Notes
1 What is early Christianity and why does it deserve study?
1 This is not to say that there was, in the pre-Constantinan period, a total
absence of efforts to achieve an overarching administrative structure.
Even so, its effects were limited to regional episcopal hierarchies, such
as those claimed by the bishops of Rome over central and southern
Italy, or the bishops of Carthage over north Africa: Amidon 1983; cf.
more generally Hess 2002.
2 There is much too large a bibliography on this subject to cite here; but
a useful introduction may be found in Bowersock 1986.
3 For use of the plural ‘Christianities’, see (e.g.) the title of Ehrman- The problem of defining the boundaries of Christianity is well
explored in Boyarin 1999 and 2004.
4 See, for example, the travel writer Colin Thubron’s account of his par-
ticipation in an Orthodox Church procession at Omsk in western
Siberia in the late 1990s, where a veteran of the Second World War
explained how Christian beliefs had been preserved under Com-
munism: ‘For me it was my mother. We lived in a remote region near
Voronezh – not a town at all, you understand, just a country village.
No church for hundreds of miles. My mother was illiterate, but she
remembered all the prayers from the old days, and taught me them’
(Colin Thubron, In Siberia, London: Chatto & Windus, 1999, p. 58).
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