'Women's religion' and second-century Christianity

Nothing is as problematic in contemporary work on the early Christian Church as Orthodoxy. P. Henry's 1980 conference paper ‘Why is contemporary scholarship so enamoured of ancient heretics?’ outlined the situation, saying, ‘we have moved from historical criticism through historical even-handedness to historical advocacy. The historian is not content to assure the heretics a fair hearing; the historian has become an advocate in their cause. We have done an about-face from Tertullian's De praescriptione haereticorum to De praescriptione patrum’. From ‘ruling-out-of-court of the heretics’ to, in Henry's phrase, ‘ruling-out-of-court of the Fathers’.