What do we really know about how Christianity took shape? Do the rituals, practices, and beliefs common today look anything like those of the earliest Christians? These questions frame the thought experiment of a group of scholars from the Westar Institute, home of the groundbreaking Jesus Seminar. Too often the history of Christianity has been written backwards, projecting later assumptions onto the past and so distorting what we can see. This team of scholars asks: What if history is played forward, without assuming an inevitable outcome, without assumptions or preconceptions? How would that change what we see in the first two centuries after Jesus? Highlighting the many archaeological and manuscript discoveries over the past twenty years, After Jesus Before Christianity offers numerous new insights and discoveries that provide a paradigm-shifting picture, including: That there was no religion called Christianity before the third century That there were multiple Jesus movements That