Historical

Perhaps no figure in biblical scholarship has been the subject of more controversy and debate than Mary Magdalene.

An uneasy spiritual sense has gripped many Christians; a profound sense that something is incomplete and disconnected within the body of church teaching; something elemental to our raison d’etre.

Over 330,000 copies sold. This is the story of the church for today's listeners. Bruce Shelley's classic history of the church brings the story of global Christianity into the twenty-first century. Like a skilled screenwriter, Shelley begins each chapter with three elements: characters, setting...

Start Your 30-Day Journey to Master the Bible. For many people—regardless of their level of experience—the Bible can seem intimidating. Maybe you've tried to read or learn about the Bible in the past and found it hard to understand. Maybe you've been reading it for years, but you still lack...

Smith Wigglesworth reveals that the key to manifesting God's power is understanding this one essential key - how to let God's anointing rest upon you....

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Chair of The Elders, and Chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, along with his daughter, the Reverend Mpho Tutu, offer a manual on the art of forgiveness—helping us to realize that we are all capable of healing and...

A Powerful Defense of The Protestant Tradition. There's a movement among evangelicals of exploring the more sacramental, liturgical, and historically-conscious church traditions, including Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. This hunger for historical rootedness is welcome—but...

New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church. The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples...

Beyond a mere introduction to great art, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart is about loving to learn what art has to teach us about the wonder and struggle of being alive. Did you know that: Vincent van Gogh's attempt to start an artist's colony with Paul Gauguin lasted only nine weeks, ending in his...

An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers—with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous. "[A] rollicking journey through every aspect of...

Your ticket from the twenty-first century to the era of Jesus and the first Christians. A listenable, two-volume introduction placing the entire New Testament and early Christianity in its original context, written by distinguished scholar and author N. T. Wright. An ideal guide for students...

A major new work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest sacred documents of Judaism, which reveals their surprising connections to early Christianity. “A luminous treatment of a fascinating subject! Highly recommended!”—Scott Hahn, author of The Fourth Cup From award-winning scholar John...

Today in the West, many consider the church to be dead or dying. Christianity is seen as outdated, bigoted, and responsible for many of society’s problems. This leaves many believers embarrassed about their faith and many outsiders wary of religion....

How do art and faith intersect? How does art help us see our own lives more clearly? What can we understand about God and humanity by looking at the lives of artists? Striving for beauty, art also reveals what is broken. It presents us with the tremendous struggles and longings common to the...

Saint Augustine's contributions to Christian theology are second to no other post-apostolic author in the whole sweep of church history. Yet along side his doctrinal treatises, Augustine tells a story of his life devoted to Christ as his only satisfaction.

Church History, Volume One offers a unique contextual view of how the Christian church spread and grew from its development in the days of Jesus to the years leading up to the Reformation. Looking closely at the integral link between the history of the world and that of the church, Church...

Africa has played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture from its infancy. Some of the most decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood in Africa before they were in Europe....

The story of the church is important for Christians to know, for it contains rich and uplifting stories of God’s dealings with His people. Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson takes the listener on a tour of the Christian history, featuring stories and songs....

“…as I slept I dreamed a dream.” So begins one of the most beloved stories in all of history. John’s Bunyan’s beautiful and moving allegory of Christian, the Pilgrim, on his perilous journey to the Celestial City, has touched hearts and minds for more than three hundred years. Filled...

Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator....

Down swept the Vikings from the frigid North. Across the English coastlands and countryside they raided, torched, murdered, and destroyed all in their path. Farmers, monks, and soldiers all fell bloody under the Viking sword, hammer, and axe.

A History of Western Philosophy and Theology is the fruit of John Frame's 45 years of teaching philosophical subjects. No other survey of the history of Western thought offers the same invigorating blend of expositional clarity, critical insight, and biblical wisdom....

Life and times of the 14th century German spiritual leader Meister Eckhart, whose theory of a personal path to the divine inspired thinkers from Jean Paul Sartre to Thomas Merton, and most recently, Eckhart Tolle Meister Eckhart was a medieval Christian mystic whose wisdom powerfully appeals to...

The preaching of the truth, brother, and the confession of Orthodoxy is more needful for us than everything else, and we must make this confession before all mankind. For this is the foundation of all who believe.

Is God a sadistic torturer? Coldhearted judge? Genocidal maniac? Unfortunately, our popular caricatures often make him out to be....

Historical Books of the Bible What if the Bible’s historical accounts were never meant to answer only what happened—but to expose why it happened? What if behind every battle won, throne lost, city burned, and exile endured stood a deliberate God shaping history through covenant, obedience, and human choice? This book confronts a shocking reality: when the theological meaning of biblical history is ignored, Scripture is reduced to stories instead of divine explanations for real-world outcomes. Many readers struggle with the historical books because they appear violent, repetitive, or ...

This study argues that nineteenth-century “ministerial education” must be interpreted as a central organ of the broader evangelical “benevolent empire,” not as a neutral aid to piety or a simple upgrade in clerical literacy. The opening chapters trace how an interlocking network of voluntary societies (Bible, tract, missions, Sunday school, reform, educational) generated a logic of holy efficiency—identifying religious “needs,” raising funds, building institutions, and standardizing personnel—within which seminaries functioned as the system’s nervous system: they existed ...

Why Christianity’s Biggest Debate Is Stuck —and Why No One Can Win It For centuries, Christians and skeptics have argued about one question: Did the resurrection really happen? The arguments are brilliant. The books are endless. The results never change. Believers stay believers. Skeptics stay skeptics. What if the problem isn’t the evidence—but the question itself? In This Book You’ll Discover: Why resurrection debates never change anyone’s mind The hidden assumption believers and skeptics share Why history alone cannot decide the resurrection How the Incarnation reframes the ...

According to a book from 2020, “non-causative predestination” is basically a modern guardrail phrase: it tries to protect two claims the author insists Scripture teaches plainly—God’s sovereignty over all events and God’s holiness as “not the moral author of sin”—without letting human “logic” bully the Bible into choosing only one of them. The Foreword’s core complaint is that many controversies come from confusing mystery with contradiction. A contradiction would be God being holy and unholy “in the same sense.” Mystery is God being “sovereign over all events”...

This book argues that Greek and Roman rhetoric is less a museum piece than the durable “engineering logic” of public persuasion—ethos, logos, and pathos—developed through Greek democratic courts and assemblies, sharpened by the Sophists and critiqued by Plato, systematized by Aristotle, and then pragmatically refined by Rome through Cicero’s canons and Quintilian’s moral program for forming a speaker. It then traces how this rhetorical bloodstream flowed into Christian preaching—most directly in the Latin West through Cicero → Augustine → later homiletics, and in the Greek...

"Moses: The Journey to Freedom" is a captivating and inspiring retelling of the timeless biblical story of Moses and the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. This compelling narrative takes readers on a transformative journey through the depths of oppression, the rise of a chosen leader, and the remarkable deliverance of an entire nation. The book begins by immersing readers in the historical context of ancient Egypt—a land of grandeur, power, and cultural magnificence. Against this backdrop, the narrative explores the origins of the Israelites in Egypt, tracing their ...

“1832: The Great Baptist Separation—From Local Churches to the Benevolent Empire,” argues that the Old School–New School conflict was not a polite intramural quarrel but a nationwide re-wiring of Baptist life—a rolling series of fractures (late 1820s → 1830s → into the 1840s) driven by whether churches would submit to a new institutional “benevolent empire” (boards, societies, Sunday schools, seminaries, press) or reject it as extra-scriptural machinery that displaced the local church and the Spirit’s direct work. The paper does three big things: Defines the camps and ...

A Classical Defense of Christianity from the Age of Persecution Written at the crossroads of Roman rhetoric and Christian theology, Lactantius’s works present one of the earliest sustained efforts to explain and defend Christianity to the educated world of the Roman Empire. Explores The Divine Institutes, the first systematic presentation of Christian doctrine in Latin Includes doctrinal, philosophical, historical, and poetic writings by Lactantius Modernized for clarity while preserving the substance of the classic Ante-Nicene Fathers translation Ideal for students, pastors, and readers ...

The Antichrist is not who you think he is. The Protestant Reformers knew his identity—have you forgotten? Body: Who is the "Man of Sin"? For centuries, modern theology has pointed to a shadowy future figure—a political dictator who will rise for a brief seven-year tribulation. But what if this interpretation is a recent invention, designed to hide a threat that has been operating in plain sight for over a thousand years? In Antichrist Unveiled: The Man of Sin Biometric Fingerprints, David Michael Curtis conducts a rigorous forensic audit of the Scriptures to expose the true identity of ...

This book is a compact, historically anchored argument that treats Sunday School less as a neutral “church activity” and more as a modern institution with a theology baked into its machinery. It opens with a brief foreword framing the piece as a continuation of (and response to) ongoing criticism of the Old School Baptist position. In the first movement, Sunday School is defined in its modern, recognizable form—an age-graded, volunteer-run “learning hour”—but its origins are located in late–late-18th-century social conditions: industrial poverty, child labor, and a push for ...

The book traces the Nicene Creed from its fourth-century origins into its later reception among Old School Baptists, using both patristic history and Trott/Beebe as lenses. It begins by outlining what the Creed is in its 381 (Niceno-Constantinopolitan) form: a compact confession of one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ “true God from true God” and “of one substance with the Father,” the Holy Spirit as “Lord and giver of life” worshiped with Father and Son, and one holy catholic and apostolic Church, one baptism, and the hope of resurrection. It situates this formula within ...

In broad strokes, the document shows that “eternal vital union” among Old School Baptists is not a random oddity but a specific way of talking about how Christ and his people are related in eternity, and how that relation intersects with Adam, the fall, and time-bound regeneration. At its core, eternal vital union is the claim that the elect are not merely decreed or foreseen in Christ, but that they truly stand to him as children to a Head in an eternal, living relation before the world began. In Gilbert Beebe’s pieces, that union is pushed very far: the elect are an “eternal seed,...

Martin Luther and the Birth of Protestant Thought: A Complete Guide to His Ideas, Influence, and Lasting Legacy is a clear, accessible, and well structured introduction to one of the most influential thinkers in Western history. This book offers readers a guided journey through Luther’s most important ideas, the world that shaped him, and the movement that emerged from his bold challenges to tradition. Written for learners, history enthusiasts, and anyone seeking to understand the foundations of Protestant theology, it explains the core concepts that defined Luther’s work and why they ...

Paul the Pharisee celebrates not just the New-Paul as Jew but the New-New-Paul as Jewish Pharisee. Granted past Christian, Jewish, and Roman matrices of interpretation, this book explores the historical Paul through the fourth matrix of Evolution. (Think of those matrices as four Russian nesting Matryoshka dolls.) We are not on the Titanic; we are the iceberg. What, then, does Pauline “resurrection” have to do with human evolution?

The Westminster Assembly is celebrated for its doctrinal standards and debates on church polity. But how often is the assembly noted for its extraordinary intervention in the pulpit ministry of the Church of England? Chad Van Dixhoorn recounts the Puritan quest for a reformation in preachers and preaching and how the Westminster Assembly fit into that movement. He examines the assembly’s reform efforts, tracing debates and exploring key documents about preaching in a way that highlights disagreements within the assembly’s ranks and showcases their collective plan for the church going forward.

Is Christmas a compromise with paganism or a powerful platform for the gospel? In Reclaiming Christmas: A Biblical & Historical Defense for Celebrating the Season, Dr. Rob McKee takes you on a surprising journey through Scripture, church history, and common-sense logic to expose the myths, memes, and half-truths that have convinced many sincere Christians to abandon the celebration of Christ’s birth. By contrasting research into ancient sources and modern internet claims, Dr. McKee carefully “proves all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) and challenges readers to do the same. What if the ...

Who is the true Israel? For centuries, the Christian Church has answered this question with a resounding affirmation: the Church, as the body of believers in Jesus Christ, is the True Israel, inheriting the covenant promises of the Old Testament. Yet, in the modern era, this historic understanding has been challenged by dispensationalism, a theology that separates Israel and the Church, fueling political agendas and reshaping evangelical thought. Who is Israel?

In this groundbreaking work, Roberts argues that Jesus of Nazareth was not a passive spiritual teacher, but a devoted leader within the Zealot movement—a Jewish resistance fighting for liberation from brutal Roman rule. Backed by historical, cultural, and linguistic evidence. A corrected interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, uncovering that it was Pilate, not the Jewish crowd, who issued the order to crucify Jesus.

I wrote these books, Part One and Part Two, for all those who demanded of me believable answers to their thoughtful and intelligent questions. With or without me, these people so often found themselves in the presence of the Risen Christ and subsequently had even more questions about Jesus of Nazareth. He was and is to them the man Jesus, before the transformation wrought by the resurrection. Our subsequent myths have bred confusion, making Jesus of Nazareth remote and incomprehensible and the Risen Christ an unrelated magical figure.

The book argues that high-church pageantry (vestments, incense, processions, chant) and evangelical worship bands (lights, platforms, curated song-sets) are really two styles of the same thing: religious theater. Both center a visible “front” team, run on rehearsed scripts, and use aesthetics (sound, light, movement, space) to create a sense of “the holy,” often turning the congregation into an audience and quietly treating atmosphere as a quasi-sacrament or “means” of producing spiritual effect. Historically, it traces religious theater from ancient ritual-as-drama (pagan and ...

Socialism Examined What Happens When a Nation Turns to Socialism? It promises fairness and compassion, but everywhere it gains power the results are the same: declining freedom, weakened families, and growing dependence on government. Why does it always end this way? A Clear Christian Perspective This book explains, in simple terms, why socialism conflicts with biblical truth and why it consistently harms the very people it claims to help.You will learn how modern political leaders use fear, crisis, and entitlement to push a country toward greater state control — and why many don’t ...

This bookt frames Edwards, Hopkins, and Fuller as one “Edwardsian ecosystem” expressed in different church habitats—Congregational New England (Hopkins) and Particular Baptist England (Fuller)—and it does so explicitly through Old School Baptist eyes, i.e., with the controlling suspicion that this whole line (however brilliant) proved practically corrosive to “sound Baptist doctrine.” The thesis is clean: Edwards supplies the conceptual machinery, Hopkins systematizes and weaponizes it into an activist ethical program, and Fuller translates Edwards into an anti–Hyper-Calvinist...

In Scripture, “witness” and “testimony” are truth-terms, not technique-terms. A witness gives honest attestation to reality—Christ’s person and work—and the believer’s life is meant to function as corroborating evidence, not as a staged performance. Modern usage often drifts: “witnessing” becomes a program (“going witnessing”) and slides into scripts, pressure tactics, and “closing the deal,” while “testimony” can become a stylized personal story that subtly shifts the center from Christ to the speaker. Harris’s The Witnessing Church (1837) represents an ...

The Christ of God - Volume II Why He Suffered If Christ is eternal and sovereign, then His suffering was neither accidental nor misunderstood. Volume II of The Christ of God moves from identity to obedience, examining the suffering of Christ not as defeat, but as deliberate fulfillment. This volume confronts the cross as a theological necessity, not merely a tragic event, revealing a Messiah who enters suffering knowingly, submits without surrendering authority, and fulfills the Law without being overcome by it. Here, the crown of thorns is not a symbol of weakness, but of covenant ...

The Christ of God - Volume I Who He Is. Who is Jesus Christ-before tradition, before argument, and before the cross? The Christ of God is not a devotional and not a biography. It is a Christological work that begins where many discussions do not: with identity. Volume I examines who Christ is apart from human projection, cultural framing, or emotional reduction. Drawing directly from Scripture, this volume explores Christ as eternal, sent, anointed, and sovereign-revealing a Messiah whose authority precedes incarnation, suffering, and resurrection. Rather than treating Jesus as a response ...