The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery

The purpose of this volume is to take the central event in the life of primitive Christianity—the launching of the mission to the Gentiles—as a paradigm of changing Christian self-definition and as the force that brought Christian identity into the light of thematic consciousness. This has entailed reconstructing the history of the launching of the mission. The Early Christians explores questions of the earliest Christian self-definition and self-consciousness.