‘A standard work for European students, which has already been reprinted four times in the original German, this history is a lucid and highly readable up to date account of the early church from its beginnings to the Council of Chalcedon which offers an illuminating alternative to sometimes more conservative British works.’ This is the claim of the publishers of A History of the Early Church by Norbert Brox, professor of Early Church History and Patrology at the University of Regensburg. Lucid and readable it certainly is, but I am not sure to which of the ‘more conservative British works’ it offers ‘an illuminating alternative’.

Certainly Brox’s general approach to the history of the early church is empirical and pragmatic, although he traces the beginnings of that history from what he describes as the ‘quite unhoped-for experience’ of the disciples in ‘completely novel encounters’ with Jesus after his execution.

Many will agree with his thesis that the church which emerged by the end of the patristic period was not the original church of the apostles—‘what developed and in the course of church history also changed again cannot be described after the event as a divine institution … and back dated to Jesus and the apostles’ (p. 77). The church and Christian doctrine, he argues, were both products of development if not syncretism. He rejects any Petrine episcopate at Rome as unhistorical and anachronistic (p. 88) and dismisses Matthew 16:18–19 and John 21:15–17, which were used to support Petrine and papal primacy, as ‘statements of early Christian theology and not historical sayings of Jesus’ (p. 88). Brox contends that ‘at the end of late antiquity, in the fifth century, there were political and historical conditions which proved extraordinarily favourable to the development of the papacy’, and that Leo I’s ‘idea of the papacy was clearly marked by elements of the pagan idea of Rome, with notions and concepts drawn from the imperial Roman ideology’ (pp. 90–91).

He also sees the church’s ‘fixation on right doctrine in the form of dogma and formulae of faith’ as a regrettable development and ‘in favour of which other Christian postulates were misused’ (p. 120). Certainly many would share his condemnation of the ‘devastating polemic, the unprecedentedly sharp aggression, the rejection of union and reconciliation, the unscrupulous means of dealing with opponents’, which too often disgraced Christians involved in doctrinal disputes.

Brox’s thematic presentation of the history of the early church has advantages and disadvantages. It obeys Acton’s classic advice to historians to study problems rather than periods and provides an intelligible overview of the themes he examines, e.g. Society, State and Christianity (35 pages) and Church Life and Organisation (51 pages), but the inevitable cross-references can be confusing.

In his preface Brox acknowledges that ‘a basic account of church history can always be criticised for omitting or failing to do justice to certain topics’. His own work cannot altogether escape such criticism—e.g.there is little detailed information on the lives and personalities of such formative figures as Athanasius or Augustine. He does succeed, however, in his aim ‘to provide basic information on the history of the early church’, which needs to be supplemented by following the bibliographical guidance he offers, to which might be added such recent works as Stuart Hall’s Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church and Ian Hazlett (ed.) Early Christianity: Origins and Evolution, both published by SPCK.