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

Few scholars writing today are as well versed in the text of the New Testament and the texts of the various extra-canonical works from the first two centuries of the Common Era than Bart Ehrman. Having entered the world of scholarship with an important book (a revised dissertation from Princeton) on the text of the gospels witnessed by Didymus (1986), he has published a number of other works from The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993) to Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999), The New Testament (2000), and, most recently, a very fine edition and translation of the Apostolic Fathers, replacing that of Kirsopp Lake, in the Loeb Classical Library. In 2003, two new works appeared, the book here being reviewed and a companion volume, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did not Make it into the New Testament, the former serving, it would seem, as an introduction to the latter collection of texts in translation.

Lost Christianities is tripartite in structure. The first part, "Forgeries and Discoveries," examines the origin and history of four texts: the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Thecla, the Gospel of Thomas, and the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark. In the second part of the book, "Heresies and Orthodoxies," Ehrman examines "broader social phenomena," in the course of which he surveys the Ebionites and Marcionites (which provide in their ideologies a nice foil for each another) as well as those movements which are not infrequently huddled together under the perhaps too broad umbrella of Gnosticism. To these movements or groups Ehrman contrasts what he calls the "proto-orthodox," representative of those traditions which "eventually came to dominate the religion toward the middle of the third century." Finally, in the third part Ehrman considers "Winners and Losers," in which he examines the largely literary conflicts among these various groups with particular attention to the way in which the proto-orthodox managed to carry the day. It is out of these struggles, Ehrman observes, that the canonical New Testament emerged.

While Ehrman's reading of Christian origins is no doubt correct in emphasizing the emergence of consensus or unity from diversity, it is also clear that very early on even those intellectually indisposed to the nascent Christian movement recognized amidst the sea of competing communities calling themselves Christian one group which somehow stood apart from the rest. Writing in the latter half of the second century, Celsus, no friend of Christians and an early witness to the diversity Ehrman so ably recounts, himself seems to have recognized the "Great Church," a mainstream movement (to use a more modern term) to which the others were lesser competitors and against which he directed the brunt of his assault.

Over the past forty years or so the socio-historical paradigm of power and dominance has entered the literature of late antique historians (and theologians) and has, perhaps, too often and too easily shaped our perception and understanding of the first centuries of the Common Era. One might even suggest that Nietzsche and Foucault have had, for weal or woe, a greater influence than even they might have imagined on the discourse of the guild. One could, however, posit that such an approach to early Christianity is reductionist, overly facile, and too little attentive to the theological motives which might have prompted the various players in the drama recounted by historians of late antiquity to write and act as they did. From the beginning of Ehrman's analysis, phrases such as "stamped out," "struggle for dominance," "destroy their special scriptures," and "annihilate their following" reflect his interpretative lens. History of this sort, cast largely if not exclusively in such terms, is ultimately insufficient to explain fully the ideas and the characters who populated the first centuries, much less provide a firm basis for an evaluation of their motives. At its best such history is hampered by anachronism, and at its worst it becomes procrustean: the data...