Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity

Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.

Reviews

“Classifying Christians represents a crucial missing chapter in the larger history of Western discourse about itself and others. Too often, studies of heresiology understand and present it as a sui generis literature, a fascinating late-ancient ‘oddity’ that gets pitched to modern readers as an intriguing bauble. Todd Berzon’s study is the first to make a convincing argument as to why anyone outside the narrow field of late ancient studies should care about heresiology.”—Andrew Jacobs, Professor of Religious Studies and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Humanities, Scripps College

“With Classifying Christians, Todd Berzon has produced an original, important, and impressive intellectual intervention in early Christian history, the history of social sciences, and critical theory of religion. This well-conceived, highly learned, and sophisticated analysis of the genre of heresiology will be required reading for scholars of antiquity.”—Jeremy Schott, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington