The Other Half: Recovering the Christianity That Existed Before the Bible

Christianity was a complete, functioning religion for centuries before it had a Bible. Communities baptized converts through years-long initiations involving exorcism, nakedness, triple immersion, and anointing with oil. They fasted twice weekly, prayed at fixed hours, ate together across class lines in sacred meals, ordained women as deacons, prayed for their dead, and organized their entire lives around rhythms of worship that no canonical text ever commanded. The Other Half reconstructs this forgotten world from the primary sources: the Didache, the letters of Ignatius, Justin Martyr's account of second-century worship, the Apostolic Tradition's baptismal rite, catacomb inscriptions, and the testimony of hostile Roman observers. Drawing on the earliest documents with philosophical rigor and historical honesty, it recovers the practices, convictions, and habits of life that the first Christians carried in their bodies and their memories long before anyone collected the texts that would become the New Testament. This is not a book about what the early church believed. It is a book about what the early church did, and about what was lost when a living tradition was slowly reduced to a written one.