Internal renewal and dissent in the early Christian world

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most significant debates of this century among scholars of earlyChristianity is the extent to which it is appropriate to speak of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ before the Council of Nicaea (325 ce). The rise of historical criticism and its application to the development of doctrine shattered scholars’ former straightforward assumption of the canon of Vincent of Lérins – that orthodoxy is what was believed by everyone, everywhere, at every time. Before many had come to terms with the evidence calling this assumption into question, a second and more significant challenge was raised by the German scholar Walter Bauer. In his Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (’Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity’; 1934), Bauer called into question even the more modest assumption retained by late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century scholars – that orthodoxy was the common faith from which heretics then diverged. On the contrary, Bauer argued, heresy came first, and then orthodoxy.

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