Resumen de Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection by Markus Vinzent (review)
Chapter Two meticulously details the inter-informative relationship of the Life of Abercius and the famous Abercius inscription, paying special attention how the latter's role as a centerpiece in the Museo Pio Cristiano's collection came to shape its interpretation (77–96). Vinzent declines, however, to explore the social and historical contexts that shaped many of these debates: "What would be a study in its own right, the church debates and politics of the unearthing of Ignatiana, the attacks and defences of their authenticity in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, I need to leave to specialists of that period" (369–70). [...]Vinzent's proposed retrospective approach provides a useful reminder to historians that in any historiographical endeavor, what's present is prologue to the past.
