In my previous post I discussed the wide variety of early Christianities and their ranging views.  Here I consider some aspects of the Scriptures known and used by these various groups.  Again, this comes from the Introduction to my book Lost Christianities (Oxford Press, 2003).

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The Lost Scriptures

The Gospels that came to be included in the New Testament were all written anonymously: only at a later time were they called by the names of their reputed authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  But at about the time these names were being associated with the Gospels, other Gospel books were becoming available, sacred texts that were read and revered by different Christian groups throughout the world: a Gospel, for example, claiming to be written by Jesus’ closest disciple, Simon Peter; another by his apostle Philip; a Gospel allegedly written by Jesus’ female disciple Mary Magdalen; another by his own twin brother, Didymus Judas Thomas.^[1]

Someone decided that four of these early Gospels, and no others, should be accepted as part of the canon – the collection of sacred books of Scripture.   But how did they make their decisions?  When?  How can we be sure they were right?  And what ever happened to the other books?

When the New Testament was finally gathered together, it included the book of Acts – an account of the activities of the disciples after Jesus’ death.  But there were other Acts written in the early years of the church, the Acts of Peter and of John, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Paul’s female companion Thecla.  Why were these not included as parts of Scripture?

Our New Testaments today contain a number of epistles, that is, letters written by Christian leaders to other Christians – thirteen of them allegedly by Paul.  Scholars debate whether Paul actually wrote all of  these letters.  And there are other letters not in the New Testament that also claim to be written by Paul – for example, several letters sent by “Paul” to the Roman philosopher Seneca, and a letter written to the church of Laodicea, and Paul’s Third Corinthians (the New Testament has First and Second Corinthians).  Moreover, there were letters written in the names of other apostles as well, including one allegedly written by Simon Peter to Jesus’ brother James, and another by Paul’s companion Barnabas.  Why were these excluded?

The New Testament concludes with an apocalypse – a revelation concerning the end of the world in a cataclysmic act of God, written by someone named John and brought into the New Testament only after Christian leaders became convinced that the author was none other than John the son of Zebedee, Jesus’ own disciple (even though the author never claims to be that John).  But why were other apocalypses not admitted into the canon, such as the apocalypse allegedly written by Simon Peter, in which he is given a guided tour of heaven and hell to see the glorious ecstasies of the saints and, described in yet more graphic detail,  the horrendous torments of the damned?  Or the book popular among Christian readers of the second century, the Shepherd of Hermas, which, like the book of Revelation, is filled with apocalyptic visions of a prophet?

We now know that at one time or another, in one place or another, all of these non-canonical books – and many others – were revered as sacred, inspired, Scriptural.   Some of them we now have, others we know only by name.   Only twenty-seven of the early Christian books were finally included in the canon, copied by scribes through the ages, eventually translated into English, and now on bookshelves in virtually every home in America.  Other books came to be rejected, scorned, maligned, attacked, burned, all but forgotten — lost.^[2]

 

Losses and Gains

It may be worth reflecting on what was both lost and gained when these books, and the Christian perspectives they represented, disappeared from sight. One thing that was lost, of course, was the great diversity of the early centuries of Christianity.  As I have already pointed out, modern Christianity is not lacking in a diversity of its own, with its wide-ranging theologies, liturgies, practices, interpretations of Scripture, political views, social stands, organizations, institutions, and so on.  But virtually all forms of modern Christianity – whether they acknowledge it or not – go back to one form of Christianity that emerged as victorious from the conflicts of the second and third centuries.  This one form of Christianity decided what was the “correct” Christian perspective; it decided who could exercise authority over Christian belief and practice; and it determined what forms of Christianity would be marginalized, set aside, destroyed.  It also decided which books to canonize into Scripture and which books to set aside as “heretical,” teaching false ideas.

And then, as a coup de grâce, this victorious party rewrote the history of the controversy, making it appear that there had not been much of a conflict at all, claiming that its own views had always been those of the majority of Christians at all times, back to the time of Jesus and his apostles, that its perspective, in effect, had always been “orthodox” (i.e., the “right belief”) and that its opponents in the conflict, with their other Scriptural texts, had always represented small splinter groups invested in deceiving people into “heresy” (literally meaning “choice”; a heretic is someone who willfully chooses not to believe the right things).

What Christianity gained at the end of these early conflicts was a sense of confidence that it was and always had been “right.”  It also gained a creed, which is still recited by Christians today, that affirmed the right beliefs, as opposed to the heretical wrong ones.  Relatedly, it t gained a theology, including a view that Christ is both fully divine and fully human, and a doctrine of the Trinity that maintained that the Godhead consists of three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — distinct in number but equal in substance.  Moreover, it gained a hierarchy of church leaders who could run the church and guarantee its adherence to proper belief and practice.  And it gained a canon of Scripture — the New Testament — comprising twenty-seven books that supported these leaders’ vision of the church and their understanding of doctrine, ethics, and worship.

These gains are obviously significant and relatively well known.  Less familiar are the losses incurred when these particular conflicts came to an end.  It is these losses that we will be exploring throughout this book.  It is striking that, for centuries, virtually everyone who studied the history of early Christianity simply accepted the version of the early conflicts written by the orthodox victors.  This all began to change in a significant way in the nineteenth century as some scholars began to question the “objectivity” of such early Christian writers as the fourth-century orthodox author Eusebius, the so-called “Father of Church History,” who reproduced for us the earliest account of the conflict.  This initial query into Eusebius’s accuracy eventually became, in some circles, a virtual onslaught on his character, as twentieth-century scholars began to subject his work to an ideological critique that noted his biases and their role in his presentation.  The re-evaluation of Eusebius was prompted, in part, by the discovery of additional ancient books, uncovered both by trained archaeologists looking for them and by locals who came across them by chance – other Gospels, for example, that also claimed to be written in the names of apostles.

In this book we will examine these lost books that have now been found, along with other books that were marginalized by the victorious party but have been known by scholars for centuries.  We will also consider how the twenty-seven books of the New Testament came to be accepted as canonical Scripture, discussing who made this collection, on what grounds, and when.  And we will explore the nature of these early conflicts themselves, to see what was at stake, what the opposing views were, how the parties involved conducted themselves, what strategies they used, and what literature they revered, copied, and collected on the one hand and despised, rejected, and destroyed on the other.  Through it all, we will be focusing our attention on the diversity of early Christianity – or rather the diversity of early Christianities, a diversity that came to be lost, only to be rediscovered, in part, in modern times.

 

^[1]On Jesus having a twin brother, see below pp. xxx.  For extensive discussions of the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas, see chapters 2 and 4.

^[2]For a collection of the “lost” Christian texts that have now been found, in readable English translations, see the companion volume to this study, Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Become the New Testament (New York: Oxford, 2003).