Keep Christianity Weird: This review of Destroyer of the Gods by Larry Hurtado (Baylor, 2016), 304 pages, notes that book reminds us how weird Christianity was to the Roman world. Christianity’s sheer familiarity has desensitized us to its radical claims. Hurtado aims to show how the “odd” became “commonplace,” by surveying the first three centuries of the Jesus movement. The very concept of a bound book can be traced to early Jesus followers. The “bookishness” of the movement is one of the “distinctives” which helped make a ragtag group of Jewish schismatics into a global institution. It also offered a radically new way of thinking about three things: identity, religion, and morality.
