ADULT SUNDAY SCHOOL 

On September 12, as MCC launches the fall Sunday School classes, Rev. Dr. Ron Franklin will teach a class entitled “From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity,” using 24 half-hour DVDs by Professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Each week following the DVD, the class will share discussion on the topic for half an hour. Any interested adult is invited to participate. Beginners at Bible Study are welcome. We meet in Room 117.

These lectures offer a fresh and provocative perspective on what are perhaps the most intriguing questions of all: How could a movement originally made up of perhaps only 20 low-class followers of a Jewish apocalyptic preacher crucified as an enemy of the state grow to include nearly four million adherents in only 300 years? And how would it eventually become the largest religion in the world, with some two billion adherents?

To answer those questions, Professor Ehrman examines Christianity from several directions:
(1) The faith's beginnings, starting with the historical Jesus and the other individuals and traditions that formed the foundation of the emerging religion;
(2) Jewish-Christian relations, including the rise of anti-Judaism within the Christian church and the emergence of Christianity as a religion different from and ultimately opposed to the Jewish religion from which it emerged;
(3) The way Paul and other Christians spread the new faith, including the message they proclaimed and their approaches to winning converts;
(4) Hostility to the Christian mission from those who were not persuaded to convert and who considered Christianity to be dangerous or antisocial, leading to the persecutions of the 2nd and 3rd centuries;
(5) Internal struggles within the faith, as Christians with divergent understandings sought to make their beliefs the ones that defined the one "true" faith, and
(6) The factors that led to the formation of traditional Christianity we know today, with its canon of New Testament scriptures, set creeds, liturgical practices such as baptism and Holy Communion, and church hierarchy. 

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