ABSTRACT
This book has explored the birth of a worldview and how this worldview differentiated itself from its forebears. The spectrum of positions that could be included under the umbrella called Christianity was as wide then as it is today; there was no one Christian answer to questions of sex, of how to deal with governments, of who should be Christian ministers. But by the end of the fourth century, the Christians had their own public meeting places with their own rituals and observances and their own hierarchical organization, their own canon of holy writings, their own history, with its heroes the martyrs as well as the appropriated history of the Hebrew Scriptures. But some themes emerged that dominated the later history of Christianity as well as raised questions that remain troubling today.
