Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew | Bart D. Ehrman | An Excellent Choice

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Lost Christianitie...

	Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew Bart D. Ehrman Oxford University Press, USA, 2005 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 106 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Shoot Out at the New Testament Corral

Because many of the previous reviewers have so thoroughly covered the material presented in Mr. Ehrman's book, we see no need to restate their information. Suffice it to say that Mr. Ehrman is, as usual, thorough to a fault and offers the most difficult material in a completely accessible manner. Some reviewers, in a seeming effort to smear Mr. Ehrman's academic veracity, have accused him of having an opinion. One would hope that he (and every other person that takes the time to write a book) does! After reading many of Mr. Ehrman's books, we have come to the conclusion that his opinion consists of thinking the world might be a more tolerant, if not peaceful, place to live if we could all let go of the thought that our ideas are unassailable truth and the ideas of "others" are not. Mr. Ehrman then presents the reader with an abundant and varied amount of information that may help them to embrace this view. Mr. Ehrman does not make the mistake of telling anyone they must change their mind or adhere to any certain way of thinking, he merely invites the reader to consider the concept that the world we live in might have been constructed along different lines if some historical events had not taken place and others had.

As writers who also have an opinion, our desire would be that everyone who reads the New Testament would also read Lost Christianities or Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. Yes, this may leave the reader confused as to how they should proceed on their spiritual journey, but a confused and searching mind is far more likely to be open to truth than one that has been bound by doctrine. Yes, the reader may well come to the conclusion that no one "owns" Jesus, his teachings or the right to interpret them. And yes, this also means that we each have the right and responsibility to find out who Jesus is by approaching him on a one to one basis. This may be a frightening concept to those of us who have been taught that we need to be directed or we will go astray. It is freeing to those of us who feel ready for liberation. Those who fear that the wall of their beliefs will crumble if Ehrman pulls out a brick are the ones who feel the need to attack this book. Ehrman's great gift is his knack for offering information without creating doctrine or dogma. He asks questions that invite more questions, and for that we thank him. Quantum Prodigal Son: Revisiting Jesus' Parable of the Prodigal Son from the Perspective of Quantum Mechanics

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An Excellent Choice

This is the second book by Dr. Ehrman that I have read. It is a nice sequel to my first book that I read of his "Misquoting Jesus." He goes into nice depth of what it was like in the first few centuries of Christianity. Once again, Christians need to take a look at their creeds and consider the need for further light and knowledge from God. I believe in the Bible but I don't believe in false creeds. I dare Christians to find out more about the Bible they know only by their traditions. I dare them to ask God to guide them in their search for Truth.

Another excellent work from Ehrman

Once again Bart Ehrman has produced an excellent work on the early history of Christianity geared towards lay readers. There is a common misunderstanding (myth, perhaps?) in modern times that Christianity's canon, beliefs, creeds, and structures somehow magically sprung up fully formed immediately after the death of Christ. Not so, Bart Ehrman explains with great care in this fascinating and accessible work. For centuries the proto-orthodox underpinnings of modern Christianity were simply one of many understandings of the teachings of Christ and the apostles. The diversity of modern Christianity pales in comparison the ideologiocal divides between the ancient Ebionites, Marcionites, Ascetics, Montanists, Gnostics, the proto-orthodox, and numerous other groups, all of whom claimed to hold the correct interpretation of the Christian faith. The story of these conflicts, culiminating in the eventual victory of the proto-orthodox over their rivals, is a delightful and thought-provoking read.

Ehrman charts a navigable course for his readers through the stormy waters of biblical scholarship, first examining a selection of "heretical" scriptures, then exploring the sects responsible for them, and finally looking directly at the conflicts waged between the various early Christian sects. This isn't a textbook, mind you, but it provides and excellent overview for the curious and a good jumping off point for further study. A copious number of endnotes suggest additional readings and provide more explanations for those who are interested.

I should mention that I think this book is at its best when read alongside Ehrman's companion book "Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament". That work is a collection of non-canonical texts, many of them referenced in "Lost Christianities", translated by Ehrman himself. After reading a discussion about a particular text in "Lost Christianities", I found it to be worthwhile to actually read the gospel (or epistle, or other work in question) in its entirety in "Lost Scriptures". That strategy provides a bit more context than simply reading the quotations prvided in "Lost Christianities".

In any event, this book is a must for anyone who's curious about the early evolution of Christian doctrine. It's an illuminating look into the Christianity of the 1st-4th centuries and well worth the time for people who want to know what forces came to shape the modern face of Christianity.

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Pop Academia: How is a Christian to sort out these strange teachings?

"... and Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, whose author has discovered and is informing us that we do not have original gospel documents and that those we have are of diverse quality and display variants--something even fundamentalists freely learn from the footnotes in the Greek New Testaments that they used in seminary." Martin Marty

Gnosticism & Early Church:
"The word itself conjures up an image of obscure men in long robes, poring for hours over ancient texts and scrolls, seeking in musty tomes the essence of truth. In reality this teaching was in existence long before the formalization of Christianity." J. van der Merwe
"Gnosticism has a chameleon-like ability to appear like the genuine article, true Christianity, and thus has managed to transform itself to fit the times in countless new wrappings over the centuries. It particularly adapts itself to that place where the ideas of the east and west meet. Whenever eastern mysticism and western rationalism collide, one can find there the seedbed for a pseudo-Gospel that mimics the real thing. Gnosticism is fool's gold, shiny and beckoning on the surface, yet phoney. Modern Saints are poorly equipped to recognize the counterfeit." Strange Fire, the rise of Gnosticism in the Church.

Ancient Christian Gospels:
The New Testament, as it is now known to us, was evidently an inevitable result of a sifting out of what was genuine and valuable from a mass of irrelevant or misleading material. Ehrman argues that this is the concluding view of the victors; which could have turned out differently, if one of the alternative views had prevailed, proposing that doctrines of Christianity would have been very different from what it is today. If you are serious about the Christian origins, then you could read a scholarly study, by the eminent Harvard Scholar Professor Helmut Koester (Pagels own mentor), or his like. In 'the Story of the Story Tellers,' H. Koester explains why such trubador techniques are exiting to the lay reader, "... because here we have a collection of sayings of Jesus, additional sayings of Jesus, that were not known before, and the whole beginning of a new field of studies has opened up..."

Koester on Thomas' Gospel:
To make Didaskalex review, 'Juxtaposing Texts & Turning Down Textual Criticism,' technical terms clear I quote how savvy scholars like Koester write for the lay on a controversial issue. The Gospel of Thomas: "... begins with the scribal note in the margin, "The Gospel According to Thomas." And the first sentence of that document says, "These are the secret words which the living Jesus taught and which Judas Thomas Didymos wrote down." And then they start a total of over 110 sayings, each introduced by "Jesus said...." Some of those sayings have parallels in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Some of these have not. Some of these sayings may go back to a very early period of Christianity, some of them may have been added later. The document itself comes from the fourth century.... As with all gospel text, with this one in particular, we have to remember that these texts were fluid, that scribes could add, that scribes could leave out things, that scribes could add comments, or add an interpretation. So we cannot with certainty reconstruct what did the Gospel of Thomas look like around the year 100 or earlier. But it is very likely that it existed at that time, and that a good deal of the material that's now in that manuscript was already in a Greek manuscript that dates back to the first century."

Ehrman on Forgery:
Forgery, was traditionally an important practice in the ancient literary world, by most every intellectual and it receives a correspondingly an extensive amount of attention from Ehrman. He devotes the first third of his book, of four chapters on the topic. He has proposed earlier that the Orthodox corrupted the scripture, which showed me how he is so absorbed in his own thesis, without any scholarly proofs on Alexandria, whose scribes training and scriptorium traditions, surpassed any prior or later practices.
A notable alleged discovery in 1958 of a letter supposed to have been written by Clement of Alexandria, around 200 CE, purportedly referring to a secret version of Mark's Gospel, which contains rather absurd accounts about Christian initiation. The Secret Gospel of Mark is known only from the references in this letter. The discoverer Dr. Morton Smith, who claimed to have found it in St. Saba monastery near Jerusalem, before it disappeared once again. Ehrman discusses this Gnostic document at some length without committing himself to a clear judgement on its genuineness, or the controversy over the letter, whose handwriting can be dated to around 1750.

Pop American Academia:
Today, Gnosticism infiltrates the readers via the popular pseudo-Christian academia, where the real and the false get mixed up in a garbled soup of doctrines and teachings. The rise of the New Age movement, and the extent to which it has permeated Christian thinking, further clouds the issue. How is a Christian to sort out these strange teachings?
With all due respect for Dr. Ehrman writing talents, I would like beginning with quotations of what applies to him, best defined by Martin Marty, "... writes with the instincts of a novelist, the skills of a scholar, and the ability to sort out significances that many writers lack." Dr. Marty thus confirms what Paul Mankowski, S.J., of the Pontifical Biblical Institute appeal that, "Pagels (and her clan) should be billed accurately -- not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist. Her oeuvre is that of fiction -- in fact, historical romance."

Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development
Trajectories Through Early Christianity

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