1. Modern studies in church history and especially NT studies use the term “early Catholicism” to refer to the attempt on the part of the Reformation and Protestantism to understand and explicate their own manifest divergence from Catholicism also as a difference in history, that is, as a difference manifesting itself already during the first centuries of Christianity. Because Reformational Christianity had broken loose from what had hitherto been its own history, it had to answer for itself the question of its material and historical continuity as a church. (See S. Franck, Chronica [15…