Judith Lieu Discovery Of Tradition Analysis

Humanity has long sought safety inside groups with a similar identity. The existence of tribes or clans based on family throughout the history of the world serves a simple benchmark of what an oft-sought community looks like: It looks like me. One of the many segments of history where we see this desire for like-identified communities is in the development and discourse that frames up early structures of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” in the second through fourth centuries. Driven by the idea that comfort and security could be found in like-minded groups, the early Christians clashed over everything from dates to Christology in order to form a cohesive, definitive truth- something that continues to evade Christians and still remains out of reach …show more content…
As she sets up her chapter on the “Invention of Tradition,” she quotes John Gillis, saying “The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity.” In other words, the stories that we tell ourselves and the experiences that we share are foundational to how we see ourselves, and by extension, how we see others. It seems that much of study has focused on the beliefs deemed heretical themselves. This, unfortunately, has minimized the study into the ways the individuals who were “naming and being named,” and the competing influences they brought along with them to the table. Again, Lieu hits the nail on the head: “Although it is often said that to discover the past is to understand how it created the present, no less important is the question, ‘how did the present create the past?’” In other words, Lieu is stating that it is important for us to understand how our own individual and communal experiences and stories shape how we each see history. In this specific case, the meaning is two-fold. It is important that I understand how the personal and cultural influences I bring to the table influence how I read historical accounts, but it is also important to understand how the personal and cultural influences the heresiologists we read, their “present,” influenced how they saw and understood the beliefs and histories of the people around