Reinventing Christian origins: competing conceptions in the Christianity of the second century

This contribution analyzes the reconstruction of Christianity’s origins in a selection of ancient Christian texts (Acts, Clement, Ignatius, Justin and Irenaeus). Key features of the original community are used to justify the nature of the church in these authors’ own time. Noted features include the church’s hierarchical structure and its various rites, which are related back to the original community. In polemical or apologetic contexts, the original Christian community represents a standard that separates those who uphold the true doctrine from “heretics.” When ecclesiastical institutions are defined and when the line of argument requires it, the idea of an original Christian community is adapted to such ends. These later reconstructions seem to fit well with Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of the construction of memory