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Title details for The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins - Available

The Lost History of Christianity

The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—-and How It Died

by Philip Jenkins
Dick Hill
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
The Lost History of Christianity will change how we understand Christian and world history. Leading religion scholar Philip Jenkins reveals a vast Christian world to the east of the Roman Empire and how the earliest, most influential churches of the East—those that had the closest link to Jesus and the early church—died. In this paradigm-shifting book, Jenkins recovers a lost history, showing how the center of Christianity for centuries used to be the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, extending as far as China.


Without this lost history, we can't understand Islam or the Middle East, especially Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Complete with maps, statistics, and fascinating stories and characters that no one in the media or the general public has ever heard of, The Lost History of Christianity will immerse the listener in a lost world that was once the heart of Christianity.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 11, 2008

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400129713
      • File size: 296172 KB
      • Duration: 10:17:01

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Dick Hill's reading of Jenkins's revisionist history is pleasant enough, but for this listener it falls short on several counts. Listeners are challenged, for the ten hours over which the audiobook unfolds, to hold in their minds the names of many unfamiliar people, places, dates, and sects without the helpful visual cue of seeing words on the page. The second quibble is content related. Jenkins's book presents itself as an iconoclastic retelling of the early history of Christianity--of the rise and fall of sects lost to history when Roman Catholic and other orthodox Christianities achieved dominance. It's pitched by its publisher as a "shocking" history of the death of early Christianity, and Dick Hill plays along, occasionally imparting a wide-eyed tone to the narrative that eventually grows tiresome. M.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from July 14, 2008
      Revisionist history is always great fun, and never more so than when it is persuasively and cogently argued. Jenkins, the Penn State history professor whose book The Next Christendom
      made waves several years ago, argues that it's not exactly a new thing that Christianity is making terrific inroads in Asia and Africa. A thousand years ago, those continents were more Christian than Europe, and Asian Christianity in particular was the locus of tremendous innovations in mysticism, monasticism, theology and secular knowledge. The little-told story of Christianity's decline in those two continents—hastened by Mongol invasions, the rise of Islam and Buddhism, and internecine quarrels—is sensitively and imaginatively rendered. Jenkins sometimes challenges the assertions of other scholars, including Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels, but provides compelling evidence for his views. The book is marvelously accessible for the lay reader and replete with fascinating details to help personalize the ambitious sweep of global history Jenkins undertakes. This is an important counterweight to previous histories that have focused almost exclusively on Christianity in the West.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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