What is Gnosticism? by Karen King is an excellent book. This and Lost Christianities were the books that finally made it sink in for me that Latin Christianity is just one of many diverse strands of early Christianity. Latin Christianity is not the true or authentic version, just the strand that allied itself with the empire that crucified Jesus. I’ve since been looking for a history of the early church that does not privilege the strand that led to the gentile church and instead treats all the diverse types equally. The best I’ve seen are by Helmut Koester and Charles Freeman. I still would like to see a book that gives as much space to Christian Judaism, the various Gnostic groupings, Marcion etc. as it gives to Pauline Christianity. A book with 3/4th of the space given to the diversity would seem to be more true to pre-Nicene Christianity

I’ve just finished The Lost Way:How Two Forgotten Gospels are Rewriting the Story of Christian Origins by Stephen Patterson. It is written in a more popular style but he has an earlier more scholarly version concentrating on the Gospel of Thomas in The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Origins.

I just finished Raymond Brown’s NT Introduction. It was great. Since I am a lay person and not a Bible scholar there were a few big shifts for me. One was starting to imagine the books being written in different cities and arising from different traditions. It’s the mental geographical map in my mind that I think will most alter how I read the NT from now on. The other big shift was reading Philippians 2:5-8 as not being about how Jesus became human but instead being a reading of Jesus as a second Adam who refused to become divine. I would have never thought to have read it that way, but once Brown showed how it works it’s hard not to admit that reading makes sense. The bibliographies for each chapter are very helpful, and it’s also helpful that Brown print’s in bold the one or two commentaries that he considers the best on each book of the Bible. I can’t wait to dive into a few of them.

I’m currently in the middle of Jacob Taubes “The Political Theology of Paul” which is very interesting. Taubes was a jewish philosopher of religion who wanted to reclaim the distinctly Jewishness of Paul’s mission. Taubes is working completely independently of the “New Perspectives on Paul” which is pretty much an phenomenon among english-speaking protestants. Taubes is motivated by different concerns than the NPP, including some interesting debates about political theory in the 20th century and the theological roots of these political ideas. Taubes reads Paul as a second Moses, and Paul’s mission to the gentiles as the attempt to found a new people. Just as Moses founded the Jewish people, Paul was going to constitute a new people for the new heaven and new earth which Paul believed was imminent. It’s a very interesting book, one that comes out of left field in a lot of ways but is very persuasive.

Up next for me is E.P. Sanders “Paul and Palestine Judaism” and, on the recommendation from Brown’s intro, the commentary on Romans by Fitzmyer.

gmatthews said

1) Your two favorite all time books on any topic applicable to Prof. Ehrman’s forum.  

Trajectories through Early Christianity by Helmut Koester and James Robinson is probably the book that influenced me the most in reading about early Christianity. It is one of the few books that I have read several times and return to regularly when I see other scholars referring to it (which they still do after 40 years). In turn Trajectories caused me to read other books by these scholars, none of which are disappointing and several of which are classics like Ancient Christian Gospels by Koester.

Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas by April DeConick is probably the best book I’ve read on this sayings gospel. It is a companion book to The Original Gospel of Thomas in Translation. Recovering presents DeConick’s ideas of the growth of the Gospel of Thomas. She calls it the rolling corpus model in which a core group of sayings is added to over time reflecting the communities’ new situations. DeConick analyzes every verse by over 20 criteria such as characteristic themes, characteristic vocabulary, accommodation of Gentiles and leadership crisis. She then uses this analysis to develop her ideas of a kernel gospel which she dates very early (30-50) and the accretions over time.

Her scholarship is beyond my ability to judge but she argues her theories persuasively. In a strange way, it reminds me of Raymond Brown’s involved theory of the stages in the development of the Gospel of John.

Walid mentioned The Jesus Wars  which reminded me of one of the most interesting books I’ve read about early Christianity, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia by Philip Jenkins. It points out there is an entire little known or discussed history of Christianity outside the Roman empire in the middle and far East. Jenkins contends that the orthodox Christians of the Roman empire were actually outnumbered by the Nestorians and other Christians outside of the empire. This lasted for over 1000 years until the Muslims began to persecute the Christians within their lands. When you realize the Reformation was early 16th century, it becomes clear that orthodoxy was rarely a majority within Christianity and also further emphasizes that there is no such thing as Protestant orthodoxy.