Böcker av April D. DeConick

A ground-breaking introductory textbook for the study of the New Testament and the first Christians, written for the next generation of studentsComparing Christianities: An Introduction to the New Testament and the First Christians maps the historical rise of Christianity out of a network of early Christian movements. This major new textbook systematically explores the struggles to define the faith by presenting Christianity as the result of a lengthy process of religious consolidation which emerged from a landscape of persistent Christian diversity.The book delves into the history of the first five generations of Christians, from Paul to Origen. The first chapter considers the challenges of constructing Christian histories and offers a new model of Christian families to organize and explain the emergence and competition of different varieties of Christianity. Each successive chapter focuses on key issues that Christian leaders engaged over the centuries, demonstrating how the questions they posed and the answers they provided gave Christianity its distinct shape. As the movements competed for social advantage, Christians began identifying certain Christian movements as enemies and consolidated against them. The final chapter schematizes the Christians studied in the book into three families of Christian movements based on the particular God they worshipped and other shared patterns of thought and practice. This chapter also explains where the varieties of Christianities came from and how the process of consolidation undertaken by some churches shaped Christian identity within a forge of intolerance that still affects us today.Comparing Christianities explores the answers to questions:* Who were the early Christians and what did they write?* What did Christians think about sex, women, immortality, Judaism, suffering and death?* What rituals did the first Christians practice, and what did their religious experiences mean to them?* How did Christians live in a Roman-dominated world?* How did the first Christians explain the origins of their movement?Comparing Christianities: An Introduction to the New Testament and the First Christians serves as an excellent primary textbook in undergraduate classrooms for Introduction to Christianity, Introduction to Religion, New Testament Studies, Christian Origins, World Religions, and Western World Religions, and a thought-provoking resource for anyone wishing to know more about Christianity.

Provides an English translation of the entire "Gospel of Thomas", which includes the original 'kernel' of the Gospel and all the sayings. This book also includes translations to the parallels of the Gospel.

In 2006, National Geographic released the English translation of the "Gospel of Judas. It caused a sensation because it seemed to overturn the popular image of Judas the betrayer and instead presented a benevolent Judas. This work offers a translation of the "Gospel of Judas" which challenges the National Geographic interpretation of a good Judas.

Gnosticism is a countercultural spirituality that forever changed the practice of Christianity. Before it emerged in the second century, passage to the afterlife required obedience to God and king. Gnosticism proposed that human beings were manifestations of the divine, unsettling the hierarchical foundations of the ancient world. Subversive and revolutionary, Gnostics taught that prayer and mediation could bring human beings into an ecstatic spiritual union with a transcendent deity. This mystical strain affected not just Christianity but many other religions, and it characterizes our understanding of the purpose and meaning of religion today.In The Gnostic New Age, April D. DeConick recovers this vibrant underground history to prove that Gnosticism was not suppressed or defeated by the Catholic Church long ago, nor was the movement a fabrication to justify the violent repression of alternative forms of Christianity. Gnosticism alleviated human suffering, soothing feelings of existential brokenness and alienation through the promise of renewal as God. DeConick begins in ancient Egypt and follows with the rise of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages, the advent of theosophy and other occult movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemporary New Age spiritual philosophies. As these theories find expression in science-fiction and fantasy films, DeConick sees evidence of Gnosticism's next incarnation. Her work emphasizes the universal, countercultural appeal of a movement that embodies much more than a simple challenge to religious authority.

In the end, DeConick shows that Thomas is best explained as arising from the fusion of Jewish Mysticism and Hermetic praxis and not as being shaped by gnostic traditions.--Marvin Meyer "Journal of Biblical Literature"

A tribute to the scholarship and friendship of Larry Hurtado (University of Edinburgh) and Alan Segal (Barnard College), two scholars who have contributed significantly to the contemporary understanding of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity.

Explores tough questions that have occupied scholars since the discovery of the "Gospel of Thomas" in the sands of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in the 1940's. Where did this gospel come from? When was it written? Who wrote it? Why was it composed? What is its meaning? This book examines these issues.