I picked up this book several months ago. I was determined to learn the real, unbiased truth, outside the filter of any denomination, an actual historical account of my own faith. If I’m going to follow a church, I’m going to follow one that has roots in Jesus’s teachings. In one that spawned from his direct command. So I asked my sister, a newly-achieved Ph.D. of theology, what I should read. “A loaded question,” she replied, and then linked me to this 400-page tome.

I bought the book, and it sat on my coffee table for a month before I finally opened it.

It’s good. It’s factual without being overwhelming, and it’s presented in a way that’s easy for this non-theologian to understand. But it’s also overwhelming. Because I want to understand all of it. I want to know what happened after the canon of the Gospels. These are the things I often wondered, never considering that the history had actually been recorded. And that I’d be able to learn it.

Obviously history had been recorded in some sense. But from my Bible-only religious education, it didn’t seem feasible that there was anything after the Bible.

Until, of course, I started to look.