ABSTRACT
It may be worth beginning with a definition of what is meant in this book by ‘early Christianity’. Let me take ‘early’ first. I will be analysing Christianity between the life of Jesus Christ, in the early first century AD, and the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine (306-37) to Christianity at the beginning of the fourth. By setting these limits and by describing the Christianity in this book as ‘early’ it will seem that I am imposing upon it the traditional approach of dividing the past up into distinct periods (e.g. ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, ‘early modern’, etc.). Such periodization, as it is called, is rather out of fashion with historians these days. Of course, human activity does not neatly fall into such categories. They are devised, rather, by historians looking back on the past and trying to impose some ‘structure’ on a rather more chaotic reality. For that reason, therefore, such periods may be described better as historians’ concepts rather than as historical ones (cf. K. Jenkins 1991: 16). It was not the case, after all, that Christians leaped out of bed one morning and exclaimed
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shown that deciding where early Christianity ends is difficult to determine, and that the change to medieval Christianity was something that happened gradually and fitfully over a number of centuries (Markus 1990). Yet one has to begin somewhere and, pedagogically, periods provide manageable chunks that can be comprehended easily by students. Even so, I ought to offer some justification for the limits set on the particular period I have chosen if they are not to appear entirely arbitrary.
