Chapter 1
What is early Christianity
and why does it deserve
study?
The shape of early Christianity
It may be worth beginning with a definition of what is meant in
this book by ‘early Christianity’. Let me take ‘early’ first. I will
be analysing Christianity between the life of Jesus Christ, in the
early first century AD, and the conversion of the Roman emperor
Constantine (306–37) to Christianity at the beginning of the
fourth. By setting these limits and by describing the Christianity
in this book as ‘early’ it will seem that I am imposing upon it the
traditional approach of dividing the past up into distinct periods
(e.g. ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, ‘early modern’, etc.). Such periodiza-
tion, as it is called, is rather out of fashion with historians these
days. Of course, human activity does not neatly fall into such
categories. They are devised, rather, by historians looking back
on the past and trying to impose some ‘structure’ on a rather
more chaotic reality. For that reason, therefore, such periods
may be described better as historians’concepts rather than as his-
toricalones (cf. K. Jenkins 1991: 16). It was not the case, after
all, that Christians leaped out of bed one morning and exclaimed
that early Christianity was at an end and that late antique or
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