Uniting or Separating: The Role of Religious Rituals in Shaping Christian Groups’ Bonding in the 2nd and 3rd century CE

The paper considers the role of religious rituals for the early Christian communities during the second and third centuries CE. The majority of Christians were illiterate, thus at that time rituals might have been as important as the written texts for Christian communities in terms of group bonding and group identity. They were easier to perceive and remember, and more likely to instill a sense of unity within a group. The question is whether these religious rituals united various Christian groups as well or distinguished and separated them from each other. Two Christian rituals are examined: baptism and eucharist, since they are different regarding their frequency and emotional arousal. We can see that the Christian authors paid more attention to the theological grounds of baptism, but practical issues of eucharist, and naturally demonstrated greater diversity in these parts. Moreover, eucharist being a repetitive ritual, seems to have been more important for discriminating “heretics”, i.e., representatives of other Christian groups, who were allegedly performing this ritual “incorrectly”.