Lost Christianities

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.

ISBN 0195182499   Pages 309 ISBN13 9780195182491 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Oxford University Press Inc   Weight (grammes) 465 Imprint Oxford University Press Inc   Published in New York Format Paperback   Previous ISBN 9780195141832 Publication date 27 Oct 2005   Height (mm) 234 Library of Congress BS2840   Width (mm) 155 DEWEY 270.1   Spine width (mm) 22 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level General

		Introduction : recouping our losses		1
1		The ancient discovery of a forgery : serapion and the gospel of Peter		13
2		The ancient forgery of a discovery : the acts of Paul and Thecla		29
3		The discovery of an ancient forgery : the Coptic gospel of Thomas		47
4		The forgery of an ancient discovery? : Morton Smith and the secret gospel of Mark		67
5		At polar ends of the spectrum : early Christian Ebionites and Marcionites		95
6		Christians "in the know" : the worlds of early Christian Gnosticism		113
7		On the road to Nicaea : the broad swath of proto-orthodox Christianity		135
8		The quest for orthodoxy		163
9		The Arsenal of the conflicts : polemical treatises and personal slurs		181
10		Additional weapons in the polemical arsenal : forgeries and falsifications		203
11		The invention of scripture : the formation of the proto-orthodox New Testament		229
12		Winners, losers, and the question of tolerance		247

"An illuminating book." Noel Rooney, Fortean Times

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