The first, perhaps most crucial thing to understand about the earliest generations of Christians is that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. They were rabble. They lightly cast off all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, even family. Christ, in fact, far from teaching “family values,” was remarkably dismissive of the family. And decent civic order, like social respectability, was apparently of no importance to him.
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