A comprehensive survey of the church's first 1500 years of social and intellectual history, from Christ to the Reformation, by distinguished scholar Everett Ferguson.
Church History, Volume 1: From Christ to Pre-Reformation offers a unique socially contextualized view of how the Christian church spread and developed from Jerusalem and into Asia and Europe.
Ferguson rightly stresses that the church did not spread in a vacuum, but in specific places, mileus, and cultures, all of which were both influenced and were influenced by the church. Ferguson also examines how the events directly related to the church also impacted and were impacted by larger world events.
Filled with maps, charts, and illustrations, Church History offers overviews of the Roman, Greek, and Jewish worlds; insights into the church's relationship to the Roman Empire, with glimpses into pagan attitudes toward Christians; the place of art and architecture, literature and philosophy, both sacred and secular; and much more, spanning the time from the first through the thirteenth centuries.