Antiquitopia

April DeConick, in the comments of her posts, has expressed some concerns with the term "polymorphic." Firstly, she notes that she had considered it before coming up with "polydoxy," and her reasons for rejecting it are: 1. Primarily, it is the same problem with "Christianities"--it just denotes varieties, but does not give any hints pertaining how these groups interact with one another or how they understand themselves. Although, I should note, "polymorphic" is not as grammatically jarring as "Christianities" or "Judaisms." 2. There is nothing particularly Christian about polymorphic--something I consider in its favor, but if one is trying to capture the interactions exclusively between Christians rather than Christians and other groups or just all groups in antiquity, then something with a more Christian ring, with "doxy" or "praxy" would be preferable. I consider the first point the real potential pr...

April DeConick, on Forbidden Gospels, has opened up an issue of how to refer to primarily 2nd and 3rd century Christianity, saying that we need a new term. She writes, and I quote at length: "Orthodoxy did not exist as a totalitarian entity, although each type of Christianity may have thought of itself as orthodox while everyone else were heretics. So the discussion of heresiology is important to maintain, as long as one understands that the heretic is so only from the point of view of one party. An orthodox Christianity doesn't emerge until the fourth century. Even then, it struggles through council after council, swinging from Arian to anti-Arian for over fifty years. Not until the fifth century are the major lines put into place that will determine the shape of "orthodox" Christianity for the centuries to come. "Heterodoxy is not any better because it describes religions that deviate from the orthodox. Since we don't have orthodoxy yet, we can't have...