The Triumph of Christianity, Bart D. Ehrman
The Triumph of Christianity, Bart D. Ehrman
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The Triumph of Christianity
How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World

Bestseller

Author: Bart D. Ehrman

Narrator: George Newbern

Unabridged: 10 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/13/2018

Synopsis

The “marvelous” (Reza Aslan, bestselling author of Zealot), New York Times bestselling story of how Christianity became the dominant religion in the West.

How did a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries? In The Triumph of Christianity, early Christian historian Bart D. Ehrman weaves the rigorously-researched answer to this question “into a vivid, nuanced, and enormously readable narrative” (Elaine Pagels, National Book Award-winning author of The Gnostic Gospels), showing how a handful of charismatic characters used a brilliant social strategy and an irresistible message to win over hearts and minds one at a time.

This “humane, thoughtful and intelligent” book (The New York Times Book Review) upends the way we think about the single most important cultural transformation our world has ever seen—one that revolutionized art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics, economics, and law.

About Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. A distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and The Triumph of Christianity. He has also created nine popular audio and video courses for The Great Courses. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages, with over two million copies and courses sold.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Anne on January 17, 2024

The basis of this one is Ehrman's theory that Christianity would have still dominated even if Constantine hadn't converted and made it popular. The idea is that no religion other than Judaism at the time required you to give up the worship of other gods, so pagan gods actually lost potential worshipe......more

Goodreads review by Clif on August 11, 2021

Bart Ehrman has a knack for turning facts from the academic study of Christian history into history books for popular audiences. He makes the subject personal by beginning this book by saying that he can understand how fourth century pagans must have felt when everything they understood about the go......more

Goodreads review by Kuszma on October 20, 2019

"Hogyan térítette meg egy apró, betiltott szekta az egész világot?" - kérdezi az alcím, én meg azt felelem neki: no, ezen már én is gondolkodtam. Ehrman kötete ezt az egészen unikális sikertörténetet világítja meg nekünk, szépen érzékeltetve a Római Birodalom akkori állapotát, a sokszínű, plurális v......more

Goodreads review by Brian on October 01, 2022

As usual, Ehrman’s research is fascinating and challenging. Maybe the parts I found most helpful concerned the classical pagan religions, and how they differed in function, diversity, and common sense from early Christianity. Concerning the factors accounting for the slow but exponential expansion o......more

Goodreads review by Tim on March 20, 2018

It's a mark of a good work of history when it changes the views of someone who knows the subject well, but this one has done that on several points for me. This is far from the first book which has tackled how Christianity went from a tiny Messianic Jewish sect to a marginalised and often persecuted......more

Quotes

“How did a small, provincial Jewish sect called Christianity convert the mighty pagan Roman Empire? Bart Ehrman answers this baffling question with the same wit, passion, and rigorous scholarship that have made him one of the most popular religion writers in the world today. The Triumph of Christianity is a marvelous book.” 
— Reza Aslan, New York Times bestselling author of Zealot

“The great appeal of Ehrman’s approach to Christian history has always been his steadfast humanizing impulse... Ehrman always thinks hard about history’s winners and losers without valorizing the losers or demonizing the winners… Reading about how an entire culture’s precepts and traditions can be overthrown without anyone being able to stop it may not be heartening at this particular historical moment. All the more reason to spend time in the company of such a humane, thoughtful and intelligent historian.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“Drawing on a wealth of ancient sources and contemporary historical research, Bart Ehrman weaves complex questions into a vivid, nuanced, and enormously readable narrative.”
— Elaine Pagels, National Book Award-winning author of The Gnostic Gospels

“Like a good college lecture class, [Ehrman’s] book offers both a wealth of historical information and, to make sense of it all, a few plausible theories — including his own. He doesn’t tell us what to think. He gives us a lot to think about.”
— Newsday 

“The value of Ehrman’s book, as is so often the case with his writings, is in his ability to synthesize complex material and distill it into highly readable prose.”
— Booklist

“Well worth reading for those wishing to dispel myths around the early Christian churches.”
— Publishers Weekly

“One of Christian history’s greatest puzzles after the age of the apostles is how a tiny band of mostly-illiterate outsiders converted the proud and massive Roman Empire in just three centuries — a historical blink of an eye. In The Triumph of Christianity, Ehrman brings impressive research, intellectual rigor, and an instinct for storytelling to this extraordinary dynamic.”
— David Van Biema, former religion writer at Time and author of the forthcoming Speaking to God

“Accessible and intriguing.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Bart Ehrman is the leading expert on early Christian texts and here he takes the story on into the fourth century in a vivid and readable narrative that explores why Christianity “triumphed” as a world religion. The work is particularly valuable for its critical survey of the work of other scholars in the field.”
— Charles Freeman, author of A New History of Early Christianity

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