Early Christianity

5 The realities of such trends were brought home to me when I visited
Split in Croatia at Easter 2000. The engaging elderly man from whom
I rented a room made much of my Irishness, stressing that the Croats,
like the Irish, were Catholics. Then he remembered that there was
a large Protestant population in Northern Ireland: ‘Protestants’, he
hissed, ‘are like Serbs.’ The role of religion in the ethnic divisions of
the post-Cold War Balkans was chillingly predicted (it seems to me
now) by Stella Alexander in an essay published in 1982. She wrote
that ‘[r]eligion in Yugoslavia is a divisive, not a unifying force’, and
that ‘[t]he Yugoslav communists have reason to fear the disintegrative
force of unfettered nationalism, and as long as the churches are associ-
ated with this, the regime will continue to attack them’ (Alexander
1982: 591 and 607). Indeed, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has
noted of the regime of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman (1990–9)
that it would not have been able ‘to stir up Croats against the large
Serbian minority in Zagreb by plastering the town with “God Protects
Croatia” posters, if there wasn’t something already there to be stirred
up’ (Geertz 2000: 173).
6 On the topic of ‘new religions’, see the various essays in Wilson and
Cresswell 1999.
7 Although it has been suggested by some sections of the news media
that the popularity of the film in North America owed much to the
appetite among some young males for images of extreme violence.
The re-release of the film for Easter 2005 saw many of the more
extreme scenes of violence excised.

2 Tradition and revelation: the historical

quest for early Christianity

1 It was precisely for this reason that ecclesiastical authorities in the
north Italian city of Ravenna were troubled by the early history of their
bishopric penned by the ninth-century priest Agnellus. A staunch
defender of the prerogatives of the Ravenna church, Agnellus high-
lighted the independence from Rome that Ravenna had enjoyed in ear-
lier centuries. In a civilization that had for centuries subscribed to the
notion of papal supremacy, and even more so in the sensitive atmos-
phere of Catholic Europe after the Protestant Reformation, accounts
of such challenges to the authority of the bishop of Rome could be
considered dangerous. Hence a succession of humanist scholars were

NOTES

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