Review
Title: Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints
Editors: Jason R. Combs, Mark D. Ellison, Catherine Gines Taylor, and Kristian S. Heal
Publisher: BYU Maxwell Institute
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 561
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0842500920
Price: $49.95
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints is a beautiful, intuitively designed, and laid out corrective to many ideas and assumptions Latter-day Saints often have about ancient Christians and ancient Christianity. The book has fourteen chapters, each focusing on a different element of ancient Christian beliefs or practices. The first chapter functions as an introduction to how to approach the book and the final chapter jumps forward to extend the methods of the book to medieval Christians.
The book is beautiful (great work Andrew Heiss!)—printed on glossy pages packed with full-color images of art and material culture for and by ancient Christians, demonstrating the book’s commitment to helping readers embody and understand the worldview of ancient Christians. This does make the book surprisingly heavy, which caught me off guard every time I picked it up. Each chapter also includes a variety of infoboxes that contain extra information that is not immediately relevant to the main ideas of the chapter but may be of interest to readers. These are somewhat similar to explanatory footnotes that might be encountered in a scholarly article or infoboxes in a textbook. The images and infoboxes are smoothly integrated into the layout, so readers can easily move through the chapter, pausing on these supplements or not (though I highly recommend that you do—some of the book’s most helpful asides about how Latter-day Saints specifically should think about the information presented are found in these infoboxes).
Ancient Christians is an invaluable, gentle corrective to many of the ways that Latter-day Saints think about apostasy and restoration. The “Introduction” speaks directly to this and many of the chapters make a turn in their conclusions and elsewhere to speak explicitly to a Latter-day Saint audience about ways we should and shouldn’t engage with the beliefs and practices of ancient Christians, particularly in relation to our own. The book also effectively demonstrates the wide-ranging diversity of ancient Christianity, which was quite enlightening. Throughout, the scholars use a positive, ecumenical framing of ancient Christians as believers and disciples that we, as believers and disciples, can and should learn from. This is perhaps one of the most valuable elements of the text—that it models a far more charitable, generative, humble mode of engagement with other religious people. I hope to be able to engage so thoughtfully and kindly with other people, living and dead, and their beliefs.
I want to highlight a few specific insights from the book, though as I was trying to narrow down which chapters to draw attention to, I had a very difficult time choosing. So here are five chapters that I found particularly interesting, with a brief mention of a detail or approach that struck me and I’ll continue pondering for some time to come.
“Church Organization: Priesthood Offices and Women’s Leadership Roles”, Ariel Bybee Laughton: Wow. Loved this chapter—especially the way that it unapologetically narrates the role that women played in the ancient Church and the ways that that role was stripped away as the church became more public and integrated into the Roman empire.
“Divine Nature: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”, Jason R. Combs: Combs digs into ancient ideas about the nature of God and Jesus Christ, looking at the ancient creeds and the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. I loved the clarity with which he expressed the different camps that existed at any given time, offering insight into a facet of Christianity that I have long been somewhat hazy on.
“Receiving Christ: Atonement, Grace, and Eternal Salvation”, Cecilia M. Peek: Peek digs into the diversity of thought surrounding the atonement, grace, and salvation in ancient Christianity, highlighting 4 atonement models—Christ the Illuminator, Christ the Restorer, Christ the Victor, and Christ the Victim. Peek includes a helpful table that names each model, describes the problem it set out to solve, the solution it offers, and the scriptures that ancient Christians may have drawn on to develop it (along with Latter-day Saint scriptures that seem to support each model).
“Sacred Spaces and Places of Worship: From House Churches to Monumental Basilicas”, Matthew J. Grey: This chapter offers specific details about how the place that Christians worshipped shaped their practices (one example building on Laughton’s article is that as Christians moved away from worshipping in homes towards basilicas and other public buildings, women lost positions of authority).
“Living in the Afterlife: Heaven, Hell, and Places Between”, D. Jill Kirby: Kirby’s chapter is chockfull of intriguing details about how various ancient Christians thought about the afterlife. A short section on the resurrection was quite fascinating—arguments for the necessity of a bodily resurrection so that sinners could be punished, arguments against it because the flesh was inherently corrupted, etc. But a specific tidbit that feels relevant to some ideas that I thought were specifically Mormon needs to be shared. Kirby writes, “By the fourth century, debates about the bodily resurrection became more specific: if one’s genitals are present and in working order in heaven then ‘the victory over them—and our reward for this victory—can continue for all eternity'” (459). Wild!
Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints is a fantastic, long overdue volume. I’m excited to reference it throughout the next year as we discuss the New Testament and to have some of the ideas and frameworks on hand for comments about the apostasy and restoration that seem misguided, unhelpful, or otherwise wrong-headed. The book is approachable and a great resource for all thoughtful Latter-day Saints looking for a better understanding of what ancient Christians actually did and believed. I hope enough of my fellow Latter-day Saints read this remarkable, beautiful book that it can act as leaven, bringing our collective ideas of apostasy and restoration closer to God.