"Amazing reading"
Professor Erhman provides deep yet easy to follow insight
into the early days of Christianity by offering a deep
look at the competing factions trying to gain supremacy
and those documents that failed to become scripture.
Additionally the Professor provides a fascinating look at
"what if" scenarios in which a different group other than
the "proto-orthodox" sect that reigned supreme had won. LOST CHRISTIANITIES: THE BATTLES FOR SCRIPTURE AND THE
FAITHS WE NEVER KNEW is at its best when Professor Erhman
digs deep into a divided religion in which to the victors
goes the doctrine. He summarizes the various competitors
through the first three centuries so that the readers
receive a powerful historical perspective of multiple
Christian factions as opposed to the popular current
belief of solidarity. However, though well written and
thought provoking especially with intriguing side
conjectures, many readers familiar with similar works will
feel that this religious thesis sheds little new light
on the Christian beginnings. Harriet Klausner
Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted September 26, 2003
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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.
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