Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection by Markus Vinzent (review)

How does our present context shape our understanding of the past? How might historians of early Christianity better account for this relationship in their scholarship? It is to this notoriously difficult set of questions that Markus Vinzent dedicates this densely packed and informative study. Vinzent challenges historians to recognize more readily how their own subjectivities and contexts shape the ways that they understand Christian history, and proposes a "retrospective" approach, where historians "approach history moving slowly backwards from now towards the past . . . to take into account more seriously our present experience" (3).

Chapter One inaugurates the study with an important survey of insights drawn from critical historiography of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Vinzent notes how thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Roger Chartier, and Michel de Certeau, among others, have emphasized the significance of the subjective context of the historian in shaping the writing of history. Vinzent here engages only briefly with more recent historiographical approaches that have grappled with the question of historians' positionalities (e.g., cultural history, post-colonial theory, gender studies), but the volume nonetheless forwards fresh insights and approaches.

Vinzent proposes that historians must move "retrospectively," taking account of the scholarship that has shaped the issue at hand, in "regressive" stages, before moving to a (re-)consideration of the ancient evidence (48, 60). In this way, Vinzent attempts to draw attention to the "lenses" that are made available to scholars in their various cultural contexts, and which thus inevitably shape their examinations of the past (132). Vinzent develops this approach across four case studies on figures from the second and third centuries: "Abercius" of Hierapolis (Chapter Two), Hippolytus of Rome (Chapter Three), Aristides of Athens (Chapter Four), and Ignatius of Antioch (Chapter Five).

The value of Vinzent's approach emerges most clearly in the volume's careful consideration of the how previous scholarly paradigms have shaped modern assumptions and approaches to its respective topics. Chapter Two meticulously details the inter-informative relationship of the Life of Abercius and the famous Abercius inscription, paying special attention how the latter's role as a centerpiece in the Museo Pio Cristiano's collection came to shape its interpretation (77–96). Chapter Three traces illuminating connections between modern church history, Renaissance humanism, and traditional understandings of the enigmatic figure of Hippolytus of Rome (162–90). Similarly, Chapters Four and Five detail how previous scholarly approaches or assumptions have contributed to the neglect of important aspects of Aristides's Apology and the long recension of Ignatius's letters, respectively (228–59, 379–409). In each of these chapters, Vinzent's retrospective approach ensures that the reader is thoroughly versed in the history of scholarship before embarking on a detailed re-examination of the early Christian evidence.

Other aspects of the volume, however, deliver less consistently on the considerable promise of Vinzent's retrospective approach. Chapter One details how Vinzent envisions retrospection as entailing a thorough consideration of "my own embodied and social existence . . . my contemporary social experiences, which will help to explain the physical and mental situation within which this research is carried out and the question is being asked" (50). Perplexingly, with the notable exception of Chapter Two, Vinzent engages in this type of self- and meta-critical analysis only minimally. Vinzent's approach within the chapters instead remains largely focused on various scholarly positions, rather than on the contexts and institutions that might have shaped scholarly positionalities. In Chapter Five, for example, Vinzent devotes considerable and useful attention to previous scholarly proposals regarding the recensions of Ignatius. Vinzent declines, however, to explore the social and historical contexts that shaped many of these debates: "What would be a study in its own right, the church debates and politics of the unearthing of Ignatiana, the attacks and defences of their authenticity in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, I need to leave to specialists of that period" (369–70). This type of detailed exploration of the social contexts...