The last decade of Christianity Studies has witnessed a revolution in Late Antiquity scholarship. The very popularity of Late Antiquity says something about the current intellectual climate in which these studies arise: a shift from a primary emphasis on Christianity itself to the larger cultural setting of which it was a part, a shift from doctrinal studies to the church as a social institution, and a shift from concern for orthodoxy to the popular religious attitudes and expressions. While the chronological scope is the same, the first six centuries of the common era, this collection of...

This volume honors Professor Everett Ferguson of Abilene Christian University on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. Reflecting the interests of the honoree, the twenty-one contributions focus on various aspects of the early church and its environment. Together the articles form a broad tapestry of interrelated topics informed from the disciplines of philosophy, patristic theology, archaeology, rhetoric, art, Greco-Roman religion, and biblical studies.

Church history is the story of the greatest community the world has known and the greatest movement in world history. Yet, just as the biblical record of the people of God is the story of a mixed people with great acts of faith and great failures in sin and unfaithfulness, so is the history of the people who have made up the church down through the ages.

Church History, Volume Two is an account of the ups and downs, the triumphs and struggles, of the Christian movement. It offers a unique contextual view of how the Christian church spread and developed from the...

A collection of five lectures which provide a much-needed study of the demonic in New Testament literature and thought, with useful summaries of demonology in the Greek and Jewish literature of that era.

This magisterial volume is a comprehensive survey of the doctrine and practice of baptism in the first five centuries of Christian history, arranged geographically within chronological periods. Baptism in the Early Church covers the antecedents to Christian baptism and traces the history of Christian doctrine and practice from the New Testament through the writings of the church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. The book deals primarily with the literary sources, though it also gives attention to depictions of baptism (primarily of Jesus) in various art forms and to the...

This book employs a methodology that I have found helpful in dealing with other topics. This procedure is to assemble the New Testament texts on the topic and interpret them, then check this interpretation against usage in early Christian literature outside the New Testament, and finally to examine the doctrinal considerations to determine if the interpretation rests on solid biblical theology. Rather than gathering quotations from secondary literature, my approach is to read the source documents in the original and present the texts in their context. At the time of first edition of the book,...

About the Contributor(s): Philip LeMasters is Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Religion at McMurry University and the Corporate Secretary of the Board of Trustees of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary. A priest of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, he is the author of Toward a Eucharistic Vision of Church, Family, Marriage, and Sex (2004) and The Goodness of God's Creation: How to Live as an Orthodox Christian (2008).

"These essays, spanning four decades of Ferguson's scholarship, sum up major discussions of ministry and canon in early Christianity. Especially useful for exploring the terminology surrounding ordination, these essays are vintage Ferguson." --Elizabeth A. Clark, Duke University, Durham, NC For Volume 2: "This volume is another great contribution by Everett Ferguson toward a better understanding of the practices of the early church. Because of his vast and thorough knowledge of the original documents, as well as scholarly studies that contribute to one's understanding of their context,...