People find it hard to believe that Christianity had such an inauspicious beginning in A.D. 33 with the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. He had only a handful of followers — many of them poor ...

After a long period in which the persecutions of Christianity were really spasmodic, local, [and] involved very few people, suddenly in the middle of the 3rd century, the year 250, the Emperor ...

But that older world of Ovid and Horace was in ruins by the time of Constantine—and Christianity had nothing to do with the collapse. For reasons that were variously social, political, and economic, ...

A new paperback edition of The Rise of Christianity was long overdue. To all the folks at Princeton UP, you’re doing God’s work. This article appears in the January/February 2024 issue ...