Christianity: How a Despised Sect...Came to Dominate the Roman Empire by Jonathan Hill

"The Christian religion was founded by a group of fishermen and peasants from Galilee, a rural backwater in an unimportant region of the Roman empire. They were the followers of a relatively minor wandering prophet who had died as a condemned criminal. When their movement came to the attention of the Roman authorities, it was brutally suppressed. Yet little more than three centuries later, the Christian religion had become the faith of the empire itself. Christian bishops had combined Christian theology with classical philosophy to create an intellectual and spiritual synthesis that would endure for over a thousand years, while Christian emperors were busy dismantling the ancient religion of Rome itself and supplanting it with the official teachings of a triumphant church."

I love this summary that begins the Introduction (PDF) to a book I'm thinking of getting, Christianity: How a Despised Sect...Came to Dominate the Roman Empire by Jonathan Hill. The Fortress Press link has an interview with the author. This period of development of Christianity is espcially interesting to me since my understanding of Christ takes issue with "how Christians began to construct notions of orthodoxy and heresy, and how they distinguished between them."