444 - Strange Religion - with Dr. Nijay Gupta

Voxology

Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, we have Dr. Nijay Gupta back to talk about his new book, "Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling." In this book, Dr. Gupta discusses and explores the social force of early Christians in the Roman Empire. He highlights the contrast between Roman religion and the beliefs and practices of the early Christians. The early Christians defied Roman hierarchy and power, rejected rituals of appeasement, and emphasized direct access to God. They also practiced gift-giving and generosity, expanding their acts of kindness beyond their own community.

The early Christians challenged the notions of Romanness and monoculturalism, embracing diversity and inclusivity. What are the parallels between Christianity and Roman religion? How does Christianity resemble the Roman religion, including hierarchy and power, appeasement and divine judgment, and elitism and limited access? We talk about the influence of preachers, the role of the church, the professionalization of pastoral ministry, elitism and limited access, building up each other, the teachings and lifestyle of Jesus, authentic relationship with Jesus, dying to everything but Jesus, the daily question of dying, the scandal of pastors falling from grace, and making Christianity weird again...

As always, we encourage and would love discussion as we pursue. Feel free to email in questions to [email protected], and to engage the conversation on Facebook and Instagram.

We're on YouTube (if you're into that kinda thing): VOXOLOGY TV.

Learn more about the Voxology Podcast

Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify

Support the Voxology Podcast on Patreon

The Voxology Spotify channel can be found here: Voxology Radio

Follow Mike on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mikeerre

Music in this episode by Timothy John Stafford

Instagram & Twitter: @GoneTimothy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey everybody welcome to the Voxology Podcast Mike Erie Tim Stafford the Holy Spirit of
0:05.6	Jesus of Nazareth and we have a special guest today Dr Nijj Gupta is with us again.
0:13.1	He wrote a book last year.
0:15.0	We talked to him, tell her story about women
0:17.7	and their elevated roles in leadership
0:20.0	in the New Testament.
0:21.3	He just wrote a book called Strange Religion.
0:23.2	And we're getting away from doing people
0:25.5	who are on book tours, like, you know,
0:28.5	I mean, there are loads of worthy books.
0:32.3	But it also, if somebody's doing 90 podcasts, you know about their book it's like you know you're not always going to get a great
0:42.0	a great sample of like what you thought made the book great. But for
0:47.3	knee jay man this book I actually endorsed it so when I endorse books which I'm really asked but I actually read them and I
0:55.0	and I know shocking and only endorse the ones I really agree with.
1:01.0	So if you open the front cover there's Mike Erie right there. Now I didn't make
1:05.8	the back cover which is where the big names go and I'm joking I think you know my
1:12.1	endorsement will probably count against the book
1:17.3	but I I wanted to just highlight that because I'm fascinated by the questions that he is exploring.
1:27.6	Because we've talked to a man a bunch about evangelism and how was the early church so compelling and the answer
1:36.6	keeps coming back whether it's from Crider or now from our friend knee jay it's the quality of the community that was so compelling.
1:46.0	And the way that Nije gets at this is he talks about what Roman religion was like,
1:52.1	and he's very thorough in this and then he just
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Voxology, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Voxology and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.