Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea

About this book

The creation of the Christian Church is one of the most important stories in the development of the worlds history but also one of the most enigmatic and little understood shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding. Through a forensic brilliant reexamination of all the key surviving texts of early Christianity Geza Vermes illuminates the origins of a faith and traces the evolution of the figure of Jesus from the man he wasa prophet recognizable as the successor to other Jewish holy men of the Old Testamentto what he came to represent: a mysterious otherworldly being at the heart of a major new religion. As Jesuss teachings spread across the eastern Mediterranean hammered into place by Paul John and their successors they were transformed in the space of three centuries into a centralized state-backed creed worlds away from its humble origins. Christian Beginnings tells the captivating story of how a man came to be hailed as the Son consubstantial with God and of how a revolutionary anticonformist Jewish subsect became the official state religion of the Roman Empire.