There is only one history of the Church before Constantine. By Eusebius the father of Church History, the first to enter upon the subject.

He has a narrative in mind. The continuous line of Church leaders since the first followers…

Named for the Spanish town that hosted it, the Council of Elvira is the first recorded gathering of Church elders to enact and publish laws. Given the list of attendees - including Hosius who went on to great renown as…

In his The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark sets out to answer …

How the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the western world in a few centuries

Right off, he discards a straightforward old favorite - an…

To be educated meant knowing Homer, quoting Homer. At least in the east. For Christians too. He was simply the Poet.

And his books became inerrant long before the Christian or Jewish scriptures. Right back in the second century BC. Back…

In the Martyrs of Palestine, Christian Historian Eusebius wrote of his fellows who would die rather than sacrifice to the gods of Rome.

His account is largely free of the miraculous - though there is the sea threw out before the…