Seventeen hundred years after the conversion of the Roman Empire, with European Christendom and its offshoots rapidly becoming things of the past, the common opinion—not least among Christians—is no doubt that the whole thing was a massive mistake. I take the somewhat contrary (with the stress on either the first or the second syllable, take your pick) view that the conversion of the nations of the Greek-Roman world was exactly what the early church had in mind as it spread beyond Judea and Samaria.

Paul Gabriner has posted a thoughtful comment on an old article about the mission to the Gentiles in the New Testament. This started out as a hurriedly written reply but has grown too big for the comments section. I’ll quote Paul Gabriner in places, but you should read what he has written, which I take to be essentially a critique of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith as a departure from Jesus’ more practical moral teaching. We begin with the “justification” of Abraham.

This isn’t what I was planning to do today, but a blog post by Roger Olson suggesting that evangelicals are more tolerant towards the modalism of Oneness Pentecostals than they used to be got me thinking again that we are moving towards some sort of revision of classical Trinitarianism.

It’s well worth listening to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discussing the historical Jesus in their The Rest is History podcast. I plan to write something about how they understand Jesus’ teaching about the “kingdom of God,” but here’s a short diversion before we get to that. It has to do with the reasons for Joseph and Mary travelling to Bethlehem to be registered.

Krishna is a practising Hindu whose “knowledge of the Bible/Gospels is basic at best,” but he asks a perceptive question—the sort of question that Christians don’t usually bother to ask, assuming that one size fits all—about the relevance of the death of Jesus for Gentiles:

While we are on the subject of the pre-existence of the exalted Christ, and since Christmas is nearly upon us, I feel we have to ask the question: What do the Christmas stories tell us about the pre-existence of Jesus? We start with Matthew, then Luke, then John.

I don’t deal with this in the book, but I’m wondering whether the retrospective argument about the pre-existence of the exalted Christ gains a polemically heightened character in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch (d. 107/108).