Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary Lds Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy

Edited by Noel Reynolds and published jointly by FARMS and BYU Press, Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy is the culmination of several years' work by BYU scholars to build on the formative research on the Christian apostasy by James E. Talmage, Joseph Fielding Smith, and B. H. Roberts using manuscripts written during the first few centuries of Christianity but not discovered until after their time. As Reynolds writes in his introduction, "The great difference between the first Christian apostasy and the many other apostasies [is that] it did not consist only in widespread rejection of God, but was accompanied by the disastrous loss of priesthood authority. Why was there an apostasy? How did it come about? What does it mean? What is the significance of new discoveries on the study of the apostasy? These are among the questions discussed in this book, and "which we hope will be given new life with these essays" (p. 26).