Integrating Material and Visual Evidence into Early Christian Studies: Approaches, Benefits, and Potential Problems

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Historians of ancient Christianity are now, more than ever, incorporating the study of material evidence into their research. Artifacts who may have been trained primarily as text-scholars. Thus the need to expand beyond literary evidence offers challenge and promise as well as opportunities for new insights and perspectives. Nevertheless, certain problems also arise, many of them parallel to the issues that characterize the work of literary studies. This essay offers a brief overview of the situation and summarizes some of the common approaches and operating assumptions of primarily text historians when incorporating the study of objects into their work.