(and therefore the paganism) in which it developed. Some forty
years after Burnet visited Rome, the same journey was made by
one Conyers Middleton. On returning to England, he wrote an
account of what he had seen. The title of his book, published in
1729, leaves nothing about its polemical purpose to the imagi-
nation:A Letter from Rome Shewing an Exact Conformity between
Popery and Paganism: Or, The Religion of the Present Romans
to be derived entirely from that of their Heathen Ancestors! For
Protestants, then, the early Christian traditions to which Rome
laid claim were utterly corrupt. Purity was to be found instead in
the Christian movement described in the New Testament, and
it was from this that Protestantism claimed to be descended
(Smith 1990: 14–25).
Such polarizations of opinion about early Christianity
became all the more acute in the eighteenth century with the
application to other areas of historical enquiry of the processes
of analytical, secular reason associated with the European Enlight-
enment. History writing increasingly moved away from the eccle-
siastical focus that had dominated in the middle ages and early
modern period. Endeavours by non-clerical historians were now
largely directed to satisfying the well-known precept of David
Hume (1711–76) that it was the duty of cultivated people to know
their own country’s history and that of Greece and Rome (Hay
1977: 184). In turn, however, the techniques of historical analysis
associated with secular reason were applied also to Christian
history in a manner that was frequently highly critical of Christian
traditions. In the anti-clerical atmosphere of revolutionary France,
for example, Charles François Dupuis (1753–1809) published an
account of comparative religious history that argued that all reli-
gions were, essentially, variations on the same basic pattern: in
one swift blow, the special status of Christianity was swept away
(Smith 1990: 26–33). In the English-speaking world, this rational
scepticism of Christianity is perhaps best represented by Edward
Gibbon (1737–94), who encapsulated the themes of his History
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empireas ‘the triumph of
barbarism and religion’ (Gibbon 1776–88 [1994]: III, 1068).
THE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
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