Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine

After 2,000 years, Christianity is the world's largest religion and continues to prosper and grow. What accounts for its continued popularity? This course locates this success in Christianity's ability to provide its followers with a powerful and personal religious experience. In these lectures, you define "religious experience" and study its forms in the Roman Empire, Judaism, and early Christianity. A major focus is how early Christians viewed religious experience -- through Christ's resurrection and such practices as speaking in tongues -- in the religion's first 300 years. You benefit from such newly employed scholarly techniques as the social sciences and comparative literary analysis to identify the elements that first made Christianity appealing, and continue to do so.