He left us a wonderful account of his life – a rather solemn and not terribly humourous autobiography – in which you get a picture of a snobby, rather prissy, self-important man who likes everything just so. The epic story begins with the Jews' gradual transformation of pagan idol worship in Babylon into true monotheism--a concept previously unknown in the world. So Bede’s story is celebrating his people’s association with this far away place, Rome, which was the centre of the Roman Empire. Instead of using God’s Word to convince God’s people, he cries out relentlessly: “Be holy, because it will make you happy.

Meacham makes the related point that "questions of meaning – who are we, how shall we live, where are we going? So he sat down on it, and of course it was the Stool of Repentance and the whole congregation burst into laughter at seeing this stupid foreigner sit where you should never sit.The expertise that Hastings brought to what he did was quite exceptional, and this history is just entrancing. Was there a big change in Scotland between the pre- Reformation period and the post-Reformation period, or was it always quite strict and dour?

Longenecker imagines Antipas to be a Roman civic leader who has come across Luke’s writings and wants to ask him more about what he has written. That’s the starting point for my family memoir, which spans five generations, starting with the first convert, a fisherman from Fujian. Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University and co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. Scottish society remained full of festivity, but it had a rather different relationship with the Church. General essays on history, translation matters, different canons in use today, and issues of daily life in biblical times inform the reader of important aspects of biblical study.And at a time when Christianity's profile in our culture is neither as positive nor as extensive as it has been, this book is crucial testimony to the resilience of the Christian community in a remarkable diversity of social settings. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years is a 2009 book written by the English ecclesiastical historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford.

I had to wait until my college years to find that out by reading Francis Schaeffer’s book Art and the Bible. But what you do see in Gibbon is a very exhilarating rejection of priestcraft, the claims of the Church to absolute authority, and the attempts of the Church to boss people around in their lives.

The whole congregation would stare at these people Sunday after Sunday and then, at the end, the whole congregation would welcome them back, hugging them and shaking their hands. Such people don’t always have an easy time with the rest of the human race, and, like a lot of people who devote their time to writing, he was very selfish: very few other people ever got in the way of Edward Gibbon and his building a life to suit himself. Again and again, in all sorts of different societies, it is that sense, that however unfortunate you are, however powerless in political terms, you’ve got access to a different sort of power.