Talk:Christianity in the ante-Nicene period

Orphaned references in Ante-Nicene Period

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Ante-Nicene Period's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "ReferenceA":

• From Apostolic Age: Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church ed. F.L. Lucas (Oxford) entry on Paul
• From First Council of Nicaea: Ad Afros Epistola Synodica
• From Saint Peter: Historical Dictionary of Prophets In Islam And Judaism, Brandon M. Wheeler, Disciples of Christ: "Muslim exegesis identifies the disciples as Peter, Andrew, Matthew, Thomas, Philip, John, James, Bartholomew, and Simon"

Reference named "Harris":

• From Paul the Apostle: Harris, Stephen L. Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985. ISBN 978-1-55934-655-9
• From Early Christianity: Harris, Stephen L., Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985.
• From Apostolic Age: Harris, Stephen L. Understanding the Bible. Palo Alto: Mayfield. 1985.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 10:13, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Merger proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Proposal

Merge Christianity in the 2nd century and Christianity in the 3rd century into Ante-Nicene period; same topic, no need to have three pages on the same topic. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:01, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

• Support - per above. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 07:01, 12 August 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. Hesitant. There's reason in consistently offering higher resolution of History of Christianity in specific centuries articles. Could an alternative be to redistribute significant chunks of Ante-Nicene period into Christianity in the 2nd century and Christianity in the 3rd century, leaving Ante-Nicene period dealing more restrictively with purely the historiographical term? PPEMES (talk) 16:38, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Those two century-articles don't offer substantially more info than ante-Nicene period. It's still the same basic asrgument: the more articles, the more trouble to keep them synchronized. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 17:40, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree with that point. However, what if we could narrow down the scope of Ante-Nicene period to only covering the historiographical term? Wouldn't that be a solution? PPEMES (talk) 17:46, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

But that's the same argument to keep two distinct articles on "Early Christianity" and "History of early Christianity"! Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 19:21, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't understand how that's the same thing? PPEMES (talk) 20:42, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

It has repeatedly been argued that "History of early Christianity" could contain more historiographic details about the first 3 centuries of Chrostianity than "Early Christianity." In effect, both articles are doublures, with "Early Christianity" being the longest article. And "Ante-Nicene period" is the common name, of course, and also covered as such at "Early Christianity." But, with that argument, it could also be argued that "Christianity in the 1st century" should redirect to "Apostolic Age." Ad infinitum... Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:40, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

I still think Early Christianity suffices, containing both historical and historiographic aspects. For the rest, I'm sorry I still don't understand the point of how logically that means that Ante-Nicene period has to merge with a century article? It doesn't say Historiography of Ante-Nicene period, it says simply Ante-Nicene period, doesn't it? PPEMES (talk)

I this Epinoia below raised a very valuable point that seem to have ignored-- before proceeding further with these mergers it might be an idea to form an overall plan - the history of Christianity can be presented in various ways. (It also seem to be unfairly "archived" as a way to insure it is ignored.) tahc ^chat 02:09, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

• -not unfairly archived, but redirected to Talk:History of Christianity#Results and proceedings where a reply is given - Epinoia (talk) 02:27, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

• Support with lower case a for ante. Laurel Lodged (talk) 13:34, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Proceedings

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

• Comment - before proceeding further with these mergers it might be an idea to form an overall plan - the history of Christianity can be presented in various ways - one path is to follow the development of Christianity with the Apostolic Age, the Ante-Nicene period, etc. - another path is to proceed chronologically, 1st century, 2nd century etc. - the article Apostolic Age was recently merged to Christianity in the First Century, which seems to indicate a preference for a chronological order - so which path are we to follow to be consistent? - we should get our act together before implementing random mergers and creating a confused mess - Epinoia (talk) 20:46, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Update

Since the topic was raised above, for the record, Historiography of early Christianity has a ton of historiography coverage for this period. -- Beland (talk) 02:13, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I was planning to do the merge-down from Early Christianity (basically splitting that too-long article in half) and looking at the resulting length and overlap before revisiting the question of merge up from 2nd and 3rd century articles. -- Beland (talk) 02:13, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

We should consider this discussion closed, in favor of the current idea. I will remove the template on splitting into 2nd and 3rd century articles, but a new proposal (for that) could be presented at a later time. tahc ^chat 15:40, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Requested move 19 February 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: page moved, uncontroversial. -- Beland (talk) 23:55, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

---

Ante-Nicene period → Christianity in the ante-Nicene period – Rename to match form of other Christianity history articles. tahc ^chat 17:33, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

• Support Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 19:16, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
• Support. The proposed form is certainly an improvement. There is also the issue that "ante-Nicene" is no longer a word in common use. Judging from this ngram, it fell out of favor in the early 20th century. On Gbooks, the search term "ante-Nicene" returns a list of books published in the late 19th century. Colin Gerhard (talk) 19:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I am aware of no better term than ante-Nicene. While overall use has dropped off, to say it "fell out of favor" normally implies other term(s) are used in its place-- which I do not think is the case. tahc ^chat 21:22, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I see the landmark multi-volume work the Ante-Nicene Fathers was first printed in the late 19th century. This probably just resulted in an unnatural increase in the study (and use of the term) that died down in the several decades hence. tahc ^chat 21:36, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

NOTE: Does anyone think "...in the ante-Nicene period" is better than "...in the Ante-Nicene..."? Should such a word be here capitalized in an article name? tahc ^chat 21:22, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

The "a" should be lower cased. See here. Colin Gerhard (talk) 00:47, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Merge again

Proposal

After looking at Christianity in the 2nd century and Christianity in the 3rd century and this article after its other merge, I think those two other articles should be merged into this one. The readable prose length here is 34.8k, which is below the threshold at which WP:SIZE recommends even starting to think about splitting up on length alone (40k). Most of the content of those articles is more or less a word-for-word copy of this article. This would not be a problem if the subarticles followed Wikipedia:Summary style and the intro of each subarticle was a copy of a paragraph in this article that summarizes the subtopic. Instead, the copied prose is from all the sections of this article. This article doesn't try to break down the ante-Nicene period cleanly in half into the 2nd and 3rd centuries; it breaks the topic down into subtopics like Church Fathers, scriptures, practices, spread, diversity of beliefs, etc. Breakdown by subtopic makes more sense to me, given that we have detail articles on topics which do follow summary style, and are also somewhat less directly redundant because they cover a subtopic across a broader span of time. The 2nd and 3rd century articles are broken down in the same way, and are sometimes summarizing the same subarticles in similar ways. It's a bit harder to read about the trends of the period if half the explanation has to be in 2nd century and half has to be in 3rd century, or alternatively the same explanation needs to be repeated in both places.

The main non-redundant material are timelines from both the 2nd and 3rd century. Those aren't prose, so I'm not sure how they should count against length here, but if we want to make the post-merge article shorter, I think it would be better to move some details to topic subarticles, in particular Church Fathers. -- Beland (talk) 00:45, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose - We already have a system of Christianity in the 1st century... Christianity in the 21st century. I don't see the harm in keeping Christianity in the 2nd century and Christianity in the 3rd century nor do I see and benefit in deleting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_contentChristianity in the 2nd century and Christianity in the 3rd century. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tahc (talk • contribs) 21:19, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that it's nearly impossible to maintain long word-for-word copies. Someone will make an improvement in one copy and not in the other, and they will drift apart. Eventually, someone will have to do an arduous sync up like I have been doing with various articles recently. If we want to keep by-century articles, to avoid intolerable duplication, I think we'd want to split up "Christianity in the ante-Nicene period" into the century articles, and redirect the title to History of Christianity#Ante-Nicene period. -- Beland (talk) 15:29, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

We do not need, nor should we hope for them to be, word-for-word copies. For one thing, some should be more detailed than the others. Per Joshua Jonathan, if they were word-for-word copies, then we would not need both. tahc ^chat 03:56, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Well, in Christianity in the 2nd century, all of the sections except "Parthian and Persian Empires" and "Timeline" are nearly word-for-word copies of parts of "Christianity in the ante-Nicene period". In Christianity in the 3rd century, "Diversity and proto-orthodoxy" is a one-sentence stub plus stuff about the 4th century, "Develoment of the Biblical canon" [sic] is a less nuanced rehash of the same text, 3 out of 5 in the "Church Fathers" cover the same person at the same or lesser level of detail but with different words (the other two are nearly word-for-word copies), "Timeline" is original, and all the other sections are nearly word-for-word copies. -- Beland (talk) 23:55, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

If you think they are too similar then fix it, and stop letting people duplicate everything. There is no need to delete different articles because they are similar right now. tahc ^chat 04:49, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

They are fixing it. There's no need to have two (or three, or four) articles on the same topic. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 05:33, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Addentum: regarding stop letting people duplicate everything "Christianity in the 2nd century" et cetera is a duplicate of existing articles; so, if you want to be consistent, you should support merging those duplicate articles back to the original articles. Also, I don't see History of Christianity use a century-by-century approach, do you? If you want to change it, start with the basics, and propose a century-by-century approach there. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 09:21, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

• Support - as said so many times before, there's no need to have multiple articles on the exact same topic. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 06:19, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

• Support an excessive zeal for numbers puts a stumbling block in the way of readers. Really the whole ante-Nicene period is a single cogent narrative. Laurel Lodged (talk) 07:41, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Are you really trying to claim that 100 AD to 325 AD is all a single cogent narrative? Nothing at all happened except what can be said in a single 100K article? How would you possibly support this claim? tahc ^chat 19:43, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

I don't see Laurel Lodged arguing that "nothing at all happened except what can be said in a single 100K article," do you? I also haven't seen attempts from your side, over the past year, to substantially expand these articles, which might be expected if there's such an urgent need to do so. What I mostly see you do is trying to tamper improvement of these articles by persistently trying to keep the number of redundant articles as large as (seems) possible. Well, the basic facts can be told while keeping to the recommanded 100k; there's plenty of room for additional articles on subtopics such as the spread of Christianity (presently a redirect, to which a lot of info from the centuries-series could be transferred); or the individual Church Fathers, which seems to have been main concern of these duplicate articles, multiplying the amount of redundant information. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 03:41, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Reply to Tahc "Are you really trying to claim that...". No. As explained above by JJ. Less of the mis-direction or knocking about of straw men please. Laurel Lodged (talk) 08:27, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Reverts and consensus

@Tahc: regarding this revert by you, edit-summary No WP:Consensus. Please to do NOT circumvent the discussion process to make a controversial merge: adding sourced info which improves the article should not be removed. If that info duplicates another article, it only illustrates the redundancy of having multiple articles on the same topic. I see a stubborn unwillingness on your part to reach consensus, or give way to proposals with which you disagree, despite defending a minority position. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 04:34, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

If you really see the problem is that the shorter articles duplicate the longer, standard policy would only be to get rid of, or shorten the longer article: Christianity in the ante-Nicene period, in order to keep articles a manageable size, per Wikipedia:Splitting. tahc ^chat 19:43, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

There are two reasons to split an article: size, and topic. "Christianity in the ante-Nicene period" has an acceptable size; there's no need to split it for that reason. A topic-split is warranted when two topics share the same name; that's also not the case here. Joshua Jonathan -Let's talk! 03:54, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

After well over a month of the discussion thread being open, one editor opposes and three editors support the merge; there seems to be ample consensus to do the merge. -- Beland (talk) 00:50, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Merges complete. -- Beland (talk) 06:38, 16 April 2020 (UTC)