the triumph of christianity by rodney stark

For them – even for the ones who analyse the historical dynamics much as Ehrman does in this book – everything that happened from the execution of Jesus onward has to be seen through the prism of Christianity’s inevitable triumph. For Christians the answer to this question is straightforward – it is because Christianity is the one true faith and Jesus was/is God himself. In this, his latest book for a popular audience, Ehrman sets out to summarise the scholarship on how and why Christianity went from a tiny Jewish sect to the religion that conquered the Roman Empire, and to add some synthesis and analysis of his own.

Ehrman himself regards this dichotomy with characteristic amused sangfroid and gives the impression he feels that if he annoys the extremists at both ideological extremes, he is probably getting things about right. For the latter he is all too often reviled, scorned and rejected. For the former he is lauded, cited and quoted. On the other he is denigrated by many New Atheists because he has the temerity to do exactly the same with the fringe theorists and apologists at the other extreme – the Jesus Mythicists. On one hand, most of his popular works are praised and held in high esteem by them for making clear the reasons scholars do not take the arguments of Biblical literalists seriously and exposing the flaws in fundamentalist apologism regarding the origins and nature of the New Testament’s texts and testimony. Ehrman has an ambiguous status as far as New Atheist activists are concerned.

The triumph of christianity by rodney stark