Introduction

There can be little doubt that the appearance of Bauer's Orthodoxy and Heresy marked a significant step in the development of modern critical scholarship on the development of orthodoxy within early Christianity.¹ Bauer argued that the emergence of orthodoxy after the second century involved not the fighting off of "heresies" that had threatened the apostolic faith, but in many significant cases the overturning and labeling as heresy of previously accepted beliefs. For Bauer, narratives of orthodoxy's historical continuity are later constructions aimed at legitimating that which is newly established. As Walter Völker's 1935 review (published in translation here for the first time) shows, however, Bauer's thesis was controversial in its use of evidence as soon as it was published. Over the decades that have followed it is probably fair to say that Bauer's thesis has been rejected in two distinct ways. First, most of his examples have turned out to be unconvincing as scholarship on the second and third centuries has progressed.² Second, most significant scholarship on the development of Christian belief has rejected the idea that we can narrate a monolithic story of heresy becoming orthodoxy.

This second rejection has not, however, seen scholars return to a picture of simple continuity: instead they have shaped accounts of the emergence of defined orthodoxies from more pluralistic situations which preceded them and frequently from situations of exegetical uncertainty. Orthodoxy is constructed from a range of possibilities, some more prominent than others, some already seemingly marginal. Scholars working from a variety of perspectives and commitments now also tend to take for granted that the emergence of orthodoxy involves a concomitant definition of heresy as that which is excluded. In such contexts questions about the legitimacy of claims to continuity involve complex judgments about the relationships between new doctrinal formulations and the language and possibilities that preceded them. Similarly, the restatement of traditional formulae in new contexts forces upon us a host of questions about the meaning and possibility of repetition itself. The seminal work of Alain Le Boulluec and Rebecca Lyman's latest essays on different notions of heresy represent some of the best of recent work attempting to describe and theorize the ideas of orthodoxy and heresy.³

At this point I think it is also important to note that the emergence of post-Bauerian understandings of orthodoxy has occurred alongside the two other significant developments in early Christian studies. The first is the gradual emergence of consciously post-Harnackian modes of scholarship. I do not refer here to the rejection of Harnack's organic model of the development of doctrine in the abstract, but to the manner in which he described the development of Christian thought as stages in the progress of "hellenization." Harnack's account of hellenized Judaism and of the gradual hellenization of Christianity itself traced a trajectory that involved downplaying the significance of exegetical argument, a valuation of all Jewish tradition other than that which participated in this trajectory as outmoded, and an understanding of doctrinal formulation as always balanced on a knife-edge between the search for new modes of philosophical expression and universality and the desire to return to an institutionalized superstition.⁴ While Harnackian perspectives still occasionally appear, the best studies of the last fifty years have found the rejection of his views to be a stimulus for good scholarship. Most importantly, this rejection has resulted in the shaping of many new questions about how we might understand doctrinal debate as both exegetical and philosophical in character.⁵ The best studies are those which trace in detail modes of argument while being attentive to the inseparability of categories of argument that have become divorced in modern theological practice. One important corollary of these shifts is a move away from a Dogmengeschichte that focuses solely on the evolution of the formulae of orthodoxy toward modes of historical theology that focus on the wider matrices of belief within which such formulae function.⁶

The second significant theme that deserves mention here is the rapid development of theoretical resources within which theological development is understood...