A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity
A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianityby  Keith Hopkins is a rollicking work of revisionist history about Christianity's  ascent as the dominant religion of the West. In its tour of Roman paganism,  Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism,A World Full of Godsemploys a  range of techniques of description, analysis, and historical reportage. The  first chapter is a report from two time-travelers visiting Pompeii just before  the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius; soon after comes a description of the ascetic  Jewish sect at Qumran that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls--in the form of a TV  drama. Hopkins, a professor of ancient history at King's College, Cambridge,  justifies his experimental style by asserting that "to reexperience the  thoughts, feelings, practices, and images of religious life in the Roman empire,  in which orthodox Christianity emerged in all its vibrant variety, we have to  combine ancient perceptions, however partial, with modern understandings,  however misleading." Rather than presenting a focused argument,A World Full  of Godsoffers immersion in a sensibility--a history of Christianity that  has little interest in the historical Jesus and instead traces the influence of  imagination on the growth of Christianity. Jesus, Hopkins argues, "is not just,  nor even primarily, a historical person. Rather, like the sacred heroes of other  great religions, he is a mirage, an image in believers' minds, shaped but not  confined by the images projected in the canonical gospels."--Michael Joseph  Gross--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.