Since the majority of the ministers who post actively on this, our networking site, appear to be Christian, and I am not, I will only offer a few suggestions of my own for self-education about Christianity and its many branches. I cordially and respectfully invite our colleagues who are Christian to suggest their favorite resources that would useful to our brothers and sisters; both about Christianity in general, and any particular denomination and/or theology that they may favor.
The most obvious thing to read is, of course, the Christian Bible. There are many translations of it in the various major languages, and their partisans dispute over which ones are good, bad or even heretical. What is an objective student to do? I have two levels of recommendation for this matter: 1) read and compare different translations if possible and 2) get some basic familiarity with the original languages (Hebrew Aramaic and Greek) and read bilingual editions of the Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek portions respectively.
In regard to the first recommendation, one can either gather various printed Bible translations, or take advantage of the various websites and apps that give parallel translations of several or even many versions. A websearch for "Bible" or "Bible translations" should snare you a list of resources.
As for the second recommendation, many people are intimidated by the very idea of learning languages, so let me assure those people that I'm not saying you must become fluent in three ancient languages (all three languages are still used, but the ancient forms are not identical to modern forms), I simply suggest that gradually become familiar with the original words and languages will allow you to read the Bible more or less as originally written, and freeing you from utter dependence on translations. If you stick with it, you may well eventually reach fluency; that being said, I myself and definitely still working on it... far from fluent.
There are fairly easily available textbooks on Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek. The widely-available Teach Yourself series includes "Biblical Hebrew" and "New Testament Greek", which are excellent starting-points. The Aramaic parts of the Bible are only a few chapters worth, so there few resources, as far as I know. However, Aramaic is the language of the Talmud and of other important Jewish literature, so there are more resources for learning the Aramaic of those texts. The dialects aren't identical, but much will overlap.
After the Bible, the next main textual source for Christianity is the writings of the early Church leaders. I can recommend Anne Fremantle's "A Treasury of Early Christianity" as a nice anthology of extracts from those writings, giving the student a good overview of the roots of the forms of Christianity we know today.
Having mentioned some Jewish literature above, it is worth remembering that Judaism is the primary source and foundation of Christianity, so understanding Judaism, particularly its ancient forms, is important context for understanding Christianity. Those of us who aren't either Christian or Jewish should take care to not take sides in the disputes that cause them to be separate religions.
Once again, I would like to invite Christian ministers in our network to contribute a suggestion or two: their favorite books or online resources that would be worthy and useful for our colleagues who would like to self-educate themselves in the spirit of the ULC's Doctor of Divinity degree in regard to Christianity. Anyone who would like to help in that way can either post a comment with your suggestions, or send me a message, in which case I may edit the suggestion into this post. Thank you!
