Lost Christianities
Book description
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…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Lost Christianities as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I don’t always agree with Bart Ehrman, but I do here. Forgeries, heresies, martyrs, even unfamiliar texts featuring women (who was Thecla and why was she hanging around with Paul?) contribute to an engaging read.
Whereas MacCulloch provides the “big picture” of Christian history, Ehrman targets the first centuries of Christianity—those centuries so critical to current debates about gender and lay roles in churches—to help us understand what we don’t understand about holy texts, especially ones that never made it into Christian Bible.
Ehrman takes us into the thought processes of early Church communities to help us see how Christians…
From Lisa's list on how we got so confused about women, gender, and Christianity.
Ehrman’s many books are worthy of study, especially this one which shows how Christianity developed over the first three centuries. The older view, that there was one mainstream church surrounded by many smaller deviant sects or “heresies” has now been discarded. Prior to Constantine, there were many groups all claiming to be Christian and no one was dominant. Each battled for supremacy. Only in the 4th century CE did one faction emerge as dominant, the group favored by two Roman Emperors, Constantine and Theodosius.
From Barrie's list on early Christianity.
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