Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. By Bart D. Ehrman. Pp. xv + 294 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. isbn 0 19 518249 9. Paper £8.99.

Abstract

In a stream of books, Bart Ehrman has displayed a rare gift for providing both information and analysis with freshness and acuity. His territory is the development of Christianity from Jesus through to roughly the fifth century. It is hard to think of any scholar who presents the story of this period with anything like this degree of sharpness and attractiveness. In many passages, almost every sentence provokes thought and not infrequently a rearrangement of common assumptions. From the start, we are to learn to live with the thought that the diversity of Christianity in the second and third centuries was quite as wide and quite as chaotic as it is today; and it was not far short of this condition even in the first century. In other words, we are often overdriven by a teleological sense which, consciously or not, sees the early period of Christian belief and thought as already driving its way forward to the formulations of the fourth and fifth centuries: they might not have been clear and many of them were in fact wrong-headed, but ‘the truth’ was always there, just below the surface, and only needed time to emerge into the clear light of day. A Whig view of early church history is no closer to the truth than a Whig view of the British Constitution (and in both areas we persist as we deny). Of course, we have known this at some levels for a long time, but the knowledge does not go either very wide or very deep, as churches and groups of many kinds see themselves as plainly the authentic heirs of the early period. Some of them do indeed reproduce trends and approaches to faith going the rounds in the first and second centuries. What is true of course is that many of these luxuriant growths were either brutally or by discussion eased out of prominence and into the shadows or out of existence altogether (except for more recent reproductions of amazingly similar groups and mindsets).