Sinners and Saints: The Real Story of Early Christianity by Derek Cooper

Sinners and Saints: The Real Story of Early Christianity

by Derek Cooper

Dr. Cooper was born and raised in East Texas (The poor benighted soul.). He attended college in Texas, where he met his wife, they were married in the Northeast. After graduating college, he attended seminary and began teaching Spanish at Phil-Monto Christian Academy outside of Philadelphia; though he eventually entered a Ph.D. program in historical theology and graduated in 2008. It was shortly before his graduation that he was hired as an associate professor (Okay, so there are six ranks for people who teach in universities. The first are Graduate Teaching Assistants, who are the lowly graduate students. However, while their rank is lower they have better pay and benefits than the adjunct faculty. Typically adjuncts are paid below minimum wage, have no job security, and no benefits. Excuse me as I add “university admin” to the list of people we’re gonna Robespierre in the revolution. After that are the Lecturers, who teach but don’t do research. They at least get paid with benefits, and have minimal job security - at least they have to be fired, as opposed to the adjuncts who’s semester contracts are just… not renewed. After that, we get the almost mythical tenure-track. An Assistant Professor is someone who teaches and does research, but who hasn’t gotten tenure yet. Tenure is basically “The only way to fire me is if I do something really bad like sleep with a student or embezzle funds.” It’s protection from the capricious whims of administration, so you can study what you want without having to kiss their golden rings or worry that you’ll be fired for reaching conclusions they don’t like for political or economic reasons. Which is why admin has been getting rid of it in favor of adjuncts, and increasingly no longer let you have tenure if you just publish lots of papers. You have to bring in shitloads of grant money, signaling to Admin that you can play ball with the Bourgeoisie and genuflect appropriately. If you don’t get tenure after six years, you’re gone and will have a hard time getting hired elsewhere as anything but a lecturer, or going into industry or civil service. That’s what I did, I decided to skip that precarious rat-race hell entirely because I don’t hate myself that much. Once you have tenure, you’re an Associate Professor, and Full Professor is basically a level-up from that after you’ve had tenure for a while. It is actually really surprised that he got hired on with tenure straight out of graduate school. Especially in 2008. Maybe religious institutions do things differently, or this one only has the two professorial ranks: tenure track, and already has tenure..{As you might have noticed my editor has opinions on how college education works}) of historical theology and global Christianity at Reformed Episcopal Seminary, in Pennsylvania. He has also served on the pastoral staff of two churches and regularly leads students and pastors on trips in Israel, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece. He currently lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children and is still teaching and writing. He has written such works as Introduction to World Christian History and Exploring Church History and translated Philip Melanchthon's Commentary on Proverbs. He is also the co-editor of the Reformation Commentary volume on 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, and 1-2 Chronicles. Sinners and Saints is his latest book published in 2018 by Kregel Publications, a Christian book publisher based out of Grand Rapids Michigan.

Dr. Cooper is as you might have guessed from the above is a devout Christian and fairly active in the Church, so why is he publishing a tell-all style book on the early history of Christianity? According to the book itself, he has many reasons (Other than, of course, the tendency toward scholarship you find in certain less-charismatic branches of Christianity. Like, the Lutherans and Anglicans/Episcopals still actually do honest theological and historical research. A tradition that has fallen out of favor among say… Southern Baptist clergy.). First of all, the tendency towards painting the early church as an organization of pure, sinless people who knew no quarrels or internal conflicts is both untrue (And how!) and honestly harmful. It only helps push people away from the Faith. It is healthier for everyone if we confront our dirty laundry and are open about our past. Additionally, in the United States at least there is a severe lack of knowledge about the early Church once you get past the end of the Biblical book of Acts. Most Protestant Churches prefer to focus entirely on teaching the Bible (and to be fair to the Churches my experience is getting most Church goers to understand and become familiar with the Holy Text at the center of our Faith is in and of itself a monumental struggle [Honestly, I think it’s left many of the Protestant churches intellectual pauperized, because in many but not all of them - Episcopals and Lutherans, for instance, are notable exceptions - this tendency has translated down to the clergy. This is why you see a tendency toward young-earth creationism in many of them, and why a great many of them cannot meaningfully defend their faith intellectually. It is far more stimulating arguing with a Catholic or Lutheran priest over your average Southern Baptist pastor. And don’t even get me started on the “Non-Denominational” churches.{I think I did alright, that said it is honestly a struggle to get some Church goers to basic Biblical literacy}) which means when you get out to the 2nd century, it's as far as the average American knows a vast empty blank spot. I can say from personal experience as a young man that it was hard to find sources aimed at laymen as well. This leaves us without context. Without an understanding of how we got to where we are and if you don't know how you got here, you'll never be sure where you're going. Dr. Cooper is attempting to at least address some of that problem with this book. This does place him among the growing but still somewhat behind the scenes reform movement-building in Protestant churches in North America. I won't go too much into that however since this is a book review not a discussion of current politics.

There's a wide variety of subjects covered in the book like the strange fringe cults that developed on the outer edges of Christianity in the first century when Christianity was itself a fringe movement. Dr. Cooper does well in not only examining some of the more widespread ones but explaining why there was such fertile ground for this and things were such a struggle. He makes a point of explaining that in the 1st century the vast majority of Christians were illiterate because most of the population was back then. Even if they weren't, books were massively expensive items, owning your own Bible back then would have been like owning an Aston Martin. Let's be honest the Bible isn't a small book and when every page has been handwritten the page count matters (And this was before there were monks who devoted large portions of their lives to hand-copying religious texts. It is also worth noting that not everything was written in the same language either.). On top of that, there wasn't really an agreement on what books should be in the New Testament. While Dr. Cooper doesn't go into depth on the struggles over what would be considered canon and what wouldn't be, he does give us a look at what the struggle meant as every Bishop and Priest fully believed that if they lost, their failures would condemn legions uncounted to hell (Keep in mind, these were not small differences like whether the Host is transubstantiated or not. Rather, it’s stuff like whether or not Jesus was a human or fully Divine, or whether they should include entire books like the Gospel of Mary, or even the Gospel of Judas. Yes, there is one of those, it is really really Gnostic.{This is the subject of one of the chapters, the early church spent a lot of energy on this}). Dr. Cooper also gives us a look at not so fringe behavior that honestly freaked out the pagans of the time and would likely freak out Christians and non-Christians today. Such as the Martyrdom cults that would hold feasts in graveyards and venerate the corpses of martyrs, the nude baptisms which undoubtedly alarmed pagans who realized just what their newly converted spouses were heading off to when they got word of that. As well as the love feasts and Christians greeting each other through the holy kiss that generated all sorts of rumors. It didn't help that people on the fringe were willing to prey on the unlearned and uncertain to make those rumors true and the long struggle of Christian churches to police themselves and put an end to that kind of exploitative behavior would lay the seeds for future misdeeds and brutal behavior by the Church, but that's looking far ahead of the book's time frame.

He also discusses the compromises and failures of the Church when dealing with the wealthy and the subject of slavery (Which is kind of a problem when you’re savior really really didn’t care for the wealthy or existing class hierarchies. I said in an earlier review that being both a communist and a Christian is remarkably easy, Cold War propaganda and politics notwithstanding. This is why Liberation Theology is a thing.{Ah Liberation Theology, so much fear, and ink spilled over it}). The failure to confront slavery is both understandable and terrible. It's understandable considering just how widespread and omnipresent slavery was in those days. It's terrible because this failure by the Church meant that widespread suffering and degeneration of fellow humans was not only ignored but tacitly allowed (And doctrine was used to prop it up in the 19th century when it was seriously questioned.). Which led to it being encouraged in some places. The ramifications of these decisions are still with us today, as pre-civil war southern pastors would use these decisions to excuse their own system of oppression and violation, leaving us still saddled with the scars and lingering wounds of American Slavery. These failures came as Christianity moved away from being a fringe religion that was considered anti-social and deviant to a respectable religion with followers at every level in society. This led to problems because it's hard to square having the 2nd and 3rd century equivalent of billionaires sitting in the front row when today's reading was Jesus' sermon about how camels will walk through the eye of the needle before the wealthy get to heaven. One way of squaring the circle was to push wealthy members to support the poorer members of the Church and to donate funds for the maintenance of Church buildings and property (in the 1st century most churches were home churches but by now public churches were being built). This is where we see the Church assuming the role of charity and distributor of goods and services for the poor and just like today where a lot of critics point to that distribution having a political edge to it, there was one back then too (And then there is the Heresy that is the Prosperity Gospel…). Not that everyone got on board with treating the wealthy with kid gloves even back then the backlash to political decisions was well underway. For example, we have John Chrysostom, aka the Golden Mouth, who preached an agenda of a social gospel that would make even my editor happy with him, at least on this subject. For example, declaring “refusal to share our own wealth with the poor is theft” and asking one wealthy Church goer how many poor people were starving so he could wear a single ruby (Yaaassss!). On top of that, he walked the walk, refusing to throw lavish parties for wealthy backers and living in a very simple manner. Which made him beloved by the common people but loathed by upper society. John would take this message all the way up to the imperial throne in 397 AD which would result in him being banished... Twice. Dr. Cooper is quick to point that John Chrysostom was a deeply imperfect human being though, as he would also preach savagely against the Jews of the Roman Empire and inspired anti-Semitic laws and actions in his time (Ugh. I should have seen this coming. Look, bro, your savior was himself a Jew. All the disciples were Jews! You literally worship a crucified Jew!). Antisemitism is another failure and a recurring sin of Christianity that still causes an immense amount of suffering in the world today. While it's true that Christianity didn't create the Antisemitism that was present in the Roman world, it sure as hell spread it to new places and gave it a new lease on life in others. I shouldn't have to explain to you readers why or how that affects us even in the current day and I do mean today, not the 1940s, not 1970, today (We’ve got a Nazi infestation again kids, they’ve breached the Treatment Threshold, time to exterminate! Okay, real talk time. Back in the 19th and early 20th century, aggressively Christianizing Jews was a thing. Like, there was church encouragement to adopt and Christianize Jewish orphans, of which there were many due to pogroms and working conditions at the time. That’s the reason why I don’t know my great grandfather’s original last name, in this particular case the culprit was Mormonism, but it was common in more… conventional denominations as well. My family tree just stops. Thousands of years of history and cultural heritage just…erased. Not as an act of charity or compassion but as an act of antisemitic devotion. They crossed a god-damned ocean to do it, specifically for that purpose. It was so complete that my family didn’t even know that’s what happened for nearly a hundred years. It hurts me in ways I cannot even describe in words. During the Holocaust, the Roman Catholic Church made this their policy. They would hide Jewish children, convert them, and then refuse to give them back to their surviving families. Families that in abject desperation took them to the church for safety. Antisemitism is one of Christianity’s original sins if you’ll pardon the expression, and it is one which it has yet to fully acknowledge or repent.). Maybe if we can all admit we have a problem we can confront it and solve it. I'm not hopeful but it's worth a shot.

Sinners and Saints covers roughly the first 500 years of the history of the Christian Church, it is mostly focused on the Church in the Roman Empire, as that's the part we have the most written records of. He does, however, provide a chapter to discuss missionary work in the first century to places like Armenia, Ethiopia, and India. The book itself is well-organized, split into ten chapters each devoted to a specific topic. This does mean that unlike how history books are traditionally organized, Sinner and Saints isn't chronologically organized. So you'll find yourself moving from time to time as required by the topic. There are strong points and weak points to this approach, it allows you to cover a single topic with a fair amount of depth and without having to space it out by time period. This makes it easier for the reader to trace changes and see the effects over time. On the flip side, you do run the risk of unmooring the topic from the time frame and leaving the reader feeling like they're just dealing with an endless “now” instead of concrete periods in the past. I’ve got mixed feelings about this approach as I can see both the pros and cons. What I don't have mixed feelings about is the language and word choice for this book. Dr. Cooper chose to use informal and fairly everyday language, I honestly prefer this over using the formal delivery that you'll see in most older textbooks that manage to make even world wars dry and dusty subjects (The best history books, even with sprawling page counts like A Distant Mirror at almost 800 pages, choose to use informal language. Incidentally, I’d recommend that one without reservation if you ever want to study the 14th century.).

Dr. Cooper has written an interesting look into the early centuries of Christianity and the human mistakes and outright sins that plagued its early years. Which is a worthwhile project. The book is easy to read and clocks in at about 170 pages, counting the prelude and afterword. This is incredibly slim for a history book and I honestly wish it was about a hundred pages more (Given the subject matter, I cannot disagree.). I should note a couple of things though, first of all despite the informal and easy to read language this is definitely not a book for children. Dr. Cooper doesn't get graphic but he doesn't pull any punches in describing some rather strange and morbid behavior. Additionally, I don't think the book works very well on its own, although it is not really meant to. So I would suggest that anyone meaning to do a real dive into Early Christianity might want to pair this with a book that has a more mainline focus. In such an area, Sinners and Saints would really shine I think filling in the details and shining a light on neglected corners. By itself, a reader might be tempted to think this is all there is to history which isn't Dr. Cooper's intent. That said, this book is a worthwhile read and I do think it's time for the Churches of North America to start looking at our history beyond the Bible, even if getting the average Church goer to appreciate it seems more a labor of Hercules than the labor of a Saint. Sinners and Saints: The Real Story of Early Christianity by Derek Cooper gets a B+ from me.

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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders