The claim that the Bible was "the Christian's only rule of faith and practice" has been fundamental to Protestant dissent. Dissenters first braved persecution and then justified their adversarial status in British society with the claim that they alone remained true to the biblical model of Christ's Church. They produced much of the literature that guided millions of people in their everyday reading of Scripture, while the voluntary societies that distributed millions of Bibles to the British and across the world were heavily indebted to Dissent. Yet no single book has explored either what...

This book shows how, in unearthing biblical cities, archaeology transformed nineteenth-century thinking on the truth of Christianity and its role in modern cities.

The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ("out-of-England"). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England -and also traces newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church...

Smith and Wace's magisterial A Dictionary of Christian Biography provides an account of the figures and personalities of the early Christian Church. Its four volumes and more than 4,000 pages provide authoritative accounts of every person connected with the early Christian Church, the literature connected with them, and the controversies relating to doctrine or discipline in which they were engaged. Articles range from extended entries on major figures such as Constantine I, Isidore of Seville, Justinian and Tertullianus, to entries on the Doctrine of Faith, the Apochryphal Gospels,...