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Early Christianity

Author:	Mark Humphries
Published By:	Routledge (Abingdon)
Pages:	276
Price:	£12.99
ISBN:	0 415 20539 5

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

The only snag with this otherwise excellent little book is that the title does not describe the contents. The title led me to expect a routine and probably chronological exploration of the early church. What I got was an excellent and delightful exploration of how we discover the realities behind early Christian experience.

Mark Humphries is a Classics lecturer at the National University of Ireland. He is not a specialist church historian nor a committed Christian, and therefore brings to his subject the freshness of an outsider combined with a very strong understanding of how the fledgling Christian church fitted into the world of the late Roman empire and beyond. It is aimed at Classicists to help them locate the development of the church within the context of the wider classical world. As such, he writes “unashamedly a personal and idiosyncratic volume”, illuminated throughout by a dry sense of humour. Therein lies its charm and its usefulness.

Particularly instructive is his examination of the understanding of the early church held by people in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His first chapter includes a section on how we should explore and understand the early church in our own century.

The author examines the sources from which we gain our knowledge of the early Christians, and helps us to get to grips with the contexts, origins and spread of the faith. He shows us how the new religion became increasingly organised and how, as it did so, it developed its own power structures, and how it used that power to challenge the power of the Roman Empire.

The whole study is illuminated with case studies which focus on particular issues and events. The Nag Hammadi documents are given a helpful section (he even describes how the codices relate to the popular novel, The Da Vinci Code), as are the missionary journeys of Paul and the relationship between Pliny the Younger and the Christians.

I found this to be one of the most enjoyable and accessible books on early church history that I have ever read. Christian readers will be made to feel uncomfortable in places as he ruthlessly addresses issues of heresy and their potential validity, but let that not deter. I thoroughly commend it and will be doing to my students as they develop their understanding of their Christian faith.