Renewal, reform, and the origins of critical scholarship
The origins of a more rigorous approach to the study of early
Christianity can be traced to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
when a chain of seemingly unrelated events made knowledge of
the subject suddenly easier and more desirable. The stirrings
of the European Renaissance; the development of printing; the
collapse of the Byzantine empire in the eastern Mediterranean,
culminating with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in May
1453; and the fallout after Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five
theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg on the last
day of October 1517: all played a role.
From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for a wide
variety of reasons, intellectuals, at first in Italy but soon elsewhere
in Europe, began to look at the heritage of the ancient world with
renewed interest. This movement, known to us as the early modern
Renaissance, was to have a fundamental impact on the way in
which Christianity impinged on the European self-consciousness,
and was to have a wide-ranging impact on the development of
scholarship. The revived interest in all things ancient brought
with it a concern to try to recover as much as was possible of the
writings of ancient Greek and Roman authors. This encouraged
scholars to develop rigorous standards for assessing the content
of ancient texts, often through the close study of their linguistic
content, giving rise to the discipline known as philology. These
trends marked the turning of intellectual efforts more generally
away from an exclusive concentration on the pursuit of sacred
knowledge, much as had been the case in the middle ages, towards
investigation of areas of primarily human achievement: hence the
emergence of the scholarly movement called humanism.
In addition to searching for ancient texts in local libraries,
the intellectuals of western Europe were soon indulged with a
deluge of manuscripts from the Greek east of the Mediterranean.
As the rising power of the Ottoman Turks began to encroach
on the Byzantine empire based on Constantinople, Byzantine
grandees began to send books from their libraries to the west,
THE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
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