Early Christianity

History of Early Christian Literature), founded in 1882, and Die

griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhun-

derte(The Greek Christian Authors of the First Three Centuries),

begun in 1897 (Frend 2003: 9–31). Other important series

were initiated around the same time. In 1886 the first volume of

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum(Corpus of Latin

Ecclesiastical Writers) was published in Vienna; the series is still

in progress today. By this time comprehensive editions of early

Christian inscriptions from Rome and France were already in

progress. The tools for the modern study of early Christianity were

coming together.

Harnack’s critical approach to early Christian texts provoked

some opposition from the Lutheran church. His contemporary,

Louis Duchesne (1843–1922) also found himself criticized, this

time by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Duchesne’s work – on

early Christian liturgy and on the Liber Pontificalis, a chronicle

of the early popes – threw into doubt many of the central tenets

of the Catholic view of history, such as the foundation of the

church at Rome by St Peter. For similar assaults on time-honoured

traditions, Duchesne found his L’Histoire ancienne de l’Église

(1906–10; published in English as The Early History of the

Church, 1909–24) placed on the Roman Catholic Index of Prohib-

ited Books in 1912. This came in the midst of the campaign

against ‘Modernism’ under pope Pius X (1903–14) and other

historians besides Duchesne were condemned (O. Chadwick

1998: 346–59). It was a sign that, for all the progress ‘from dogma

to history’, ecclesiastical concerns had not disappeared. Indeed,

as recently as 1929 the Roman archaeologist Orazio Marucchi

(1852–1931) published a volume that aimed to show ‘that in the

catacombs... we find the most ancient monuments confirming

the present Catholic faith’ (1929: 25).^2

Marucchi’s work built on the researches of Giovanni Battista

de Rossi (1822–94), who undertook the first really thorough work

in the Roman catacombs since Bosio in the early seventeenth

century. Others too were beginning to explore the archaeological

heritage of early Christianity. By now, of course, archaeology had

THE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY

60