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

A religion of emotive intuition, of aestheticized and commodified experience, of self-creation and self-improvement and, yes, selfies. A religion for a new generation of Americans raised to think of themselves both as capitalist consumers and as content creators. A religion decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth-claims ab

Tracking the centuries-long literature since Edward Gibbon on the origins of Christian intolerance and violence towards pagans and others in late antiquity, Guy Stroumsa provides further background for the emergence of monotheism. The region occupied by the myriad communities across the Byzantine and the Sassanian empires in late antiquity generate

Christians soon discovered that they had many significant disagreements among themselves regarding many of the most basic elements of their faith.

Cosmas describes the Bogomils as rejecting the Old Testament and Church sacraments; the only prayer they used was the Lord’s Prayer. They did not venerate icons or relics, while the cross was denounced as the instrument of Christ’s torture. The Church itself was seen as being in league with the devil, whom the Bogomils regarded as not only the crea