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The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years is unavailable, but you can change that!

Contrary to several popular works of Christian scholarship, historian Paul Barnett maintains that the first two decades of Christian history are hardly “lost years.” As he shows in this penetrating book, the period between Jesus and the earliest Christian texts is open to historical investigation, and he richly details the time and setting in which the church was born. Writing with accessible...

The earliest surviving records of Christianity are the letters of Paul, which began appearing twenty years or less after the crucifixion of “rabbi” Jesus. Good historical method suggests that the earliest written evidence is the place to begin one’s inquiry. This, however, is not where Crossan and others mentioned shortly begin their analyses. Remarkably, Paul’s letters reveal that the readers had come to worship Jesus as “Christ,” “Son of God,” and “Lord” and to pray to
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