10 - Book Review: "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom" by Candida Moss

The Myth of Persecution:
How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

By Candida Moss

HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99

A Review by Ephraim Radner

(Christianity Today, May 2013)

The tedium of repeated déjà vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It is as if a publisher came to Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame, with a proposal for a quick buck, relying on the political twitter of the times: “You’re an expert: Reframe Gibbon’s notorious chapter on the Romans and the Christians with some contemporary scholarship and cultural fillips, and we can put out a nifty pamphlet that’ll sell.”

9 - Book Review: "The Photian Schism" by Francis Dvornik

By Bishop John (Christodoulou) Kalogeraki of Amoriou

The work titled The Photian Schism of Fr. Francis Dvornik was welcomed with great enthusiasm by Byzantinists, because Photios had, by the judgments and opinions of fanatic heterodox theologians and historians, been erroneously discarded. Historians beforehand portrayed the Patriarch Photios as the cause of the schism of the Church between West and East. Thanks to this treatise, which was published in 1948, the outstanding personality and enormous worth of the great and wise Patriarch of the Orthodox Church was recognized.