Foundations: A Journey Through the Early Church

If you're here, you've probably had the experience of reading something about the New Testament — a scholarly commentary, a popular history, even a serious biography of Jesus — and feeling that the world around him remained frustratingly thin. A few lines about "Roman occupation." A paragraph on "messianic expectation." And then, almost immediately, back to the main event. As if the men who were doing the same things, drawing the same crowds, and dying the same deaths in the same decades were merely scenery.

They weren't scenery. They were the context. And I believe that until you know them — really know them, by name and method and fate — you don't yet have the tools to think rigorously about any of this.

That conviction is what this school exists to address. We begin not with Jesus but with the world that made figures like Jesus possible: the crushing mathematics of Roman taxation, the catastrophic power vacuum that followed Herod's death, and the ancient concept of "messiah" itself, which was far more contested, political, and dangerous than most modern readers realize. We then work through the claimants themselves — Simon of Peraea, Athronges, Judas of Galilee, Theudas, the Egyptian Prophet, and others — as subjects worthy of serious historical investigation in their own right, not merely as background color. We sit with Josephus long enough to understand what he's doing when he writes about them, and what he might be hiding.

I won't pretend this material is religiously neutral for everyone who encounters it. For some of you, it will sit comfortably alongside existing faith. For others, it will raise hard questions. What I can promise is that the school itself takes no position on those questions — my job is to equip you with the same sources, the same methodological tools, and the same historical discipline that professional ancient historians bring to this period, and then trust you to think for yourself. I have no interest in converting you to any position. I have a great deal of interest in giving you the intellectual equipment to hold your own position, whatever it is, with genuine rigor.

By the end of this school, you will be able to pick up Josephus's Jewish War and read it as a critical historian, not a passive recipient. You'll be able to place John the Baptist and the Teacher of Righteousness within their distinct prophetic traditions, understand why Rome killed the men it killed and ignored the men it ignored, and engage the final question — what, historically, set Jesus of Nazareth apart from his contemporaries — with the seriousness it deserves, rather than the reflexive answers, from any direction, that serious questions so rarely receive.

The ancient world was violent, complicated, and electrifying. Come see it whole.