Pagan Christianity - A book review

I read a book last year called, "Pagan Christianity". It approaches many of the questions I have always asked and could never get a straight answer on. No one seemed to want to think about the possibility that there is no such thing as an altar call in the Bible. And... where the hell did communion come from anyway? What the hell is hell? The tithe... all the NT passages I read seem to be fitting the tithe into the lump of items called "the law" and that generosity of spirit is the law of the spirit. The book I am reading seems to have a large focus on the practice of preaching from a pulpit and having trained teachers leading a mute and tethered congregation. Tethered because they are not allowed to interact, ask questions, even sit on the same level as the teacher. The claim from the author (with much historical and text book support) is that the early church was nothing like the church that developed in rome. The early church was more like a community of hellenistic believers. More on Jewish Hellenism later.