1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910953813003321

Autore

Ehrman Bart D.

Titolo

Lost Christianities : the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew / / Bart D. Ehrman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Oxford University Press, , 2023

ISBN

0-19-773998-9

0-19-518414-9

1-280-48168-4

0-19-972712-0

Descrizione fisica

xv, 294 p. : ill

Collana

Oxford scholarship online

Disciplina

229/.9206

Soggetti

Apocryphal books (New Testament) - Criticism, interpretation, etc

Christian heresies - History - Early church, ca. 30-600

Church history - Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2003.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-287) and index.

Sommario/riassunto

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.