Nicholas Perrin , Wheaton College Graduate School

In surveying the past several decades of scholarship on early Christianity, it is difficult to miss various restatements of the thesis, first put forward by Walter Bauer, that prior to the third century Christianity was characterized by a radical theological diversity. Apparently, Bauer’s thesis of a late-developing orthodoxy together with growing interest in the ‘gnostic’ codices of Nag Hammadi has given new life to the notion that, before Irenaeus wrested ecclesial control by issuing his polemic Against Heresies, the ‘Great Church’ was a largely disenfranchised minority. Drawing on both historical and theological analyses, my intention is to subject Bauer’s thesis, especially in its recent iterations, to fresh critique. I argue that much of contemporary scholarship has reductively exaggerated the political dimension of the bishop’s polemic and, correspondingly, underestimated the substantive differences between Irenaeus and his interlocutors, made fully palpable at a narrative-theological level. I see this work – in addition to its historical import – as potentially laying some important groundwork for a subsequent task of exploring, on a much more practical level, how the church might profitably reconceive its proclamation along Irenaean (as opposed to neo-Gnostic) lines.

Nicholas Perrin is incoming Franklin S. Dyrness Chair of Biblical Studies Associate Professor of New Testament at the Wheaton Graduate School. He is the former research assistant for N. T. Wright and the author of numerous articles and books, including, Questioning Q (with Mark Goodacre; SPCK, 2004); Thomas: The Other Gospel (Westminster John Knox, 2007); and Lost in Transmission: What We Can Know about the Words of Jesus (Thomas Nelson, 2007). He is currently completing a book entitled Jesus the Temple (SPCK; Hendricksen). His specialties include gospel studies, historical Jesus research, and second-century Christianity.