from students to examination questions. More seriously, however,
it can lead to spurious lessons being drawn from history. Anthro-
pological approaches to the study of antiquity have reminded us,
however, that in many respects the ancient world is an incredibly
strange and confusing place, and our efforts to understand it are
often hampered by the modern preconceptions that, intentionally
or otherwise, we bring to it.
In addition to anthropology, studies of the Graeco-Roman
world influenced by modern literary theory have underlined the
extent to which ancient texts present subjective interpretations of
events and experiences, not transparently objective ones. This is
not to deny, of course, that things actually happened in the past
(to put it bluntly: real people dying, suffering, or killing), but that
is not the same as claiming that there is a single indisputable
version of the truth that can be discovered. What we need to
recognize is that when we study historical documents or write our
own accounts of the past we are dealing with various layers of
interpretation, with different tellings and retellings (by ancient
authors and modern interpreters) of what happened – or, to put
it another way, with different versions of the past.
Moreover, what we choose to study about the ancient world
and the ways in which we choose to study it often reflect the
particular priorities and perspectives of our society. Different
generations of historians – indeed, different individualhistorians- will place emphasis on different things, and in many cases this
will reflect not only the varying personal tastes and interests of
individual scholars, but also something of the culture and society
in which they work (for some examples, see chapter 2). Study of
the ancient world (indeed, of any period in history) reflects the
priorities of the society in which that study is undertaken.
Traditionally, that has meant the deeds (mainly military and
political) of ‘great men’, or ‘great works’ of literature (usually
produced by or for those same ‘great men’): precisely the sorts
of things that you would expect to be of interest to members of
a male social élite. In recent decades, however, there has been an
erosion of the traditional hierarchies of social and political power
WHAT IS EARLY CHRISTIANITY?
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