The “Great Church” and the Many Schools of Alexandria
from Part II - Early Christian Teachers and Movements in Alexandria
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2023
The conclusion tackles two lingering problems in Alexandrian church history: the meaning of the “great church” of Alexandria and the “catechetical school.” Despite Celsus’s use of the “great church,” no Christian group in Alexandria could convincingly claim numerical superiority in the second century. The use of numbers or quantitative contrasts were largely rhetorical, not demographical statements. Origen indicates that a number of alternative Christian groups flourished in his youth, and some of these groups could be represented by the Second Discourse of Great Seth and the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter. 2 Clement, if taken to be Alexandrian, does not indicate that incipient catholics had the upper hand. The catechetical school run by Origen in the early third century did not have a clear institutional antecedent. Throughout the second century, there were multiple, mostly informal, Christian schools run by a variety of Christian teachers (e.g., Basilides, Carpocrates, Pantaenus) offering higher theological instruction.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.