Early Religions

Alexandria was the epicenter of Hellenic learning in the ancient Mediterranean world, yet little is known about how Christianity arrived and developed in the city during the late first and early second century CE. In this volume, M. David Litwa employs underused data from the Nag Hammadi codices and early Christian writings to open up new vistas on the creative theologians who invented Christianities in Alexandria prior to Origen and the catechetical school of the third century.

"Miracles in the Early Christian Church" edited by Timothy W. Grogan is a thought-provoking exploration into the historical claims of miraculous events that were believed to have shaped the early Christian faith. Drawing from Conyers Middleton's seminal 1749 work, this annotated edition critically examines the authenticity of miracles attributed to the Christian Church from its earliest days. Grogan provides detailed commentary on the controversies surrounding these events, questioning their origins and the motivations behind them.

From her own experiences - her struggles and victories on the way to peace - Eugenia Price offers in this book a step-by-step guide for all who seek a new, happy, and complete life. This thrilling and inspiring chronicle of spiritual adventure lifts the heart and head of the listener, as the widely respected Christian author and speaker lets Christ speak through her to those who long to follow him as Lord of their lives.

The early Church faced its share of villains - persecutors like Nero and Julian, heretics like Marcion and Arius. And what good were they? Plenty, say the Church fathers. The threat of persecution made Christians strong and bold. As noted author Mike Aquilina demonstrates in Villains of the Early Church: And How They Made Us Better Christians, the menace of heresy made Christians smarter - and deepened their knowledge of the divine mysteries. The villains of the ancient world proved the mettle of heroes like Peter and Paul, Irenaeus and Athanasius.

For many Christians, our understanding of the history of the church universal jumps straight from what we read in the New Testament to a basic understanding of the Reformation. We're missing more than a millennium! And it was a busy, fascinating, tumultuous thousand-or-so years during which Christianity spread across three continents. In places as distant and different from each other as China, Sudan, and Britain, the gospel was spreading, the church was growing, and believers were expressing their faith in myriad ways.

Did you know that Christianity has gone through many changes since its origin? Over two thousand years ago, a Jewish man was born into a society in turmoil. It is impossible to tell the story of Christianity without understanding the man behind it. What were the lives of Jesus and his followers like? How were their words so impactful that they changed history and affected the lives of billions of people over the course of two thousand years?

The Shepherd of Hermas, composed in the late 1st or mid-2nd century AD, is an intriguing early Christian work filled with vivid visions, parables, and teachings. It follows the journey of Hermas, a former slave, who receives divine revelations through a figure known as the Shepherd. The text explores themes of repentance, moral integrity, and the necessity of maintaining a pure and faithful Christian community.

This particular volume (Volume One) begins with the period in the early 1600s when two very different English societies were established in the New World, one in Virginia and one in New England. The Virginia society simply re-created the rigidly class-based feudal society of the times. The New England society was a most unusual democracy of social equals, covenanted to live under God's—not man's—personal rule. These two American social types would find themselves in rather constant struggle....

This book welcomes listeners to appreciate the origins of Christianity within the Roman world in which early Christianity got its first foothold. It does that by immersing listeners in the life and culture of two thriving first-century towns—Pompeii and Herculaneum. Those towns (destroyed in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE) act as showpieces of the world into which the early Christian movement was spreading.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel” - Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE - took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.

You've probably heard of St. Raphael Hawaweeny, St. Alexander Hotovitsky, liturgical translator Isabel Hapgood, and other righteous men and women who made their mark on the early development of Orthodoxy in America. But what about the notorious itinerant Bulgarian Monk? Or Fr. Raphael Morgan, the first black Orthodox priest in America? Or Vera Johnston, who served the Orthodox Church without renouncing her Theosophist roots?

Recorded by the author himself, most of the topics for the book were conceived between three and four a.m. We've all woken up in the middle of the night with a good idea only to fall back to sleep and not be able to remember it in the morning. The Bible states multiple times that God wakes his prophets early. Were the prophets of old special, or just normal people who chose not to fall back to sleep, listen, and write it down?

This book is about Paul, the apostle who had an amazing revelation of the love of God the Father expressed through Jesus Christ, his beloved Son. The revelation of the God who was in Christ. How did Paul receive such an incredible revelation? How was this legalistic Jewish pharisee who persecuted the early church transform into the man who has this profound revelation? Who was the man behind the words? What was the back story? Paul’s story unfolds in the pages of the New Testament.

In the first book of the series, listeners will embark on a captivating journey through Jesus' formative years, from his humble birth in Bethlehem to his upbringing in Nazareth. Through vivid storytelling and historical context, this book immerses listeners in the cultural backdrop of Jesus' early life, shedding light on his family and the events that helped to shape his extraordinary character. Uncover the mysteries. Embrace the revelations. Discover Jesus in a way you've never imagined.

Early Scenes in Church History, is the eighth in a series of 17 books called The Faith-Promoting Series. Published between 1879 and 1915, this series of books was published by the Juvenile Instructors Office for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-day Saints. It was George Q. Cannon's inspiration that produced the series, however. In 1866, Cannon, then a member of the Quorum of the 12, began publication of a magazine for youth and young adults called The Juvenile Instructor, which he owned and published until his death in 1901, when his family sold the magazine to the LDS Church's Sunday School organization. Thus, in 1882 when the present work, Early Scenes in Church History, was published, it was a work undertaken under the direction of Cannon, with the blessing of the Church's governing leadership.

Who was Priscilla? Readers of the Bible may know her as the wife of Aquila, Paul's coworker, or someone who explained baptism to Apollos. Biblical references to Priscilla spark questions: Why is she mentioned before her husband? Does the mention of her instruction of Apollos mean that women taught in the church? What is her story?

That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified is the closest to a historical fact anyone can say about him. Biblical scholars have spent centuries debating the details of what Jesus did and said, but this crude fact—that Jesus suffered capital punishment at the hands of the Roman authority by crucifixion—is accepted by the overwhelming majority of scholars. That there once was a cross where Jesus suffered and died is, therefore, the sequential logical affirmation.

This volume offers an accessible investigation of the Naassene discourse embedded in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies (completed about 222 CE), in order to understand the theology and ritual life of the Naassene Christian movement in the late second and early third centuries CE. The work provides basic data on the date, genre, and provenance of the Naassene discourse as summarized by the author of the Refutation (or Refutator).

This audiobook focuses on the history of the early African Church from the upper room at Pentecost to the rise of Islam. Its content is a subset of the research in the book Surveying Christianity's African Roots. Herein are cross-references to chapters in the research book, as well as additional details about the contributions, sacrifices and faith of indigenous African Christian men, women and teenagers.

Today, we live in a world that is asking, “Can God?” Do we believe miracles and promises from God are for another age? Hebrews tells us plainly that God is the same today as he was yesterday. The story of Mike Martin and Vivian is the story of miracles, of prayers answers, of mountains moved. It is the story that could have only been realized By Faith and nothing else. It is the testament that God is at work today and that the miraculous can happen each and every day if we are willing to see it.