Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18126 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"An illuminating book." Noel Rooney, Fortean Times

Review
"An illuminating book." (Noel Rooney, Fortean Times )

About the Author
Bart D. Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An authority on the early Church and the life of Jesus, he has appeared on A&E, the History Channel, CNN, and other television and radio shows. He has taped several highly popular lecture series for the "Teaching Company" and is the author of The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Third Edition, OUP, 2003) and
Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (OUP, 1999).

Customer Reviews

Neutral evaluation
The "Lost Christianities" of Bart Ehrman is a very neutral description of the Christian history of the first 3 centuries AD. Ehrman has no axe to grind with competing scholars no dogmatic bias, just the open minded attempt to describe the different streams of Christianities before the orthodox were left as winners.

Part 1 of the book is evaluating the different forgeries of Gospels, epistles, revelations and prophecies which were circulating in the ancient Middle East. Gospels of different authors suppressed from the orthodox winners, sometimes only available as fragmented quotations from opponents of the other camp.

Part 2 is describing the 4 different main directions of early Christianity:
- Ebonite's based on the Jewish ancestry, following more the original apostle teachings, using the Gospel of Matthew and consider Jesus as a human teacher not divine `Son of God' but just adopted from God.
- Marcionites breaking completely with the OT and consider the Jewish God YHWH as imperfect creator of the earth and the true God is sending his son only as spirit (docetic) to wrestle control back from YHWH and forgive the sins of humans entrapping them to YHWH by faking a mortal dead of Jesus.
- Gnostics who are looking for the `Jesus within' everybody and consider only the truly knowing and enlighten elite as eternal spirits. They are predominantly in Egypt and were using several Gospel texts many of them found in Nag Hamadi, interpreting these texts as way to knowledge of the divinity inside themselves.
- The fourth group Ehrman calls proto-orthodox who considers Jesus as divine but made of flesh and blood, which caused many discussions even inside the proto-orthodox camp.

Part 3 finally is about the different tactics of the groups who called their opponents heretics and the trend even within the groups was changing over time. What was considered mainstream like Origen for proto-orthodox could be fall into disgrace a century later and forbidden as heretic.

The group of proto-orthodox had the strategic advantage of their stronghold in Rome which yielded power, money and influence. As Ebonite's would require the circumcision of all males and following the kosher food laws they had not much appeal to the Gentiles. The Marcionites missed the long ancient history to convince the wide public about their `truth'. The Gnostics were too elitist to be accepted from the wide masses. So only the proto-orthodox had a chance to end the final battle in their favor.

After all these detailed introductions I expected Ehrman to describe this as preparation of readers for the final battle at Nicaea 325AD and the tactics of the different groups. However the book is just rushing in a few sentences over this crucial Nicaea council and is ending like under time pressure to deliver the book to the publisher.

Variety is the spice of this and the next life!
This exploration of early Christianity is conducted in three parts:

Forgeries & Discoveries, in which four intriguing texts are examined as representative of the wide variety of fabricated narratives in religious history;

Heresies & Orthodoxies, an investigation and comparison of the divergent beliefs of various early Christian movements like the Ebionites, Marcionites, different Gnostic groups and the Proto-Orthodox;

Winners & Losers, that considers the conflicts that unfolded between the above-mentioned movements, focusing on the role of the Proto-Orthodox and how the New Testament came to be accepted in its present form.

The book opens with an alphabetical list of the major Christian Apocrypha under discussion, with dates and contents, under the headings Gospels, Acts, Epistles & Related Literature, and Apocalypses & Related Literature. In the Introduction, the author mentions the diversity within modern Christianity and compares it with the situation in the first three centuries, which was equally, if not more, bewildering.

The Gospel of Peter is discussed in chapter one; this Docetic document was discovered in 1886. The next deals with the Acts of Paul and Thecla plus some other apocryphal acts which were popular in antiquity. It seems Thecla was a popular heroine that inspired the ancient equivalent of Barbra Cartland-type pulp fiction. The Gospel of Thomas is considered in chapter 3, as well as the discovery of the The Nag Hammadi Library, whilst the last chapter of this section tells the story of Morton Smith and the secret "gospel" of Mark, a modern-day mystery.

The fascinating second part opens with a discussion of heresies and orthodoxies on the nature, teachings and significance of Jesus of Nazareth. It is clear that all the various forms and movements, no matter their vast differences, trace their lineage back to him. See the book How On Earth Did Jesus Become a God? by Larry Hurtado to understand how early this devotion started and how astonishing it was in the view of the Mother Religion, strict monotheistic second-temple Judaism.

Chapter 5 takes a closer look at the polar opposites in early Christianity; Ebionites and Marcionites. The first were Jewish followers of Jesus who adhered to Torah, believed in one God, considered Jesus to be completely human and distrusted the Apostle Paul. On the other hand, the Marcionites claimed there were two gods, utterly rejected the Old Testament, saw Jesus as completely divine and Paul as the only true apostle.

What is known about the various Gnostic beliefs is discussed in the next chapter under the headings Nag Hammadi Library, Origins & Tenets of Gnosticism as well as some texts like the Gospel of Truth. Ehrman briefly discusses apocalyptical Judaism and Middle Platonism as two roots of Gnosticism. An interesting and sympathetic book on this movement that includes a chapter on Marcion, is Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing by Stephan A Hoeller.

The large tent of the Proto-Orthodox is explored in chapter seven, including its relation to the Jewish and prophetic traditions and the theological developments that led to the Nicene creed. Christian Anti-Semitism was inherent in Marcionism whilst amongst the Proto-Orthodox it appears in the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian and Melito of Sardis in a virulent form. Our Hands Are Stained with Blood by Michael L Brown and Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism by Dennis Prager provide more info on this phenomenon in early Christianity.

The final part looks at the winners and losers with regard to the nature of the internecine conflicts and the strategies that proved effective in the long struggle for dominance. The winners determined the structure, creeds and canon of Constantine Christianity that triumphed in Europe. Here the author engages with the classical view of orthodoxy and analyses the assaults on orthodoxy by scholars like H Reimarus, FC Baur and Walter Bauer.

The victory was won in a battle of words and Ehrman also provides some examples of Ebionite and Gnostic attacks on Proto-Orthodoxy. Polemical treatises, personal slurs, forgeries and falsifications were used as weapons by all sides. Chapter 10 includes examples of Anti-Adoptionistic (Anti-Ebionite), Anti-Separationist (Anti-Gnostic) and Anti-Docetic (Anti-Marcionite and Anti-Gnostic) alterations to the New Testament text by the Proto-Orthodox.

The penultimate chapter investigates the formation of the New Testament over 300 years whilst the last one ponders the significance of it all, considering with sadness the remnants of what was lost and the question of tolerance and intolerance. The text is enhanced by black and white photographs of illustrated pottery sherds (ostrakons), manuscripts, works of art, places and inscriptions. The book concludes with notes arranged by chapter, a bibliography of seven pages and an index.

There is nothing in Lost Christianities that disturbed or offended me as a believer. Some other books on early Christianity that I have found illuminating include The Authentic Gospel of Jesus by Geza Vermes and Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus: New Insights from a Hebraic Perspective by David Bivin. As regards a few widely diverse modern strains of Christianity, I recommend the interesting works Serpent-handling believers by Thomas Burton, Yeshua the fullness of Yahweh by Lester McCracken and Kabbalah of Yeshua by Zusha Kalet.

Scary.
If anyone is truly to know their faith then they must test it against that which their core beliefs hold most dear. Christians will find this difficult to read as it highlights many characteristics of our faith that don't hold true to that which we have grown up with.
To challenge these fundamentals is indeed scary or, at least, it was for me.
Some of these include; was Christ actually a normal person who's body was occupied by the son of God hence the words from the cross, 'Why hast thou forsaken me.' Taken by many Christians at the time to mean that the son of God had left his host at the time of death.
Be prepared for soul searching and lots of discussion if you buy this.