On "Christianity outside the Roman Empire" by F. Crawford Burkitt ***

This is essentially a short version of Burkitt's Early Eastern Christianity, as it is based on two lectures instead of five or six, and "outside the Roman Empire" for Burkitt means "eastern." 

We get a taste for Christianity as it developed outside Rome near Edessa and in other parts of the world that sat just outside its realm, where the Greek and Persian world collided, and where there were remnants of Semitic culture. Because there's little literature from this church, we don't know much about it until the middle of the second century. Burkitt sees this Christianity as having "changed less" than that further to the west, but given its predilection for ascetism, transubstantiation, and baptism only for monks (as doctrine apparently shared with the Marcionites), it would seem to me not that the church in the east changed less but that it changed in different ways--less influenced by Greek philosophy and more influenced by more eastern ways of thinking. Although Burkitt's other book on the subject is in part so long because it reproduces some primary sources in full, on the whole, it is the more thorough work and only about twice as long--thus more recommended.