A world full of Gods
Keith Hopkins

Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire.

This is a book about the world in which Christianity emerged told in an extremely accessible way by one of the most outstanding ancient historians writing today. Its main thrust is to show how Christianity emerged in the market-place of competing religions. We can’t understand the success of Christianity without understanding its rivals in the Jewish and Roman worlds. So we have to go back to Rome, Egypt, Syria to understand the passionate attachment which pagans had for their gods, temples, sacrifice, magic, and mystery rites. And we can’t appreciate the innovations of Christianity without glimpsing the commitment and expectations of Jews. Keith Hopkins also shows in this book history in the making. Most books on Jesus defend a particular version of Christianity. Believers look back and find in earliest Christianity exactly the sort of Christianity they want now. Keith Hopkins argues that this is not how history unfolds. His view is that there is no such thing as one version of history there never is just one story. He shows that the central story for Christianity the Jesus story exists not just in the gospels, but in dozens of magnificent variations: there isn’t just one Jesus. One of the most extraordinary and contentious aspects of this book is the way Keith Hopkins tells the story of how Christianity emerged. He combines conventionally ‘objective’ analysis with letters from professors aghast at what he is writing, a TV drama about the Dead Sea Scrolls, memoirs of two time-travellers, and an invented correspondence between an ingenue Christian and his more sophisticated superior.
This is a dazzlingly clever and truly entertaining book. Hopkins writes from the point of view of a non-believer and combines humour with a wonderful gift for telling stories. His aim is to allow the reader to live vicariously in antiquity without ever leaving the modern world and he does this brilliantly.