Are you a Christian? Are you a believer or a Nazarene? Who was Jesus Christ and what was his family like? What happened to his parents and siblings? Who actually wrote the gospels; Mark or Luke? Were those even their true names? How were the healing miracles which took place in Syria, Egypt and Turkey viewed by contemporary writers? If the Romans didn’t mind Jesus being a god, what was it they did mind? Was it Paul’s personality which got him into so many difficult situations – or was there more to it than that?

The Kingdom Of Fools: The Unlikely Rise Of The Early Church, is a thoroughly researched and engagingly written book that traces the rise of the early church, offering a wealth of information which brings it all to life. It’s packed with details you never knew were there and supported with so much background material that you feel yourself stepping through the pages into the 1st century.

Fools. Rebels. Ignorant peasants. That’s how the Roman world saw the first Christians. Led by fishermen, tax collectors and renegade Pharisees, the first Christians shunned power and welcomed the poor and uneducated. Roman commentators mocked their upside-down values, but the apostle Paul – himself a Roman citizen, and a Pharisee to boot, affirmed that ‘God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.’

Its followers were persecuted and its leaders killed, yet this ragged collection of lowly tradesmen, women, slaves – and a smattering of turncoat high-born Jews – created a movement that changed the world.

How did this happen? How did the kingdom of fools conquer the mighty empire that was Rome? In this fascinating new biography of the early church, Nick Page sets the biblical accounts alongside the latest historical and archaeological research, exploring how the early Christians lived and worshipped – and just why the Romans found this new branch of the Jewish faith so difficult to comprehend.  It is an accessible portrait of a movement so radical, so dangerous, so thrillingly different that it outlasted the empire that tried to destroy it and went on to become the driving force of our cultural development – and claims more followers today than ever before in history.