Enforcing Priesthood: The Struggle for the Monopolisation of Religious Goods and the Construction of the Christian Religious Field

Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, this paper aims to sketch out the main strategies by which the ‘ecclesiastical party’ of successive bishops from the mid-second to the late third century CE managed to establish itself as mainline, to make its normative claims effective, and to see off the major forms of religious competition, thereby constructing the Christian religious field of the imperial era. To accomplish all this, what we might call the bishop’s viewpoint had to be brought to prevail over that of specialists endowed with different types of religious capital. Among these, three categories of religious providers were particularly competitive: the ‘charismatics’, the ‘great laymen’ and those who viewed themselves as ‘enlightened’, usually known as Gnostics.