Was Christianity carefully constructed centuries after Christ? The voices in this book say otherwise — and they were there.
Long before the Council of Nicaea, men and women were reading the Gospels and the letters that later became the corpus of the New Testament, wrestling with doctrine, defending the faith, and calling believers to deeper devotion. Their words have survived. And they sound like they were written yesterday.
Excerpts of Christian Wisdom: Ancient and New brings 52 of those voices into your hands — one for each week of the year. Each meditation opens with a brief portrait of an early church writer, grounds you in related Scripture, then offers a carefully chosen excerpt from their writings alongside commentary that draws a direct line from their world to yours.
The result is a devotional that does something most devotionals cannot: it hands you evidence. Evidence that the faith you hold was not invented, not assembled by committee, not handed down through institutional convenience. It was alive and deep and recognizable from the very beginning.
After two decades of studying the mostly forgotten writers of the early church — alongside Matthew Henry, John Wesley, and extrabiblical texts reaching back to the second century BC — Jeff Thompson has curated a collection that will stop you mid-page. Not because the language is archaic, but because it isn't. Because Tertullian in 200 AD will say something that makes you think: I have never seen it that way before. And yet I know it is true.
That is the experience this book delivers, week after week.
Stand on ground two thousand years deep.