2013 Theses Doctoral

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

Berzon, Todd Stephen

This dissertation analyzes the paradigms Christian writers (150-500 C.E.) used to array, historicize, and polemicize ethnographic data. A study of late antique heresiological literature (orthodox treatises about heretics) demonstrates how the religious practices, doctrinal beliefs, and historical origins of heretics served to define Christian schematizations of the world. In studying heretics, Christian authors defined and ordered the bounds of Christian knowledge and the process by which that knowledge was transmitted.