Early Christianity

Christian literature

The New Testament

Most modern Christians – and many non-Christians – will natur-
ally commence their search for early Christianity with the books
contained in the New Testament. This collection contains twenty-
seven works: four accounts of Jesus’ ministry and death (the
gospels); a narrative of the deeds of Jesus’ immediate successors
(theActs of Apostles); twenty-one letters, thirteen of which are
ascribed to the apostle Paul; and Revelation, an apocalyptic vision
of the future. In terms of their contents, these various books
can answer different sorts of questions about the nature of the
Christian movement at its earliest stages. The gospels and Acts
present, on the face of it, something like a narrative of Christian
origins. The letters are concerned with the lifestyle and faith to
which early Christians were expected to adhere. Revelation, with
its coded allusions to Rome as ancient Israel’s great foe Babylon,
seems to present a mental portrait of early Christians suffering
in this world, perhaps because of persecution, but hopeful that
good would vanquish evil in the end.
Some modern historians of the ancient Roman world have
engaged with the New Testament texts in ways that differ little
from their approach to other ancient sources. They have sought
to integrate them with other ancient evidence to yield a portrait
of the earliest followers of Jesus that is firmly embedded in the
social and cultural world of the Roman empire (e.g. Sherwin-
White 1963; Mitchell 1993: II, 1–10). Such an approach has been
particularly pronounced in the study of the Acts of the Apostles,
a text that seems to present an account of the earliest expansion
of the Christian movement in a narrative form with which modern
historians of the ancient world are familiar. A. N. Sherwin-White
(1911–94), one of the leading Roman historians of the twentieth
century, gave a neat summation of what is so attractive about this
text for the modern scholar of the Roman world:

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