History, Historiography, And Christian Origins

Abstract

The study of Christian origins should in no way differ from the study of anything past and, yet, historical studies of Christianity continue to "privilege" the data with imagined origins. In contrast to such imaginative fictions, critical historiography is based on human events presumed actually to have occurred. The productions of and, consequently, the explanations for such data instantiate both the material and the mental environments of human beings. Whereas the common constraints of biology are clear and those of cognition are increasingly so (although both are traditionally discounted in accounts of Christian beginnings), historically valid theories of socio-cultural contingencies remain contested, as does the relationship between these three domains. Since the earliest historical evidence for "Christian" groups is socio-cultural, i.e., textual, might these texts be better understood historically as themselves positive data for a plurality of Christian social formations rather than as historiographical documents containing positivistic data about Christian origins? In this way, it is possible to access real activities of real human beings in the past in their actual relationships.

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