The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some
groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or
twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by
God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus
was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human.
In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at
these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be
suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that
they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all
possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced
by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a
number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries
reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which
history gets written by the winners.
Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost
scriptures"--including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter,
Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin
brother--to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian
Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects.
Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox
Christians"--those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the
New Testament and standardized Christian belief--and the groups they
denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame. Scrupulously researched
and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of
politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades
before one group came to see its views prevail.
