remains found at the city. Early Christianity was now more than
ever being considered as an aspect of Roman imperial civilization.
From the mid-twentieth century onwards the study of early
Christianity has undergone radical change. A topic that had once
been the preserve of churchmen, who studied it to illuminate theo-
logical concerns, now increasingly became a field of endeavour
for scholars drawn from the laity, or even from entirely different
religious backgrounds, such as Judaism. The study of early
Christianity has been affected also by the various trends that have
come to shape late twentieth-century secular scholarship of the
ancient world more generally. At the same time, new sources for
early Christian history began to be gleaned from archaeological
excavations: not only physical remains such as the Dura church,
but also new documents such as the papyrus books found at Nag
Hammadi in Egypt (see chapter 5). By this point of my narrative
of early Christian studies I am beginning to encroach on topics
that will crop up in later chapters of this book. I will limit my
final remarks here, therefore, to outlining some of the more
striking features of the study of early Christianity as we enter the
third millennium.
Among the major transformations of recent decades in
scholarship of the ancient world – among English-speaking
scholars particularly – has been a flourishing interest in the period
known as late antiquity. This term, roughly speaking, designates
the period from the political upheavals that enveloped the Roman
empire in the third century ADto the era of the first Arab inva-
sions in the seventh. Edward Gibbon’s judgement that this era
represented nothing more than a depressing narrative of ‘decline
and fall’, characterized by the ‘triumph of barbarism and religion’
(see p. 57), was overthrown by the work of scholars such as
Peter Brown (born in 1935), who himself was building on the
scholarship of an earlier generation of brave and lonely Byzantine
historians such as Norman Baynes (1877–1961). Late antiquity
has come to be regarded as a period of dynamic transformation,
as the classical culture of Greek and Roman antiquity fused with
emerging Christianity (and, later, Islam) to forge the contours ofTHE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY
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