Today Christianity has become all too familiar, even for the devout. Western culture over two millennia is permeated by the legacy of this faith. In this slim volume the Duke University New Testament scholar, Kavin Rowe, drives home the point that in our day, “Christianity is at one and the same time here and gone, familiar and forgotten.” Back in the first century Greco-Roman world, Christianity landed as a complete, unexpected surprise. The focus of the early Christians was on Jesus. This focus on a single Jew was historically explosive. In three chapters Rowe aims to show what the surprise of Christianity originally was and still can be: the story of everything, the human, and institutions. 

First, Christians discovered that they had a place in the story of everything because of the surprise of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Second is the question of what it means to be human. For the early Christians the startling and original answer to this question was that Jesus of Nazareth is the human. This is in contrast to the modern narrative of the “autonomous self.” This view of Jesus as the “true human” had profound implications for how Christians treated other humans; to love their neighbour was Christological. In order to deal with the reality of sin in the human image of God, we must undergo transformation into the image of God. Third is the concern with how this neighbour ethic or posture was lived out by the Church in its “social extensions” or institutions that were required for the early Church to sustain its vision of what it meant to be human. Christians carried with them a new attitude towards dying, accepting the possibility of persecution and martyrdom. They ministered to the sick and risked catching deadly diseases. They started hospitals and sacrificed possessions. Death was a “rock-bottom reality of human life” and they trusted that they would be raised to eternal life. Rowe himself writes from a place of deep suffering as his wife recently entered hospice after living for years with an incurable disease.