The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (Oxford Illustrated Histories)

Rating:
Summary: A good overall history, but very Anglocentric.
Review: I gave this book three stars because it has some very good qualities, and some qualities that detract from it. First, it offers a history of Christianity that neither focuses on the positive aspects nor on the negative aspects of the religion. Instead, it attempts to offer an objective retelling of the story of Christianity's spread. As far as this goes, I recommend this book.

There are two problems with this book, however. First, it is certainly very biased toward the British. Written by many English scholars, this is not terribly surprising considering their propensity for a superiority complex. But, if one can ignore this bias, and even laugh at it in some places, it does not take away from the learning experience of reading this book. What does harm this experinece are the assumptions that the authors make about the knowledge of their audience. I have a fairly good background in Christian history, and I read this to fill in some of the gaps. What I found were a lot of teasers to stories I did not know. The authors would mention some fairly obscure person or event without elaboration, expecting the reader to understand what he/she was talking about. This became quite annoying after awhile.

In conclusion, this book is a good read for anyone who wants to learn more about Christian history, but don't expect it to be comprehensive.