Abstract:
‘Adoptionism’ is an early Christian ‘heresy’ often associated with early strands of
Jewish Christian tradition. It figures as such in handbooks of church history and New
Testament studies alike. This essay investigates the origins of the concept of ‘adoptionism’
in the historiography of early Christianity, offers a fresh analysis of the relevant
‘adoptionist’ sources, and concludes that the concept is a misleading one. Therefore,
the proposal is made to abandon the notion of ‘adoptionism’ as a category and to focus
on the authors involved as such and to investigate what their soteriological and
christological concerns were, rather than to identify them as ‘adoptionists’ and to
study them with that identification as a starting point.
