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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  This will take us to the third part, "Winners and Losers," where we move beyond the diverse texts, beliefs, and practices of these various groups to consider the conflicts that raged between them, as each of them contended for converts, insisting that its views were right while those of the others were wrong. In particular, we will consider how proto-orthodox Christians engaged in these internecine battles which eventually led to their victory. As we will see, these confrontations were waged largely on literary grounds, as members of the proto-orthodox group produced polemical tractates in opposition to other Christian perspectives, forged sacred texts to provide authorization for their own perspectives (forgeries, that is, claiming to be written by Jesus' own apostles), and collected other early writings into a sacred canon of Scripture to advance their views and counteract the views of others. It is out of these conflicts that the New Testament came into being, a collection of twenty-seven books taken to be sacred, inspired, and authoritative.

  The study will conclude then with some thoughts on the significance of the victory of this one form of Christianity over the others, as we reflect on what was achieved and what was sacrificed when so many alternative forms of Christianity and the texts they espoused came to be lost to posterity, only to be found again, in part, in modern times.

  Part One: FORGERIES AND DISCOVERIES

  Almost all of the "lost" Scriptures of the early Christians were forgeries. On this, scholars of every stripe agree, liberal and conservative, fundamentalist and atheist. The book now known as the Proto-Gospel of James claims to have been written by none other than James, the brother of Jesus (see Mark 6:3; Gal. 1:19). It is an intriguing text in which, among other things, Jesus' mother, Mary, is said to have remained a virgin even after giving birth, as proved by a postpartum inspection by an overly zealous midwife who finds her "intact." But whoever actually wrote the book, it was not James. So, too, with a book now called Pseudo-Titus, allegedly written by the Titus known from the New Testament as a companion of the apostle Paul. It also is an interesting book, arguing page after page against sexual love, even within the confines of marriage, on the grounds that physical intimacy leads to damnation: "Why," it asks, "do you strive against your own salvation to find death in love?" But whoever actually wrote the book, it was not Titus. The same holds true for nearly all of the Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses that came to be excluded from the canon: forgeries in the names of famous apostles and their companions.

  That Christians in the early centuries would forge such books should come as no surprise. Scholars have long recognized that even some of the books accepted into the canon are probably forgeries. Christian scholars, of course, have been loathe to call them that and so more commonly refer to them as "pseudonymous" writings. Possibly this is a more antiseptic term. But it does little to solve the problem of a potential deceit, for an author who attempts to pass off his own writing as that of some other well-known person has written a forgery. That is no less true of the book allegedly written to Titus that made it into the New Testament (Paul's Letter to Titus) than of the book allegedly written by Titus that did not (Pseudo-Titus), both claiming to be written by apostles (Paul and Titus), both evidently written by someone else.

  Forgery, of course, is not the only kind of pseudonymous writing there is. In the modern world, at least, pseudonymity occurs in two forms. On the one hand, there are simple pen names, usually considered innocent enough. When Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn and signed off as Mark Twain, no one much objected. When Maryann Evans published Middlemarch and Silas Marner under the name George Eliot, there was no public outrage (although in her case it did raise, at first, a good deal of public curiosity).

  On the other hand, there are works written under a false name with the intent to deceive. In 1983 when the Hitler Diaries appeared, the world was fooled for a time. A now (in)famous German forger had done credible work, and for several days even experts and newspaper magnates were fooled into thinking that these were authentic handwritten diaries kept by the Furhrer himself up to the last days of World War II. The forgery was soon exposed, however, and people were not amused—especially the experts and media moguls who had been duped.

  People in the ancient world did not appreciate forgeries any more than people do today. There are numerous discussions of forgery in ancient Greek and Latin sources. In virtually every case the practice is denounced as deceitful and ill-spirited, sometimes even in documents that are themselves forged. An interesting example occurs in a fourth-century Christian text, the so-called Apostolic Constitutions, a book giving instructions about Christian belief and practice, written in the names of the twelve disciples. The book warns its readers not to read books that claim to be written in the names of the twelve disciples but are not. But why would a forger condemn forgery? Possibly to throw a reader off the scent of his or her own deception.

  An interesting parallel case may occur even within the pages of the New Testament. A book written in Paul's name, Thessalonians, warns against a letter, allegedly written by Paul, that had disturbed some of its readers (2:2). In an interesting twist, scholars today are not altogether confident that Thessalonians itself was written by Paul. And so we have a neat irony: Either Thessalonians was written by Paul and someone else was producing forgeries in Paul's name, or Thessalonians itself is a forgery that condemns the production of forgeries in Paul's name. Either way, someone was forging books in Paul's name.

  Second Thessalonians aside, scholars are reasonably sure that forgeries have found their way into the New Testament. This does not apply to any of the Gospels, whose authors chose to remain anonymous and only decades later were reputed to be either followers of Jesus (Matthew the tax collector and John the son of Zebedee) or companions of the apostles (Mark the secretary of Peter and Luke the traveling companion of Paul). Nor can the Book of James or the Apocalypse of John be labeled forgeries. The former was written by someone named James, but he does not claim to be Jesus' brother; and the name was quite common among first-century Jews (as many as seven people are called James just in the New Testament). So too the Apocalypse: It was written by someone named John, but nowhere does he claim to be any particular John.

  Other books, however, are widely regarded as forged. The author of Peter explicitly claims to be Simon Peter, the disciple of Jesus, who beheld the transfiguration (1: 16-18). But critical scholars are virtually unanimous that it was not written by him. So too the Pastoral epistles of Timothy and Titus: They claim to be written by Paul, but appear to have been written long after his death.

  How could forgeries make it into the New Testament? Possibly it is better to reverse the question: Why shouldn't forgeries have made it into the New Testament? Who was collecting the books? When did they do so? And how would they have known whether a book that claims to be written by Peter was actually written by Peter or that a book allegedly written by Paul was actually by Paul? So far as we know, none of these letters was included in a canon of sacred texts until decades after they were written, and the New Testament canon as a whole still had not reached final form for another two centuries after that. How would someone hundreds of years later know who had written these books?

  The debates over which books to include in the canon were central to the formation of orthodox Christianity. We will observe some of these debates in the following chapters. First, however, I should say a word about terms. As I pointed out, scholars sometimes refer to forged documents as pseudonymous writings, or they use the technical term pseudepigrapha, meaning "false writings" but taken to mean "writings written under a false name." This is not an altogether helpful term, however, since it is typically taken to refer only to the noncanonical books that claimed, and sometimes received, scriptural standing (e.g., the Gospel of Peter, which we will be exploring in the next chapter). But by rights it should cover some of the New Testament books as well, including the letter of Peter.

  And so sometimes these noncanonical books are called apocrypha. That term, too, ma
y be a bit misleading, as it technically refers to "secret" writings that have been uncovered (the Greek word literally means "covered over" or "hidden"), and there was nothing particularly secretive about a number of these writings: They were used, and written to be used, in communal settings as authoritative texts. Still, the latter term has taken on a broader sense of "noncanonical document of the same kind as found in the canon (i.e., Gospels, epistles, etc.)." I will use the term Christian apocrypha in that sense throughout the discussion.

  In the four chapters that follow, we will consider several of these apocryphal texts, forged documents that disclose alternative forms of Christianity that came to be lost. These chapters will serve to set the stage for our broader consideration, in part 2, of the social groups that embodied some of these understandings of the faith. Most of these groups were eventually reformed or repressed, their traces covered over, until scholars in the modern period began to rediscover them and to recognize anew the rich diversity and importance of these lost Christianities.

  Chapter One: The Ancient Discovery of a Forgery: Serapion and the Gospel of Peter

  Ancient Christians knew of far more Gospels than the four that eventually came to be included in the New Testament. Most of them have been lost to us in all but name. Some are quoted sporadically by early church writers who opposed them. A few have been discovered in modern times.

  We can assume, and in many cases we know, that the Christians who read, preserved, and cherished these other Gospels understood them to be sacred texts. The Christians who rejected them argued that they were heretical (promoting false teachings) and, in many instances, forged.

  The Christians who won the early conflicts and established their views as dominant by the fourth century not only gave us the creeds that have been handed down from antiquity, they also decided which books would belong to the Scriptures. Once their battles had been won, they succeeded in labeling themselves "orthodox" (i.e., those who hold to the "right beliefs") and marginalized their opponents as "heretics." But what should we call Christians who held the views of the victorious party prior to their ultimate victory? It may be best to call them the forerunners of orthodoxy, the "proto-orthodox."

  Proto-orthodox Christians accepted the four Gospels that eventually became part of the New Testament and viewed other Gospels as heretical forgeries. As the famous theologian of the early and mid-third century, Origen of Alexandria, claimed, "The Church has four Gospels, but the heretics have many" (Homily on Luke I). He goes on to list several of the heretical Gospels he himself has read: the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Gospel according to the Twelve Apostles, the Gospel of Basilides, the Gospel according to Thomas, and the Gospel according to Matthias.

  We know almost nothing of the Gospels of the Twelve Apostles and of Basilides, a famous second-century Gnostic heretic. The Gospels of the Egyptians and of Matthias are known only through a few quotations by Origen's older contemporary, Clement of Alexandria. These quotations give a sense of what we lost when these texts disappeared. The Gospel of the Egyptians apparently opposed the notion of procreative sex. In one passage, a female follower of Jesus, Salome, known slightly from the New Testament Gospels (see Mark 16:1), says to Jesus, "Then I have done well in not giving birth," to which Jesus is said to reply, "Eat of every herb, but do not eat of the one that is bitter" (Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 3.9.66). At an earlier point he is said to have declared, "I have come to undo the works of the female" (Miscellanies 3.9.63). The Gospel according to Matthias may have been an even more mystical affair. At one point Clement quotes the intriguing words, "Wonder at the things that are before you, making this the first step to further knowledge" (Miscellanies 2.9.45).

  The other Gospel that Origen mentions, the Gospel of Thomas, has been discovered in its entirety in modern times and is arguably the single most important Christian archaeological discovery of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating document, the subject of an extensive modern literature; we will look at it at length in a later chapter.

  Clement and Origen were not alone in acknowledging the existence of other Gospels and assigning them to heretical forgers. The early fourth-century church father Eusebius also mentions the Gospels of Thomas and Matthias, along with the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Peter (Church History 3.25). The last named is of particular interest, because Eusebius gives an extended account of how it was used, questioned, and eventually condemned as heretical by a proto-orthodox leader, to be relegated to the trash heaps of discarded Gospels. But then it turned up again, not in a trash heap but in the tomb of an Egyptian monk, discovered over a hundred years ago.

  Eusebius, Serapion, and the Gospel of Peter

  Prior to its discovery, virtually everything we knew about the Gospel of Peter came from Eusebius's account. In his ten-volume Church History, Eusebius narrates the history of the Christian Church from the days of Jesus down to his own time, in the early fourth century. This writing is our best source for the history of Christianity after the period of the New Testament to the time of the emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. The work is filled with anecdotes and, of yet greater use to historians, extensive quotations of earlier Christian writings. In many instances, Eusebius's quotations are our only source of knowledge of Christian texts from the second and third centuries. The account we are particularly interested in here concerns Serapion, a proto-orthodox bishop of the city of Antioch, Syria, one of the hubs of Christian activity in the early centuries, and his encounter with the Gospel of Peter.

  Serapion had become bishop in 199 ce. Under his jurisdiction were not just the churches of Antioch but also the Christian communities in the surrounding area, including one in the town of Rhossus. Serapion had made a visit to the Christians of Rhossus, trying, in good proto-orthodox fashion, to correct their misperceptions about the true gospel message. While there he learned that the church in Rhossus used as its sacred text a Gospel allegedly written by Simon Peter. Not knowing the character of the book, but assuming that it must be acceptable if Peter himself had written it, Serapion allowed its use, prior to returning home to Antioch.

  But some "informers" came forward to cast doubts on the authenticity of the book, inducing him to read it for himself. When he did so, he realized that this Gospel was susceptible to heretical misconstrual, specifically that some of the passages found in it could be used in support of a docetic Christology.

  Docetism was an ancient belief that very early came to be proscribed as heretical by proto-orthodox Christians because it denied the reality of Christ's suffering and death. Two forms of the belief were widely known. According to some docetists, Christ was so completely divine that he could not be human. As God he could not have a material body like the rest of us; as divine he could not actually suffer and die. This, then, was the view that Jesus was not really a flesh-and-blood human but only "appeared" to be so (the Greek word for "appear" or "seem" is doceo, hence the terms docetic/docetism). For these docetists, Jesus' body was a phantasm.

  There were other Christians charged with being docetic who took a slightly different tack. For them, Jesus was a real flesh-and-blood human. But Christ was a separate person, a divine being who, as God, could not experience pain and death. In this view, the divine Christ descended from heaven in the form of a dove at Jesus' baptism and entered into him; the divine Christ then empowered Jesus to perform miracles and deliver spectacular teachings, until the end when, before Jesus died (since the divine cannot die), the Christ left him once more. That is why Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (see Mark 15:34). Or as it can be more literally translated, "Why have you left me behind?" For these Christians, God had left Jesus behind, by reascending to heaven, leaving the man Jesus to die alone on the cross.

  For proto-orthodox Christians, both forms of docetism were strictly off-limits. With regard to the first—Jesus the phantasm—they asked: If Jesus did not have a real body, how could he really die? And i
f he did not die, how could his death bring salvation? If he did not have real blood, how could he shed his blood for the sins of the world? With regard to the second view—Jesus and Christ as separate beings—they asked: If the divine element in Jesus did not suffer and die, how was his death different from that of any other crucified man? How could his death be redemptive? It might be a miscarriage of justice, perhaps, or a bad end to a good man. But it would be of no real relevance to the plan of God for salvation. And so proto-orthodox Christians denounced both kinds of docetism as heresy and fought them with all their might. It was not just their lives at stake but their eternal lives, the salvation of their souls.

  When Serapion read the Gospel of Peter for himself, he realized that it could be used in support of a docetic Christology. And so he wrote a little pamphlet, "The So-Called Gospel of Peter," in which he explained the problems of the text, pointing out that whereas most of the Gospel was theologically acceptable, there were "additions" to the Gospel story that could be used in support of a docetic view. Serapion concluded that because the book was potentially heretical, it must not have been written by Peter—operating on the dubious assumption that if a text disagreed with the truth as he and his fellow proto-orthodox Christians saw it, then it could not possibly be apostolic.

  Serapion then penned a letter to the Christians of Rhossus in which he forbade further use of the Gospel and appended his pamphlet detailing the problem passages. Eusebius narrates the tale and quotes the letter. But he does not cite the passages.

  That is unfortunate, since now it is impossible to know for certain whether the Gospel of Peter discovered in the nineteenth century is the book condemned by Serapion and known to Eusebius. Most scholars, however, assume that it is, for this book, too, would have been acceptable in the main to proto-orthodox thinkers. Yet there are several passages that could well lend themselves to a docetic construal. And this is a book written in the first person by someone who calls himself Simon Peter.