-
Jesus Wars
- How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
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This incisive history upends the complacency that confines anti-Judaism to the ideological extremes in the Western tradition. With deep learning and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to the history of the West. Questions of how we are Jewish and, more critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world.
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Great Book: Terrible Narrator
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Medieval Christianity
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For many, the medieval world seems dark and foreign - a miraculous, brutal, and irrational time of superstition and strange relics. The pursuit of heretics, the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the domination of the "Holy Land" come to mind.
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New Standard Text for This Period
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The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1, Revised and Updated
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In The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1, Justo L. González, author of the highly praised three-volume History of Christian Thought, presents a narrative history of Christianity from the early church to the dawn of the Protestant reformation. From Jesus' faithful apostles to the early reformist John Wycliffe, González skillfully traces core theological issues and developments within the various traditions of the church, including major events outside of Europe, such as the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World.
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Throughly engaging
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Dominion
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Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion - an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus - was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history.
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Only the forward is narrated by Holland.
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For five centuries, Martin Luther has been lionized as an outspoken and fearless icon of change who ended the Middle Ages and heralded the beginning of the modern world. In Rebel in the Ranks, Brad Gregory, renowned professor of European history at Notre Dame, recasts this long-accepted portrait. Luther did not intend to start a revolution that would divide the Catholic Church and forever change Western civilization. Yet his actions would profoundly shape our world in ways he could never have imagined.
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Something to think about
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Celebrated religious and social historian Rodney Stark traces the extraordinary rise of Christianity through its most pivotal and controversial moments to offer fresh perspective on the history of the world's largest religion.
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Balanced and unapologetic, excellent read
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The Lost History of Christianity
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The Lost History of Christianity will change how we understand Christian and world history. Leading religion scholar Philip Jenkins reveals a vast Christian world to the east of the Roman Empire and how the earliest, most influential churches of the East---those that had the closest link to Jesus and the early church---died. In this paradigm-shifting book, Jenkins recovers a lost history, showing how the center of Christianity for centuries used to be the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, extending as far as China.
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Worthwhile with caveats
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The Birth of Classical Europe
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To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....
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Excellent overview of the Classical World
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Turning Points
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In this popular introduction to church history, now in its third edition, Mark Noll isolates key events that provide a framework for understanding the history of Christianity. The book presents Christianity as a worldwide phenomenon rather than just a Western experience. Students in academic settings and church adult education contexts will benefit from this one-semester survey of Christian history.
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Excellent, Brief Snippet’s
- By ejb on 01-06-23
By: Mark A. Noll
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The Council of Nicea was not clerics in a dark and ornate hall. It was brawls in churchyards; it was emperors and governors fighting to save the empire; it was political intrigue as the governments of church and state blended into a volatile stew. It was the way a fringe group of peace-loving communal worshipers of a crucified Palestinian prophet conquered the Roman Empire.
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Dry and very complex though somewhat informative
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unabridged bias.
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Be aware that the audio book is an old edition
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In this iconoclastic and provocative work, leading scholars Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman draw on recent archaeological research to present a dramatically revised portrait of ancient Israel and its neighbors. They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible - the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon’s vast empire - reflect the world of the later authors.
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In this highly accessible discussion, Bart Ehrman examines the most recent textual and archaeological sources for the life of Jesus, along with the history of first-century Palestine, drawing a fascinating portrait of the man and his teachings. Ehrman shows us what historians have long known about the Gospels and the man who stands behind them. Through a careful evaluation of the New Testament (and other surviving sources, including the more recently discovered Gospels of Thomas and Peter), Ehrman proposes that Jesus can be best understood as an apocalyptic prophet.
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I must read for those whose wanting to expand their insight from a single perspective (devotional) to include historical
- By RGO on 11-25-19
By: Bart D. Ehrman
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What listeners say about Jesus Wars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- V
- 10-21-22
Lots of history on Christianity
This author did a great job of giving you the events, players and the doctrins that have gone into shaping Western Christianity.
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- Anna Durham Windrow
- 01-12-23
Deep
Well researched but too deep into the considerable weeds for me. Bvvb bbggddss. Lljjff. Lljjff
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- No to Statism
- 06-15-21
Intellectualism (Academia)
The author (Philip Jenkins) wrote this book in a very accessible way; on balance, it can be understood by the "lay" reader. Nevertheless, Mr. Jenkins ultimately could not avoid the ubiquitous snare of academia; the baneful "what if" or the obligatory hypothetical teleological alternative outcomes.
My hope in purchasing this audio book, was that clear and heretofore obscure "facts" in early church history, would reveal the persons and events that affect the modern Christian's belief system - doctrinal or theological. The impression I was unfortunately left with, was that the author simply wanted to present historical events. And this with the aforementioned hypothetical teleology, or the possibility of different outcomes.
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- Adam Shields
- 08-29-23
subtitle over promised, but worth reading
I am not sure that the book’s subtitle, “How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years,” helped my perception of the book. I have read two previous books by Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity and The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. I am mixed, even as I am glad I read them. I bought Jesus Wars on Kindle years ago but never read it. I noticed it was free as part of my Audible membership, but it was leaving the free section soon, so I picked it up.
Jesus Wars is part of my reading in response to Christian Nationalism, especially Noll’s America’s Book and Whitehead’s American Idolatry. A point that many pro-Christian Nationalists attempt to make is that their expression of Christianity is more consistent with historic Christianity than those that oppose Christian Nationalism. If their point is narrow, that there have been some aspects of Christianity that are similar to their understanding of Christian Nationalism, then I think that is accurate. But not all expressions of Christianity should be emulated.
Philip Jenkins is a historian of Christianity who tends to look at significant trends and demographics. I appreciate how he draws attention to both geographies and times to parts of Christian history that are less well-known or ignored. In all three books I have read, he draws attention away from traditional Western (European and North American) Christianity and toward Christianity of Africa and Asia. He is not anti-orthodox (in the theological sense), but he believes that some of the lines drawn in the past were more about politics, language, and culture than theology. Jenkins wants to introduce the reader to what is often called Miasophite or Nestorian Christianity. The introduction discusses why those descriptions are inaccurate but still commonly used. He concludes that there were fundamental differences in approach with these early theological battles but that the disagreements were not only about theology but also language, culture, and politics. I think Jesus Wars and Christianity The First 3000 Years are examples of trying to do Christian history by primarily looking at the political and social history as a contributing factor to the theological history. This is important to Christian history because, so many times, Christian history is presented as solely spiritual. Christian history is messy, as Jesus Wars presents.
Jesus Wars is mainly a political and social history of about 400 to 800, focusing primarily on the later councils. If you have heard of the violence of European Christianity around the Reformation, the violence and persecution during this earlier era were just as bad. The Roman Empire was slowly breaking up, and the politics of that breakup influenced political involvement in theological and ecclesiological issues. There was a different understanding of the idea of covenant and God’s role in the world. Gods were geographical, and as nation/states developed, the understanding of the gods’ role was as a sponsor or patron of those entities. This is not how we generally conceive of the role of God today, but that change in understanding is relatively recent. Christendom understood the ecclesiology and politics as connected. Bad decisions politically had theological implications. If the state was allowed by God to wield the sword, then the church often was as well. And it wasn’t just that there was the option, but an obligation to wield.
(As a side note, there has been a discussion on spanking within Christianity on Twitter recently. Many pro-spanking voices are not simply saying there is an option to spank as a type of parental discipline allowed within Christianity but that there is an obligation to spank. These voices seem to suggest that spanking is not one of several options that should be allowed but, in some way, a biblical mandate. I can’t help but think that this is part of the discussion of Christian nationalism because of the exertion of power and authority that is associated with Christian nationalism. And as I said above, there is historical precedent for the wielding of power in this way. But there is also historical precedent for many other things like slavery and patriarchy, and the presentation of these as obligations is where the fundamental disagreement rests.)
Jenkins’ presentation often revolves around the concept of Jesus and what his body was made of, how divinity and humanity related, and what the role of Mary in the making of that body was the surface-level fight. But underneath the surface, philosophy, previous cultural understanding of the role of the gods, and metaphysics in general were part of why the fight over Jesus was occurring. There is an ongoing “joke” that it is virtually impossible to talk about the Trinity without entering into some type of heresy. Jenkins wants the reader to understand that the characters fighting were often much closer in position than we tend to believe. Part of the problem in our current understanding is that we do not always know the positive views of different sides because we lack documentation. We only have the stereotype of losing views because positive views were repressed and often destroyed.
This led me to pick up The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction because I had not considered some of the aspects of the role of Mary in a number of these discussions. And then, I am starting Mideieval Christianity to explore further ideas that Jenkins brought up.
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- M
- 04-02-24
Ok
I appreciated the historical context emphasis but it was a lot of unnecessary events and words and info. Skipped half the book .
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