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The Early Church in North America: Late Antiquity, Theory, and the History of Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2011

David Brakke
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Extract

By almost any measure, the study of ancient Christian history is alive and well, even if one limits one's view to the North American scene. Over the last three decades the number of publications in the field, both books and articles, has grown considerably, fueling (among other things) the astonishing success of the Journal of Early Christian Studies, founded by the North American Patristic Society (NAPS) a decade'ago. Each year the program of the annual meeting of NAPS features more papers and attracts more participants (even though they must stay in less than ideal, even appropriately monastic, dormitory rooms). The number of papers on early Christian topics at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (as well as the American Philological Association) is very impressive.

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Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , September 2002 , pp. 473 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2002

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References

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4. Many (but not all) of the authors in the outstanding series The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, edited by Peter Brown and published by the University of California Press, are classicists or historians treating Christian persons or materials.

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17. Ibid., 465. Tertullian no doubt would object to Norris’ desire that NAPS be a place where “Christians” and “Gnostics” can “talk to each other” and even learn from one another.

18. For a critique of postliberal theology on these grounds, see Tanner, Kathryn, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology, Guides to Theological Inquiry (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), esp. 93–155Google Scholar. For a more complicated understanding of the position of the Christian historian, see Bobertz, Charles A., “Prolegomena to a Ritual-Liturgical Reading of the Gospel of Mark,” in Reading in Christian Communities: Essays on Interpretation in the Early Church, ed. Bobertz, Charles A. and Brakke, David, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002): 174-87Google Scholar.

19. See Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflict, ed. Barnes, Michel R. and Williams, Daniel H. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. Rebecca Lyman, “A Topography of Heresy: Mapping the Rhetorical Creation of Arianism” (45–62); the essays in “The Markings of Heresy: Body, Text, and Community in Late Ancient Christianity,” a special issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 403–513Google Scholar; Shaw, Teresa M., “Wolves in Sheeps' Clothing: The Appearance of True and False Piety,” Studia Patristica 29 (1997): 127-32Google Scholar; the contributions of Elm, Susanna, Lyman, Rebecca, and Burrus, Virginia to Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire/Orthodoxy, Christianity, History, ed. Elm, Susanna, Rebillard, Éric, and Romano, Antonella, Collection de l'école française de Rome 270 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2000)Google Scholar.

20. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 21. Oddly, though, thanks to their shared attention to the rhetorical dimension of patristic literature and thought, these two perspectives can sometimes occupy the same volume: Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community, ed. Ayres, Lewis and Jones, Gareth (New York: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar.

22. Cameron, Averil, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse, Sather Classical Lectures 55 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Clark, Elizabeth A., Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Chris tianity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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24. See Clark, “The Lady Vanishes” and “Women, Gender, and the Study of Christian History,” for consideration of this issue with regard to the study of women. For the following discussion I am indebted to Andrew S. Jacobs, “The Lion and the Lamb: Rethinking Rhetoric, Reality, and ‘Jewish-Christian Relations,’” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the North American Patristic Society, Chicago, May 2001.

25. For example, Harnack, Adolf von, Die Altercatio Simonis Iudaei et Theophili Christiani: Nebst Untersuchungen über die antijüdische Polemik in der alten Kirche, TU 1.3 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1883)Google Scholar. The inventor of the term “Spätjudentum” may have been Bousset, Wilhelm, Die Religion des Judentums in neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (1903; reprint Berlin: Ruether and Reichard, 1906)Google Scholar (Jaffee, Martin, Early Judaism [Princeton, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1997], 22Google Scholar).

26. Simon, Marcel, Verus Israel: A Study in the Relations Between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (135–425), trans. McKeating, H. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 27Google Scholar. The labeling of this approach as the “conflict model” or “conflict theory” may be attributed to Taylor, Miriam, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, Studia Post-Biblica 46 (Leiden: Brill, 1995)Google Scholar.

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31. For example, Shoemaker, Stephen J., “‘Let Us Go and Burn Her Body’: The Image of the Jews in the Early Dormition Traditions,” Church History 68 (1999): 775–823CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brakke, David, “Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 453-81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Boyarin, Daniel, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), esp. 1–41Google Scholar; Fonrobert, Charlotte, “The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 483–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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34. Similarly Clark, “Lady Vanishes,” 14–15; Clark, “Rewriting Early Christian History,” 8.

35. Theory and the Premodern Text, xv-xvi, the source of the quoted phrases and terms that follow, with one exception noted.

36. The phrase comes from Greenblatt, Stephen, “Toward a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, H. Aram (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–14Google Scholar. Of the recent trends in literary studies, New Historicism may have the most to offer the historian of religion, since it combines an appreciation for representation with “a touch of the real”: see now the essays in Gallagher, Catherine and Greenblatt, Stephen, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

37. Cf. Clark, “Lady Vanishes,” 12. Among the theoretical perspectives that may be useful in this effort, depending on the agenda set by the text, are Foucauldian power analysis, gender studies, queer theory (e.g., Burrus, Virginia, “Queer Lives of Saints: Jerome's Hagiography,” journal of the History of Sexuality 10 [2001]: 442-79)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, post-colonialist analysis (e.g., Jacobs, “Judea Sancta”; Brakke, David, “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 [2001]: 501-35CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and a chastened form of psychoanalysis (see Elliott, Dyan, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, The Middle Ages Series [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999], 7–9Google Scholar; Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, xvi, 165–214, standing behind my next point, the “textual unsaid”).

36. For these themes especially in New Testament studies see my “Cultural Studies. Ein neues Paradigma US-amerikanischer Exegese,” Zeitschrift für Neues Testament 2 (1998): 69–77Google Scholar.