If we take archaeology’s current interest in human networks in a broad sense as an interest in understanding human interactions, this is not exactly new to archaeology.1 This is evident in archaeology’s interest in intercultural contacts as an explanation for cultural and socio-political changes, which is also a core theme in changing approaches to Mediterranean urbanisation.2 Processual archaeology still approached such changes by taking an over-formalistic approach to it, if it considered interaction at all.

In an earlier essay on the interplay between charisma and office, I listed the questions I had left unanswered:

This essay will assess scholarship from the last two decades on the socioeconomic profile and diversity of the early Christian communities. Several methodological observations about recent studies on social stratification and its implications for early Christian groups in the Greco-Roman world will also be offered, touching on poverty and the dynamics of rank and status in antiquity.1 The transitions in scholarly consensus prior to twenty-first-century scholarship on social stratification in the early Christian communities are well known and need only be briefly summarized below.

The stories of the martyrs occupied a place in early Christian thought and practice that at times rivaled scripture itself. Christians honored figures such as Paul and Peter as apostles of the gospel message, but their reputations and influence were magnified by the accounts of their gruesome deaths. They had stood up for the faith at the cost of their own lives, and in doing so they sealed their places in the celestial hierarchy.

The Pauline Epistles, or some portion of them, provide a remarkably early picture of the Christ movement as it spread through Asia Minor and Greece in the 40s and 50s ce.1 They render evidence that only a decade or two into the movement’s existence there were serious tensions developing around fundamental problems of Christian identity and culture. Several questions are of primary concern in our earliest Christian documents.2 How will Gentiles be incorporated into Israel’s eschatological salvation? What is their obligation to Torah? How are prior identities transformed “in Christ”? What obligations do members of Christ’s body have to one another? What can followers of Jesus expect to encounter from a world controlled by hostile principalities and powers? One does not have to read between the lines of the Epistles to understand that their author, a diaspora Jew with a zealous past, was more than a little responsible for the factions developing around these issues.

In this chapter I consider some of the ways in which Jesus was remembered or commemorated in the second and third centuries ce, and how recent scholarship has addressed this issue. In this context, the use of the verb “remember” points to the significance of social or collective or cultural memory1 as the means by which individuals and communities understand both their present identity and the past that has helped to shape it. Such memory may extend over significant periods of time, as noted by Jan Assmann, who uses the category “cultural memory” to refer to a process made possible by written texts and ritual performance, and therefore neither dependent on the product of individual neurobiological memory orally transmitted (“communicative memory”) nor limited by any need for living contacts with eyewitnesses to past events.2 This category enables Assmann to explain how societies pass on foundational memories beyond the period of “communicative memory” with the original participants or eyewitnesses (which he considers to be 80–100 years or three to four generations). It is therefore readily applicable to the period studied here, in which authors of the second and third centuries ce draw on written sources and on “memory formulas and configurations that underpin [their] sense of community and … the memory needs of a clearly defined ‘we’” by means of which they construct and transmit their socially conditioned memories of Jesus.3

From the point when Justin Martyr first introduced Marcion (his more-or-less contemporary), as “even now teaching those who are persuaded to acknowledge another God greater than the creator (demiurge)” and causing “many to utter blasphemies” (1 Apol. 26.5, 58.1–2; cf. Dial. 35.5–6), Marcion has been given the role of arch-heretic and even archetypical heretic. Yet, perhaps more than most of his peers in the catalogues of heresies that so preoccupied early Christian writers, he has not just maintained an enduring fascination but among some modern interpreters has enjoyed considerable rehabilitation by symbolizing alternative accounts of early Christianity or the path it might have taken. Although the earliest polemical accounts provide little more biographical information about him than they do about most of those peers, his individual persona was not swallowed up by the system associated with him, but retained its renown as it was augmented in the developing tradition, swiftly becoming part of the received “knowledge” of who he was; from his (probably reliable) origins in Pontus and subsequent presence in Rome as reported by Justin, in the tradition that ensued Marcion becomes a shipmaster or -owner, specifically identified with Sinope, responsible for the seduction of a virgin, even son of a bishop, excluded from the church either at home by his father or/and from the church in Rome, perhaps following disappointment at failing to achieve some sort of status there. Most of this is a combination of widespread heresiological stereotypes and of vivid imagination, but in whole or in part it has too often been simply repeated even by more recent interpreters.1 This is no doubt largely due to the desire to answer the questions provoked whenever “an author” is supposedly identified – why did they take the precise theological steps and develop the particular theological system with which they were credited?