Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling

“Earliest Christianity emerged as a new and strange religion” that sometimes left others “puzzled” and “offended,” according to this dynamic history from Gupta (Tell Her Story), a professor of the New Testament at Northern Seminary in Lisle, Ill. Unlike first-century Romans, whose relationship to the divine was ritualized yet distant, early Christians worshiped a God that “loves you and cares for you, and [that] you ought to honor and love... back,” Gupta writes, explaining that the concept was foreign to pagans, for whom love was “beside the point of religion.” Furthermore, early Christians spurned animal sacrifices, venerated a so-called “criminal” (Jesus), and suspiciously shared no common ethnic background, all of which made them a “deviant and improper” threat to Rome’s civic order. After exhaustively contrasting the pagan and Christian traditions, Gupta ventures that the latter triumphed because of “the people, the Christians themselves... this community had to be compelling.” While the personal qualities that made Christians so compelling might have been explored in greater detail, Gupta provides a fresh and rigorously researched take on Christianity’s founding, and in the process sheds light on the community-building functions of religion and religious norms. This is an excellent resource for students of theology and religious history. (Feb.)