In the Marquette Lecture volume, I focus on the question in the title. I emphasize the social and political costs of being a Christian in the earliest centuries, and contend that many attempts to answer the question are banal. I don't attempt a full answer myself, but urge that scholars should take the question more seriously.

Early Christianity, like Roman-era philosophical traditions, laid emphasis on everyday behavior, about how to live your life.

In the Marquette Lecture volume, I focus on the question in the title. I emphasize the social and political costs of being a Christian in the earliest centuries, and contend that many attempts to answer the question are banal. I don't attempt a full answer myself, but urge that scholars should take the question more seriously.

Galen recognized, with some considerable puzzlement it seems, that Christians exhibited the virtues that he associated with the discipline of philosophy.

I offer early Christianity as a case-study to show that the phenomena that we group under "religion(s)" comprise a somewhat artificial category, and that "religions" are not "all the same."

In Destroyer of the gods I focus on several major features of early Christianity that made it distinctive, even odd or bizarre .We don't today realize just how different early Christianity was in that context.

Some modern scholars contend that in terms of what "religion" was in that [Roman-era setting], you can't even call Christianity a religion.