What this is
Christianity Unearthed is not a devotional reading of Christianity. It is a historical reconstruction of how a religion took shape over time - how the texts were written, how the beliefs developed, and how the institutions formed in response to conflict, crisis, and change. The central question is not whether Christianity is true. The central question is how it got this way.
The series treats the Bible and early Christian writings as historical sources rather than as a unified system. It asks how a movement that began as a set of competing interpretations became a structured religion capable of defining orthodoxy and excluding alternatives.
The scope
The project traces the development of Christianity across 4,000 years. It follows how ancient traditions, Jewish scripture, the historical Jesus, early Christian movements, texts, institutions, imperial power, war and reform combined to produce a single dominant form of Christianity - and how that form was later contested, fractured, and inherited.
The focus is not on belief. It is on formation.
Method
The series works from the historical record and from the work of scribes, translators, archivists, archaeologists, textual critics, and historians who have preserved and compared the materials that make the seams visible. Quotations are marked. Claims are ranked by strength. Uncertainty is named rather than smoothed.
The governing method is simple: the texts do not agree, the world that produced them did not agree, and those disagreements are not an embarrassment. They are evidence.
The five-Age structure
The series is organized into five historical Ages. Each examines a phase in the long development of Christianity:
- Age I - Before the Filter. Ancient Near Eastern and Jewish foundations.
- Age II - The Winner’s Tale. Early Christianity and the formation of the New Testament.
The first Age to be recorded.
- Age III - Conquest. Institutional consolidation and alignment with imperial power.
- Age IV - Intrigue. Breakdown of unity and reconfiguration of authority.
- Age V - Schism & War. The long afterlife of Christianity in culture and history.
At full scale, the series plans three seasons per Age, and roughly twenty episodes per season - a complete structured history rather than an open-ended catalogue.
Who made this
Christianity Unearthed is created and produced by Tom Schuster.
Tom Schuster spent his career building technology companies across four continents. He is also an art historian, a photographer, and the author of seven unpublished volumes on the history of the biblical world.
None of that explains why he made this podcast. His father does, and a mosaic floor in northern Italy.
The Right Reverend James Leo Schuster was an Oxford theologian and historian, a man of deep faith, formidable intellect, and absolute integrity. He knew the history of his religion in full: the contradictions in the texts, the politics behind the councils, the human machinery beneath the doctrine. He knew it, and his faith did not waver. He chose, as Tom describes it, always the hardest path.
Tom always questioned what the actual stories were behind the paintings he photographed on his art-historical trips to Europe. Not the theology. The history. The empires and catastrophes, the rival texts and erased movements, the councils that decided by vote what Christians were required to believe. He spent years following that question through the evidence, writing as he went, producing seven volumes that now form the backbone of this podcast - two of which cover the period examined in the first two seasons.
The question sharpened into focus in Aquileia, in the ruins of a fourth-century basilica. Beneath it lies one of the oldest Christian mosaic floors in the world, and above it, for centuries, has hung a claim: that this floor is evidence the proto-orthodox Church was always the natural center of Christianity, and that every other early movement was a heretical fringe. Standing in front of it, Tom saw that the argument didn’t hold. The floor proved no such thing. The story being told about it was a later fabrication - the winners writing their own origin, in mosaic, for pilgrims to walk across.
That moment crystallised the project. Christianity Unearthed is structured in five Ages spanning four thousand years. The podcast launches with Age Two, The Winner’s Tale, covering the period 0 to 500 CE, when multiple Christianities existed simultaneously, competed for authority, and one of them won. The others were not defeated by argument. They were erased by power.
Christianity Unearthed is not an attack on faith. It is an attempt to understand, as honestly as possible, how the most influential institution in Western civilization actually came to be, and what was lost along the way.
The podcast was originally published under the pseudonym Leo Bishop, a name drawn from his father’s own: James Leo Schuster, Bishop of the Church. It is now published under Tom’s own name, as it always should have been.
To reach Tom directly, write to contact@christianityunearthed.com. Press and media inquiries: info@christianityunearthed.com.
Listen or watch
Full episodes are available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.