As we have known at least since Shklovsky, the task of “defamiliarization”— to make familiar what, at first glance, appears strange to us, and to make strange what we first thought familiar—is essential to the study of any human social formation (Shklovsky 1965; cited in Smith 2004a: 484). In the field of Christian Origins—the branch of the academy charged with the study of early Christian writings, and a field that, as Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed out, has remained overwhelmingly an affair of native exegesis—defamiliarization is especially imperative, since it is sometimes easy to forget that our data are unfamiliar. Though, in anthropological terms, a text like 1 Corinthians should appear no more familiar to the scholar than any ethnography of a nineteenth-century Fijian village, we scholars of Christian origins often allow the “self-evidence” of the Corinthian Christ group to stand unquestioned. We often assume we know why this association was formed, why it continued to meet, and what kind of problems it was experiencing. Upon reflection, however, this self-evidence cannot be allowed to stand.