I'm 27 years old, married, and I have two kids. I was born and raised LDS, went on a mission to Iowa, etc., etc. I'm married, have two kids, and in the Church I've been an elders quorum president, a seminary teacher, a stake missionary, and lots of other things. Right now I'm the ward clerk and an elders quorum teacher. I graduated magna cum laude from BYU with a major in geology and minors in philosophy and chemistry, and now I'm a Ph.D. candidate in geochemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The National Science Foundation has generously given me a graduate fellowship, so I haven't had to teach any classes and I have some free time to write frivolous books.

I got interested in early Christianity during a philosophy class at BYU, and I just never stopped reading after the class! The reason an admitted amateur such as myself has presumed to write a book on early Christianity is that there is really nothing like it in the LDS literature. As I sifted through the few books that are available on this topic I noticed that all of them were either above my head until I read them three times and did a lot of background study (e.g. some of Hugh Nibley's stuff), or they were overly simplistic and really didn't give much solid evidence for their claims (I won't mention which ones, because I don't want to embarrass anyone with my opinions). Therefore, when I went about writing my book I tried to write exactly the kind of thing that I wish I would have had when I first started looking into the subject. That is, I tried to provide enough background information that anyone could understand it, and I tried to make the scholarship rigorous enough to make an impact on the skeptical reader. Also, I tried to be fairly comprehensive. Hopefully I did the job right!