From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries & Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith

By L. Michael White

L. Michael White, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the origins of Christianity, provides the complete, astonishing story of how Christianity grew from the personal vision of a humble Jewish peasant living in a remote province of the Roman Empire into the largest organized religion in the world.

Rather than reading the New Testament straight through in its traditional, or “canonical” order, From Jesus to Christianity takes a historical approach. Looking at the individual books chronologically, in the sequence in which they were actually written, readers can see what they divulge about the disagreements, shared values, and unifying mission of the earliest Christian communities. White digs through layers of archaeological excavations, sifts through buried fragments of largely unknown texts, and examines historical sources to discover what we can know of Jesus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780062241979

L. Michael White

L. Michael White is Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins and the director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of From Jesus to Christianity and has been featured in and co-written two award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries.

Reviews for From Jesus to Christianity

[kant1066 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If anyone out there is looking for a one-stop introduction to early Christianity, this might well be it. In fact, I usually use an index card to try to organize what I want to say in reviews, but about one hundred pages into the book, I realized that there was just so much information here that I would never be able to do justice to everything “From Jesus to Christianity” has to offer. Don’t let the “By The Featured Expert on the PBS Special ‘From Jesus to Christ’” sticker on the front fool you, either. I haven’t seen the PBS special, but I can certainly assure you that this book has more scholarly rigor and vastly more detail than any television program ever could. I found the first quarter of this book which includes a rich, detailed account of the ways in which ancient Judaism informed both the thought and practice of nascent Christianity (or, as White calls it, the “Jesus cult,” since Christianity wasn’t a word available to the earliest Christians). We get a quick history of post-Davidic Israel with an emphasis on the cultural, social, and political strife that was occurring at the time, including a history of the various imperial occupations with which Jesus dealt, and the radical politics this occasionally spawned. White then goes on try to construct the historical person of Jesus by looking at the four Gospels and the Pauline corpus. This is where White starts to include a little more rigor than even the more interested readers might want. We get charts detailing the intricacies of the synoptic problem, including the “Two-Source Hypothesis,” “the Two-Gospel Hypothesis (the Griesbach hypothesis,” and the “Farrar-Goulder Hypothesis.” There is another detailed table on page 136-137 discussing the content of the Q source, a.k.a. the “synoptic sayings source.” What are the Two-Source Hypothesis and the Q source? Before reading the book, I couldn’t have told you in any real detail, but White lays it all out beautifully and in context.I don’t mean any of this to say that the book is hopelessly obscure. It’s not. White gives a detailed account of Paul’s Aegean travel, and an analysis of his letters to various new Christian communities (again, replete with numerous charts). There is a wonderful discussion of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition and Jewish sectarianism and how people dealt with the Gospels in the first century A.D. Thankfully, White includes not just canonical texts, but also non-canonical ones like the Gospel of Thomas. In later generations, White discussions the development of various Christological controversies and the rise of what he calls “normative self-definition.” How did Christian communities define themselves in relationship to their (often) Jewish past? In relation to Hellenism? For interesting questions to these questions answered through the spectrum of morality and ethics, I heartily recommend another book I recently reviewed for this site, namely Wayne Meek’s “The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries.” I tried to think of some aspect of New Testament history, ancient Christian society, or the literature that White didn’t at least touch on, but couldn’t find one. The material is presented in chronological, which makes things extraordinarily easy to find. This might not be exhaustive for someone interested in the minutiae in, say, the dating controversies of certain books or hermeneutic approaches, but this book provides a more than solid introduction, and has the virtue of having thirty-five pages of endnotes. If there is one thing this book is missing, it’s a chapter-by-chapter reading list, although some of the aforementioned charts do have recommended ancillary reading material. All in all, you can’t really go wrong with using this book as a stepping stone to studying this material.

[davidpwithun_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Probably the best introduction to early Christianity that I have yet come across. The tables that show relationships between and summaries of various writings are enough to make the book a valuable resource. Multiple theories on the history surrounding various writings and events are presented along with the proof for each in an unbiased way, which makes this book valuable as a general introduction to the field for newcomers. This book is also especially useful for the background information (the late BCE era), the parallel history of early Judaism (contrary to popular belief, Judaism in fact developed alongside Christianity, not before), and information about Greco-Roman society, history, and customs. Some of the information presented here, though, seems a little outdated (for instance, who honestly still believes that the Secret Gospel of Mark wasn't a hoax?). Overall, not a bad book for a thinking person who is interested in the topic and can take what they read with a grain of salt