Customer Reviews

Early Christian Reader

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Tom Robinson and I, the co-authors, thought we should clarify what might seem puzzling from the website: there is also a paperback called An Early Christian Reader (1990), with our names as authors. Is it the same thing? No. That paperback is an entirely different product. Here is the background. Tom and I had an idea for useful textbook for our (university) students in Christian origins. It would be a reader that presented the early Christian texts in something like historical order, and included non-New-Testament texts. So we quickly produced a manual for our classes, with a local business run part-time by a professor. It was hurriedly done, laid out on Tom's Macintosh, and its main use was in our classes. Over years of using that resource, and in light of student feedback, we agreed that we should take the time to prepare a much larger and more useful text with an established publisher in the field. And so we did. This Hendrickson hardcover is an altogether new work, going much further than the 'trial run'. It uses the NRSV translation. It has much fuller introductions to each text and each group of texts. It includes a number of texts that are not in the NT. It is nearly 200 pages longer. Supporting material at the back, including colour maps, is fuller and more accessible. The book is professionally edited and, in hardcover, a far more valuable investment for students and instructors as well as the self-taught.