The European conceptualization of World Religions might arguably be located in the nineteenth century. The driving forces of globalization and secularization that undergirded a new interest in religion and religious studies came to shape a new ethos which rested uncomfortably with Catholic historiography. In reaction to these forces, a new corps of Catholic scholars developed "sacred archaeology" in which the catacombs of Rome were reconceptualized as pristine spaces of pure, proto-Catholic Christianity. In this imaginative revisioning of the past, Catholic scholars laid down new concepts that would shape the discourse on Christianity's ostensible development: the power of the papacy, the primacy of saints and relics, the nature of Christian sacramentalism, and the role of women in the Early Church. More recent scholarship interrogates this discourse, reframing early Christianity's development as less linear and substantially more sophisticated. I argue that such revisionism is crucial to critiquing, in fact, the entire enterprise of conceptualizing religion.