Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints— A Brief Review

I had elaborate plans for this review, and just don’t have the time. The Maxwell Institute recently published Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints, and these are my thoughts.

Full disclosures: This review contains Amazon Affiliate links. I received a free electronic copy of Ancient Christians, and most of the authors/editors are friends or acquaintances. Also, I have only read the introduction and skimmed several chapters; this is not a full, detailed review as much as an overview. Ancient Christians is available now on Amazon (Kindle $9.99) or preorder (hardcover $49.95)

I have long recommended Deseret Book’s Jehovah and the World of the Old Testament (which I reviewed here) and Jesus Christ and the World of the New Testament. They are visually interesting, balancing text with breakout boxes, maps, and images; introductory but informed by solid scholarship. They both reaffirm and subtly challenge LDS traditions. Alas, both are out of print and harder to find. Deseret Book has JWOT in hardcover for $45, but both books are now available from Deseret Book in paperback, print-on-demand! (One downside, the images are now in black-white.)

This is particularly frustrating as I would place  Ancient Christians as the the logical extension of the series, a third book, though I do not think the authors intended it that way. It strikes me as similar in design, but with more text; and similar in approach, aimed at interested non-specialists but written by scholars. To my knowledge, all the authors have PhDs relevant to their topics (New Testament, Classics, Early Christianity, etc.) and all but one are actively employed in academia.

The introduction by Jason Combs implicitly frames the book as responding to long LDS interest, but also a gentle corrective to non-specialist LDS attempts to make early Christians fit into a monolithic LDS box.

(Sidenote: I think the Church is in a very interesting place right now; we have achieved a degree of maturity and stability to the point that we can evaluate our own traditions critically, and separate what was merely inherited, cultural, and traditional from what is actually historical, scriptural, and prophetic. It strikes me that this is what the scholarship on the priesthood/temple ban has done, ditto for the Gospel Topics essays, and it’s what I’m trying to do with my dissertation topic on Latter-day Saints, evolution, and creationism.)

The fourteen chapters are thematic. I skimmed several chapters, and briefly discuss two.

• Jason Combs’ “Divine Nature: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” should prove quite useful to just about all Latter-day Saints, and I hope it gets read widely. It explains the history and theological motives behind the early creeds, and the terminology used. Most LDS think “the trinity” is modalism, i.e. one being or personage who manifests in three different ways; we compensate against this too-much-one-ness by overemphasizing the three-ness of God.
• Cecilia Peek’s “Receiving Christ: Atonement, Grace, and Eternal Salvation” dives into these concepts, and their Greek backgrounds. Again, this should prove very useful, because many Latter-day Saints read Paul’s “grace” through our American post-Protestant-Reformation  lenses… and those lenses just don’t fit us comfortably. I wish more had been said about pistis and the Greco-Roman patron-client relationship, but then, the author is a classicist, and I’ve just read some books outside my own area of speciality.

If one thing comes through all these essays, it is that one cannot generalize about early Christianity; it was extremely diverse, divided, and not really 2021 Mormonism in disguise, as some authors have tried to portray. Some early Christians held beliefs and acted very much like LDS; and many others didn’t. (That should not threaten anyone.) This diversity in itself is a point of interest and discussion, I think. What does the diversity of early Christianity mean?

If the book has a flaw, I think it is that it lacks a historical overview chapter to tie all the different groups, languages, etc. together; I’m not sure such an overview is possible to write for a non-specialist book.

And so, tentative only because I have been able to give it such a brief perusal, I highly recommend Ancient Christians as a gateway introduction for Latter-day Saints. I think it will greatly increase LDS understanding and empathy for early Christians, help us relate better to other Christians who spend more time with early Christian material, and undermine common LDS misunderstandings. I’ll be adding it to my list of recommended New Testament books for next year.

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