I struggle with all the Latin phrases. They may have meaning, but they exclude us who don’t know their meaning. Otherwise, it is good so far (just started chapter 3)

This is more than a history book on the ancient Church, it is an examination of the early Christian faith and practice in its context and, to the sensitive reader, how it is relevant to us today. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace is quoted as saying "A fish doesn't know it's in water”, meaning that the most obvious realities that surround us are often hard to identify and define. Followers of Jesus Christ in the Western are mostly unaware of how jarringly different, or weird, Christianity is to other world religions. Surrounded by the remnants of “Christendom” and western individualism, it is hard to notice the radical difference Jesus made to the world then, and our lives now. Nijay Gupta helps the reader to see just how weird Christianity was to the Romans during the time of the early Church and in doing so awakened me to again to many of the key elements of genuine Christian faith now. Although this book is accessible written, Gupta is an accomplished academic writer and the material is well researched and footnoted.

I have worked in cross cultural missions in the majority world (specifically Asia) for over twenty years and found that Gupta’s book is extremely accurate in laying out many of the key differences between Christianity and the religions I have encountered in Asia. Not only did the Romans think Christians were weird, they thought they were dangerous because they represented a risk to the “pax deorum”, (meaning “peace with the gods”) and as such put the entire community in danger. This is also true today in many majority world contexts! Accordingly, I would strongly recommend this book to every westerner who works in cross cultural missions. Beyond this, I fully recommend this book to all who are curious about the early church and its cultural context.

This was a really fascinating read. I find the interactions between early Christians and Roman pagans really interesting.

Strange Religion - Nijay K. Gupta

The book is split into 4 sections, with 12 chapters, an introduction, and a short conclusion. There are end notes at the back. The 4 sections are: Becoming Christian, What the First Christians Believed, How the First Christians Worshipped, and How the First Christians Lived.

I reviewed an advance reader copy, meaning it wasn’t in its final form. My copy had no illustrations, just captions where the illustrations should go. So I cannot comment on their quality, though there were a good number of them and they’re placed to illustrate interesting aspects of the text.

The author used a decent number of quotes from ancient texts in addition to numerous Old and New Testament quotes. He often tied things together with modern examples which I found a bit jarring but might help a general audience better understand the thought process of ancient peoples.

The book has some great aims and asks some excellent questions. These are questions that cannot be fully answered, as sources are limited, but it was frustrating at times how short the discussion was. The author might give a few possible answers but little or sometimes no reasoning on why these answers should be considered.

For example, in the 3rd chapter he questions why Romans would join the new Christian church when it was so radically different from what they were used to. He mentions 4 possibilities: the intriguing idea of monotheism, the promise of eternal life, that the new faith blended religion, philosophy and morality in a way others didn’t, and the concept of loving everyone. He mentions these but has no follow-up discussion about them and simply ends the chapter. Also strange is the absence of Christianity’s idea of equality as one of those possibilities. Many early adopters of Christianity were rich upper class women (women whose houses were gifted to the church to become buildings of worship upon their deaths). While upper class women had more agency than many in ancient Rome, the Christian faith gave them power over belief in ways other religions denied them. The author does cover the stratification of Roman society and how Christians tried to upend that with their idea of everyone being treated equally within the church in a later chapter, but he never posits this as a reason why lower class individuals might have joined the church in the first place. Even in his conclusion, when he again considers the question of what made Christianity so compelling, he neglects to mention it in favour of purely spiritual answers.

Despite my desire to see more discussion, the book is excellent at giving a good idea of how differently ancient peoples thought about concepts like religion. It was very useful learning how Greeks and Romans worshipped. I also appreciated learning more about how early Christian practice was different from the Jewish faith it sprang from. I highlighted numerous passages in the book that I thought were worth reflecting on. Christianity has changed a lot from those early years, so it was interesting seeing what the first Christians believed and how they followed Christ.

Consider this a great introduction to the topic of how early Christians practiced and how their worship and thought patterns differed from those of the people around them. It’s a fairly short, easy to read book that will give you a lot to think about.

Nijay Gupta is a gift to those of us trying to understand the ways of the earliest Christians. This book points out the early Christian distinctives, oddities, and points of departure with its cultural world. Gaining an appreciation for how "strange" Christianity was helps me to be challenged in gaining a vision of a less-watered down version of Christianity that reclaims some of the potency of its earliest forms.

An enjoyable book to help give context to the Christian faith. I would definitely recommend this to anyone of that faith or interested to know more. It is full of references and important descriptions from historical documents. I don't know of few books that give so much information on this topic so easily and in so pleasant a read.

It is more comforting than challenging. This is not a drawback, not everything has to be challenging and adversarial. Instead, it's a positive and profoundly engaging book to bring you closer to the context of the development of Christianity from its origins in Antiquity.

Similarly to Lost Christianities by Bart D. Ehrman, this book examines the weirdness of early Christianity and all of the various permutations it took. For someone who isn't versed in early Christianity, it's a real treat to learn about!

One thing I didn't love was the lack of images in the ARC. I felt like that in particular made reading it a demonstrably worse experience.