Echoes of Power (Paperback, 2nd Edition)

Description

Second Edition. Rome chose the high priest. The high priest sent Saul to Damascus.

Echoes of Power follows one question from Jerusalem to Rome: was the apostle Paul useful to the Roman Empire, and did the empire end up running the early Church? Ryan Richard Thompson starts with the Roman governors who appointed and removed Judea’s high priests, then follows Saul from enforcer for that priesthood to the apostle who wrote Romans 13 and found friends in Caesar’s household.

He tests his own theory against Josephus, the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters, then gives a full chapter to the strongest case he can make against it. The second half traces what came after: a persecuted movement that became a persecuting one, Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, the councils that decided which books made the Bible, the gospels and texts left out, the edits in the manuscript margins, and a Roman Church that put on the mitre.

Nothing here is aimed at anyone’s faith in Christ. The argument is with power, and with what it did to a movement that started out on the wrong end of it.

This second edition rewrites and expands the 2023 original, corrects its mistakes in the open, and adds a timeline, 256 endnotes, a bibliography and a glossary. For readers of early church history, New Testament history, the historical Paul and the formation of the biblical canon.