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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Introduction: Recouping Our Losses

  It may be difficult to imagine a religious phenomenon more diverse than modern-day Christianity. There are Roman Catholic missionaries in developing countries who devote themselves to voluntary poverty for the sake of others, and evangelical televangelists who run twelve-step programs to ensure financial success. There are New England Presbyterians and Appalachian snake handlers. There are Greek Orthodox priests committed to the liturgical service of God, replete with set prayers, incantations, and incense, and fundamentalist preachers who view high-church liturgy as a demonic invention. There are liberal Methodist political activists intent on transforming society, and Pentecostals who think that society will soon come to a crashing halt with the return of Jesus. And there are the followers of David Koresh—still today—who think the world has already started to end, beginning with the events at Waco, a fulfillment of prophecies from Revelation. Many of these Christian groups, of course, refuse to consider other such groups Christian.

  All this diversity of belief and practice, and the intolerance that occasionally results, makes it difficult to know whether we should think of Christianity as one thing or lots of things, whether we should speak of Christianity or Christianities.

  What could be more diverse than this variegated phenomenon, Christianity in the modern world? In fact, there may be an answer: Christianity in the ancient world. As historians have come to realize, during the first three Christian centuries, the practices and beliefs found among people who called themselves Christian were so varied that the differences between Roman Catholics, Primitive Baptists, and Seventh-Day Adventists pale by comparison.

  Most of these ancient forms of Christianity are unknown to people in the world today, since they eventually came to be reformed or stamped out. As a result, the sacred texts that some ancient Christians used to support their religious perspectives came to be proscribed, destroyed, or forgotten—in one way or another lost. Many of these texts claimed to be written by Jesus' closest followers. Opponents of these texts claimed they had been forged.

  This book is about these texts and the lost forms of Christianity they tried to authorize.

  The Varieties of Ancient Christianity

  The wide diversity of early Christianity may be seen above all in the theological beliefs embraced by people who understood themselves to be followers of Jesus. In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed in one God. But there were others who insisted that there were two. Some said there were thirty. Others claimed there were 365.

  In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that God had created the world. But others believed that this world had been created by a subordinate, ignorant divinity. (Why else would the world be filled with such misery and hardship?) Yet other Christians thought it was worse than that, that this world was a cosmic mistake created by a malevolent divinity as a place of imprisonment, to trap humans and subject them to pain and suffering.

  In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that the Jewish Scripture (the Christian "Old Testament") was inspired by the one true God. Others believed it was inspired by the God of the Jews, who was not the one true God. Others believed it was inspired by an evil deity. Others believed it was not inspired.

  In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that Jesus was both divine and human, God and man. There were other Christians who argued that he was completely divine and not human at all. (For them, divinity and humanity were incommensurate entities: God can no more be a man than a man can be a rock.) There were others who insisted that Jesus was a full flesh-and-blood human, adopted by God to be his son but not himself divine. There were yet other Christians who claimed that Jesus Christ was two things: a full flesh-and-blood human, Jesus, and a fully divine being, Christ, who had temporarily inhabited Jesus' body during his ministry and left him prior to his death, inspiring his teachings and miracles but avoiding the suffering in its aftermath.

  In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that Jesus' death brought about the salvation of the world. There were other Christians who thought that Jesus' death had nothing to do with the salvation of the world. There were yet other Christians who said that Jesus never died.

  How could some of these views even be considered Christian? Or to put the question differently, how could people who considered themselves Christian hold such views? Why did they not consult their Scriptures to see that there were not 365 gods, or that the true God had created the world, or that Jesus had died? Why didn't they just read the New Testament?

  It is because there was no New Testament. To be sure, the books that were eventually collected into the New Testament had been written by the second century. But they had not yet been gathered into a widely recognized and authoritative canon of Scripture. And there were other books written as well, with equally impressive pedigrees—other Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses claiming to be written by the earthly apostles of Jesus.

  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 Magdalene; another by his own twin brother, Didymus Judas Thomas.

  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 whatever happened to the other books?

  When the New Testament was finally gathered together, it included 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, and others. Why were these not included as parts of Scripture?

  Our New Testament today contains 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 torme
nts 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 noncanonical 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.

  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 grace, 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 gained a theology, including a view that Christ is both fully divine and fully human, and a doctrine of the Trinity which 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 which 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 exposed his biases and their role in his presentation. The reevaluation of Eusebius was prompted, in part, by the discovery of additional ancient books, uncovered both by trained archaeologists looking for them and by bedouin 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.

  The Stakes of the Conflict

  Before launching into the investigation, I should perhaps say a word about what is, or at least what was, at stake. Throughout the course of our study I will be asking the question: What if it had been otherwise? What if some other form of Christianity had become dominant, instead of the one that did?

  In anticipation of these discussions, I can point out that if some other form of Christianity had won the early struggles for dominance, the familiar doctrines of Christianity might never have become the "standard" belief of millions of people, including the belief that there is only one God, that he is the creator, that Christ his son is both human and divine. The doctrine of the Trinity might never have developed. The creeds still spoken in churches today might never have been devised. The New Testament as a collection of sacred books might never have come into being. Or it might have come into being with an entirely different set of books, including, for example, the Gospel of Thomas instead of the Gospel of Matthew, or the Epistle of Barnabas instead of the Epistle of James, or the Apocalypse of Peter instead of the Apocalypse of John. If some other group had won these struggles, Christians might never have had an Old Testament; if yet a different group had won, Christians might have had only the Old Testament (which would not have been called the "Old" Testament, since there would have been no "New" Testament).

  Moreover, we will see that as vital as the outcome of these early Christian struggles was for the internal character of the religion, it was even more significant for the effect and impact that this religion had externally, on the history of civilization itself. It is conceivable that if the form of Christianity that established itself as dominant had not done so, Christianity would never have become a major world religion within the Roman Empire. Had that happened, the empire might never have adopted Christianity as its official religion. In that case, Christianity would never have become the dominant religion of the European Middle Ages, down to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and on to today. Had the conflicts been resolved differently, as odd is this may seem, people in the West—we ourselves—might have remained polytheists to this day, worshiping the ancient gods of Greece and Rome. On the other hand, the empire might have converted to a different form of Christianity and the development of Western society and culture might have developed in ways that we cannot imagine.

  However one plays such games of imagination, it is clear that the victory of one form of Christianity was a significant event both for the internal workings of the religion and for the history of civilization, especially in the West. But it was also a victory that came with a price. In this study, as I have indicated, we will be exploring both what was gained and what was lost once the conflicts of the early Christian centuries had been resolved.

  The Shape of Our Study

  For those who like to have a road map for their journey, I can explain how the book has been structured. It contains three major parts. The first, "Forgeries and Discoveries," looks at several intriguing
literary texts: (a) a Gospel allegedly written by Jesus' disciple Peter, (b) a legendary account of Thecla, a female companion of the apostle Paul, (c) a Gospel claiming to be written by Judas Thomas, supposedly Jesus' twin brother, and (d) a longer, but until recently lost, version of the Gospel of Mark.

  Although differing from one another in significant ways, these texts all appear to represent forgeries, three of them ancient, one of them (possibly) modern; moreover, they all advocate understandings of Jesus and/or forms of Christianity that were not destined to come into the mainstream. To this extent, they may be taken as representative of a larger number of fabricated accounts known from the early Christian centuries, some recognized as forgeries already in antiquity, others not discovered (or rediscovered) until relatively recent times.

  As we will see, it is principally through such literary texts—many of them lost, and only some now found—that we know about alternative forms of Christianity, as there are very few archaeological discoveries (for example, of buildings, coins, or artwork) that can contribute to our knowledge.

  After examining these four instances of forgery at some length, we will move to the second part of the book, "Heresies and Orthodoxies," to consider broader social phenomena, based on information drawn from such forgeries and from a wide array of other surviving sources. In particular, we will discuss the widely disparate beliefs of several important Christian groups: the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and a variety of groups called "Gnostic." Standing over and against each of these groups was a form of Christianity that endorsed the beliefs and practices that eventually came to dominate the religion toward the middle of the third century. Since, from the distance of a later perspective, this group (or groups) may be considered the forebears of Christian orthodoxy, we will call them the "proto-orthodox."