A World Full of Gods: The Triumph of Christianity

by Keith Hopkins

Book Overview

"Evokes the sights and sounds of the ancient world with daring and imagination... An intellectual tour-de-force that challenges us to see the history of Christianity through the eyes of those who... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743200101
• ISBN13: 9780743200103
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 402 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful.

This book is fantastic. Using historical information the author recreates the ancient world. Five pages into the visit to Pompeii, I was completely hooked. This is a book that everyone should read.

An eccentric exercise in "popular" history

Keith Hopkins is an internationally respected classicist who decided that he would do something different for his book on pagan religiousity the rise of Christianity. He would go out of his way to make his book more accessible to a popular audience and at the same time adapt some postmodern elements. So in his first chapter he introduces two time travellers who visit pre-Vesuvius Pompei who make them some properly footnoted comments on the culture and lifestyle of the region. Later they go to Egypt, look at the temples, the man seeks a love spell directed at the woman who isn't talking to him, then he is unfairly arrested and barely escapes before being tortured. At other points Hopkins has a TV interview of an aged Jewish sectarian, and later has an imaginary conversation between a Christian and his pagan colleagues. At the same time there are (fictional?) letters from other scholars which criticize Hopkins' prejudices.The result is certainly interesting. We certainly get a sense of the public, vigorous and somewhat misogynist sexuality of the Romans. The account of the ascetiscism of the Dead Sea Scrolls Sect is certainly interesting. Hopkins' discussion of Christianity emphasizes the potential alternatives to the central doctrines that became Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. He then goes into considerable details about the world-views of Manicheanism and Gnosticism, with its own elaborate geneologies and cosmologies. Hopkins also emphasizes the strong tendencies towards acesticism within Christianity. "It is ideal that we should feel no desire," says one Christian intellectual. Hopkins goes into considerable detail about the Acts of Thomas, with its miracles and its emphasis on newly converted Christian wives refusing their pagan husbands. The book also benefits from plates of thirty illustrations which are well chosen. One important fact that Hopkins properly reminds us is that the early Church did not emphasize the Gospels. ("It seems amazing now that the New Testament was not recognized as a single set of privileged Christian scriptures before the end of the second century.") Their major polemical tool was trying to find prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament. (The most famous of these is the classic mistranslation of Isaiah, in which the Hebrew, "A young woman shall conceive," was mangled into the Greek "A virgin shall conceive.") And so we get fascinating details about the topes of Christian martyrdom literture, about brother-sister marriages in Egypt, and pagan accusations of ritual murder against Christians.At the same time one might want something more. The book is well researched but the contrast with Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians is striking. There Lane Fox patiently sifted through the whole range of somewhat scarce evidence to give a picture of surprising Pagan vitality on the eve of Constantine's conversion. By contrast Hopkins account is somewhat sketchier. Hopkins gives the most recent

Hopkins hits the nail of christian origins on the head

Some have criticized Hopkins' book for not being scholarly. If they mean by this that it does not bore the reader with yet another positivist history of early christianity, they are right. However, critics cannot fault the author for his research. The footnotes present factual evidence in the scholarly tradition to back up Hopkins' interpretation. This book is way overdue. It meticulously and creatively lays out the context of the christian origins. The lay reader will come away with an existential hermeneutic of history based on informed knowledge of the context of christian origins. This is the most important contribution of Hopkins' book. The author traces the role of episcopal christianity in establishing the 1)canon of scripture (necessitated by Marcion and then gnostic christians), 2)the chain of bishops(replacing reliance on Jewish scriptures for legitimacy), and 3) the rule of faith. This sequence was critical in creating the identity of that form of christianity that became a historical force to be reckoned with. The bishops forged a historical reality from the myth of Christ, thus institutionalizing the church under their control. The modern secular world has compartmentalized religion to time and place. The ancient world was not secular. Religious symbolism was literally "in your face" for the ancients. Hopkins does the interested modern a service by opening the door to the complex and syncretistic cultural world of the Roman Empire. In short this book provides a useful tool for appreciating, not merely gaining information, about the world, challenges, and contributions of christianity.

It was time

Keith Hopkins' "writing history" is a worthy attempt to overcome the intimidating scholarly jargon that scares the majority of people and at the same time is an obstacle to the truth. Breaking new ground, it is a first step in the right direction. It attempts to uncover the brutality of believing in an historically unproven Christianity, with its gospel truth. Still Keith Hopkins is unable to give up the obsolete category of atheist Protestant. I thought that Atheism had been discredited by sophisticated scholars. Atheism doesn't exist because you cannot deny a construction of the mind: God. Every so -called believer is an atheist for another believer. A Catholic is an ateist for a Muslin and viceversa and so on with the others religions. One of the reasons that the United States is so great is because the founding fathers believed that God is a construction of man, the imagination is limitless. and nobody has the right to impose his imaginary construction on others, calling it the truth. In christian world the consequences of this imposition of one faith have been devastating and murderous. Anothor obsolete category that Keith Hopkins still clings to is the distiction between believers and nonbelivers. Many so- called believers hold on to farfetched stories and statements out of fear of giving up cherished childhood fantasies. Scholars ought to know better.

Unusual Take on History

The author, an esteemed university professor of history, takes an unorthodox approach with this book on the Late Antique/Early Christian period. The book reads almost like a novel, in that Hopkins sets up actual scenarios of people traveling back in time to witness for themselves what Rome was really like (they visit Pompeii in 76 A.D. - in enough time to escape Vesuvius). Other travelers visit other areas of the Roman Empire later in the first century and on into the fourth (i.e., Syria and Egypt). While the premise smacks of the new Michael Crichton novel envolving time travel, Hopkins does thoroughly footnote, and his bibliography indicates extensive study of the major scholars in the field. While this new approach may be problematic to some, it is fresh and opens up new ideas for further study. For instance, Hopkins recreates a Roman bath house, with obvious attention payed to the aftifacts that have been discovered and written accounts of life in Rome that have survived to the present day. There are some problems: passing by houses in Pompeii that display mosaics of dogs that say, in Latin, beware of the dog, Hopkins proposes that the dog, in reality, would be chained there as well. There is literally no way to know this for sure. While problematic in certain details, Hopkins should be commended for producing a vivid account of the period, a time in history that is already receiving a reassessment from scholars in many areas of research.