Nick Page The Longest Week The Wrong Messiah Kingdom Of Fools

Essential reading...enlightening and informative...you will be sure to learn something new. - Church of England Newspaper In this illuminating read, Nick Page strips away centuries of misrepresentation and myth to reveal the real personality portrayed in the gospels. Drawing on a wealth of historical and archaeological research, the result is a startling and vivid new portrait of Yeshua ben Yosef - Jesus of Nazareth.

What really happened during Jesus' final days? It was, historically speaking, nothing much; a death in Jerusalem, a routine execution at the edge of an empire. Yet that execution - and the events surrounding it - were to have a profound effect on the history of the world. The last week of Jesus' life on earth was probably the most important week in history. This book aims to reconstruct the events of those days. From Jesus' entry to Jerusalem on the Sunday, to his resurrection a week later; this book explores the claims and explode the myths. It looks seriously at the evidence of the gospel accounts, without ducking the controversies and contradictions. It focuses on the history rather than the spiritual and theological significance of events and uses archaeological research and detailed Biblical analysis to take the reader through THE LONGEST WEEK.

He came from the wrong social class, the wrong place and the wrong profession. He ate with the wrong people, championed the wrong causes and attracted the wrong kind of supporters. He even spoke with the wrong accent. In fact everything about Jesus of Nazareth was wrong. How could this odd-job man be God's Messiah?To the authorities he was a dangerous rebel; to the pious he was scandalously unorthodox. Even his family thought he was mad. But somehow this builder from 'up north' - this outrageous, unorthodox, rebellious teacher and miracle worker - changed the world. In this illuminating new biography, Nick Page strips away centuries of misrepresentation and myth to reveal the real personality portrayed in the gospels. Drawing on a wealth of historical and archaeological research, the result is a startling and vivid new portrait of Yeshua ben Yosef - Jesus of Nazareth. Challenging and thought-provoking, THE WRONG MESSIAH will change the way you view Jesus: the man who in so many ways seemed utterly wrong, but who history has proved triumphantly to be right.

Fools. Rebels. Ignorant peasants. That's how the Roman world saw the first Christians. Led by fishermen, tax collectors and renegade Pharisees, the first Christians shunned power and welcomed the poor and uneducated. Roman commentators mocked their upside-down values, but the apostle Paul - himself a Roman citizen, and a Pharisee to boot, affirmed that 'God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.' Its followers were persecuted and its leaders killed, yet this ragged collection of lowly tradesmen, women, slaves - and a smattering of turncoat high-born Jews - created a movement that changed the world. How did this happen? How did the kingdom of fools conquer the mighty empire that was Rome? In this fascinating new biography of the early church, Nick Page sets the biblical accounts alongside the latest historical and archaeological research, exploring how the early Christians lived and worshipped - and just why the Romans found this new branch of the Jewish faith so difficult to comprehend. THE KINGDOM OF FOOLS is a fresh, challenging, accessible portrait of a movement so radical, so dangerous, so thrillingly different that it outlasted the empire that tried to destroy it and went on to become the driving force of our cultural development - and claims more followers today than ever before in history.

500 years ago, Martin Luther nailed his ideas to a church door - and the Reformation began. Or maybe it was a little more complicated than that. Nick Page brings his skills as an unlicensed historian to bear on this key period in European (and world) history in order to uncover everything you need to know about the Reformation - with a fair few bits you never wanted to know thrown in for good measure. Historians tell us that the Protestant Reformation laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution, religious freedom, and all sorts of other Good Things. But what actually happened? Who were the winners and the losers, the ogres and the beauty queens of this key moment in church history? (spoiler: there weren't any beauty queens) In-depth research, historical analysis and cutting-edge guesswork combine to scintillating effect in this fast-moving examination of the strange and wonderful whirlwind that was church life in late medieval Europe. 'You were predestined to read this.' John Calvin

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

The earliest of the four Gospels, the book portrays Jesus as an enigmatic figure, struggling with enemies, his inner and external demons, and with his devoted but disconcerted disciples. Unlike other gospels, his parables are obscure, to be explained secretly to his followers. With an introduction by Nick Cave