Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine cover art

Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine

By: Luke Timothy Johnson, The Great Courses
Narrated by: Luke Timothy Johnson
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £25.99

Buy Now for £25.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

The New Testament cover art
The Case for Jesus cover art
The Iliad of Homer cover art
The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World cover art
The Platonic Tradition cover art
Indian Givers cover art
The History of the Ancient World cover art
Caught in the Pulpit cover art
The Lost Letters of Pergamum cover art
Outliers cover art
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World cover art
A History of the World cover art
Hidden Wisdom cover art
Bounce cover art
The Clockwork Universe cover art
1493 cover art

Summary

After 2,000 years, Christianity is the world's largest religion and continues to prosper and grow. What accounts for its continued popularity?

In these twenty-four lectures, Professor Johnson maintains that the most familiar aspects of Christianity-its myths, institutions, ideas and morality-are only its outer "husk." He takes you on a journey to find the "kernel" of Christianity's appeal: religious experience. You'll travel back to Christianity's origins during its first 300 years to identify the elements that first made it appealing and which still hold the secret to its ability to attract new followers.

Professor Johnson employs scholarly techniques that have only recently been applied to religion. In introducing early Christian religious experience, Professor Johnson looks at questions that are new and intellectually exciting in the study of religion. Was Christ the founder of Christianity? Was Christianity's early growth due to his life and works or to his followers' powerful experience of his death and resurrection, their sense of having been transformed by the Holy Spirit?

By combining such disciplines as history, the social sciences, and comparative literary analysis, you'll look at religious experience and behavior from a fresh perspective. You'll consider a variety of theories developed by the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Immanuel Kant, Emil Durkheim, the founder of sociology, and Sigmund Freud. And to better understand religious experience in Christianity, you'll also study it in the two religions with which early Christianity co-existed: Greco-Roman paganism and Judaism.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2002 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2002 The Great Courses

What listeners say about Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    21
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    3
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    19
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    3
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    18
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    2

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Really interesting and helpful

Now I'm finished, I want to listen to this all over again to glean more from it, There's so much here, and it has helped me with my own cognitive dissonance about the Christian church. Thank you very much to Luke Timothy Johnson

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

interesting angle

I enjoyed looking at Early Christianity and it's influences from a sociological stand point rather than purely historical.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

An unpleasant surprise!

I did not think that I would live to the day when a Benedictine monk will passionately invite his listeners to close ranks with polytheists. The text is almost unbearable for Christian listeners, the arguments are primitive, in particular those related to archeology, history, and religion. His treatment of religion is a compilation of secular and shallow natural religion dogmas. A very disappointing and dubious example of contemporary theology, notwithstanding the author's high posts in academia. All in all, avoid this book, if you seek genuine interpretation of Christian faith and its history and if you are here to draw an inspiration from the word of Christ.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Too androcentric a take for a xxi century historian

Just one example: Mr Johnson repeats this statement several times: ‘ ALL jews were circumcised’
This begs the question : were all Jews male?!
For Mr Johnson Jewish women are so not part of the story that he doesn’t even notice The outrageousness of his claim.
And this mentality percolates all the rest of his telling.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful