Audible sampleEarly Christianity: The Experience of the Divine
Audible Audiobook – Original recordingLuke Timothy Johnson (Narrator, Author), The Great Courses (Author, Publisher)
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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.
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©2002 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2002 The Great Courses
Listening Length
12 hours and 24 minutes
Author
Listening Length 12 hours and 24 minutes
Author Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gre
Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine
byLuke Timothy Johnson
6 total ratings, 4 with reviews
From the United States
Sean A. Heaney
1.0 out of 5 stars Only Received PART TWO Of Learning Ctr Class CDs.Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2019
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Can I Expect PART ONE Of The Learning Ctr "EARLY CHRISTIANITY: The Experience Of The Divine? Received PART TWO Only Yesterday, Used CDs. (3/18/'19)
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Ginny Nichols
4.0 out of 5 stars Four StarsReviewed in the United States on May 12, 2016
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Dr Johnson is brilliant.
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C Wm (Andy) Anderson
#1 HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars Helps Me Understand How the Roots of Christianity.Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2015
Length: just under 12-1/2 hours.
This lecture series was precisely what I've been seeking for many years. The lectures commence with a discussion, in deep detail, of the 300 years preceding the birth of and rise of Jesus's ministry. This puts the time period into perspective and helps explain how the Old Testament came to be a part of the Bible. What I mean us, he explains about the Greek translation of Torah, used by Jews in diaspora, and why it is in Greek, not Hebrew.
Only once one can come to grips with that, can one begin to see life as an early follower of Jesus. Further, since there was no Bible in use during the, uh, Big Bang explosive growth of Christianity. It is of paramount importance to understand how the early adopters would evolve into the widely differing accounts and traditions among the societies in which Christianity would grow and thrive.
What most comes to mind is the lack of an army, a temple, and, even, the lack of a home for the church.
I thoroughly appreciated the wealth of information contained within this lecture series.
I'm going to listen to his lectures about Saint Paul, but not until after listening to the latest Walt Longmire story by Craig Johnson.
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Daniel Dusanjh
4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable Evenhanded Introduction to Earliest ChristianityReviewed in the United States on June 24, 2011
Luke Timothy Johnson, a Roman Catholic NT scholar provides here an enjoyable evenhanded introduction to earliest Christianity.
Johnson's approach, according to him, is to avoid the maximalist (traditional Christian) and minimalist (tradional liberal/revisionist) ways at looking at Christianity and instead goes for an approach that takes the experiences of the early Christians seriously but doesn't really go any further.
This approach will of course appease neither side although I found the course all the more better for it - avoiding the traditional discussions on historicity and instead jumps straight to analyzing earliest Christian beliefs and practices. Of course, one is often tempted to ask "But did this really happen or not?!"
Still, a recommended audio course that introduces Christianity as it began.
Note: Some prior familiarity to the New Testament and Ancient Near East history is helpful but not necessary. Johnson does well to explain the concepts and terms that he introduces into the discussion.
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