A ground-breaking introductory textbook for the study of the New Testament and the first Christians, written for the next generation of students Comparing Christianities: An Introduction to the New Testament and the First Christians maps the historical rise of Christianity out of a network of early Christian movements. This major new textbook systematically explores the struggles to define the faith by presenting Christianity as the result of a lengthy process of religious consolidation which emerged from a landscape of persistent Christian diversity. The book delves into the history of the first five generations of Christians, from Paul to Origen. The first chapter considers the challenges of constructing Christian histories and offers a new model of Christian families to organize and explain the emergence and competition of different varieties of Christianity. Each successive chapter focuses on key issues that Christian leaders engaged over the centuries, demonstrating how the questions they posed and the answers they provided gave Christianity its distinct shape. As the movements competed for social advantage, Christians began identifying certain Christian movements as enemies and consolidated against them. The final chapter schematizes the Christians studied in the book into three families of Christian movements based on the particular God they worshipped and other shared patterns of thought and practice. This chapter also explains where the varieties of Christianities came from and how the process of consolidation undertaken by some churches shaped Christian identity within a forge of intolerance that still affects us today. Comparing Christianities explores the answers to questions: Who were the early Christians and what did they write? What did Christians think about sex, women, immortality, Judaism, suffering and death? What rituals did the first Christians practice, and what did their religious experiences mean to them? How did Christians live in a Roman-dominated world? How did the first Christians explain the origins of their movement? Comparing Christianities: An Introduction to the New Testament and the First Christians serves as an excellent primary textbook in undergraduate classrooms for Introduction to Christianity, Introduction to Religion, New Testament Studies, Christian Origins, World Religions, and Western World Religions, and a thought-provoking resource for anyone wishing to know more about Christianity.

This book integrates secular literature such as psychology, sociology, management, and organization studies with Christian and spiritual biblical literature. This book explores the importance of human worth in our personal and professional lives through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates human and societal worth with Christian and spiritual worth. Moreover, the book highlights values that receive little or no attention in secular literature. Overall, this book shows readers how human worth is often manipulated and undermined within societal worth in contrast to Christian worth with implications for cultivating leadership and education. This book focuses more on the biblical texts rather than the theological differences. In addition, this book situates itself on common biblical interests across Christian church denominations worldwide rather than exploring more on the secular cultural differences. This book positions itself from a non-denominational and Western perspective with a focus on biblical texts, theology, and secular literature. Readers that would be interested in this book are scholars and students in religion, ethics, and spirituality.

MODERN EVENTS CHALLENGE RELIGIOUS WORLD UNDERSTANDINGS Mr. Bond, as a scientist outside the religious establishment, and not subject to its conforming pressures, dares to address today’s several internet collections of supernatural experiences. His startling conclusion is that a transcendent God has been working in our world! However, he begins the book by addressing traditional Christians’ unfounded beliefs in many literal Bible understandings declared as timeless truths, as derived from oral histories, allegorical writing styles, and beliefs in the Old Testament God. The liberal church is observed as working to constructively de-mythologize many such traditional beliefs, but only responding with various new understandings and beliefs in the God Jesus called his metaphorical father. Two modern internet sites are shown as revealing a transcendent God making supernatural mind interventions in deathbed visions, near-death experiences, and God-originated personal directives. By analyzing the many reported directive experiences, Mr. Bond believes such God-initiated mind interventions are also found in several important New Testament stories. Thus, long regarded as mythological like many others, these stories instead establish God was actually intervening in the life of Jesus, and later many of his apostles, in what can be called the beginning of Christianity. The author’s understandings thus provide a distinctive new foundation for the Christian religion, that displace the few specific mythological beliefs now forming the foundation of traditional Christianity. The author thus leads to belief in a supernatural God, a Jesus even more firmly understood as inspired directly by God, and a God still working with mind interventions in individual lives and deaths. This Christianity thus is conceived with a distinctive new God-centered foundation, derived from analysis of real world experiences that should inspire modern minds in supporting Christianity. A CELESTIAL GOD IS RECOGNIZED AS WORKING IN OUR WORLD

The nine essays in this volume, written by leading international scholars in New Testament studies, examine in new depth the method of comparison so frequently deployed in the study of the New Testament. They raise and reflect on deep questions on the possibility and validity of such comparative exercise, on the methods that are most effective and intellectually defensible, on the purpose of such comparison, and on the perils and pitfalls in such exercises. Addressing these questions at both a theoretical, hermeneutical level, and through case-studies of actual examples, the book provides a much needed and up-to-date methodological resource for the numerous comparative projects spawned by New Testament studies throughout the world.

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