Right now in here I'm dealing with the development of Christianity.
How did it get from there to here? Jesus was executed and for almost three
hundred years the movement was very small. Right after the death of Jesus a
handful of his followers - all Jewish - returned to their lives and their work,
returned to synagogue worship and, as I said last week, sought to make sense
out of their world which had fallen apart.
So, I'm dealing with that and, at the same time, I want to deal with applications
and ideas we can glean from that early movement. For those of us who are
seeking to work out our lives within the context of the Christian faith, what was
the original message? How has it changed from then until now? And, how did it
move from being that small band of followers to the time of Constantine when the
Christian movement was a major world religion and destined to become the
official religion of the entire Roman Empire?