About two months ago, in May, I was feeling pretty burned out; I had just finished my manuscript on How Jesus Became God and my brain was reasonably fried. At that point, I had trouble imagining being able to come up with posts for the blog for a while, and so I asked if anyone had any questions they would like to have answered. And so once again I have learned my lesson: Be careful what you ask for!

Since then I’ve been answering the questions I received (the long series of posts on Matthew were ultimately from one of the questions). I’m, maybe, half way through the list. And questions keep coming in. So I think what I’m going to TRY to do now is simply answer the remaining ones, one question at a time, one per post (unless I get carried away again, as I did with the Matthew question).

Feel free to keep asking questions if there are any that are burning on your brain; but realize that it may take a while for me to get to them (unless there is one that is SO interesting that I feel like breaking rank and going for it right away…..)

QUESTION:

There seems to be an Egyptian influence on early Christianity (while we often focus more on what happened in Rome)…What is the significance of what happened in Alexandria and Egypt generally regarding early Christian origins?

RESPONSE:

There has been a lot of thinking done on this very question – from the time of Eusebius, the “Father of Church History,” down to through the early twentieth century and on till today. Eusebius, as was his wont, insisted that the church in Egypt from the beginning was “orthodox,” i.e., that it subscribed to the “acceptable” theological views in opposition to all sorts of heretics from the beginning; and Eusebius actually provided a list of bishops of Alexandria (the main center for Egyptian Christianity) that went from the apostolic times down to his own day.

 

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