Modernes Frühchristentum

As nineteenth-century Europe faced the challenges of advancing modernity, a lost treatise by Hippolytus of Rome was rediscovered. It soon became a popular topic of conversation among a wider public and was associated with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, not so much because of the rediscovery itself, but because of its use by the Prussian envoy in London, Christian Carl Josias Bunsen, who ambitiously set out to modernize Christianity as a whole. Pierre Sfendules sheds light on Bunsen's work, the Elenchos controversy, and deepens the understanding of the transnational role of early church history in the debates of the 19th century.