Description

The Veil Is Torn

Volume 1: A.D. 30 to 70
Pentecost to the Destruction of Jerusalem

This 287-page volume recounts how a small rabble of Jews, followers of an executed leader named Jesus of Nazareth, planted the seed of a new faith called Christianity across the mighty Roman Empire. It describes in vivid narrative and pictures the founding of the church, the astonishing work of the apostle Paul, the origins of the Gospels, the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul under the sadistic emperor Nero, and the horrific siege and destruction of Jerusalem and its great Temple by the Roman general Titus.

(Click on the image below to view a reduced resolution sample chapter drawn from the book so you get a sense of its writing style.)

Volume 1 Chapter 1 from the history series The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years

Chapter One

Madman or God? The first and continuing debate about Jesus

  • Pilate: An ignominious end for history’s most-mentioned Roman
  • River of history, river of God
  • Who was to blame for the Crucifixion?
  • Crucifixion: no death more hideous

Chapter Two

The unpromising Peter takes over

  • A continuing puzzle: Why did Jesus choose Peter?
  • The Sea of Galilee: Its great harvest was the fishers of men
  • The Temple: Herod’s legacy in gold and stone
  • The amazing faith of ‘Doubting’ Thomas

Chapter Three

Saul’s brutal campaign to wipe out Jesus’ followers

  • The ancient suffering of the ‘Chosen People’
  • To the Jews there could be no ‘good’ Samaritans

Chapter Four

The incident on the Damascus road that would change history

  • Dogs, wolves, bandits, rivers and other terrors of first-century travel
  • The controversial rite of male circumcision

Chapter Five

The two-man mission that set afoot the conversion of the world

  • James the Just’s famous letter
  • Was Apollos the author of the mysterious letter to the Hebrews?
  • Cities without street names, streets without addresses
  • The first Christian hymns
  • Paul lays down the rules for how the Last Supper must be observed
  • A living museum of the Christian past

Chapter Six

The trial and final triumph of Christianity’s greatest missionary

  • A credible ancient historian: Luke, the man who tells Paul’s story
  • First-century sea travel: Sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder on open decks
  • The Pastoral Epistles: Paul’s last and most touching letters
  • Paul of Tarsus lives on around us

Chapter Seven

The Synoptic Gospels: Three startling books that moved humanity

  • A scholarly bishop maks the case for a much ‘earlier’ New Testament

Chapter Eight

Nero: The man who taught Christians the meaning of evil

  • The Quo Vadis Legend of Peter’s last failure and last triumph
  • What became of the other apostles?
  • Peter and Paul in Rome: Here, there and everywhere
  • The heroically defiant death of Jesus’ kinsman James

Chapter Nine

Jerusalem falls in a hideous siege and the old order comes to an end

  • The controversial historian who documented Old Jerusalem’s final days
  • How Jesus’ followers escaped

Additional information

Weight 36 oz
Dimensions 0.8 × 8.8 × 12.3 in

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