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

by Bart D. Ehrman

We have seen that, as enjoyable as they are to read, the Christian Apocryphal Acts were about more than entertainment. They were about a new way of life, a new way of observing and living in the world, a new way of human existence, not rooted in what the modern press has labeled "family values" of community, children, and life in the home. These texts were meant to be disruptive of traditional society; they were designed to tear apart the fabric of communal existence and split up the home. The values they embodied are not those of this world: the warm protection of benevolent social forces, the satisfying enjoyment of the pleasures of life. Those who wrote these texts and those who embodied their perspectives looked not to the enjoyment of life in this world but to the world above, the world of God, which required the renunciation of this world and its pleasures and the establishment of alternative communities of like-minded Christians. To be sure, these texts focused on community, family, and sex. But it was precisely in order to disrupt the values of everyday life and its enjoyments.

  This stress on the ascetic life—the life apart from the pleasures of the flesh— may have been a leading factor in the creation of these texts. But where did this doctrine of renunciation itself begin? For the early Christians, it may have started with Jesus himself, who anticipated that this world and life as we know it would all come to an abrupt end when God appeared in judgment to overthrow the forces of evil in control of this earth and set up his own Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, in which there would be no more oppression, injustice, poverty, disease, famine, natural disaster, suffering, or evil. If this world is soon to disappear, why be attached to its pleasures? It is better to prepare for the coming Kingdom, living simply and humbly in expectation of that final day. "Seek first the Kingdom of God ... and all these other things will be added to you" (Matt. 6:3). When would that be? "Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death before the Kingdom of God has come in power" (Mark 9:1). There is no point becoming attached to this world if it is soon to be overhauled and remade.

  Certainly Jesus' early followers were no hedonists. Paul appears to have expected that he, too, was living at the end of the age and that God would soon intervene in a cataclysmic act of judgment, to be brought by Jesus himself (1 Thess. 4:14-18; 1 Cor. 15:51-55). How should one live, then, in light of that coming reality?

  Concerning the matters about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of sexual immorality, let each man have his own wife and let each woman have her own husband.... To those who are not married, and to the widows, I say that it is good for them to remain even as I am; but if they cannot keep themselves under control, let them marry. In view of the present distress, I think that it is good for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not get separated. Are you separated from a wife? Do not get married.. . . Those who marry will suffer an affliction to their flesh, and I would spare you of that. This is what I mean, brothers: The time has grown short. From now on, those who have wives should be as those who do not.... For the outward form of this world is passing away (1 Cor. 7:1, 8, 26-31).

  Even though the apocalyptic vision of Jesus, and then of Paul, faded, becoming lost to most of Christianity, the ascetic lifestyle it promoted lived on. A shift occurred in early Christian thinking, away from the sense that this world would be destroyed in a future act of divine wrath, toward the notion that this world was only a transient testing ground, a reflection of a greater reality, a mere shadow of the world that really mattered, the "real" world, the world of God. Christians for the most part stopped thinking in chronological terms about the present evil age and the future age to come, and started thinking in spatial terms about the present evil world (down here) and the good world of God (up there). Life lived for the real world, the upper world, could not be tied to life in this plastic or shadowy existence down here. The pleasures of this life were snares to be avoided if one were to experience a spiritual existence with God above. Anything that tied one too closely to this world must, as a result, be avoided at all costs. This was especially true of the pleasures of the body and, in particular, sex.

  This, then, becomes one strand of Pauline Christianity. It is tied closely to the kind of Pauline Christianity known through the ages as the Christianity of Tertullian, and after him of the monastic communities that celebrated abstinence, and of the desert monks who worked to discipline the flesh in order to attain the salvation of the soul. But, in one of history's ironies, this ascetic strand of Christianity is also tied closely to the forms of lost Christianity opposed by Tertullian and his like.

  The ascetic ideal went hand in glove with what we, in hindsight, might think of as the "liberated" form of ancient Christianity, which stressed the equality of women in Christ. For apocalypticists like Jesus, Paul, and their immediate followers, this age and the social conventions it embraces are passing away. That includes the distinctions between the sexes. And so it is no wonder that Jesus was reputed to have women followers who associated with him in public, ate with him, touched him, supported him. And no wonder, either, that Paul had women leaders in his churches and insisted that in Christ "there is not male and female."

  But neither Jesus nor Paul urged a social revolution. Why revolt against the present system in order to make society better in the long haul? For these people, there was never going to be a long haul. The end was coming soon, and the best one could do was prepare for it.

  Even so, one can see how the message of Jesus and his followers would be attractive to women. In the coming kingdom there would be no oppression or injustice or inequality. Women and men would be equal. Some of Jesus' followers started implementing the ideals of that kingdom in the present, working to alleviate poverty and suffering, working for justice, striving for equality. This implementation of the ideals bf the kingdom was clearly evident in the early churches, where slave and free, Greek and barbarian, man and woman were all given an equal standing.

  That is why the tales of Thecla and other ascetic women were not an anomaly in the early Christian movement. They were a significant statement of an important stream of early Christianity. Here were women who refused to participate in the constraints of patriarchal society. They remained unmarried, not under the control of a husband. And they were travelers, not staying at home under the authority of a paterfamilias, a father, a male head of household. The ascetic life went hand in hand with freedom to decide what to do with their own bodies, how to treat them, how to live in them; it went hand in hand with freedom of movement, not restricted to the household and household chores and the care and education of children, which occupied most women's time.

  Thus the asceticism advocated in the texts of the Apocryphal Acts both manifested and helped bring about a kind of liberation for Christian women. It is no surprise that women feature so prominently in the tales and no surprise that some scholars suspect that women were principally responsible for telling the tales, spreading the tales, embracing the tales, making the tales their own. Nor is it any surprise that other Christians hated the tales, outlawed the tales, burned the tales. It was these other Christians who, at the end of the day, proved the more powerful, for it was through the machinations of these other Christians—powerful proto-orthodox leaders and writers like Tertullian—that this stream of early Christianity was lost, only to be rediscovered in modern times.

  Chapter Three: The Discovery of an Ancient Forgery: The Coptic Gospel of Thomas

  As with political and broad cultural conflicts, the winners in battles for religious supremacy rarely publicize their opponent's true views. What if they were found to be persuasive? It is far better to put a spin on things oneself, to show how absurd the opposition's ideas are, how problematic, how dangerous. All is fair in love and war, and religious domination is nothing if not love and war.

  And so, in early Christianity, as we have seen, most of the writings of the losing sides in the battles for dominance were destroyed, forgotten, or simply not reproduced for posterity—in one way or another lost. So much l
ost, so many texts. Some scholars would give anything to recoup them. But comparatively little has been found.

  The little that has been found, of course, is spectacular. Discoveries began to be made in a significant way well back in the seventeenth century. And they escalated over time, as monastic libraries in Greece, Egypt, and other places were diligently searched, as archaeological expeditions turned up unhoped-for treasure, and as bedouin inadvertently stumbled across findings valued beyond our wildest dreams.

  Some Spectacular Discoveries

  There can be legitimate debates over what is the most significant manuscript discovery of modern times. Probably few would dispute the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the first lot of which was found by pure serendipity in 1947 in a cave west of the Dead Sea, just thirteen miles east of Jerusalem, as a shepherd boy was looking for a lost goat. Other caves were searched; eleven yielded manuscript treasures. And what treasures they were: manuscripts possessed and/or produced by a sectarian group of Jews living at roughly the same time and place as John the Baptist and Jesus; copies of the Hebrew Scriptures a thousand years older than anything previously in existence, allowing scholars to check the accuracy of scribes who copied the text in the intervening centuries; documents that describe and legislate on the daily life of this ascetic sect of Jewish monastics, known to history as the Essenes; books that expound their apocalyptic views of the world and its approaching end; texts that reveal their worship and liturgical life. This is a cache of manuscripts that will occupy scholars for decades still to come, possibly centuries.

  The importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for early Christianity cannot be minimized. But the importance is indirect. Despite what one reads in sensationalist media guides and in dramatic theories sometimes advanced by otherwise competent scholars, the scrolls never mention John the Baptist or Jesus or any of Jesus' followers; they contain nothing Christian. They are important for early Christian studies (as opposed to early Jewish studies, for which they are directly relevant) because they give us a rare firsthand glimpse of society, culture, and religion in the birthplace of Christianity at just the time Christianity was born.

  What about finds of direct significance for the early Christian movement? For a long time, the most significant discovery was one which has, again, ceased being a household term or even an object of study by laypeople interested in early Christianity. But it continues to retain its unique importance. The book known as the Didache (Greek for "teaching"; the full title is "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Nations") was discovered in the Patriarchal Library of Constantinople in 1873. Published a decade later, its impact was huge, for this was a very ancient Christian writing, probably as ancient as some of the writings that became part of the New Testament, known to have been considered canonical by some Christian groups in the early centuries, a document that was totally unlike any of the books that did become canonical. This was a "church order," a book that gives instructions about the ethical life to be striven after by Christians and, yet more significant, directions concerning their liturgical life, indicating how Christians are to baptize (outdoors in cold running water, whenever possible), fast (on Wednesdays and Fridays, not Mondays and Thursdays like the Jews), pray (saying the Lord's Prayer three times a day), and celebrate the Eucharist (with prayers provided by the author, first over the cup and then the bread—the reverse order of the liturgy as it developed down to today). Moreover, the document gives extended instructions about what to do with itinerant apostles, teachers, and prophets, who are assumed to be in abundant supply, some of whom are living at the (considerable) expense of the communities they visit. The document tries to bring such prophetic freeloaders under some kind of control. The Didache thus gives significant insight into church life at the time of its composition, probably around 100 ce.

  Other discoveries might be touted as even more revolutionary for our knowledge of early Christianity and its Scriptures. Some would point to the discovery, throughout the course of the twentieth century, of ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, hundreds of years older than manuscripts available to early Bible translators, such as those responsible for the King James Bible. Among other things, these early manuscripts are significant for showing that the books of the New Testament were not copied with the assiduous care you might think or hope for. In fact, the earliest copyists appear to have been untrained and relatively unsuited to the tasks; they made lots of mistakes, and these mistakes were themselves then copied by subsequent copyists (who had only the mistake-ridden copies to reproduce) down into the Middle Ages. The more recently discovered earlier manuscripts, however, are closer to the originals of the New Testament books and so more likely to give us a sense of the original wording of each book.

  Unfortunately, none of the original copies of any of the books of the New Testament survives, nor do any of the first copies nor any of the copies of the copies. By the end of the nineteenth century, prior to more recent discoveries, our earliest complete texts of the New Testament were from about the fourth century—that is, three hundred years after the writings themselves had been produced, three hundred years in which scribes of varying temperament and ability copied, and often miscopied, their Scriptures. Papyrus discoveries of the twentieth century improved matters significantly, however, so that now we have fragmentary copies of some New Testament writings that date from the late third century and earlier. The earliest surviving copy of any New Testament book is a little fragment called P (since it was the fifty-second papyrus cataloged). It is the size of a credit card, broken off from a larger page that originally formed part of an entire manuscript of the Gospel of John. It was discovered in a trash heap in Upper Egypt, probably in the city of Oxyrhynchus, and is housed now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England. Written on both sides, it contains several verses from John's account of Jesus' trial before Pilate (John 18). Paleographers—experts in ancient handwriting—can date the fragment; it appears to have been written sometime in the first half of the second century, 125 ce ą twenty-five years, possibly just twenty-five or thirty years after John itself was first published. This and other early papyri finds have helped us reconstruct the original words of the New Testament books, an important task, one must admit, since it is impossible to know what the New Testament means if you don't know what it says.

  Other scholars would consider the discovery of noncanonical texts to be at least as important for understanding the history of earliest Christianity, including the Gospel of Peter already discussed, discovered in fragments about as old as our earliest New Testament texts (except for the remarkable but tiny P). Some would place at the top of this list of noncanonical discoveries a curious fragmentary manuscript of an "Unknown Gospel" that scholars designate Papyrus Egerton. We do not have enough of this text to determine which Gospel it came from or what it was called (hence the title Unknown Gospel). It was discovered among some papyri housed in the British Museum and published first in 1935; the manuscript itself appears to date to 150 ce ą twenty-five years, and it contains four fragments that narrate words and deeds of Jesus: a controversy with Jewish leaders, a healing of a leper (in which the poor fellow laments that he had been traveling with a group of lepers and inadvertently became infected), a controversy over whether to pay tribute to the state authorities, and the story of some kind of miracle that Jesus performs on the banks of the Jordan River, a story that, unlike the other three, has no parallel in the Gospels of the New Testament. But even the other three are told quite differently from the more familiar canonical versions. This has led some scholars to think that this Unknown Gospel was produced earlier than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Others think that it was written later by someone familiar with these other Gospels but who had also been influenced by oral traditions of Jesus that continued to be in circulation long after the Gospels of the New Testament were written. We need always to remember that these canonical Gospels were not seen as sacrosanct or inviolable for many long years after they were first put into
circulation; no one, except possibly their own authors, considered them to be the "last word" on Jesus' teachings and deeds.

  A fragment of the Gospel of John (18:31-33, 37-38) discovered in a trash heap in the sands of Egypt. This credit-card sized scrap is the earliest surviving manuscript of the New Testament, dating from around 125-150 ce. Both front and back pictured here.

  This is clear as well from the most recent noncanonical Gospel discovery, published in 1999 and called by its editors the Gospel of the Savior} Discovered among papyri purchased and more or less buried away in the Berlin Egyptian Museum in 1967, this text was not recognized as a lost Gospel until the early 1990s. The text is written in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Most of its thirty surviving pages are highly fragmentary, containing just a few broken-off lines with several surviving words. But there are several nearly complete pages, enough to provide some clues concerning what this lost Gospel contained. At the least, it gave an account of Jesus' final hours. The surviving portion of the text recounts the final instructions of Jesus to his disciples, his prayer to God that the "cup" might be taken from him, and then a final address to the cross itself.

  These passages differ from the parallel accounts of the New Testament in some remarkable ways. For example, when Jesus asks his Father to "remove this cup from me," he does so not in the Garden of Gethsemane (as in the canonical accounts) but in a vision in which he has been transported to the throne room of God himself. In addition, this account records God's replies to Jesus' requests. But probably the most intriguing portion of this hitherto lost Gospel is its ending, where Jesus (who is called "the Savior" throughout the narrative) speaks several times directly to the cross. At one point, for example, he cries out, "O cross, do not be afraid! I am rich. I will fill you with my wealth. I will mount you, O cross. I will be hung upon you" (fragment 5H). We have no way of knowing what, if anything, the cross said in reply. Even so, this is obviously like the Gospel of Peter, where, at Jesus' resurrection, God speaks to the cross from heaven, and the cross responds. Whether the Gospel of the Savior originally contained much more than these final events and sayings of Jesus' life—for example, an entire account of his ministry—cannot be determined.