Redescribing Christian Origins

Call For Papers: The Redescribing Early Christianity Group will continue the bifocal approach of analyzing primary texts and examining competing scholarly theories of explanation and interpretation begun at the 2007 Annual Meeting under the rubric: “The Second Century’s Invention of the First.” Thus we solicit studies that will explore ways in which first-century texts, ideas, and movements were appropriated, reinterpreted, or reimagined in second-century Christianity. We are particularly interested in proposals that will explore the “genealogical phenomenon,” that is, the tendency among various second-century sources to collect and enshrine earlier figures as predecessors for their own formations. This notion encompasses efforts during this period to construct lineages among Jews (e.g. Mishnah), Christians (e.g. notions of apostolic origins), and others (e.g. collections of philosophical lives). Papers accepted on this topic will join those already announced as part of the Group’s initial two-year schedule: Todd Penner on “Redescribing Early Christian Redescription: Methods, Taxonomies, and Modernity”; Christine Thomas on “The Beginnings of Christian Historiography and Identity Formation in the Second Century”; Emma Wasserman with a critique of the way scholars employ the terminology of “perspectives” or “worldviews,” along with suggested alternative conceptions that do not treat groups or cultures in a monolithic fashion; and Steve Wilson on “Marcion’s Redescription of Apostolic Christianity.”

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