The new book "Beyond the Timeline: Resetting Historiography" is about to be published

 This book that goes back to a workshop from 2022 dealing with the retrospective approach that was suggested in my Writing the History of Early Christianity (CUP, 2019) and tested again in my Resetting the Origins of Early Christianity (CUP, 2023), brings together scholars from a broad range of historiographical studies, music, natural sciences, medieval history, holocaust studies ... and, like me, they grapple with the idea of writing history not simply along the chronological time-line.

You are in for a reshaping of historiography. The book is edited by Julia Seeberger, Sabine Schmolinsky and myself:

My new book 'Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection' (CUP)

First I have to apologise that for the relative quiet on the blog over the past weeks and months, but I used all the available free time to finish my manuscript of the new book Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection which is now in print at Cambridge University Press and should come out in the coming months.

Here is the blurb of the book:

Despite novel approaches to the study of Early Christianity – New Historicity, New Philology, Gender and Queer Studies; many turns – Material, Linguistic, Cultural; and developments in Reception History, Cultural Transfer, and Entangled History, much scholarship on this topic differs little from that written a century ago.  In this study, Markus Vinzent challenges the interpretation of the sources that have been used in the study of the Early Christian era.  He brings a new approach to the topic by reading history backwards. Applying this methodology to four case studies, and using a range of media, he poses radically new questions on the famous ‘Abercius’ inscription, on the first extant apologist Aristides of Athens, on the prolific Hippolytus of Rome, and on Ignatius and the first non-canonical collection of letters. Vinzent’s novel methodology of a retrospective writing thus challenges many fundamental and anachronistic assumptions about Early Christian history.

Look out for it! Release date is 31 March 2019

Argumentum e silentio? Or the big hiatus in Gospel reception - Kurt Alands 'nightmare'

Authors prior to Marcion do not refer to any Gospel ‘as a sequence of events or a “story”. Nowhere are fixed credal formulations called “Gospel”’.[1] What the famous New Testament scholar Helmut Koester summarized in rather dry words, kept Kurt Aland awake during the night.[2]

The fact is clouded by the boundaries between the disciplines of New Testament Studies and Patristics. The well-known reference work, Biblia Patristica, for example, covers texts ‘from the origins to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian’ in its first volume, but excludes all writings that can be found in the New Testament. If these were included, it would become even more apparent that pp. 223-415 of this volume listing over 10,000 quotes (!) from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for the period from Marcion onwards, does not provide a single one (!) for the time before Marcion, and would we add the canonical literature - the same would still be true, with one massive exception: The Synoptics copied each other partly literally. The first arguable cases of authors who begin to quote the Gospels are those who are sometimes dated to the beginning of the second century (Ignatius, Papias, Hegesippus), which, however, many scholars rather date contemporary or later than Marcion. How can we account for this discrepancy in the reception of the Gospels, if these later canonical Gospels were written before 100, or around 70, or, as some opt for, in the early 40^th?

I'd give a lot for somebody who can come up with a convincing answer.

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[1] H. Koester, ‘Kerygma-Gospel’ (1986), 366, especially with regard to the deutero-Pauline Epistles and Acts, but also to Ignatius – something that we can broaden, as shown above.

[2] K. Aland, ‘Bemerkungen’ (1979), 29.