What made the first Christians so different from their surrounding culture?

How did their worship differ from the way the average Roman citizen viewed their gods?

Why did the early church view themselves as a family and why is this so significant?

We'll discuss these questions more with our guest, Dr. Nije Gupta,

ran this new book Strange Religion,

subtitle, How the First Christians were weird, dangerous, and compelling.

I'm your host Scott Ray.

And I'm your co-host, Sean Macau.

This is ThinkBiblically from Talbot School of Theology here at Biola University.

Nije, welcome, great to have you with us and really appreciate the new book that you've come out with.

Thanks so much. I was looking forward to this conversation. Yeah so tell us initially my guess is there's a bit of a backstory for why you decided to write this book about this subject at this particular time.

But why this subject right at this time?

Yeah, well I live in Portland, Oregon. Why this subject right at this time?

Yeah, well I live in Portland, Oregon.

I love living here and one of the challenges but also a calling living here is we live in a very unchurched environment where there's a lot of

negative attitudes towards Christianity and even for the Christians here it's really difficult because of the

sometimes anti-traditional anti-Christian sentiment and what we noticed during the

pandemic was you know obviously people can go to church, you watch church online.

And then when it was time to go back to church, a lot of people didn't, at least not initially.

And during that phase, I was thinking about the earliest

Christians as part of my work with the New Testament and when I talk to people about

why they're not going to the church a lot of the answer is I'm busy and I'll get to it when I can or you know it's

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