For just about all of my undergraduate classes, I begin the semester, on the first day, after explaining the course, by giving students a pop quiz.  In my New Testament classes, students are often surprised at how little they know.  “Hey, I went to Sunday School my entire life!  Why don’t I know this stuff?”   Yeah, good question.

But this semester, as I indicated in my previous post, I’m teaching a course on “The Birth of Christianity,” which focuses on the period just after the New Testament up through Constantine.  For *this* class students come in *knowing* that they don’t know much of anything.  No matter:  I give them a quiz anyway!  (It’s not graded.)

Since I haven’t taught the class in 25 years, I had to come up with a new quiz (having no idea if I even did one before) . Here it is.  How well can you do?  I’ll be discussing answers in subsequent posts (I give the quiz, in part, to discuss the answers with students as a way of introducing them to some basic information that we’ll be covering during the semester)

 

POP QUIZ

1. About when did Jesus die?  About when was the first Gospel written?  About when did someone indicate that our current 27 books were the New Testament?

2. About how many Christians (roughly!) would have been in the world in 100 CE?

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