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 | New Theories re: old ideas

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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 103 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Gripping reading

Ehrman surprisingly manages to introduce a sensitive topic in a largely unbiased way without being offensive to the sensibilities of most Christians today. This is a very difficult accomplishment where many other authors failed before. I really appreciated his exposition, and actually learned much about the early history of Christianity and the so-called "apocryphal texts". My only grip is he tends to be repetitive in many places, to stress one point or another.

New Theories re: old ideas

Bart Ehrman has made a living treading the treacherous territories of New Testament scholarship. Very few things--except perhaps politics--can make more people agitated and angry the way discussion on religion does. Ehrman navigates this forest with aplomb. He makes no secret that he sees things a certain way, and he seems to have no qualms about laying out his evidence.

Lost Christianities is something of a companion volume to Lost Scriptures in that they both aim to elucidate the beliefs of many early groups of Christians. In this book, Ehrman shows how different early "Christians" were from Christianity today--and how different from each other. His writing style is clear and fascinating, and it truly does justice to his topic. I have read other books of his, and I have yet to be disappointed.

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Good enough for its target audience

In my opinion, you have two kinds of lay persons (outside of students): i) Thoroughly interested dabblers who know more than most laity but aren't quite conversant enough with the material to write/speak about the subject, say in a book or during a lecture; ii) The completely uninformed (or misinformed).

As a member of the first class of laity, the scope of this book is broad enough to relay bits of information that some one like myself may not have known, and to express that information in a fairly, neatly packaged way--a decent reference, once you've read the book, to go back and check on what's taken for granted in biblical scholarship. It invites further reading for those interested in such issues. For that you have the excellent footnotes bibliography.

The second class of laity will probably be somewhat flustered. Ehrman is already somewhat of a controversial figure (personally, I think he loves that fact), but__Lost Christianities__is conservative enough not to outrage your average church-goer into believing this book came straight from the Anti-Christ's weapons cache (since it softly challenges the claims to the original faith the 'proto-orthodox' party laid, letting the reader know that the 'church' as they know it wasn't always just there since Jesus); but at the same time, not propoganize outlandish liberal theories to work against Christian orthodoxy that some average non-Christian could ignorantly run with as ammunition, thinking that he's found the skeleton key to disproving mainline Christianity.

For what it's worth, it accomplishes its purpose. And for that I give it 4 stars.

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Survey of non-canonical writings from early Christianity

Survey of non-canonical writings from early Christianity, how they came to be, how they were used and by whom, and why they weren't included in the final form of the New Testament . The writer seems to want to make the point that many non-orthodox writings were equally deserving of inclusion, and that the final form of the New Testament was only the result of human political maneuvering. But the bizarre nature of these writings would lead the Christian to identify them as obviously non-inspired and the dispassionate observer to find them nonsensical and mythical in nature.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the sometimes Indiana Jones-like history of how some of these "lost scriptures" came to be found by archeologists or researchers centuries after being lost.

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