Book recommendations to research early Christianity

by gR0o0oT

Hello all, this is actually my very first post to reddit! But I’m really interested in the topic of early Christianity. The time period that most interests me is around the 50s (from my understanding, kind of the start of the growth) to about the year 400. I’m looking for any book recommendations that will help me really get deep into a few topics:

  1. how Christianity overcame paganism and spread the way it did
  2. how the Bible was put together (including anything I can find on books omitted and included and why)
  3. early christian “sects” I guess. I’ve heard of groups like marcion’s following. So any groups that kind of opposed that orthodox view.

I would definitely be interested in any ancient writings we have, like for example I have Eucebius’ church history, so anything like that.

Sorry if this was a bit long or anything for an initial post. And thanks in advance for any recommendations!

Edit: I’m not sure if this is needed (I haven’t spent much time in this subreddit) but preferably not from a “theistic view” just a study on the events.

Ancient_Dude

The best sub in which to ask your questions is r/AcademicBiblical. It is dedicated to the objective study of the Bible. About half the people there are theists (including Jews) and about half are not.

If you are not satisfied with the answers you get here (and this is an appropriate sub for your question) you might try r/AcademicBiblical.

hillsonghoods

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular podcast/book/novel/documentary/etc, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.

Ba-Bel

I guess the typical reference about early Christianity is Peter Brown. I've read his The Rise of Western Christendom. It starts from 200 and ends around the year 1000, but you can look his other books. I don't know right now any good reference for the previous ages, but this one goes deep about the "sects".

You can consult his list of works here: https://history.princeton.edu/people/peter-brown