Good critical assessment of early church history?

[rgprice]

Is there a good book that gives a critical assessment of the early history of the Roman Church? Primarily of the first several so-called popes? Obviously there was a lot of critical work done against the Church during the Protestant Reformation, but some of it is of dubious quality. Mainly I'm looking for information regarding claims about the first and second centuries.

[MrMacSon]

M David Litwa has a forthcoming book that probably won't address the very early 'Roman church' - if there was indeed such a thing - but it looks like it will comprehensively address the genesis of Alexandrian Christianity:

Early Christianity in Alexandria: From its Beginnings to the Late Second Century

• Due February 2024
• Alexandria was the epicenter of Hellenic learning in the ancient Mediterranean world, yet little is known about how Christianity arrived and developed in the city during the late first and early second century CE. In this volume, M. David Litwa employs underused data from the Nag Hammadi codices and early Christian writings to open up new vistas on the creative theologians who invented Christianities in Alexandria prior to Origen and the catechetical school of the third century. With clarity and precision, he traces the surprising theological continuities that connect Philo and later figures, including Basilides, Carpocrates, Prodicus, and Julius Cassianus, among others. Litwa demonstrates how the earliest followers of Jesus navigated Jewish theology and tradition, while simultaneously rejecting many Jewish customs and identity markers before and after the Diaspora Revolt. His book shows how Christianity in Alexandria developed distinctive traits and seeded the world with ideas that still resonate today.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ea ... 8F8CFA39B9

[Leucius Charinus]

Is there a good book that gives a critical assessment of the early history of the Roman Church? Primarily of the first several so-called popes? Obviously there was a lot of critical work done against the Church during the Protestant Reformation, but some of it is of dubious quality. Mainly I'm looking for information regarding claims about the first and second centuries.

It sounds like a search for the true history of the universal Christian church. Momigliano puts it this way:

p.147

"Abandonment (in the West, of the Eusebian form of ecclesiastical historiography) was not complete because each writer kept faith with the Eusebian premise of the existence of a Universal Church and of the necessity for documentary evidence."


p.149/150

"In 1519 Luther made himself familiar with Eusebius in Rufinus' translation. In 1530 Caspar Hedio published the Chronica der alten christlichen Kirchen aus Eusebius und der Tripartita. Flacius Illyricus and his team of centuriators knew their Eusebius by heart, of course - and the same can be said of all the ecclesiatical historians who worked after them, be it in the Protestant or the Catholic camp. What both Protestants and Catholics wanted to prove was that they had the authority of the first centuries of the Church on their side."


p.150 re:the universal church

"Eusebius dealt with heresies, but he had no suspicion that the very course of events of the first Christian centuries could be disputed and that there might be more than one interpretation of basic events. The position of St. Peter, the development of ecclesiastical hierarchy, the origin and development of at least certain sacraments were not a matter of controversy for him. They were, needless to say, at the centre of attention both by Flacius Illyricus and by Caesare Baronio, who, after attempts by others, at last produced the Catholic answer to the Protestant ecclesiastical historiography. What characterises the new historiography of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation is the search for the true image of Early Christianity to be opposed to the false ones of the rivals."


p.151

"As long as the notion of a Universal Church was not in dispute, Eusebius remained the source of inspiration for ecclesiastical historians. The enormous, almost pathological, output of ecclesiastical history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries becomes more and more involved in the discussions of details, and more and more diversified in theological outlook, but it never repudiates the basic notion that a Universal Church exists beyond the individual Christian communities."


The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography
Arnaldo Momigliano
Sather Classical Lectures (1961-62)
Volume Fifty-Four, University of California Press, 1990

[ebion]

Is there a good book that gives a critical assessment of the early history of the Roman Church? Primarily of the first several so-called popes? Obviously there was a lot of critical work done against the Church during the Protestant Reformation, but some of it is of dubious quality. Mainly I'm looking for information regarding claims about the first and second centuries.

The "Vicars of Christ" by (subsequently defrocked) Peter De Rosa is a classic not to be missed,
although I won't vouch for it, or for him.

Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy