“Sheila McGinn’’s book, The Jesus Movement and the World of the Early Church, is a masterful example of an important and difficult genre: the scholar’’s presentation, for an intelligent and educated but nonspecialist audience, of a large and complicated topic. Her topic is the development of Christianity from Jesus into the period of the apostolic fathers, or ‘“How did Christianity get to basically what we have today: a hierarchically organized institutional Church with a strong ‘“minor chord’” of prophetic egalitarianism?”’ She does this by treating briefly but adequately all the New Testament writings and some of the early noncanonical writings in their sociopolitical, economic, and religious contexts. In the process she educates her readers in how to handle ancient historical writings so that these readers can not only understand what she is presenting but treat it critically and relate it to other such treatments, which they will now be able to handle. This will be a valuable text for beginning theology students, parish education programs, and independent lay readers.”