The history of Christianity has been written the wrong way round: even during its earliest days, it was assumed that Jesus was Christ and that Christianity was a religion. But according to Maurice Sachot, it should be obvious that Jesus became Christ, just as Christianity became a religion. The history of early Christianity should thus be entirely reviewed. Why did a carpenter's son named Jesus leave his father's workshop and go out to preach the `coming of the Kingdom of God'? What led did several of his listeners to affirm that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah? How did his followers' belief and recognition take root and develop, three centuries later, into the religion of the Empire?
In revealing the internal processes that governed the emergence of the Christian movement and its transformations, this new history offers a plausible and coherent explanation of the origins of Christianity.