This series of 36 lectures never drags thanks to the well-crafted content and almost flawless delivery of Luke Timothy Johnson. My only negative note is that his pronunciation of some words, especially "decades", seems a bit idiosyncratic. His grasp of the subject matter is beyond excellent, however. This course will not appeal to fundamentalists, since Johnson, a Roman Catholic, freely acknowledges the shortcomings of the Bible as history or as prophecy. He also makes the good point that we simply don't know as much about how Christianity was experienced by "normal" people during these long centuries, since almost everything that remains in the way of documentary evidence stems from the literate, educated classes to which the church leadership increasingly belonged after Christianity's humble beginnings. Still, this course is a great overview that tracks quite closely with the other courses and books I have read--or am reading, in the case of Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. In this course, Johnson is a historian and he teaches as such. If you want to understand his views about the truth of the Bible, you can see that on YouTube, where he appears to say that we need to look on the Bible as a model for life, not as a history of the past or a prediction of the future. This seems a valid viewpoint for someone who so clearly understands the shortcomings of Christianity as practiced for the past 2000 years. ( )