witty", a history "not be left to students and scholars" and "a treat for the general reader." Richard Marius in The Christian Century writes that "Paul Johnson, an English Roman Catholic, has given us the best one-volume history of Christianity ever done." A Kirkus Reviews review characterizes Johnson as avoiding "all special theological pleading and abid[ing] by professional canons of evidence and objectivity." In fact, "he accents the conflicts, shortcomings, and institutional distortions and thereby effectively counters the homogenized interpretations of much orthodox church history." The book is termed "a bold achievement of compression and analysis." W.H.C. Frend's New York Review of Books review "Christians vs. Christians" described it as "brilliantly, if somberly and sometimes even wrongheadedly, told" and "a tour de force, one of the most ambitious surveys of the history of Christianity ever attempted and perhaps the most radical." Martin E. Marty's New York Times review of the book in October 1976 asserts that "whether one can represent Christianity in only 556 pages becomes pedantic and frivolous in the face of the fact that Paul Johnson has successfully done so." After Johnson's brief description of Jesus preaching the coming Kingdom of God, his death, and his followers' belief in Jesus's resurrection, Marty writes "along comes Paul,... the fanatic fool for Christ," and, for Johnson, "the greatest Christian," who "rescued Jesusism from its place among the more crabby Jewish sects of the day, picked up its hints of universal intent and then wrenched the faith and himself into a context where the 'salvation mechanism' is available for all people." Near the end, the review describes the book as "a reliable if hard-edged story of the public church." Donald Cantuar in Churchman (1977) expresses deep appreciation to Johnson's "tour de force", as for example in his estimation of Paul's impact: "The truth is that Paul did not invent Christianity. Or pervert it; he rescued it from extinction. Paul was the first pure Christian: the first to comprehend Jesus’s system of theology, to grasp the magnitude of the changes it embodied, and the completeness of the break with Judaic law." (p. 35) Colin Gunton's review in Religious Studies describes the book as "long and enthralling", though it recounts reasons of state "encompass[ing] in the name of religion the subversion of the truth" for much of Christian history. He characterizes Johnson's view of Augustine of Hippo "as the villain of the story"