we will need to look back in time before Jesus’ career and the
activities of his followers. Hence, while the focus of this book is
the period between Christ and Constantine, it will sometimes be
necessary to range beyond these limits to explain particular
aspects of early Christianity.
At the risk of seeming facetious, I should also say some-
thing on what the word ‘Christianity’ means in this book. As
various chapters below will argue, early Christianity possessed
certain characteristics that distinguish it from modern Chris-
tianity. We would be making a serious error if we wished to make
early Christianity fit in every respect expectations derived from
study or experience of its modern descendant. For example, any
debate as to whether or not the emperor Constantine was ‘really
a Christian’ (a hoary question favoured by a certain style of
scholar) would go seriously awry if the emperor’s Christianity
was expected to conform neatly with modern definitions of what
a Christian is. To assess Constantine’s Christianity, we need to
comprehend what Christianity meant generally in the early fourth
century and, altogether more specifically, we should attempt to
determine what it might have meant to Constantine himself.
More importantly, I wish to distinguish between my
approach to ‘early Christianity’ and more traditional accounts of
‘the early church’. To talk in terms of ‘the early church’ is to
give priority to institutional manifestations of Christianity. What
is worse, perhaps, is that treatments of ‘the early church’ risk
becoming partisan. Sometimes they privilege one particular def-
inition of ‘the church’, emphasizing continuities that may be
discerned in its development as an organization and in its defin-
itions of belief. Such approaches tend to focus on the affairs of
bishops, theologians, and their opponents, and thus to marginal-
ize (or even omit) other groups, such as women and the laity at
large (cf. Rousseau 2002: 5). A significant repercussion of this
approach is that traditional histories of ‘the church’ often stress
how throughout history it had a monopoly on ‘orthodox’ or
‘correct’ doctrine (see chapters 2 and 5 below). Groups that devi-
ated from this ‘church’ are dismissed as ‘heretical’ and portrayedWHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?
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