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Loading... Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never…by Bart D. Ehrman
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Ehrman writes clearly and well about the other writings of the early Christians who lost out to the proto-orthodox Christians. Wonderful stories about lost and then recovered manuscripts, particularly Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark. (  ) loon3304 | Feb 16, 2009 |  Ehrman, who frequently appears on History Channel and the science stations. This book is a discussion of some of the different churches and beliefs of Christians during the first century. A main point of this history is that the present form of Christianity, that we tend to think of as the 'right' or orthodox viewpoint, is merely the one that won the debates. The winners get to write history, while the losers have their books destroyed, lost, or declared heretical. The religion could have just as easily turned out to be Peter's Jewish form rather than Paul's Gentile Christianity; Gnostic; Ebonite, or any of the other 40 or so verifiable church beliefs during the first two hundred years. (  ) GeekGoddess | Nov 6, 2008 | Muy interesante. ( ) anuski | May 14, 2008 | Ehrman in this book writes about the broad variety of Christian viewpoints in the early centuries after the life of Jesus and the apostles. It was not until the 4th century that the books of the new Testament were finalized, and it was around the same time that what Ehrman calls the proto-orthodox views of Christian belief overcame the other views to become the orthodox Christian standard views. As the other sects of early Christianity lost out, their writings were, for the most part, lost. Over time, some of these writings have been found again, most notably with the Nag Hammadi discovery in the 1940s. Thus a new vision of early Christianity is required, one in which there were many competing doctrines, with proponents of each having lively debates with each other, and in which each church might have its own set of works it considered sacred Scripture. There's some unexpected humor in the work. Look at page 146-7 to find out what one early author thought was the relationship between weasels and oral sex., Ehrman is a decent writer, which is necessary, as he is a scholar writing about scholarly topics, which can tend to get rather dry. Yet the topic is quite fascinating, to see a new picture of a particular period that had so much influence on our world today, unfold. Recommended. (  )2  reannon | Mar 27, 2008 | If you are looking for proof that Dan Brown got it right in the Da Vinci Code, this is NOT the book for you. But if you are looking for a serious, but readable tome on the varieties of Christianity in the years before the Council of Nicea, you could not do much better than Ehrman. This is a compliment to his [Lost Scriptures], which a collection of early Christian "Bibles." Ehrman gives a cogent, historically accurate account of the different early Christian traditions; how people took the story of the life, ministry and death of Jesus, and used it as a touchstone for belief. ( )1 Arctic-Stranger | Jan 11, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0195141830, Hardcover)The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human.In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost scriptures"--including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin brother--to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox Christians"-- those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief--and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame. Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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