Download or read book Pagan Christianity written by Frank Viola and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever wondered why we Christians do what we do for church every Sunday morning? Why do we “dress up” for church? Why does the pastor preach a sermon each week? Why do we have pews, steeples, and choirs? This ground-breaking book, now in affordable softcover, makes an unsettling proposal: most of what Christians do in present-day churches is rooted, not in the New Testament, but in pagan culture and rituals developed long after the death of the apostles. Coauthors Frank Viola and George Barna support their thesis with compelling historical evidence and extensive footnotes that document the origins of modern Christian church practices. In the process, the authors uncover the problems that emerge when the church functions more like a business organization than the living organism it was created to be. As you reconsider Christ's revolutionary plan for his church—to be the head of a fully functioning body in which all believers play an active role—you'll be challenged to decide whether you can ever do church the same way again.
Download or read book Pagan Rome and the Early Christians written by Stephen Benko and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1986-07-22 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the early Roman empire, Christians were seen by pagans as overthrowers of ancient gods and destroyers of the prevailing social order. Allegations that Christians recognized each other by secret marks, met at night and made love to one another indiscriminately, worshipped the head of an ass and the genitals of their high priests, and ate children were widely believed. In examining these charges and the Christian response to them, Benko has provided a persuasively argued and refreshing, if controversial, perspective on the confrontation of the pagan and early Christian worlds."[book cover].
Download or read book Who is Your Covering written by Frank A Viola and published by . This book was released on 2002-08-01 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Final Pagan Generation written by Edward J. Watts and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling history of radical transformation in the fourth-century--when Christianity decimated the practices of traditional pagan religion in the Roman Empire. The Final Pagan Generation recounts the fascinating story of the lives and fortunes of the last Romans born before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Edward J. Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century’s dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. The emperors who issued these laws, the imperial officials charged with implementing them, and the Christian perpetrators of religious violence were almost exclusively young men whose attitudes and actions contrasted markedly with those of the earlier generation, who shared neither their juniors’ interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their propensity for violent conflict. Watts examines why the "final pagan generation"—born to the old ways and the old world in which it seemed to everyone that religious practices would continue as they had for the past two thousand years—proved both unable to anticipate the changes that imperially sponsored Christianity produced and unwilling to resist them. A compelling and provocative read, suitable for the general reader as well as students and scholars of the ancient world.
Download or read book Pagans and Christians in the City written by Steven D. Smith and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges. Picking up poet T. S. Eliot’s World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith argues in this book that today’s culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, Smith shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today’s most controversial issues.
Download or read book The Paganism in Our Christianity written by Arthur Edward Pearse Brome Weigall and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christianity Book Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity written by Dirk Rohmann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is estimated that only a small fraction, less than 1 per cent, of ancient literature has survived to the present day. The role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics. In an approach that presents evidence for the role played by Christian institutions, writers and saints, this book analyses a broad range of literary and legal sources, some of which have hitherto been little studied. Paying special attention to the problem of which genres and book types were likely to be targeted, the author argues that in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science. This book examines how Christian authorities, theologians and ideologues suppressed ancient texts and associated ideas at a time of fundamental transformation in the late classical world.
Download or read book Between Pagan and Christian written by Christopher P. Jones and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who and what was pagan depended on the outlook of the observer, as Christopher Jones shows in this fresh and penetrating analysis. Treating paganism as a historical construct rather than a fixed entity, Between Christian and Pagan uncovers the fluid ideas, rituals, and beliefs that Christians and pagans shared in Late Antiquity.
Download or read book Pagan Britain written by Ronald Hutton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain's pagan past, with its mysterious monuments, atmospheric sites, enigmatic artifacts, bloodthirsty legends, and cryptic inscriptions, is both enthralling and perplexing to a resident of the twenty-first century. In this ambitious and thoroughly up-to-date book, Ronald Hutton reveals the long development, rapid suppression, and enduring cultural significance of paganism, from the Paleolithic Era to the coming of Christianity. He draws on an array of recently discovered evidence and shows how new findings have radically transformed understandings of belief and ritual in Britain before the arrival of organized religion. Setting forth a chronological narrative, Hutton along the way makes side visits to explore specific locations of ancient pagan activity. He includes the well-known sacred sites—Stonehenge, Avebury, Seahenge, Maiden Castle, Anglesey—as well as more obscure locations across the mainland and coastal islands. In tireless pursuit of the elusive “why” of pagan behavior, Hutton astonishes with the breadth of his understanding of Britain’s deep past and inspires with the originality of his insights.
Download or read book Pagans and Christians in the Late Roman Empire written by Marianne Sághy and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do the terms 'pagan' and 'Christian,' 'transition from paganism to Christianity' still hold as explanatory devices to apply to the political, religious and cultural transformation experienced Empire-wise? Revisiting 'pagans' and 'Christians' in Late Antiquity has been a fertile site of scholarship in recent years: the paradigm shift in the interpretation of the relations between 'pagans' and 'Christians' replaced the old 'conflict model' with a subtler, complex approach and triggered the upsurge of new explanatory models such as multiculturalism, cohabitation, cooperation, identity, or group cohesion. This collection of essays, inscribes itself into the revisionist discussion of pagan-Christian relations over a broad territory and time-span, the Roman Empire from the fourth to the eighth century. A set of papers argues that if 'paganism' had never been fully extirpated or denied by the multiethnic educated elite that managed the Roman Empire, 'Christianity' came to be presented by the same elite as providing a way for a wider group of people to combine true philosophy and right religion. The speed with which this happened is just as remarkable as the long persistence of paganism after the sea-change of the fourth century that made Christianity the official religion of the State. For a long time afterwards, 'pagans' and 'Christians' lived 'in between' polytheistic and monotheist traditions and disputed Classical and non-Classical legacies.
Download or read book The Pagan Christian Connection Exposed written by Michael J. Rood and published by Bridge Logos Foundation. This book was released on 2008-01-29 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rood explodes the long-held ideas surrounding the pagan-inspired traditions of Christmas, Easter, Lent, using the Bible to lead readers back to the irrefutable truths from the World of God. Includes DVD.
Download or read book Reinventing Jesus written by J. Ed Komoszewski and published by Kregel Publications. This book was released on with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinventing Jesus cuts through the rhetoric of extreme doubt to reveal the profound credibility of historic Christianity. Meticulously researched yet eminently readable, this book invites a wide audience to take a firsthand look at the primary evidence for Christianity's origins.
Download or read book The Pagan Background of Early Christianity written by William Reginald Halliday and published by Health Research Books. This book was released on 1925 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1925 Contents: Preface; Introductory; Administration, Municipalities, Guilds; Communications; society and Social Ethics; Eastern and Western Elements in Graeco-Roman Civilisation; the Decline of Rationalism; Union with God and the Immortality of.
Download or read book Pagans and Christians written by Robin Lane Fox and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 808 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author recreates the world from the second to the fourth century A.D., when the gods of Olympus lost their dominion, and Christianity, with the conversion of Constantine, triumphed in the Mediterranean world.
Download or read book The Triumph of Christianity written by Bart D. Ehrman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Christianity become the dominant religion in the West? In the early first century, a small group of peasants from the backwaters of the Roman Empire proclaimed that an executed enemy of the state was God’s messiah. Less than four hundred years later it had become the official religion of Rome with some thirty million followers. It could so easily have been a forgotten sect of Judaism. Through meticulous research, Bart Ehrman, an expert on Christian history, texts and traditions, explores the way we think about one of the most important cultural transformations the world has ever seen, one that has shaped the art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics and economics of modern Western civilisation.
Download or read book The Darkening Age written by Catherine Nixey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph, Spectator, Observer, and BBC History Magazine, this bold new history of the rise of Christianity shows how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizations. The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion deliberately attacked and suppressed the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to "one true faith." Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyrs' deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless, and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth, and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the first century to the sixth, those who didn't fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial, and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces, and their priests killed. It was an annihilation. Authoritative, vividly written, and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable debut from a brilliant young historian.
Download or read book From Pagan to Christian written by Yutang Lin and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
