I subtitled my blog (Ancient-Faith.com) "a militant quest for honesty among the saints of God." Decoding Nicea, Rome's Audacious Claim, and my website Christian-history.org are about church history, but the reason I write about church history is to hearken back to a time when the churches were not divided. Jude, our Lord's brother, exhorted us to "contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints." How can we do that if we do not know what faith the apostles delivered to the saints.

There are two problems happening. One, humans are tribal. Even as Christians we are more likely to defend the tribe (our denomination or belief system) than honestly read the Bible. Two, we have little knowledge of what happened to the churches of the New Testament and almost none about what they believed. Worse, we are warned away from finding out because "they fell away into legalism."

I write to fight both those problems.