A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity Book

Combining exacting scholarship with a dazzling flair for the dramas of the ancient world, Keith Hopkins takes us on a trip back in time to explore the emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire. His provocative and exuberant account challenges our perceptions about what the religion was really like in its early stages, about Jesus, and about the way history is written. Hopkins brings alive the full cacophony of religious voices that vied for dominance in the Roman marketplace of ideas. He shows how Christianity took hold despite its internal schisms and multiple streams, and brings to the surface the roiling tensions this new "Jesus movement" set off among both the pagans and the Jews, as the riot of emerging traditions stole from and rejected, fought with and allied against each other in a whirlwind of competing ideologies.

The strange triumph of Christianity is a tale of struggle, courage, and religious obsession. It is also a story of fantastic innovations that have left an indelible mark on modern culture. From an illegal sect whose members were persecuted and killed, Christianity has grown to be one of the world's dominant religions. Yet, there were numerous early Christianities, rather than one monolithic version, and heretic Christians fought with each other as much as they did with the Romans. It was a group of dissenting offshoots from the original tradition that first created a Christian "bible" out of Paul's letters and Luke's Gospel, which ultimately became part of what we know as the New Testament. Hopkins controversially argues that in this tumultuous period, there were many Jesuses. The human Jesus of the early Gospels is quite different from the mystical Jesus of the Gospel of John, who again is different from the Jesus who teaches in the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas. One of the finest minds in classics plumbs these subtleties while delivering a riveting narrative that not only looks back but brings you there in vivid, living color.

Revolutionizing the way history is written, Hopkins intersperses conventional "objective" analysis with a TV drama about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the memoirs of two time-travelers sent back to Pompeii, and an invented correspondence between an ingenue Christian and his more sophisticated superior. This exceptionally original and exciting work of history enables readers to imagine themselves back in, and to sharpen their opinions about, a half-remembered world that was once full of harsh realities, dreams, demons, and gods.