I have been developing a book proposal titled The End Of The Beginning: How The Jesus Movement Became The Christian Church, which would represent a snapshot of the whole Christian world as it around 200AD. As the title suggests, I chose 200 not at random, but because that is a critical moment in the formation of what becomes the church, and especially the Great Church. The project would involve taking a very large body of scholarship, much of it highly specialized and academic, and synthesizing it for what I like to call an intelligent but non-specialized readership. This is a kind of writing I have done regularly in the past, and dare I say, with considerable success.
Parts of the proposal remain quite rough – in a few sections, this is notes, really, rather than a solid text. Here, I attach both the proposal, which is very much a work in progress, as well as the (sizable) working bibliography.
I also include many of the quite numerous blogs I have done at the Anxious Bench site over the past decade or so. This is a large document, which covers a great many topics – Gnosticism, the church in Persia, Egyptian Christianity, and much else. You can navigate your way around it by using the comprehensive catalog of blogs here. The virtue of the pdf document, of course, is that once you download, it, it is fully searchable.