This essay will assess scholarship from the last two decades on the socioeconomic profile and diversity of the early Christian communities. Several methodological observations about recent studies on social stratification and its implications for early Christian groups in the Greco-Roman world will also be offered, touching on poverty and the dynamics of rank and status in antiquity.1 The transitions in scholarly consensus prior to twenty-first-century scholarship on social stratification in the early Christian communities are well known and need only be briefly summarized below.

The stories of the martyrs occupied a place in early Christian thought and practice that at times rivaled scripture itself. Christians honored figures such as Paul and Peter as apostles of the gospel message, but their reputations and influence were magnified by the accounts of their gruesome deaths. They had stood up for the faith at the cost of their own lives, and in doing so they sealed their places in the celestial hierarchy.

The Pauline Epistles, or some portion of them, provide a remarkably early picture of the Christ movement as it spread through Asia Minor and Greece in the 40s and 50s ce.1 They render evidence that only a decade or two into the movement’s existence there were serious tensions developing around fundamental problems of Christian identity and culture. Several questions are of primary concern in our earliest Christian documents.2 How will Gentiles be incorporated into Israel’s eschatological salvation? What is their obligation to Torah? How are prior identities transformed “in Christ”? What obligations do members of Christ’s body have to one another? What can followers of Jesus expect to encounter from a world controlled by hostile principalities and powers? One does not have to read between the lines of the Epistles to understand that their author, a diaspora Jew with a zealous past, was more than a little responsible for the factions developing around these issues.

In this chapter I consider some of the ways in which Jesus was remembered or commemorated in the second and third centuries ce, and how recent scholarship has addressed this issue. In this context, the use of the verb “remember” points to the significance of social or collective or cultural memory1 as the means by which individuals and communities understand both their present identity and the past that has helped to shape it. Such memory may extend over significant periods of time, as noted by Jan Assmann, who uses the category “cultural memory” to refer to a process made possible by written texts and ritual performance, and therefore neither dependent on the product of individual neurobiological memory orally transmitted (“communicative memory”) nor limited by any need for living contacts with eyewitnesses to past events.2 This category enables Assmann to explain how societies pass on foundational memories beyond the period of “communicative memory” with the original participants or eyewitnesses (which he considers to be 80–100 years or three to four generations). It is therefore readily applicable to the period studied here, in which authors of the second and third centuries ce draw on written sources and on “memory formulas and configurations that underpin [their] sense of community and … the memory needs of a clearly defined ‘we’” by means of which they construct and transmit their socially conditioned memories of Jesus.3

From the point when Justin Martyr first introduced Marcion (his more-or-less contemporary), as “even now teaching those who are persuaded to acknowledge another God greater than the creator (demiurge)” and causing “many to utter blasphemies” (1 Apol. 26.5, 58.1–2; cf. Dial. 35.5–6), Marcion has been given the role of arch-heretic and even archetypical heretic. Yet, perhaps more than most of his peers in the catalogues of heresies that so preoccupied early Christian writers, he has not just maintained an enduring fascination but among some modern interpreters has enjoyed considerable rehabilitation by symbolizing alternative accounts of early Christianity or the path it might have taken. Although the earliest polemical accounts provide little more biographical information about him than they do about most of those peers, his individual persona was not swallowed up by the system associated with him, but retained its renown as it was augmented in the developing tradition, swiftly becoming part of the received “knowledge” of who he was; from his (probably reliable) origins in Pontus and subsequent presence in Rome as reported by Justin, in the tradition that ensued Marcion becomes a shipmaster or -owner, specifically identified with Sinope, responsible for the seduction of a virgin, even son of a bishop, excluded from the church either at home by his father or/and from the church in Rome, perhaps following disappointment at failing to achieve some sort of status there. Most of this is a combination of widespread heresiological stereotypes and of vivid imagination, but in whole or in part it has too often been simply repeated even by more recent interpreters.1 This is no doubt largely due to the desire to answer the questions provoked whenever “an author” is supposedly identified – why did they take the precise theological steps and develop the particular theological system with which they were credited?

What can we know of the ritual that came to be known as the Eucharist during the first three centuries of Christianity? Are there any clear features that can be discerned amid the limited, fragmentary, and diverse character of the sources?

In his treatise On the Soul, Tertullian remarks on certain long-established beliefs that a part of the soul survived the body after death. He explains that the practice of keeping a portion of the deceased body intact rather than cremating it with the rest of the corpse is intended to maintain a place for the soul’s continued habitation:

The authors of ancient Christian literature all wrote their distinct stories about Jesus, their letters to churches, and other types of literature on manuscripts. Consequently, any serious study of ancient Christianity must take textual transmission into account.1 Since the New Testament books, in particular, became widely copied and read, the extant textual tradition is rich in comparison with other ancient works (a cause for optimism as to the recovery of the text).2 Today, no less than 6,014 manuscripts (141 papyri, 324 majuscules, 3,011 minuscules, and 2,538 lectionaries) have been assigned a Gregory-Aland number in the official registry of manuscripts maintained by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF) in Münster.3 In addition, there are the early translations, in particular in Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, and the citations of Church Fathers to take into account.

Ancient Christianity’s relationship to classical education, literature, and philosophy is oddly tense. To be sure, Christianity originated in a thoroughly Hellenized cultural context in which literary-rhetorical education (paideia)1 was not only a lofty humanistic ideal2 but an essential prerequisite for the functioning of society.3 It existed not only for the social, political, and economic elites in metropolitan centers; members of lower social strata in the provinces, women as well as men, had a stake in it, too. During the first and second centuries ce, Galilee and Judea, the regions where Christianity can be said to have originated, were thoroughly part of that world.4

Early Christians and their Scriptures existed within a complex ecosystem. Christians across all sectors of late ancient Roman society encountered their collections of sacred writings in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways. We detect a spectrum of dispositions, activities, and projects in their engagements with these texts. Their message was continuously adapted to new and disparate forms of life. And discourses quickly emerged around these Scriptures that were sometimes heated – as a central religious artifact, they not surprisingly became the subject of important controversies. Early Christian leaders pronounced increasingly sophisticated accounts of their subject matter, functions, and readers, but often hidden from our sight were the different venues, such as homes, schools, churches, and libraries, that diversely configured an array of textual activities. And, of course, Bibles were themselves pluriform. They circulated in different materials and formats, and their contents – from readings of individual words to the number and order of books they transmitted – were often highly discrepant.

Investigating Greco-Roman intellectual culture in the first three centuries of the Common Era, the historian looks in vain for a consolidated or thoroughly well-defined “Christian cosmology,” or a fully agreed-upon doctrine of creation. Indeed, as Christian apologists and theologians of the pre-Nicene age entered in earnest into the fray of long-standing philosophical debates over the nature of the universe, they had no antecedent interpretive synthesis of biblical sources on creation, though some consulted Hellenistic-Jewish writings while others willingly accessed doxographies containing the abbreviated opinions of the philosophical sages, or else read their works directly. More than one alternative, it seems, lay open to early-generation Christian thinkers. They could attempt to start from scratch with the biblical sources (including the gradually emerging New Testament writings) in constructing a Christian understanding of the cosmos that, in fideistic fashion, thoroughly ignored or circumvented traditions of Greco-Roman cosmology. Or, on the other hand, they could surrender to the fact that their sacred scriptures were not preoccupied with problems of theoretical cosmology and turn exclusively to other more immediate concerns of human salvation and the gospel of the eschatological “new creation.” Or, for better or worse, representing a religious faith having no philosophical past or pedigree solely to call its own, these pioneering Christian intellectuals could venture a critical but constructive engagement with the revered classical and Hellenistic authorities, staking out the philosophical plausibility of a distinctly Christian cosmology – all the more importantly since sophisticated pagan speculation about the god–world relation and the nature of the cosmos enjoyed resurgences well into the Byzantine age.

Remembering Jesus is an ongoing activity. It began within Jesus’s own lifetime but continues to the present. The contexts, controls, and creativity of remembering Jesus are, therefore, not exclusive to how Jesus was remembered from the earliest time – they are also relevant to each generation’s present. With this in mind, historians who focus on Jesus must (1) attend to the material, literary, and social history of the Second Temple period, and (2) attend to their own placement, agenda, and historical vantage point. So remembering Jesus is as much about self-awareness as it is about studying ancient history. For these reasons, a robust theory of memory is required, one that helps us navigate the mnemonic frameworks of earliest Christianity as well as how our memory works more generally. We will examine the earliest Christian creed (or hymn) as it is quoted by Paul’s letter to the Romans. That said, the bulk of this essay will address Jesus and memory as topics for historians in the twenty-first century. Our aim is to explain how and why theories of memory have become integral to scholars of the Jesus tradition.