tradition in which Barnabas, the assistant of Paul in Acts, had
come to Italy and become Milan’s first bishop. The papacy and
its supporters were understandably outraged, and rejected the
Milanese claim out of hand (Humphries 1999: 56–65). Yet not
even the Roman church was immune to such inventive recreations
of the early Christian past, especially when papal authority was
at stake, and there is surely no more famous medieval forgery
than the Donation of Constantine. This text, written in the eighth
century, told how the primacy of the Roman church had been
decreed by Constantine himself shortly after his conversion
(Edwards 2003).
Early Christianity was also the subject of investigation in
the middle ages as a quarry for theological ideas. The great
medieval compendia of Christian doctrine and theology, such as
theDecretumby the twelfth-century canon lawyer Gratian or the
Summa Theologiaeof Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), depended
in no small measure on extracts from early Christian authors. For
the most part, primacy was accorded to Christians of the fourth
and later centuries: western Christendom regarded as ancient
Christianity’s greatest teachers, or ‘doctors’, bishop Ambrose
of Milan (c.339–97), Jerome (c.345–420), bishop Augustine of
Hippo (354–430), and pope Gregory the Great (c.540–604). That
said, some earlier Christians did receive attention. The third-
century Alexandrian theologian Origen, for example, enjoyed
some vogue in the intellectual circles of Cistercian monasticism
in the twelfth century, where he was read not in Greek but in the
Latin translations of his works produced during the fourth- and
fifth-century controversy over his orthodoxy. Origen’s fate in
eastern Christendom, however, was altogether less happy: he
was repeatedly condemned for heresy during the three centuries
after his death, with the result that the original Greek texts of
most of his theological treatises have disappeared, through either
neglect or deliberate suppression (Trigg 1983: 254–5).
Any activity in the middle ages that might be termed ‘early
Christian archaeology’ was largely confined to the hunt for relics,
THE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
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