Allen Brent has a developing research project extending from the second to the fifth century on the development of Church Order against its pagan, cultural and historical background. For the funding of initial parts of this project, he expresses his thanks to both the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.
His work begins with the interface between the Apostolic Fathers and the New Testament, particularly in Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome as they relate to the communities of Luke-Acts and of the Apocalypse.In his work on the Imperial Cult, he has used the sociological concept of contra-culture in order to trace the development of Church Order. One particular example is the choreographed martyr process of Ignatius reflecting the imperial mysteries and confronting Roman power with images of reversed values. More recently he has argued the solution to the Ignatian problem with its various enigmas in terms of the rhetoric, consititutional practice and order of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor in the Second Sophistic.