The Oldest Past of Christianity

Abstract

Abstract The article argues that just as religion is manufactured or invented, so is tradition and history. This starting point is worked out with reference to history as a discursive construction, the past as fictioned in the present. The past does not exist independently of historical practice. History is a tool for ideological persuasion and ideological criticism in the chaotic, disputed and contested present. This understanding of historiography is brought to bear on the scholarly discourse on Christian origins, highlighting the performativity or mythic character of conventional reconstructions of the historical Jesus and the formation of early Christianity, in which sacred apologetic texts are employed as ethnographic sources. What is called for is to take leave of the “stance of the faithful,” and to reorient the study of the history of Christian origins away from a “protectionist doxa” towards a critical historiography that understands early Christian history as invented or manufactured.