Early Christianity and the Challenge of Writing History

Early Christianity and the Challenge of Writing History asks a deceptively simple question: what is the greatest obstacle to writing history? The answer proposed here is not the scarcity of evidence, but the historian. The book develops an autofictional and retrospective approach to historiography, arguing that historical writing requires not only critical engagement with sources, but also scrutiny of the assumptions, memories, loyalties and intellectual habits of those who interpret them.

Moving through questions of space, absence, silence, cognition, time, evidence, tradition and the future, the book challenges conventional chronological narratives and invites historians to make their own position within the production of history more transparent. Its argument reaches well beyond Early Christianity to the practice of historiography itself.