was engaged also in campaigns of militant evangelization in the
newly conquered territories of central and south America. In the
confrontation with native American religions, it was believed that
lessons could be drawn from early Christianity’s encounter with
Graeco-Roman paganism (MacCormack 1991; Reff 2005).
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Roman Catholic scholars produced new editions and additions
to works that preserved and propagated their traditions, such
as Baronius’ Annales Ecclesiastici, the Acta Sanctorum, and the
Maurist editions of early Christian texts. Such enterprises laid
the foundations of much later Roman Catholic scholarship on
early Christianity. In the nineteenth century, for example, many
of the Maurist editions were republished under the guidance of
the French cleric Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–75). This was a
massive undertaking, yielding 221 volumes of the Patrologia
Latinaand 162 of the Patrologia Graeca. Likewise the investi-
gations into the lives of the saints undertaken by the followers of
John van Bolland have proved to be even more enduring: the
Bollandists, an organization founded in his memory, still flour-
ishes, publishing its scholarly journal Analecta Bollandianatwice
each year.
Protestant interest in early Christianity was largely confined
to the time of Jesus and the apostles. Even so, their reactions to
Roman Catholic scholarship on the early Christian period could
be harsh and scoffing. When, for instance, Gilbert Burnet (1643–
1715), later bishop of Salisbury and himself a historian, travelled
in Italy in 1685–6, he rejected the enthusiastic Catholic view
that the catacombs were evidence of a sizeable and flourishing
Christian community at Rome in the first centuries AD, and
suggested instead that many of the catacombs had been dug not
by Christians but by pagans (Stevenson 1978: 52; Frend 1996:
17). Such views were informed by prejudice as much as schol-
arship. Protestant polemics disputed the Roman Church’s claims
that it represented the traditions of early Christianity, and, as part
of their attack, sought to demonstrate how post-apostolic Chris-
tianity had become contaminated by the Graeco-Roman cultureTHE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY
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