Instrumenta Studiorum: Tools of the Trade

Abstract

Abstract This article introduces scholars and students to the study of early Christianity by acquainting them with some of the more important tools of research. Since the primary reading audience is Anglophone, English-language titles predominate. From the mid-first to the mid-second century, the New Testament books came into being, along with a number of other texts. For centuries, the study of early Christianity actually meant patristics, the study of theologians whose authority earned them the honorific title of ‘fathers of the church’. The discussion notes that early Christianity encompasses anything related to the history of Christianity in the first six centuries. To understand how ‘early’ Christianity earned that title, the scholar must have some sense of how this period fits into the larger history of Christianity. A good one-volume history of Christianity is The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity.