The opening volume of a collaborative history, carrying the story from Christian beginnings to Constantine through commissioned essays grouped in sections. The first of these confronts how hard it is to separate Jewish from Gentile Christianity, singles out the Johannine writings for their distinctive reading of the Jesus tradition, and closes on the shared ethos, organization and ritual that gave scattered groups a family likeness.

Later sections follow the making of Christian identity through writing and dispute — the early emergence of a literary culture, Marcion and his opponents, self-definition against Judaism and against Graeco-Roman philosophy — before breaking the picture down region by region, from Asia Minor and Egypt to Syria, Gaul, North Africa and Rome.

Those regional chapters answer a shift in scholarship: away from any assumed original uniformity, toward local variety in doctrine and practice, while declining Bauer's thesis that Rome imposed conformity.