book
The First Urban Christians
Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Why this matters here
Meeks reconstructs early urban Christian communities as sites of dispute over status, food, ethnicity, gifts, and authority—not seamless harmony. When Others Become Leaders treats that quarrelsome evidence as useful: a movement can spread shared practice while remaining internally contested. Meeks documents formative conflict; the book asks how influence moves through disagreement without requiring prior unanimity.
