Assembling Early Christianity
Trade, Networks, and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth

The story of a forgotten early Christian bishop and his emergent network of churches along ancient Mediterranean trade routes.

Cavan W. Concannon (Author)

9781107194298, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 September 2017

274 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'Concannon's use of connectivity and assemblage is a model for scholars who hope to eradicate the binaries, labels, and categories that have stagnated and misdirected the field of early Christian studies. But that minor key of dissolution also tantalized me, embracing disintegrated relationships and faded traces as phenomena that demand attention. The life of the historian is a reckoning with estrangement. Concannon shows how disintegration and traces are themselves points of connection between the past and the desirous historian.' Sarah F. Porter, Ancient Jew Review

In this book, Cavan W. Concannon explores the growth and development of Christianity in the second century. He focuses on Dionysios of Corinth, an early Christian bishop who worked to build a network of churches along trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean. Using archaeological evidence, and analysing Dionysios' fragmentary letter collection, Concannon shows how various networks and collectives assembled together, and how various Christianities emerged and coexisted as a result of tenuous and shifting networks. Dionysios' story also overlaps with key early Christian debates, notably issues of celibacy, marriage, re-admission of sinners, Roman persecution, and the economic and political interdependence of churches, which are also explored in this study. Concannon's volume thus offers new insights into a fluid, emergent Christianity at a pivotal moment of its evolution.

1. Connecting Dionysios: connectivity and early Christian difference
2. Placing Dionysios: Corinth in the second century
3. Defining Dionysios: ecclesial politics and second-century Christianity
4. Debating Dionysios: sexual politics and second-century Christianity
5. Conjuring crisis: plague, famine, and grief in Corinth
6. Responding to Rome: patronage, kinship diplomacy, and Dionysios' letter to the Romans
Conclusion: after Dionysios: collecting, linking, and forgetting early Christian networks
Appendix A: the fragments of Dionysios.

Subject Areas: Christian Churches & denominations [HRCC], Christianity [HRC], Religion & beliefs [HR], Archaeology [HD], Historical geography [HBTP], Historiography [HBAH], History [HB]