as temporary aberrations from what came to be identified with
‘the church’. Such partisanship, it should be noted, reveals the
extent to which modern scholars of early Christianity can be
regarded as prisoners of the sources upon which they rely: many
early Christian writings – from the first-century texts that make
up the New Testament to Eusebius of Caesarea’s early fourth-
century Ecclesiastical History– are concerned (in part at least)
with precisely such questions of authority and correct belief
within the Christian community. As I will argue later in this book
(especially in chapter 5), however, such a perspective represents
only one particular view of what early Christianity should be;
there were other views and they are as much a part of the early
Christian story as ‘the church’. Indeed, some modern scholars
have argued that the diversity of practice and belief apparent
in early Christian writings makes it difficult to identify a single,
easily defined phenomenon that can be called ‘Christianity’ in this
period. For that reason, it has become fashionable in some circles
to talk in terms not of a single early Christianity but of plural
early Christianities.^3 In sum, then, the Christianity described in
this book may seem surprisingly strange and diverse to readers
expecting it to be little different from, say, modern Presbyterianism
or Catholicism. That, however, is part of its fascination.
A further factor influencing the scope of this book on early
Christianity is that it is published in a series called Classical
Foundations. It therefore approaches early Christianity as a topic
for study within the classical world, the ancient civilizations of
Greece and Rome. But such civilizations were diverse, and even
within a university Classics department you might receive very
different definitions of what is ‘important’ in the study of clas-
sical antiquity if you were to ask, on the one hand, a scholar of
fifth-century BCGreek literature or, on the other, an archaeologist
working on the Roman army. In other words, the shape and
contents of a book on early Christianity for Classical Foundations
will be influenced by the author’s own view of the Classical world.
Before proceeding further, therefore, it will be worthwhile to
explain what that authorial perspective is.
WHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?1
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