The Catholic Historical Review

The Cambridge "histories" often include hefty articles on religion, but this is the first time Cambridge University Press has launched a series devoted solely to the history of Christianity. The entire project will include nine volumes [End Page 886] and extend the story from the beginnings until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with two volumes on "world Christianities." It is an ambitious and welcome undertaking.

The aim of the series is to reap the harvest of the scholarship of the last several generations on the history of Christianity, and the first volume, "Origins to Constantine," does that well. There are, for example, articles on the "Jewish Diaspora" and "The Roman Empire," essays on Marcion and on Irenaeus, a series of chapters on the growth of Christianity in distinct geographical areas, e.g., Egypt, Syria, Gaul, chapters on Christian institutions and theology, good articles on persecution and on Constantine, and a chapter on early Christian art and architecture.

Because of the way the two disciplines have developed, New Testament studies and church history are often viewed as separate fields. But here the New Testament writings and the historical epoch they reflect are seen, as they should be, as part of the history of Christianity. Accordingly, the editors include an introductory chapter on Jesus and Christian beginnings as well as essays on Jewish-Christianity, Christianity, and Johannine Christianity.

The essays are written, in the main, by recognized scholars in the several areas, e.g., Wayne Meeks on social life of early Christian communities, Harry Gamble on Marcion and the "canon," Birger Pearson on Egypt, Susan Ashbrook Harvey on Syriac-speaking Christianity, W. H. C. Frend on persecutions, A. M. Ritter on church-state relations. It is a book one can take in hand with confidence that it offers an up-to-date account of the current state of scholarship in the many areas it treats.

I think, however, that the volume will be more useful to scholars than to the general reader. One reason is that it is hard to get a sense of the whole by reading the individual essays. In works of this sort it is always a challenge how to tell the big story and it would have been helpful to have at least one essay that offers a narrative account and helps the reader to put the individual essays into context.

In a final essay the editors do step back to view the whole, but the chapter is too sketchy and too tentative. Though they recognize that these early centuries laid the foundation for the form of Christianity that was to create the new civilization built on the foundations of ancient Israel, Rome, and Hellenistic culture, varieties of life and expression hold greater interest than commonalities. Of course, the penchant to favor diversity over unity and continuity is one of the interpretive clichés that has dominated the scholarship of the last generation. And that is not all bad. As a result of the researches of the last several generations, e.g., on conflicting views and rival communities, we have a much clearer picture today of the social and religious world of early Christianity.

But it is surely not enough to say that what early Christianity bequeathed to its descendants "was a set of tensions or problematics that would preoccupy each generation of followers of Jesus for the next millennium." One does not [End Page 887] win the hearts and minds of millions of people and change the face of societies from the British Isles to Persia and beyond on the basis of tensions or problematics. Nor is it adequate to say that the early Church provided the "raw materials," as the editors would have it, for future generations. Such things as the office of bishop, Baptism and Eucharist, the canon of Scripture were not raw materials; they were the stuff of Christian life and were firmly in place long before the conversion...