Early Christianity

Investigations frequently were driven, more or less explicitly, by
confessional agendas, as Christians of various persuasions, as well
as members of other religions and those who profess atheism,
have hotly contested early Christianity, seeking in it some vali-
dation of their own actions and beliefs or rejections of such
beliefs. As we saw in the last chapter, many later generations of
Christians have sought to claim early Christian traditions as their
own. Similarly, many non-believers have sought, by means of
their investigations into early and other periods of Christian
history, ‘to expose the fraudulent or inadequate bases of Christian
belief and to reveal the shortcomings of ecclesiastical practice in
their lurid detail’ (Robbins 1975: 357). For each of the chrono-
logical segments that I delineate (periodization again, I am afraid),
I will set historical and archaeological analyses side-by-side, since
they were often undertaken to achieve identical goals. Within each
chronological chunk, however, I will begin with efforts to write
down the early Christian story before proceeding to archaeology.
This is not because I subscribe to the notion that archaeology is
the servant of written history, but because this is traditionally how
it has been regarded by those who have studied early Christianity
(cf. Snyder 1985: 8–9). That in itself is revealing: much research
into early Christianity has been driven by theological agendas, as
a quest for the truth lying behind texts, and for the most part
archaeological material has been deployed as a ‘handmaiden’ to
that endeavour.

Discovering early Christianity in the age of Constantine

The first attempt to write an account of the rise of Christianity
was the Ecclesiastical Historypenned in Greek by Eusebius of
Caesarea, who died in 339. Eusebius was a Christian bishop
(of the capital of Roman Palestine, Caesarea: hence his sobri-
quet) and had been acquainted with the emperor Constantine –
although Eusebius, keen to win prestige, may have exaggerated
the closeness of their friendship (Barnes 1981: 265–6). In its
surviving form, the Ecclesiastical Historyreaches its climax with

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