JEWISH AND NON-JEWISH NETWORKS IN THE SPREAD OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY

JEWISH AND NON-JEWISH NETWORKS IN THE SPREAD OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY: A CASE OF THE MARCIONATE AND LUKAN CHRISTIANITY

The influence of Jewish heritage on the spread of early Christianity represents a traditional research issue in the history of Christianity. However, research projects up to now have been mainly aimed at detailed analyses of fragmentary written sources and/or general reconstructions of historical process based on deductive methods. Modeling approaches based on network theory and/or discrete diffusion models can provide a more suitable way how to bridge the gap between the fragmentary historical evidence and the complexity of investigated processes.

The project is focused on the Marcionate and Lukan Christianities as a strictly coded test case dated back to the first half of the 2nd century. Despite weak historical evidence, it is obvious that these two trends, which are assumed to be contemporaneous (Pervo 2006; Tyson 2006), maintained different attitudes to the Jewish heritage and so they probably utilized different (i.e. Jewish and non-Jewish) networks. While the first trend, represented by Marcion and his canon (BeDuhn 2013), rejected the Jewish heritage, the latter one, represented by Luke and his writings, still maintained the Jewish background of Christianity.

Nuances of Judaizing and de-Judaizing tendencies are intentionally reduced to the Jewish and non-Jewish singular characteristics. It presupposes two crucial types of spreading dynamics which either used the Jewish networks or ignored them. This issue is now mathematically analyzed within the centralized and decentralized networks which might plausibly represent an ambivalent role of the Jerusalem centrality during the first two centuries of the spread of Christianity. (Research unit: Dalibor Papoušek and Zdeněk Pospíšil.)

Text: Dalibor Papoušek (e-mail: papousek@phil.muni.cz)