by looking to noncanonical and paracanonical texts, by availing ourselves of information derived from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology, we can see a different, richer, much less linear story emerging. Fredriksen brings together these many sources to reconstruct the lively interactions of pagans, Jews, and Christians, tracing the conversions of Christianity from an energetic form of Jewish messianism to an arm of the late Roman state."
It is not. Instead of a history of the development of Christianity as a practiced religion or even the development of the path towards the development of canonical writings, Ancient Christianities is reads more like a criticism of the New Testament and of Paul's writings. When Fredriksen writes actual history it is amazing. She is clearly an expert in her field but if she wanted to write criticism, she should have just done that. As other reviewers have pointed out, some chapters are much stronger than others (such as Chapter 1,3, and 5) because she takes a purely historical approach and assesses and explains competing debates and concerns of the period. Too bad the entire book (barely more than 200 pages of actual text btw) wasn't like that.
I also found her little quips aggravating. It seems petty but I hate that kind of thing.
The book is blurbed as
"But by using our peripheral vision, by looking to noncanonical and paracanonical texts, by availing ourselves of information derived from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology, we can see a different, richer, much less linear story emerging. Fredriksen brings together these many sources to reconstruct the lively interactions of pagans, Jews, and Christians, tracing the conversions of Christianity from an energetic form of Jewish messianism to an arm of the late Roman state."
It is not. Instead of a history of the development of Christianity as a practiced religion or even the development of the path towards the development of canonical writings, Ancient Christianities is reads more like a criticism of the New Testament and of Paul's writings. When Fredriksen writes actual history it is amazing. She is clearly an expert in her field but if she wanted to write criticism, she should have just done that. As other reviewers have pointed out, some chapters are much stronger than others (such as Chapter 1,3, and 5) because she takes a purely historical approach and assesses and explains competing debates and concerns of the period. Too bad the entire book (barely more than 200 pages of actual text btw) wasn't like that.
I also found her little quips aggravating. It seems petty but I hate that kind of thing.
November 29, 2025
This was an overview of five hundred years so obviously it was breezy. Where she chose to go into detail was interesting and supported her focus. I enjoyed this refresher and found it authoritative and refreshingly academic.
Recommend to those that are unfamiliar with the chaotic and varied early Christian church.
Recommend to those that are unfamiliar with the chaotic and varied early Christian church.
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March 8, 2026insufrible, ngl
habría sido más útil pedirle un resumen y línea temporal a Gemini
habría sido más útil pedirle un resumen y línea temporal a Gemini
April 16, 2025
Denser than I expected for something that seems to be hailed as an accessible read, but maybe that’s only an opinion I’ve formed since I was sick while reading it.
Very interesting, I also appreciated that is was structured thematically as it unfolds so much more like a story than a simple play by play of history - which I think is the best way for history to be told.
Very interesting, I also appreciated that is was structured thematically as it unfolds so much more like a story than a simple play by play of history - which I think is the best way for history to be told.
November 20, 2025
Paula Fredricksen's analysis of the first 500 years of Christianity is based on whatever information is available to historians of the era, which is not that much, especially once history moves into the 4th and 5th centuries. In spite of the confused history and the dueling Christian sects of the time, Fredricksen makes it relatively easy to follow. Divided into sections by topic rather than by chronology gives overlapping explanations of the era, allowing a clearer picture to emerge.
Still, she asks, where did all these early bishops come from? How were they chosen - even before Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire there were dealing bishops all over the Mediterranean world.
It is interesting that there is no census of the Roman Empire to allow a guess as to how many Romans or Christians there were once Emperor Constantine chose one sect of Christianity as the religion for the Empire. Once a specific Christianity was chosen, all the others became heretic. Accusations, with arguments and punishments fly back and forth for the next 200 years, and doesn't stop even unto the present day.
A short section on magic, as practiced by pagans, Jews and Christians is fascinating. Who knew? "All our ancient people lived in the same social world, inhabited by superhuman powers." Though we look back and draw distinctions between Christians, pagans and Jews, they all draw from the same understanding of the world and the belief that not just God, but multiple lesser gods, demons, angels, and spirits cohabitate the world and interfere in the lives of people all the time. Protecting oneself and ones family from these spirits is an important activity. Even the Empire expects its chosen diety to protect it from harm. Unfortunately, the Christian God di not prevent a successful invasion by "barbarians" from the North, who happened to be Christians!
Fundamentalist Christians today claim the inviolability of the bible, but this book shows how much controversy surrounded difficult decisions about just what eventually went into the bible: how to define Jesus as a deity and a man, relations with Jews, gentiles and pagans, which type of Christianity was orthodox and what would be heresy, etc. How can any Christian be sure of anything, given the history?
Still, she asks, where did all these early bishops come from? How were they chosen - even before Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire there were dealing bishops all over the Mediterranean world.
It is interesting that there is no census of the Roman Empire to allow a guess as to how many Romans or Christians there were once Emperor Constantine chose one sect of Christianity as the religion for the Empire. Once a specific Christianity was chosen, all the others became heretic. Accusations, with arguments and punishments fly back and forth for the next 200 years, and doesn't stop even unto the present day.
A short section on magic, as practiced by pagans, Jews and Christians is fascinating. Who knew? "All our ancient people lived in the same social world, inhabited by superhuman powers." Though we look back and draw distinctions between Christians, pagans and Jews, they all draw from the same understanding of the world and the belief that not just God, but multiple lesser gods, demons, angels, and spirits cohabitate the world and interfere in the lives of people all the time. Protecting oneself and ones family from these spirits is an important activity. Even the Empire expects its chosen diety to protect it from harm. Unfortunately, the Christian God di not prevent a successful invasion by "barbarians" from the North, who happened to be Christians!
Fundamentalist Christians today claim the inviolability of the bible, but this book shows how much controversy surrounded difficult decisions about just what eventually went into the bible: how to define Jesus as a deity and a man, relations with Jews, gentiles and pagans, which type of Christianity was orthodox and what would be heresy, etc. How can any Christian be sure of anything, given the history?
March 3, 2025
Not the easiest read, but I was interested in this era and she provided a good overview.
October 2, 2026
This is a difficult book to review. On the one hand, as other reviewers have noted, the book does manage to be remarkably concise while packing in a lot of information! She cites her sources, and has clearly engaged with a wide range of them. Her basic thesis that ancient Christianity was quite diverse is a pretty fair assessment of the consensus view in modern scholarship, and while I can't say she adds much to that idea, she argues it well, and she does a good job showing how much gets obscured when that history is told as a straight march toward later orthodoxy.
Beyond that, however, I found the book frustrating, and it may be the most skeptical portrayal of ancient Christianity I have yet read that technically isn't wrong in what it says. Most of her individual claims hold up, but by the end I knew a great deal about what Christians fought over, whom they excluded, and how they courted and resisted power, and had very little sense of what they found compelling about what they believed, or how those beliefs shaped the lives they tried to lead.
I know that this review will probably come off as just defensive, because my major frustration is with her failing to represent early 'proto-orthdoox' Christianity at all fairly, and yes I am a Christian. But my own intrinsic biases noted, I think this book still manages to sidestep engaging with early Christianity on its own terms. She seems to begin with the assumption that 'belief' is inherently unimportant, and that defining what create a group or an identity or a coherent belief system is also unimportant. Once those assumptions come into play, almost everything about early Christianity can be reduced to bickering and politics.
It seems to me that one of the main ways Fredriksen manages to pack so much in is by reducing many of her sources to one or two key ideas that get folded into her thematic presentation. Tertullian, in her hands, becomes memorable mainly for his aggressive rhetoric against "heretics" and his relish at the thought of watching others burn at the last judgment. Justin Martyr comes across largely as an anti-Jewish apologist dabbling a little too heavily in philosophy, Cyril and Nestorius look more like political power players than theologians, and Alexander of Alexandria is a bishop tightening his grip and little else. Clement of Alexandria is at least represented more or less fairly, though she barely discusses him.
Those emphases aren't totally without grounding—Tertullian's passage in On the Spectacles 30 of watching their persecutors roast in hell as a kind of spectacle better than the gladiator games is pretty messed up (to say the least), and it's more than fair to include. But the same writer, in Apology 39, describes a voluntary common fund that fed and buried the poor and supported orphaned children, the elderly, shipwrecked travelers, and Christians sent to the mines or prisons for their faith, and he reports pagans watching all this and remarking, "See how they love one another." That's definitely more complex than the other passages she chose to include conveys. Justin, likewise, spends a good stretch of his First Apology (14–17) laying out Jesus' teaching on generosity, anger, retaliation, and love of enemies, and ties it to the lives Christians claimed had been changed by it: people who once prized money now putting what they had in common, people who once hated each other now praying for their enemies.
Perhaps most offensive to my own sensibilities is what becomes of Irenaeus. He is arguably behind one of the most beautiful theological visions in early Christianity, and despite his formative role in "proto-orthodoxy," he appears here mostly as a heretic hunter, and not one she gives much attention to at all. In Against Heresies 4.38, humanity is created as an infant and has to grow into a maturity it couldn't have received at the start, and in 5.2 the bread and cup that nourish our bodies become his argument that flesh can receive eternal life—these are claims about what a human being is and what salvation is for, and they go a long way toward explaining why rival accounts mattered so much to him. He was also, as Eusebius notices in a pun on his name (eirēnē, peace), a peacemaker ( a point that John Behr highlights in his work on Irenaeus): he urged Victor of Rome not to cut off the churches of Asia over the date of Easter, even though he kept the Sunday observance himself (Church History 5.24); he carried a letter from the churches of Gaul to Rome during the Montanist controversy, sent, Eusebius says, for the peace of the churches (5.3–4); and he wrote to Florinus, whom he had known as a boy in Polycarp's circle, appealing to what they had both heard from the old bishop's own mouth (5.20). Irenaeus is a writer obviously concerned with Christian boundaries who also worked really hard to extend those boundaries numerous time—his concern wasn't only or even primarily exclusion.
I had a similar trouble with the Donatists and Novatianists. When Fredriksen wants to show that the church Constantine happened to settle on was, well, mostly interested in power, they appear as victims of imperial Christian intolerance, but when she then chastises Christians who treated the lapsed as less than real Christians, the Donatists suddenly become a negative portrait. And neither portrait says much about what these Christians thought was at stake—why lapsing or not lapsing *would* matter, or why trying to actually adhere to Jesus saying those who denied Him would be denied (while also noting the portrait of Peter being forgiven after denying Jesus) would lead to controversy.
In a similar fashion, perhaps because she directs most of her criticism at proto-orthodoxy, she rarely shows Marcionites, Valentinians, or Manichaeans in an unflattering way, and seems reluctant to press on them the questions she presses on everyone else.
Augustine, Origen, and Athanasius each fare a little better, at least. With Athanasius in particular, I felt she did a good job highlighting how the "proto-orthodox" fell afoul of imperial politics, and how bishops resisted imperial power as much as they negotiated with it. That felt like a rare moment of valuable nuance, and I wished there had been more of it.
When I reflect on the work as a whole, what stands out to me is how little curiosity she shows about why Christians of so many varieties cared. She catalogues their beliefs well enough on a surface level, but when it comes to why anyone believed any of it, or why they sought power and the imperial ear, she has much less to say. Cyril and Nestorius are a good example—their surviving letters turn on whether Mary can be called the one who gave birth to God, and whether one can say that God suffered on the cross, and each man was convinced the other's answer undid the incarnation (Cyril's Second Letter to Nestorius; Nestorius's Second Letter to Cyril). Ambitious as they both certainly were, I don't think you can understand why either of them wanted the emperor on his side without understanding what he thought the emperor would be protecting.
Manichaeans, Valentinians, and Marcionites, meanwhile, are all treated as equally Christian simply because they claimed to be. I understand why a historian might adopt that (and again something like this seems to be the consensus approach in modern scholarship), but she applies it in a way that leaves almost no room to ask whether any of these groups' beliefs reflect any meaningful interest in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Again, beliefs are reduced to essentially unimportant, despite the fact that *no one* in the swirl of Christianities shared that assumption.
And that brings me to another frustration—the shape of the chapters. Fredriksen regularly begins with the pre-Christian roots of some practice or idea, which can be illuminating, but from there she tends to skip past Jesus almost entirely on the way to Paul, and she presents her reading of Paul as though it were settled, when within Pauline scholarship it's hardly uncontested. Paul, along with the letters later written in his name, end up as nearly the only source from which all these Christianities equally validly arose, and she gives surprisingly little coverage to Jesus or his influence, or how Christianity was ever a source of rupture rather than only continuity. Given the ways that Larry Hurtado, Robert Louis Wilken, and even Bart Ehrman have contended that Christianity *did* cause real rupture, this seems an oversight to me.
The themes she chooses, too, tend to hover in the more eccentric or apocalyptic key—long catalogues of asceticism, or of Christian timelines for Christ's return. Both mattered enormously to ancient Christians, and I don't begrudge her the attention, but she gives comparatively little to things just as central: the shift in attitudes toward charity to strangers, the dignity given to the poor, the weight Christians put on the Greek vocabulary of love, the way they took ethics that had been the property of philosophers and preached them to people who would never set foot in a philosopher's school, and—importantly—the call to imitate Jesus' self-giving on the cross. Justin's description of Sunday worship (First Apology 67) puts a collection for orphans, widows, the sick, prisoners, and strangers right alongside the readings, the prayers, and the Eucharist, as part of what the gathering is for.
These practices had precedents, of course, and Christians certainly didn't live up to their ideals with any consistency. But even when Fredriksen shows where a practice came from, she rarely follows what Christians did with it—how they adapted it, organized whole communities around it, and raised what was expected of ordinary members—something pagans noticed, too, as when the emperor Julian, trying to revive the old cults in 362, complained to one of his high priests that the Christians were feeding not only their own poor but pagan ones as well, and told him to start matching them. Fredriksen seems to resist, almost on principle, the idea that Christians changed much of anything in the world they grew up in and eventually overtook, and I found that much harder to accept than anything she says about their diversity.
When I compare this book with the work of scholars like Peter Brown, Robert Louis Wilken, Lewis Ayres, or John Behr—or even Bart Ehrman, who has no stake in defending orthodoxy—her account of Christianity ultimately feels very thin. Each of them, in different ways, gets far enough inside ancient Christian convictions to see why people found them persuasive or demanding or worth reorganizing a life around, while in Fredriksen's account boundary policing, political power, and a vague continuity with the world that came before end up carrying nearly all the weight.
Unfortunately, then, I find it hard to recommend this as a first introduction to early Christianity. Readers looking for a concise account of its diversity and its entanglement with imperial politics will find plenty here, though I suspect it will mostly give ammo to people already opposed to modern expressions of Christianity. But for anyone coming to early Christianity with real curiosity about the beliefs and texture and practice of early Christians, this catalogue of its first five hundred years comes up oddly and remarkably short.
Beyond that, however, I found the book frustrating, and it may be the most skeptical portrayal of ancient Christianity I have yet read that technically isn't wrong in what it says. Most of her individual claims hold up, but by the end I knew a great deal about what Christians fought over, whom they excluded, and how they courted and resisted power, and had very little sense of what they found compelling about what they believed, or how those beliefs shaped the lives they tried to lead.
I know that this review will probably come off as just defensive, because my major frustration is with her failing to represent early 'proto-orthdoox' Christianity at all fairly, and yes I am a Christian. But my own intrinsic biases noted, I think this book still manages to sidestep engaging with early Christianity on its own terms. She seems to begin with the assumption that 'belief' is inherently unimportant, and that defining what create a group or an identity or a coherent belief system is also unimportant. Once those assumptions come into play, almost everything about early Christianity can be reduced to bickering and politics.
It seems to me that one of the main ways Fredriksen manages to pack so much in is by reducing many of her sources to one or two key ideas that get folded into her thematic presentation. Tertullian, in her hands, becomes memorable mainly for his aggressive rhetoric against "heretics" and his relish at the thought of watching others burn at the last judgment. Justin Martyr comes across largely as an anti-Jewish apologist dabbling a little too heavily in philosophy, Cyril and Nestorius look more like political power players than theologians, and Alexander of Alexandria is a bishop tightening his grip and little else. Clement of Alexandria is at least represented more or less fairly, though she barely discusses him.
Those emphases aren't totally without grounding—Tertullian's passage in On the Spectacles 30 of watching their persecutors roast in hell as a kind of spectacle better than the gladiator games is pretty messed up (to say the least), and it's more than fair to include. But the same writer, in Apology 39, describes a voluntary common fund that fed and buried the poor and supported orphaned children, the elderly, shipwrecked travelers, and Christians sent to the mines or prisons for their faith, and he reports pagans watching all this and remarking, "See how they love one another." That's definitely more complex than the other passages she chose to include conveys. Justin, likewise, spends a good stretch of his First Apology (14–17) laying out Jesus' teaching on generosity, anger, retaliation, and love of enemies, and ties it to the lives Christians claimed had been changed by it: people who once prized money now putting what they had in common, people who once hated each other now praying for their enemies.
Perhaps most offensive to my own sensibilities is what becomes of Irenaeus. He is arguably behind one of the most beautiful theological visions in early Christianity, and despite his formative role in "proto-orthodoxy," he appears here mostly as a heretic hunter, and not one she gives much attention to at all. In Against Heresies 4.38, humanity is created as an infant and has to grow into a maturity it couldn't have received at the start, and in 5.2 the bread and cup that nourish our bodies become his argument that flesh can receive eternal life—these are claims about what a human being is and what salvation is for, and they go a long way toward explaining why rival accounts mattered so much to him. He was also, as Eusebius notices in a pun on his name (eirēnē, peace), a peacemaker ( a point that John Behr highlights in his work on Irenaeus): he urged Victor of Rome not to cut off the churches of Asia over the date of Easter, even though he kept the Sunday observance himself (Church History 5.24); he carried a letter from the churches of Gaul to Rome during the Montanist controversy, sent, Eusebius says, for the peace of the churches (5.3–4); and he wrote to Florinus, whom he had known as a boy in Polycarp's circle, appealing to what they had both heard from the old bishop's own mouth (5.20). Irenaeus is a writer obviously concerned with Christian boundaries who also worked really hard to extend those boundaries numerous time—his concern wasn't only or even primarily exclusion.
I had a similar trouble with the Donatists and Novatianists. When Fredriksen wants to show that the church Constantine happened to settle on was, well, mostly interested in power, they appear as victims of imperial Christian intolerance, but when she then chastises Christians who treated the lapsed as less than real Christians, the Donatists suddenly become a negative portrait. And neither portrait says much about what these Christians thought was at stake—why lapsing or not lapsing *would* matter, or why trying to actually adhere to Jesus saying those who denied Him would be denied (while also noting the portrait of Peter being forgiven after denying Jesus) would lead to controversy.
In a similar fashion, perhaps because she directs most of her criticism at proto-orthodoxy, she rarely shows Marcionites, Valentinians, or Manichaeans in an unflattering way, and seems reluctant to press on them the questions she presses on everyone else.
Augustine, Origen, and Athanasius each fare a little better, at least. With Athanasius in particular, I felt she did a good job highlighting how the "proto-orthodox" fell afoul of imperial politics, and how bishops resisted imperial power as much as they negotiated with it. That felt like a rare moment of valuable nuance, and I wished there had been more of it.
When I reflect on the work as a whole, what stands out to me is how little curiosity she shows about why Christians of so many varieties cared. She catalogues their beliefs well enough on a surface level, but when it comes to why anyone believed any of it, or why they sought power and the imperial ear, she has much less to say. Cyril and Nestorius are a good example—their surviving letters turn on whether Mary can be called the one who gave birth to God, and whether one can say that God suffered on the cross, and each man was convinced the other's answer undid the incarnation (Cyril's Second Letter to Nestorius; Nestorius's Second Letter to Cyril). Ambitious as they both certainly were, I don't think you can understand why either of them wanted the emperor on his side without understanding what he thought the emperor would be protecting.
Manichaeans, Valentinians, and Marcionites, meanwhile, are all treated as equally Christian simply because they claimed to be. I understand why a historian might adopt that (and again something like this seems to be the consensus approach in modern scholarship), but she applies it in a way that leaves almost no room to ask whether any of these groups' beliefs reflect any meaningful interest in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Again, beliefs are reduced to essentially unimportant, despite the fact that *no one* in the swirl of Christianities shared that assumption.
And that brings me to another frustration—the shape of the chapters. Fredriksen regularly begins with the pre-Christian roots of some practice or idea, which can be illuminating, but from there she tends to skip past Jesus almost entirely on the way to Paul, and she presents her reading of Paul as though it were settled, when within Pauline scholarship it's hardly uncontested. Paul, along with the letters later written in his name, end up as nearly the only source from which all these Christianities equally validly arose, and she gives surprisingly little coverage to Jesus or his influence, or how Christianity was ever a source of rupture rather than only continuity. Given the ways that Larry Hurtado, Robert Louis Wilken, and even Bart Ehrman have contended that Christianity *did* cause real rupture, this seems an oversight to me.
The themes she chooses, too, tend to hover in the more eccentric or apocalyptic key—long catalogues of asceticism, or of Christian timelines for Christ's return. Both mattered enormously to ancient Christians, and I don't begrudge her the attention, but she gives comparatively little to things just as central: the shift in attitudes toward charity to strangers, the dignity given to the poor, the weight Christians put on the Greek vocabulary of love, the way they took ethics that had been the property of philosophers and preached them to people who would never set foot in a philosopher's school, and—importantly—the call to imitate Jesus' self-giving on the cross. Justin's description of Sunday worship (First Apology 67) puts a collection for orphans, widows, the sick, prisoners, and strangers right alongside the readings, the prayers, and the Eucharist, as part of what the gathering is for.
These practices had precedents, of course, and Christians certainly didn't live up to their ideals with any consistency. But even when Fredriksen shows where a practice came from, she rarely follows what Christians did with it—how they adapted it, organized whole communities around it, and raised what was expected of ordinary members—something pagans noticed, too, as when the emperor Julian, trying to revive the old cults in 362, complained to one of his high priests that the Christians were feeding not only their own poor but pagan ones as well, and told him to start matching them. Fredriksen seems to resist, almost on principle, the idea that Christians changed much of anything in the world they grew up in and eventually overtook, and I found that much harder to accept than anything she says about their diversity.
When I compare this book with the work of scholars like Peter Brown, Robert Louis Wilken, Lewis Ayres, or John Behr—or even Bart Ehrman, who has no stake in defending orthodoxy—her account of Christianity ultimately feels very thin. Each of them, in different ways, gets far enough inside ancient Christian convictions to see why people found them persuasive or demanding or worth reorganizing a life around, while in Fredriksen's account boundary policing, political power, and a vague continuity with the world that came before end up carrying nearly all the weight.
Unfortunately, then, I find it hard to recommend this as a first introduction to early Christianity. Readers looking for a concise account of its diversity and its entanglement with imperial politics will find plenty here, though I suspect it will mostly give ammo to people already opposed to modern expressions of Christianity. But for anyone coming to early Christianity with real curiosity about the beliefs and texture and practice of early Christians, this catalogue of its first five hundred years comes up oddly and remarkably short.
January 29, 2026
Review title: The Path to Christianity
Fredriksen has written a scholarly study of how Jesus Christ, the foreseen Jewish Messiah, became Jesus Christ, the founder of a new faith. It seems like a simple task until you step back and realize how radically this one historical figure changed the history of his time, the history of the two millenniums since, and even the way his world and all of past history before him was changed by his appearance and his followers.
The Biblical (Mediterranean Roman) world at the time of Jesus consisted of many ethnic groups each worshipping and indeed defined by their own god, including the Jewish people,and their Jehovah. But Jews were both widely dispersed and integrated with other ethnic groups so that "if we find Jews in pagan places doing pagan things —and we do—we also find pagans (and, later, gentile Christians) in Jewish places doing Jewish things. Community boundaries were porous." (p. 6). [Fredriksen uses the term "pagan" as the preferred reference to non-Jewish ethnic groups, not as a pejorative term.]. So when believers in a Messiah (one of many proclaimed at the time, but the only resurrected one) spread beyond Jerusalem they found "pagan God-fearers who were involved in the life of the synagogue," (p. 8), which Paul in his letters and Luke in Acts had to deal with as belief spread beyond Jews.
In fact, "By the early second century . . . gentile forms of Christianity begin to dominate our sources." (p. 12). Then the challenge became establishing a standard theology amongst this broad range of converts. It would be the 4th century before the church in Rome would establish "orthodox" Christianity. The two centuries between then and the writers of the canon (the Gospels, the Acts, and the letters primarily by Paul) were characterized by "vigorous variety" (p. 33): the "proto-orthodox" who called themselves Christians, and the others ("goaded by pride, said their critics; or by demons; or by too much philosophy; or by Jews; or by philosophy misunderstood; or by unseemly and destabilizing curiosity") who were identified by their "heresies".
So many air quotes around the terms here, because these were terms applied to their teachings later. In fact, as Fredriksen votes in her introduction, she does not organize this book chronologically because so much of what we "know" about the accepted chronology of these 500 years has been shaped by how the established orthodox church defined it after the fact. Fredriksen instead approaches the period topically, with chapters on how these early Christians viewed the divinity and humanity of Jesus, persecution and martyrdom, eschatology (prophecy and predictions of the end of time), redemption, morality and asceticism (including celibacy and monastic living), and living and worshipping in a world populated by all those Jews, pagans--and other Christians who lived and believed differently.
So yes, to the established church later when a standard doctrine was defined there were ideas that were correct ("orthodox") based on the finalized Canon just as there were ideas that did not agree ("heresy")with the scriptures from the Hebrew Bible, the words of Jesus in the Gospels, and the doctrine of Paul in the epistles. But the 2nd and 3rd century writers did not yet have a standard doctrine so they were using their intellect, education, and arts of oral persuasion (surprisingly robust, says Fredriksen) to present and defend their position against others. And because history has been written by the winners, in most cases all we know about those branded "heretics" comes from orthodox texts which might be presenting a distorted straw man version of their doctrines since that was an established method of debate. And with the conversion of Constantine in 312, the definition of orthodoxy vs heresy became a matter of government as well as religion, with state coercion and financial repercussions at stake.
Note that Fredriksen is not making judgments about the orthodoxy or heresy of any of the positions she documents by using the air quotes. She is writing history, not theology. She is pointing to the fact that what was defined as "orthodox" or "heretical" was a function of contemporary debate, only settled, right or wrong, by later church councils such as at Nicae in 325 and Chalcadon in 451, when the air quotes would be removed and these positions be defined in church doctrine as orthodoxy or heresy.
My biggest takeaway as Fredriksen concludes:
So how did we end up, at the end of those 500 years, with one "universal" (air quotes again)--catholic (universal) first, then Catholic, then Roman Catholic--church? Fredriksen traces this result back to the monotheism of the Hebrew Bible: "Israel's god as the final and sole deity of all peoples. . . . Ultimately, this exclusivism was supported by politics: One god, one church, one empire, one emperor" (p. 205). This is an enlightening ending to a scholarly examination (Fredriksen provides a glossary of terms, a time line of events and writings, indexes of Biblical, contemporary non-Biblical, and modern sources, as well as chapter bibliographies for supplementary reading). After all is said and done, it really is simple. The Christian faith comes down to accepting and believing in the God of the Bible.
Fredriksen has written a scholarly study of how Jesus Christ, the foreseen Jewish Messiah, became Jesus Christ, the founder of a new faith. It seems like a simple task until you step back and realize how radically this one historical figure changed the history of his time, the history of the two millenniums since, and even the way his world and all of past history before him was changed by his appearance and his followers.
The Biblical (Mediterranean Roman) world at the time of Jesus consisted of many ethnic groups each worshipping and indeed defined by their own god, including the Jewish people,and their Jehovah. But Jews were both widely dispersed and integrated with other ethnic groups so that "if we find Jews in pagan places doing pagan things —and we do—we also find pagans (and, later, gentile Christians) in Jewish places doing Jewish things. Community boundaries were porous." (p. 6). [Fredriksen uses the term "pagan" as the preferred reference to non-Jewish ethnic groups, not as a pejorative term.]. So when believers in a Messiah (one of many proclaimed at the time, but the only resurrected one) spread beyond Jerusalem they found "pagan God-fearers who were involved in the life of the synagogue," (p. 8), which Paul in his letters and Luke in Acts had to deal with as belief spread beyond Jews.
In fact, "By the early second century . . . gentile forms of Christianity begin to dominate our sources." (p. 12). Then the challenge became establishing a standard theology amongst this broad range of converts. It would be the 4th century before the church in Rome would establish "orthodox" Christianity. The two centuries between then and the writers of the canon (the Gospels, the Acts, and the letters primarily by Paul) were characterized by "vigorous variety" (p. 33): the "proto-orthodox" who called themselves Christians, and the others ("goaded by pride, said their critics; or by demons; or by too much philosophy; or by Jews; or by philosophy misunderstood; or by unseemly and destabilizing curiosity") who were identified by their "heresies".
So many air quotes around the terms here, because these were terms applied to their teachings later. In fact, as Fredriksen votes in her introduction, she does not organize this book chronologically because so much of what we "know" about the accepted chronology of these 500 years has been shaped by how the established orthodox church defined it after the fact. Fredriksen instead approaches the period topically, with chapters on how these early Christians viewed the divinity and humanity of Jesus, persecution and martyrdom, eschatology (prophecy and predictions of the end of time), redemption, morality and asceticism (including celibacy and monastic living), and living and worshipping in a world populated by all those Jews, pagans--and other Christians who lived and believed differently.
So yes, to the established church later when a standard doctrine was defined there were ideas that were correct ("orthodox") based on the finalized Canon just as there were ideas that did not agree ("heresy")with the scriptures from the Hebrew Bible, the words of Jesus in the Gospels, and the doctrine of Paul in the epistles. But the 2nd and 3rd century writers did not yet have a standard doctrine so they were using their intellect, education, and arts of oral persuasion (surprisingly robust, says Fredriksen) to present and defend their position against others. And because history has been written by the winners, in most cases all we know about those branded "heretics" comes from orthodox texts which might be presenting a distorted straw man version of their doctrines since that was an established method of debate. And with the conversion of Constantine in 312, the definition of orthodoxy vs heresy became a matter of government as well as religion, with state coercion and financial repercussions at stake.
Note that Fredriksen is not making judgments about the orthodoxy or heresy of any of the positions she documents by using the air quotes. She is writing history, not theology. She is pointing to the fact that what was defined as "orthodox" or "heretical" was a function of contemporary debate, only settled, right or wrong, by later church councils such as at Nicae in 325 and Chalcadon in 451, when the air quotes would be removed and these positions be defined in church doctrine as orthodoxy or heresy.
My biggest takeaway as Fredriksen concludes:
Syncretism—the coming together of "Christianity" with other, prior religious traditions—does not reflect a mix of two discreet and different entities. Still less does syncretism suggest a compromise or corruption of some pure and separate body of doctrine with "paganism"— though that is the image that heresiologists and later theologians rhetorically present. "Christianity" is under construction throughout Roman antiquity [death of Jesus through 500 AD]. "Christianization" proceeded precisely by syncretizing foregoing and ubiquitous patterns of life and thought with elements of its message: true for high theology, which depended on philosophy to proceed; true for practices, which drew on the familiar. What else was there to draw on? The expressions of Christianity that resulted not only varied locally between different communities. They also varied within the same locale between different members of the notionally same community—as the complaints of the bishops and the canons of church councils tell us. (p. 174)
So how did we end up, at the end of those 500 years, with one "universal" (air quotes again)--catholic (universal) first, then Catholic, then Roman Catholic--church? Fredriksen traces this result back to the monotheism of the Hebrew Bible: "Israel's god as the final and sole deity of all peoples. . . . Ultimately, this exclusivism was supported by politics: One god, one church, one empire, one emperor" (p. 205). This is an enlightening ending to a scholarly examination (Fredriksen provides a glossary of terms, a time line of events and writings, indexes of Biblical, contemporary non-Biblical, and modern sources, as well as chapter bibliographies for supplementary reading). After all is said and done, it really is simple. The Christian faith comes down to accepting and believing in the God of the Bible.
February 24, 2025
This book reveals the early consolidation of Christianity as a slow ascent out of paganism. Many Christians today are unaware of the debates, controversies, and conflicts which eventually consolidated into orthodox Christianity. Many modern Christians think that what they believe is fully articulated within a Bible that most of them have not read through. Instead, most rely on ministers to tell them what it says or to interpret it for them. Few, if any, understand that the New Testament was generated retrospectively, as a product of the fourth century, many years after the death of Christ.
Similarly, most Christians are unaware that Rome hijacked Christianity as a catalyst for the spread of a religion more suitable to the purpose of consolidating its empire. How is it so easy for people to believe that the same political empire that persecuted Christians horribly for hundreds of years could itself become Christian without ulterior motives? Perhaps nothing is more telling of this than the fact that the New Testament attempts to shift the responsibility for Jesus’s death from Pilate, the only Roman authority who could have ordered a crucifixion, to the Jews themselves. One has to ask, if it was truly the Jews that wanted Jesus crucified, then why would an arrangement be necessary to arrest Jesus at night in order to avoid social tumult?
The absence of any explanation of why the crowds suddenly turned against Jesus is indicative of manipulations in the historical record and the sad thing about it is that this interpretation has resulted in historical indictment of the Jews through the ages and served as a catalyst for their persecution. The toxic charge against the Jews for the death of Christ was not renounced by the Catholic Church until 1965.
And the retention of paganism within orthodoxy is also very telling. Much of orthodoxy involves a repurposing of certain pagan ideas within a cloak of Christian ritual. For example, the goddess-like deification of Mary, the worship of a pantheon of Saints, the idolatry of relic worship, the use of performative utterances, or magical gestures such as signing the cross, etc. The birthday of Jesus at Christmas is associated with the ancient Roman celebration of the winter solstice, essentially the birthday of the sun.
This book opens the reader to understand that much of orthodoxy is simply the particular opinions that prevailed out of diverse theological arguments. For example, thinkers such as Valentinus and Marcion emphasized a different aspect of the Christian message: not Christ as sacrifice, but as redeeming revealer, bringing the good news of salvation. The Gospels themselves present even Jesus as arguing with Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests as to what constitutes proper belief.
The arguments ensued over whether Christ actually had bodily flesh or not (a docetic Christ) or just appeared to have flesh. Valentinus and Marcion were pilloried for holding such teaching, even though they quoted 1 Corinthians 15:50 that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom”. Their opponents emphasized a fleshly incarnation and physical resurrection, as they expected believers would also experience.
Traditionally, orthodoxy has condemned diversity as deviant heresy and actively persecuted heretics. The fear of persecution from the church has truly retarded spiritual thought and free theological development, resulting instead in the austere generic orthodoxy that endured until the reformation and enlightenment. The insistence upon a closed body of authoritative texts has exacerbated spiritual narrow-mindedness, much of which gained precedence from proclamations of the Roman emperor Constantine, who was converted in 312. Diversified versions of the gospel were consolidated into a more generic form by Constantine, who essentially established orthodoxy by imperial fiat.
Constantine demanded councils settle divisive theological questions. Such a council, at Nicene, dictated that Christ was fully God. Constantine called this council at Nicaea to resolve disputes in the church because they threatened to destabilize the empire. Following the formulation of the Nicene Creed, all other teachings were henceforth marked as heresy. Constantine essentially criminalized Christian diversity.
The former persecution of Christians by the Romans really didn’t cease, it was just transferred to those particular Christians denoted as heretics because they refused to tow the imperial line with regard to their religious beliefs. And such persecution was continued by the Catholic Church through most of its history as it conducted Crusades, massacred the Cathars, persecuted Jews, burned heretics, and destroyed valuable religious treatises such as those of the Gnostics, the Mayan Codices, and others. Violence became sanctioned by scripture itself, that is, the particular scripture the imperial state chose to retain at the expense of those it chose to destroy.
Fortunately, we see through history that time uncloaks orthodoxy’s credibility. The reformation and enlightenment show us that orthodoxy truly does have a shelf life, and as we encroach into its expiration, we can rekindle the fecundity of religious thought and debate that characterized early Christian thinking. No longer is it acceptable for the church to execute and torture heretics. No longer is it acceptable to excommunicate and imprison those expressing diversified beliefs.
How can any religious person who adheres to the teachings of Christ actively deny holy communion to other denominations, as the Catholic Church does today? How can selfish religious people actually believe they are entitled to withhold sacraments from others? Clearly it is an abomination to deny Christ to others out of the social arrogance of cultic self-righteousness. It is especially an abomination for those of us who understand that authentic Christianity extends from its true origins as a religion of love, acceptance, sharing, compassion and outreach. Fortunately, we can expect that time will continue to do its work, continuing to unveil orthodoxy for the anachronism it truly is, and opening us all to better experience a more authentic Christianity that is free of embellishment.
-End-
Similarly, most Christians are unaware that Rome hijacked Christianity as a catalyst for the spread of a religion more suitable to the purpose of consolidating its empire. How is it so easy for people to believe that the same political empire that persecuted Christians horribly for hundreds of years could itself become Christian without ulterior motives? Perhaps nothing is more telling of this than the fact that the New Testament attempts to shift the responsibility for Jesus’s death from Pilate, the only Roman authority who could have ordered a crucifixion, to the Jews themselves. One has to ask, if it was truly the Jews that wanted Jesus crucified, then why would an arrangement be necessary to arrest Jesus at night in order to avoid social tumult?
The absence of any explanation of why the crowds suddenly turned against Jesus is indicative of manipulations in the historical record and the sad thing about it is that this interpretation has resulted in historical indictment of the Jews through the ages and served as a catalyst for their persecution. The toxic charge against the Jews for the death of Christ was not renounced by the Catholic Church until 1965.
And the retention of paganism within orthodoxy is also very telling. Much of orthodoxy involves a repurposing of certain pagan ideas within a cloak of Christian ritual. For example, the goddess-like deification of Mary, the worship of a pantheon of Saints, the idolatry of relic worship, the use of performative utterances, or magical gestures such as signing the cross, etc. The birthday of Jesus at Christmas is associated with the ancient Roman celebration of the winter solstice, essentially the birthday of the sun.
This book opens the reader to understand that much of orthodoxy is simply the particular opinions that prevailed out of diverse theological arguments. For example, thinkers such as Valentinus and Marcion emphasized a different aspect of the Christian message: not Christ as sacrifice, but as redeeming revealer, bringing the good news of salvation. The Gospels themselves present even Jesus as arguing with Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests as to what constitutes proper belief.
The arguments ensued over whether Christ actually had bodily flesh or not (a docetic Christ) or just appeared to have flesh. Valentinus and Marcion were pilloried for holding such teaching, even though they quoted 1 Corinthians 15:50 that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom”. Their opponents emphasized a fleshly incarnation and physical resurrection, as they expected believers would also experience.
Traditionally, orthodoxy has condemned diversity as deviant heresy and actively persecuted heretics. The fear of persecution from the church has truly retarded spiritual thought and free theological development, resulting instead in the austere generic orthodoxy that endured until the reformation and enlightenment. The insistence upon a closed body of authoritative texts has exacerbated spiritual narrow-mindedness, much of which gained precedence from proclamations of the Roman emperor Constantine, who was converted in 312. Diversified versions of the gospel were consolidated into a more generic form by Constantine, who essentially established orthodoxy by imperial fiat.
Constantine demanded councils settle divisive theological questions. Such a council, at Nicene, dictated that Christ was fully God. Constantine called this council at Nicaea to resolve disputes in the church because they threatened to destabilize the empire. Following the formulation of the Nicene Creed, all other teachings were henceforth marked as heresy. Constantine essentially criminalized Christian diversity.
The former persecution of Christians by the Romans really didn’t cease, it was just transferred to those particular Christians denoted as heretics because they refused to tow the imperial line with regard to their religious beliefs. And such persecution was continued by the Catholic Church through most of its history as it conducted Crusades, massacred the Cathars, persecuted Jews, burned heretics, and destroyed valuable religious treatises such as those of the Gnostics, the Mayan Codices, and others. Violence became sanctioned by scripture itself, that is, the particular scripture the imperial state chose to retain at the expense of those it chose to destroy.
Fortunately, we see through history that time uncloaks orthodoxy’s credibility. The reformation and enlightenment show us that orthodoxy truly does have a shelf life, and as we encroach into its expiration, we can rekindle the fecundity of religious thought and debate that characterized early Christian thinking. No longer is it acceptable for the church to execute and torture heretics. No longer is it acceptable to excommunicate and imprison those expressing diversified beliefs.
How can any religious person who adheres to the teachings of Christ actively deny holy communion to other denominations, as the Catholic Church does today? How can selfish religious people actually believe they are entitled to withhold sacraments from others? Clearly it is an abomination to deny Christ to others out of the social arrogance of cultic self-righteousness. It is especially an abomination for those of us who understand that authentic Christianity extends from its true origins as a religion of love, acceptance, sharing, compassion and outreach. Fortunately, we can expect that time will continue to do its work, continuing to unveil orthodoxy for the anachronism it truly is, and opening us all to better experience a more authentic Christianity that is free of embellishment.
-End-
January 10, 2026
2026 reads: 02
Rating: 3.5 stars
This is tough to review. Fredriksen makes little to no attempt to reconcile any of the discrepancies in the New Testament corpus and its interpreters. There seems to be only negative motivations behind differentiating doctrine and teaching in the early church. At the end of the day, "Christianity's exclusivism was supported by political exclusivism." What we have today is imperial religion. I did however appreciate the complexity Fredriksen brings out. Her analysis is thematic and not temporal, since, in her mind, the latter projects a neat, linear progression that simply doesn't exist. An emphasis is laid on the political movements throughout. While I think this reading is overly cynical, it is nonetheless an important analysis that should be considered. One leaves challenged by the complexities and diversity of "Christianities" that proliferated in antiquity.
Rating: 3.5 stars
This is tough to review. Fredriksen makes little to no attempt to reconcile any of the discrepancies in the New Testament corpus and its interpreters. There seems to be only negative motivations behind differentiating doctrine and teaching in the early church. At the end of the day, "Christianity's exclusivism was supported by political exclusivism." What we have today is imperial religion. I did however appreciate the complexity Fredriksen brings out. Her analysis is thematic and not temporal, since, in her mind, the latter projects a neat, linear progression that simply doesn't exist. An emphasis is laid on the political movements throughout. While I think this reading is overly cynical, it is nonetheless an important analysis that should be considered. One leaves challenged by the complexities and diversity of "Christianities" that proliferated in antiquity.
June 18, 2025
A leading biblical and historical scholar of the Bible and early church, Fredrikson provides a skilled survey of the church's first five centuries. She reveals that we should talk about Christianities, plural, since the faith encompassed so much variety in beliefs and movements, which she amply demonstrates. I have read many similar books and so much was not new, but I did enjoy several moments: her reminders that how most Christians experienced the faith was very different from how the movements' writers and leaders described the faith; that no one considered themselves "pagan" until much later after Christians started using the term pejoratively; that Augustine defended the use of coercion for matters of faith; that there were many more martyrs of Christians by Christians after Constantine than there was by Rome before the faith was established in the Empire.
March 30, 2025
overall a very good study of ancient christianity.
i particularly enjoyed the discussions on eschatology & gender & popular dynamics. it is particularly strong concerning the topics of heresy & plurality, & placing the narrative within an historical context. fredriksen makes some bold & compelling arguments—many of which i found quite convincing. my biggest complaints have to do with footnotes, of which there are none, & citations, which are limited only to primary sources. the supplementary reading list at the end was quite helpful, but i would have preferred direct citations for specific claims.
i particularly enjoyed the discussions on eschatology & gender & popular dynamics. it is particularly strong concerning the topics of heresy & plurality, & placing the narrative within an historical context. fredriksen makes some bold & compelling arguments—many of which i found quite convincing. my biggest complaints have to do with footnotes, of which there are none, & citations, which are limited only to primary sources. the supplementary reading list at the end was quite helpful, but i would have preferred direct citations for specific claims.
July 3, 2025
Wonderful Sketch of the Beginnings
This book is fascinating and flows so that it is easy to read and follow. She organizes facts and the weavings of men, most likely unknown to most people, so that the history is clear. It is unlike what is spoken from most pulpits, for it is history looked at from within and without the orthoxy that developed. I began to be aware, and to seek and study many decades ago, when I was at university. This book brings together in one place the outlines of actual history. I highly recommend it.
This book is fascinating and flows so that it is easy to read and follow. She organizes facts and the weavings of men, most likely unknown to most people, so that the history is clear. It is unlike what is spoken from most pulpits, for it is history looked at from within and without the orthoxy that developed. I began to be aware, and to seek and study many decades ago, when I was at university. This book brings together in one place the outlines of actual history. I highly recommend it.
October 13, 2025
Comprehensive and fairly helpful overview to the sources and facets of ancient Christianity. It is unclear for whom this book is intended, however: sometimes Fredriksen defines (repeatedly) the most basic terms and figures of Christian doctrine, and other times she seems intent on combatting academic narratives that an introductory reader would never know. The chapter on martyrdom, especially, ends up tied in all kinds of knots.
December 1, 2025
Fredriksen does an admirable job compassing the polyvalence of early Christ-followers. She's organized the book thematically rather than chronologically to capture that sense of conversation, not yet consensus. It's an effective strategy although it does make the text feel somewhat repetitive.
Fredriksen gives a good account situating the early movement within Jewish spaces, and further pointing out how integrated those spaces were with the larger, "pagan" culture. Just as there were many Hellenized Jews, there were also Judaizing pagan "God-fearers" who frequented Jewish communities and imbibed Jewish ideas. These gentiles became a fertile seedbed for the growth of early proselytization. She concisely describes the competing visions of the apostles and early generations in debating whether gentiles were appropriate targets for conversion. Fredriksen does some of her strongest work demonstrating the fluidity between cultural milieux Christian, Jewish, and pagan, and how that increasingly became a source of anxiety in the patristic period as thinkers sought to police the boundaries of each and to minimize Jewish influences while hijacking their scriptural and interpretive patrimony.
Even in the triumphalist Constantinian period, she points out that the proto-"orthodox" church was one sect among many, and that it succeeded largely because the administrative apparatus of a bishop-led church lent itself to the command and control needs of the empire. There were other types of Christian communities around, many of which were brutally suppressed once the emperor turned enforcer. Despite the later romanticization of the age of martyrs, the number of Christians killed after 312 far exceeds earlier periods. There's nothing like the narcissism of small differences to ensure similar competing cults tear each other apart, right? Fredriksen talks about some soi-disant Gnostic groups like the followers of Valentinus or Marcion, who were simultaneously vilified and plundered for useful concepts (e.g., Marcion's early promotion of gospel plus letters as canon, which later evolved into the New Testament), in a reprise of the earlier pattern with the Jews.
This book is definitely a welcome tonic for anyone seeing history as the inevitable ascension of the Church Triumphant. Reality is much messier, contingent, and frankly, more interesting: the first several centuries of the Common Era were a chaotic, fertile, and often violent ferment of ideas, out of which emerged one winner while the losers were assimilated or swept under the rug. It's probably not the most exciting presentation of that reality, but it's pretty short, readable, and mostly right. It's worth checking out if you want a fuller picture of how Western civilization ended up where it did.
Fredriksen gives a good account situating the early movement within Jewish spaces, and further pointing out how integrated those spaces were with the larger, "pagan" culture. Just as there were many Hellenized Jews, there were also Judaizing pagan "God-fearers" who frequented Jewish communities and imbibed Jewish ideas. These gentiles became a fertile seedbed for the growth of early proselytization. She concisely describes the competing visions of the apostles and early generations in debating whether gentiles were appropriate targets for conversion. Fredriksen does some of her strongest work demonstrating the fluidity between cultural milieux Christian, Jewish, and pagan, and how that increasingly became a source of anxiety in the patristic period as thinkers sought to police the boundaries of each and to minimize Jewish influences while hijacking their scriptural and interpretive patrimony.
Even in the triumphalist Constantinian period, she points out that the proto-"orthodox" church was one sect among many, and that it succeeded largely because the administrative apparatus of a bishop-led church lent itself to the command and control needs of the empire. There were other types of Christian communities around, many of which were brutally suppressed once the emperor turned enforcer. Despite the later romanticization of the age of martyrs, the number of Christians killed after 312 far exceeds earlier periods. There's nothing like the narcissism of small differences to ensure similar competing cults tear each other apart, right? Fredriksen talks about some soi-disant Gnostic groups like the followers of Valentinus or Marcion, who were simultaneously vilified and plundered for useful concepts (e.g., Marcion's early promotion of gospel plus letters as canon, which later evolved into the New Testament), in a reprise of the earlier pattern with the Jews.
This book is definitely a welcome tonic for anyone seeing history as the inevitable ascension of the Church Triumphant. Reality is much messier, contingent, and frankly, more interesting: the first several centuries of the Common Era were a chaotic, fertile, and often violent ferment of ideas, out of which emerged one winner while the losers were assimilated or swept under the rug. It's probably not the most exciting presentation of that reality, but it's pretty short, readable, and mostly right. It's worth checking out if you want a fuller picture of how Western civilization ended up where it did.
January 24, 2026
More accurately, a history of heroes of Christian heresies.
By ‘Christianities’ the author really means all the equally valid but politically suppressed heresies, hence the plural. To the author, there is no unified or coherent Christianity, only a bunch of equally valid Christianities, but what Christians call heresies. Analogically, it would be like proposing not science, but sciences. The equally valid sciences of pre-Copernican view who opposed Galileo. These equally valid sciences were stamped out by political power not because they were less useful or because Galileo eventually was recognized as the consensus view (not universal as there are flat earthers - scientific heresies). Cast into the realm of sciences, this approach is preposterous on its face.
In contrast to Papandrea’s ‘Reading the Church Fathers’, which approaches the Church Fathers from a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic perspective, this book comes from a fundamentalist secularist perspective, but this perspective is never admitted or owned up to.
This approach leads to some rather odd positions. Her view on the persecution of Christians is that it probably didn’t happen, if it did, it was orthodox Christians persecuting the equally valid heretics. (No doubt persecution of heretics happened). She surmises that because there wasn’t widespread killing of Christians, and that most Christians survived, the martyr stories are probably not histories, rather they are a form of literature. (Can’t they be both?) She even makes the shocking claim that if Christians were persecuted, it was not because they were Christian. For example, when Nero persecuted and burned Christians, it was not because they were Christian, but because they started fires!? It’s hard to imagine that perspective for any other religious persecution.
She also takes the perplexing position that Manicheism is an equally valid form of Christianity that was only deafened by political power rather than its rather preposterous ideas. To call Manicheism Christian or even a Christian heresy is a stretch. They considered the historical Jesus a demon in disguise (a fact, one of many, overlooked by this book). So to call it a Christianity one would certainly have to call Islam a “Christianity”. One sees the absurdity of this and the length the book goes to to counter any claims of primacy of orthodoxy. Although the effect is purely objective, academic, secular, one can clearly see the aversion to orthodox Christianity, that plays as insight in large parts of the academy.
Not completely without value, but not recommended unless you want a sympathetic history of the heroes of heresies, or should I say equally valid, but politically persecuted Christianities.
By ‘Christianities’ the author really means all the equally valid but politically suppressed heresies, hence the plural. To the author, there is no unified or coherent Christianity, only a bunch of equally valid Christianities, but what Christians call heresies. Analogically, it would be like proposing not science, but sciences. The equally valid sciences of pre-Copernican view who opposed Galileo. These equally valid sciences were stamped out by political power not because they were less useful or because Galileo eventually was recognized as the consensus view (not universal as there are flat earthers - scientific heresies). Cast into the realm of sciences, this approach is preposterous on its face.
In contrast to Papandrea’s ‘Reading the Church Fathers’, which approaches the Church Fathers from a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic perspective, this book comes from a fundamentalist secularist perspective, but this perspective is never admitted or owned up to.
This approach leads to some rather odd positions. Her view on the persecution of Christians is that it probably didn’t happen, if it did, it was orthodox Christians persecuting the equally valid heretics. (No doubt persecution of heretics happened). She surmises that because there wasn’t widespread killing of Christians, and that most Christians survived, the martyr stories are probably not histories, rather they are a form of literature. (Can’t they be both?) She even makes the shocking claim that if Christians were persecuted, it was not because they were Christian. For example, when Nero persecuted and burned Christians, it was not because they were Christian, but because they started fires!? It’s hard to imagine that perspective for any other religious persecution.
She also takes the perplexing position that Manicheism is an equally valid form of Christianity that was only deafened by political power rather than its rather preposterous ideas. To call Manicheism Christian or even a Christian heresy is a stretch. They considered the historical Jesus a demon in disguise (a fact, one of many, overlooked by this book). So to call it a Christianity one would certainly have to call Islam a “Christianity”. One sees the absurdity of this and the length the book goes to to counter any claims of primacy of orthodoxy. Although the effect is purely objective, academic, secular, one can clearly see the aversion to orthodox Christianity, that plays as insight in large parts of the academy.
Not completely without value, but not recommended unless you want a sympathetic history of the heroes of heresies, or should I say equally valid, but politically persecuted Christianities.
July 6, 2026
I was a little bit disappointed with this book having hoped that it would go into a bit more detail about the beliefs, worship and lives of those Christians that the church would later identify as heretics. Of course, as Fredriksen points out at the end, we have virtually no information about these Christians - their writings were largely destroyed and many would in any event have been illiterate and left no trace of their lives. Even so, I had hoped to learn more new material than I did. Ancient Christianities treads quite a well worn path.
It is commendably short (and that's not a sly comment). Some books - I think of J.N. Kelly's huge tome on early Christian beliefs (as deep and dry as the Dead Sea) - are indigestible and this one definitely isn't. It gives a good overview of some of the main divisions in the early church without taking us too deeply down the rabbit hole of monophysitism. I do find it a little frustrating when historians throw out the idea that Acts is early second century when to my mind it's a good thirty years earlier. I was rather more surprised by her dating of Revelation to the mid 60s which would have made it possibly the earliest book after Paul's epistles. Elsewhere I had some bones to pick about her Biblical interpretation which felt to me a little off kilter.
The penultimate chapter asks the question promised by the title: What is Christianity (or Christianities), was it a doctrinal creed, political realpolitik, contested literary interpretation, charismatic exorcisms, ecclesial councils, heroic martyrdom or "semi-pagan" popular rituals. Fredriksen's answer is that for much of the first five centuries it was all these things and more and that (following Gibbon) it was the peculiar intolerance and zeal of the early Christians combined with imperial power that forced orthodoxy through at the expense of other interpretations. I think that there is more to it than that, whilst not denying the particular force with which "orthodoxy" was argued for at the councils. There is a case for arguing that over centuries of debate the "heretical" opinions were simply unable to sustain their argument when matched against Scripture and emerging church tradition.
The book ends with a timeline and glossary which those new to the subject will find invaluable.
It is commendably short (and that's not a sly comment). Some books - I think of J.N. Kelly's huge tome on early Christian beliefs (as deep and dry as the Dead Sea) - are indigestible and this one definitely isn't. It gives a good overview of some of the main divisions in the early church without taking us too deeply down the rabbit hole of monophysitism. I do find it a little frustrating when historians throw out the idea that Acts is early second century when to my mind it's a good thirty years earlier. I was rather more surprised by her dating of Revelation to the mid 60s which would have made it possibly the earliest book after Paul's epistles. Elsewhere I had some bones to pick about her Biblical interpretation which felt to me a little off kilter.
The penultimate chapter asks the question promised by the title: What is Christianity (or Christianities), was it a doctrinal creed, political realpolitik, contested literary interpretation, charismatic exorcisms, ecclesial councils, heroic martyrdom or "semi-pagan" popular rituals. Fredriksen's answer is that for much of the first five centuries it was all these things and more and that (following Gibbon) it was the peculiar intolerance and zeal of the early Christians combined with imperial power that forced orthodoxy through at the expense of other interpretations. I think that there is more to it than that, whilst not denying the particular force with which "orthodoxy" was argued for at the councils. There is a case for arguing that over centuries of debate the "heretical" opinions were simply unable to sustain their argument when matched against Scripture and emerging church tradition.
The book ends with a timeline and glossary which those new to the subject will find invaluable.
May 3, 2026
Broadly, this is a great history book, and floats through all the important topics without getting too bogged-down in individual details. It's a much more effective retelling of early Christianity than, for instance, Tried by Fire, which is more heavy-handed enforces boundaries too aggressively for my liking. Fredriksen is much more balanced, and the prose is good, though not groundbreaking.
That being said, I have some underlying qualms with her definition of Christianity (or rather, "Christianities," in her verbiage). When so-called "semipagan" bishops claimed Christian status, Fredriksen takes them at face value: "As they told criticizing clergy in no uncertain terms, they were Christian. And so they were.” Those who opposed them are largely viewed as aggressors seeking political or personal gain.
Fredriksen, to my knowledge, is not a Christian, so her lack of concern for discerning orthodoxy should come as no surprise. Still, early bishops had good reason to be concerned about heresy. New Testament stories warn of wolves in sheep's clothing (Matt. 7:15), the covert appearance of "false brothers" (Gal. 2:4-5), and the dangers of "diverse and strange teachings" (Heb. 13:9). I consider myself broadly ecumenical and irenic on most contested doctrines, but if the Christ of "Christianity" meant what he said in Matthew 25 (and elsewhere), then the label should be applied with more discernment. Self-identity is useful for statistical surveys, but within a theological construct, more scrutiny may be required.
This qualm aside, the book was great — an informative, enjoyable read that I will be returning to for reference purposes. It's shortcomings are largely backgrounded by its successes, and I'm glad it exists in my (digital) library. The identity of "Christian" was highly contested early on (and, in some circles, remains so to this day). Her emphasis on this doctrinal struggle is a strength of the book, even if I think her conclusion somewhat misses the bullseye. Strong four stars.
That being said, I have some underlying qualms with her definition of Christianity (or rather, "Christianities," in her verbiage). When so-called "semipagan" bishops claimed Christian status, Fredriksen takes them at face value: "As they told criticizing clergy in no uncertain terms, they were Christian. And so they were.” Those who opposed them are largely viewed as aggressors seeking political or personal gain.
Fredriksen, to my knowledge, is not a Christian, so her lack of concern for discerning orthodoxy should come as no surprise. Still, early bishops had good reason to be concerned about heresy. New Testament stories warn of wolves in sheep's clothing (Matt. 7:15), the covert appearance of "false brothers" (Gal. 2:4-5), and the dangers of "diverse and strange teachings" (Heb. 13:9). I consider myself broadly ecumenical and irenic on most contested doctrines, but if the Christ of "Christianity" meant what he said in Matthew 25 (and elsewhere), then the label should be applied with more discernment. Self-identity is useful for statistical surveys, but within a theological construct, more scrutiny may be required.
This qualm aside, the book was great — an informative, enjoyable read that I will be returning to for reference purposes. It's shortcomings are largely backgrounded by its successes, and I'm glad it exists in my (digital) library. The identity of "Christian" was highly contested early on (and, in some circles, remains so to this day). Her emphasis on this doctrinal struggle is a strength of the book, even if I think her conclusion somewhat misses the bullseye. Strong four stars.
July 1, 2025
Where to begin with this one. I initially ventured into this read hoping to gain insight on that most personally interesting and unknown part of Christian/theological history--the Roman period--and instead got a mostly brutally unreadable work. To start, over half of the book is written with explicit anti-Christian overtones, and the rest subtle and implicit anti-Christian overtones. Always contradicting Christian tradition, going as far as to say that Christian persecution in antiquity was a total myth, and also implying that Saint Paul was a pagan, there are no depths of depravity this "work" won't plunge to. Making constant anti-biblical assertions, I am truly dumber having read this. All those false and malign assertions this "historian" has made could cloud out in my long term memory actual biblical knowledge, confusing this biblical knowledge so called with actual biblical literacy. And, it needs to be said, this was written by a convert to Judaism. Why is a Jewish convert opining on Christian history? The context we as Christians use to inform our perspective on current year? Any book about Christian history that uses BCE/CE can be, as again proven here, safely discarded and never touched again. From now on I will be because of this book observing the B.C./A.D. rule--the moment BCE/CE are used unironically the book is forever closed and returned to Amazon. If this is the "history" that accredited and prestigious university graduates/professors churn out, it is far past time Christian's energetically endorse the most radical education reform possible, which starts with tanks parked on Harvard's lawn.
The only reason I won't give it one star is because buried beneath the ethno-religious resentment/inferiority complex is genuinely fascinating history.
The only reason I won't give it one star is because buried beneath the ethno-religious resentment/inferiority complex is genuinely fascinating history.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 28, 2026
This survey of the first five centuries of Christianity was not exactly what I expected. Fredriksen approaches this period through historical reconstruction, asking what we do (or can) know about the earliest Christians and how Christianity “developed” throughout antiquity.
She’s a good historian and a very good writer. She brings the ancient world to life and does a good job of reminding us that Christianity started and grew in a very different world from ours. I learned a lot about the religious and social contexts of that world. Even though I disagreed with her conclusions, it certainly wasn’t boring or a waste of time.
My problem with the book (and it’s significant) is her method. If you start with her presuppositions, her conclusions will follow. But her presuppositions are presented as settled facts of scholarship even when they are contested. Positions that are debated within biblical and/or historical scholarship are presented with a certainty that just isn’t warranted. For example, she treats Acts (and at least portions of the gospels) as a second-century work, dismisses many of the Pauline epistles, and presents skeptical reconstructions without making clear that they indeed disputed. A reader with no background in these matters would assume that her positions and conclusions are settled and indisputable facts.
I expect an author to make clear distinctions between evidence, inference, speculation, and assumption. Those distinctions seemed pretty blurred here. I questioned the conclusions because she seemed far too confident in them given the speculative reconstructions on which they rest. I wish she had been transparent about where the evidence ends and her reconstruction begins.
I don’t regret reading the book. She raises good questions and has valuable insights into the world of early Christianity (when she sticks to history rather than biblical interpretation). Keep in mind that this is not a neutral presentation of the evidence. It’s a critical reconstruction built on this author’s assumptions and commitments. If you share her commitments, you will probably like the book more than I do. If you don’t share them, you might find it thought-provoking and perhaps informative but will also find it frustrating as well.
She’s a good historian and a very good writer. She brings the ancient world to life and does a good job of reminding us that Christianity started and grew in a very different world from ours. I learned a lot about the religious and social contexts of that world. Even though I disagreed with her conclusions, it certainly wasn’t boring or a waste of time.
My problem with the book (and it’s significant) is her method. If you start with her presuppositions, her conclusions will follow. But her presuppositions are presented as settled facts of scholarship even when they are contested. Positions that are debated within biblical and/or historical scholarship are presented with a certainty that just isn’t warranted. For example, she treats Acts (and at least portions of the gospels) as a second-century work, dismisses many of the Pauline epistles, and presents skeptical reconstructions without making clear that they indeed disputed. A reader with no background in these matters would assume that her positions and conclusions are settled and indisputable facts.
I expect an author to make clear distinctions between evidence, inference, speculation, and assumption. Those distinctions seemed pretty blurred here. I questioned the conclusions because she seemed far too confident in them given the speculative reconstructions on which they rest. I wish she had been transparent about where the evidence ends and her reconstruction begins.
I don’t regret reading the book. She raises good questions and has valuable insights into the world of early Christianity (when she sticks to history rather than biblical interpretation). Keep in mind that this is not a neutral presentation of the evidence. It’s a critical reconstruction built on this author’s assumptions and commitments. If you share her commitments, you will probably like the book more than I do. If you don’t share them, you might find it thought-provoking and perhaps informative but will also find it frustrating as well.
September 28, 2025
This is the kind of learning I could get used to. It was, by all accounts, a very laid-back work of non-fiction.
So used as I am to this particular topic, this book didn't really break any new ground for me, with the notable of exception of a constant reference to what would otherwise have been minor details in the broad sweep of history - so focused are a lot of these scholars on the ascension of orthodox Christianity in late antiquity, and on its literary evolution via the learned, that they tend to ignore how the lives of most lay Christians were still fundamentally intertwined with their Jewish and pagan neighbours, and that the evolution of Christian theology and institutions were in part a product of Roman cosmopolitanism. Compared to the focus on key powerful players done by Charles Freeman, the ground-breaking introductions to particular topics by Bart Ehrman, or the socially conscious analysis of Hector Avalos, this particular book of Fredriksen's felt very much like a warm, lazy lecture, where you'd take in interesting points of data, but didn't have to do too much rigorous analysis. And this isn't a criticism - I could do with this kind of book more often, even as my eagerness to understand complicated topics leads me to look for complicated books.
Nevertheless, there is something particular too about the voice Fredriksen brings to this, where her focus on the cosmopolitanism, and leading Christian writers complaining about it creates a far less starkly-divided world of the light and the dark that far too many apologists have sought to present, and important lesson for how we view the past and our present.
So used as I am to this particular topic, this book didn't really break any new ground for me, with the notable of exception of a constant reference to what would otherwise have been minor details in the broad sweep of history - so focused are a lot of these scholars on the ascension of orthodox Christianity in late antiquity, and on its literary evolution via the learned, that they tend to ignore how the lives of most lay Christians were still fundamentally intertwined with their Jewish and pagan neighbours, and that the evolution of Christian theology and institutions were in part a product of Roman cosmopolitanism. Compared to the focus on key powerful players done by Charles Freeman, the ground-breaking introductions to particular topics by Bart Ehrman, or the socially conscious analysis of Hector Avalos, this particular book of Fredriksen's felt very much like a warm, lazy lecture, where you'd take in interesting points of data, but didn't have to do too much rigorous analysis. And this isn't a criticism - I could do with this kind of book more often, even as my eagerness to understand complicated topics leads me to look for complicated books.
Nevertheless, there is something particular too about the voice Fredriksen brings to this, where her focus on the cosmopolitanism, and leading Christian writers complaining about it creates a far less starkly-divided world of the light and the dark that far too many apologists have sought to present, and important lesson for how we view the past and our present.
April 20, 2026
An alright introduction overall. Some interesting insights like the Pagans who would help the Jews with worship but viewed the Jewish God as just one of many deities. The section on magic was also interesting, suggesting that early Christians largely took a neutral view on magic and saw no issue with its use.
My biggest problem was the standard problem in a lot of modern scholarship on early Christianity, where sinister motives are overtly or implicitly ascribed to the orthodox to cast doubt on everything. The section on Christian persecutions was particularly baffling, as the author spends most of the time going, “I don’t think this really happened,” but then admits she has no idea what actually happened and it’s left at that. Of course this kind of skepticism is welcome in scholarly works, but it ends up just coming off as writing off the words of the orthodox simply because they prevailed.
At every turn she implies the orthodox have sinister or ulterior motives, yet doesn’t hold the same for their opponents much of the time.
Many of the great orthodox writers were mostly left out too, despite their vast writings providing plenty of material.
The discussions of heresies also left some to be desired, I was disappointed over the lack of a discussion/examination of Gnosticism.
I found myself struggling to finish near the end, I had 30 or so pages left for a few months. This could just be a personal problem.
My biggest problem was the standard problem in a lot of modern scholarship on early Christianity, where sinister motives are overtly or implicitly ascribed to the orthodox to cast doubt on everything. The section on Christian persecutions was particularly baffling, as the author spends most of the time going, “I don’t think this really happened,” but then admits she has no idea what actually happened and it’s left at that. Of course this kind of skepticism is welcome in scholarly works, but it ends up just coming off as writing off the words of the orthodox simply because they prevailed.
At every turn she implies the orthodox have sinister or ulterior motives, yet doesn’t hold the same for their opponents much of the time.
Many of the great orthodox writers were mostly left out too, despite their vast writings providing plenty of material.
The discussions of heresies also left some to be desired, I was disappointed over the lack of a discussion/examination of Gnosticism.
I found myself struggling to finish near the end, I had 30 or so pages left for a few months. This could just be a personal problem.
August 4, 2026
Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years is an engaging and illuminating exploration of the rich diversity that characterized Christianity during its formative centuries. Paula Fredriksen moves beyond familiar narratives to reveal a far more complex history, showing how numerous Christian communities, beliefs, and practices developed alongside Judaism, pagan traditions, and the changing political landscape of the Roman Empire. The result is a compelling account that deepens our understanding of how Christianity evolved into a global religion.
One of the book's greatest strengths is its use of a wide range of historical sources, from noncanonical writings and archaeological evidence to inscriptions and papyri. Fredriksen skillfully reconstructs the vibrant religious world of late antiquity, demonstrating that the emergence of orthodox Christianity was neither simple nor inevitable. Her accessible writing makes sophisticated historical scholarship engaging for both general readers and those with a deeper interest in early Christian history.
Overall, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years is an insightful and highly rewarding read for anyone interested in church history, biblical studies, religious history, and the ancient world. It offers a nuanced perspective on the origins of Christianity while highlighting the diversity, complexity, and historical forces that shaped one of the world's most influential religious traditions.
One of the book's greatest strengths is its use of a wide range of historical sources, from noncanonical writings and archaeological evidence to inscriptions and papyri. Fredriksen skillfully reconstructs the vibrant religious world of late antiquity, demonstrating that the emergence of orthodox Christianity was neither simple nor inevitable. Her accessible writing makes sophisticated historical scholarship engaging for both general readers and those with a deeper interest in early Christian history.
Overall, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years is an insightful and highly rewarding read for anyone interested in church history, biblical studies, religious history, and the ancient world. It offers a nuanced perspective on the origins of Christianity while highlighting the diversity, complexity, and historical forces that shaped one of the world's most influential religious traditions.
December 2, 2025
Impressive survey of Christianity and its adherents during the first five centuries of the CE. A slew of information on the different beliefs, practices, players, etc. To label the author's knowledge of these things as "encyclopedic" would be a massive understatement. For me, growing up in the Christian faith and church with present-day dogma, learning the variety that existed back then is eye-opening.
Notwithstanding that praise, the book has a few faults. My impression is that the author wasn't sure of her audience: the writing is frequently obscured (to me) by her use of what I assume is the argot of her profession. Sometimes simply words like "religio" and "superstitio" that make me wonder whether she is using them synonymously with "religion" and "superstition." Or maybe there is a subtle or not-so-subtle difference. Latin terms like "pro Iudaeos" that I am unfamiliar with. And do forth. At the same time, the text is summary in a way that makes me think it couldn't be of much interest to a deep student of the subject.
The book has a number of detailed and useful indices at its back. I would have found a single and more comprehensive index helpful.
Notwithstanding that praise, the book has a few faults. My impression is that the author wasn't sure of her audience: the writing is frequently obscured (to me) by her use of what I assume is the argot of her profession. Sometimes simply words like "religio" and "superstitio" that make me wonder whether she is using them synonymously with "religion" and "superstition." Or maybe there is a subtle or not-so-subtle difference. Latin terms like "pro Iudaeos" that I am unfamiliar with. And do forth. At the same time, the text is summary in a way that makes me think it couldn't be of much interest to a deep student of the subject.
The book has a number of detailed and useful indices at its back. I would have found a single and more comprehensive index helpful.
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