April D. DeConick

This is the book that I have wanted to write my entire career.  It is the story about the birth of Christianity as a wild thing, yet untamed.  The earliest manifestations of Christianity were far from the homogenized creedal religion that emerged in the early third century.  Not only was earliest Christianity very diverse in its initial stages, but from its inception, it was also inherently seeded with a Gnostic spirituality.  The Ancient New Age tells the story of Christianity’s native beginnings and her shrewd taming, as she was domesticated and secularized by the leaders of the proto-orthodox or Apostolic churches into an orthodoxy that would sustain mass conversion across the Mediterranean world.  The result of this cultivation by the proto-orthodox was the eradication of an old spirituality that had centered on the realization and recovery of the human self as a lost fragment of God.