Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity: Representing Early Christian Differences for the 21st Century

Abstract

Abstract Early Christians largely understood their differences in terms of factionalism, articulated in terms of discourses of orthodoxy and heresy. Contemporary historiography has troubled those discourses with talk of the “diversity” or “variety” of early Christianities, but without entirely displacing either the logic or the functions of the orthodoxy-heresy bifurcation. This essay examines the limits of current historiographical modes of treating early Christian diversity, and suggests an understanding of religion and methods of analysis usable for a history of difference beyond orthodoxy and heresy.