From Jesus To Christianity

"Now, for the first time, L. Michael White, one of the world's foremost scholars on the origins of Christianity, provides the complete story of how Christianity grew from the personal vision of a humble Jewish peasant living in a remote province of the Roman Empire into the largest organized religion in the world." "Rather than reading the New Testament straight through in its traditional order - Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and so on - White takes a historical approach, looking at the individual books in the sequence in which they were actually written. He explores what these books divulge about the disagreements, shared values, and unifying mission of the earliest Christian communities. White digs through layers of archaeological excavations, sifts through buried fragments of largely unknown texts, and examines historical sources to discover what we can know of Jesus and his early followers."--BOOK JACKET.

L. Michael White is Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Classics and Christian Origins and is the director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin