THE LOST HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia---and How It Died

Dick Hill's reading of Jenkins's revisionist history is pleasant enough, but for this listener it falls short on several counts. Listeners are challenged, for the 10 hours over which the audiobook unfolds, to hold in their minds the names of many unfamiliar people, places, dates, and sects without the helpful visual cue of seeing words on the page. The second quibble is content related. Jenkins's book presents itself as an iconoclastic retelling of the early history of Christianity—of the rise and fall of sects lost to history when Roman Catholic and other orthodox Christianities achieved dominance. It's pitched by its publisher as a "shocking" history of the death of early Christianity, and Dick Hill plays along, occasionally imparting a wide-eyed tone to the narrative that eventually grows tiresome. M.G. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2009]