Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Loving Jesus the Wrong Way: Christological Heresies and how they hurt us


Here is a fascinating page describing eight of the main heresies about who Jesus is, written by Professor Telford Work of Westmont College. You can learn more about him (and he is a fascinating fellow!) here.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Dating the Writings of the Early Christians


You can find Peter Kirby's "giant list of early texts" here . (Don't worry, it's in English!) It can be fun to see which NT epistle came before another, and how some venerable early Christian writings, like the Didache, were actually older than others (like Ephesians and 1 Peter) but still didn't make it into the NT.

As Mark Ritchie says, "Not all are Christian in the classical sense of the word, but hey, you are a student and you need to know this stuff!"

Sunday, January 20, 2008

The Martyrdom of Polycarp


Read the Gaius' (et al) account of Iranaeus' account of Polycarp's martydom here --brief and moving.

Bibliography


Welcome to VCC's 2008 adult Christian Formation class, "Church History." We will see how far we get from now until Palm Sunday.

Here are some helpful books for our class:

My main text is A Concise History of Christianity, by R. Dean Peterson. It is available new at Amazon or you can get in an older edition for as low as $4.80.


Eerdman's Handbook to the History of Christianity is only available used. Amazon has copies as low as $2.38.

Here are some good places to look online for used books:

Bookfinder
Fetchbook
Windows Booksellers Their store is here in Eugene, so if they have what you want, you can avoid shipping charges.


The 100 Most Important Events in Christian History (Paperback)
by A. Kenneth Curtis,J. Stephen Lang, and Randy Petersen. Available as low as 6.56 from Amazon .

Christian History Magazine: The 100 Most Important Events in Church History Issue 28, 1990. 2 hour 24 mins. audio download available here
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Here are some good websites to check out:

"Church History on the Web" -- a list of great links
http://www.ritchies.net/links.htm

Church History -loads of links http://www.theopedia.com/Church_history

Religious Tolerance Organization: "History of Christianity"
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_ch.htm

"The Story of the Church"
http://www.ritchies.net/churchhi.htm

"History Of the Christian Church, Part I: 30-299 AD http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dekker/essays/history.html

Christian History Institute: "100 Key Events in Church History" http://chi.gospelcom.net/lives_events/events/index.shtml

EarlyChurchOrg.UK
http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/index.html

The Canon and the Creed
http://www.kencollins.com/bible-c1.htm