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Summary: The problem with online reviews
Review: The problem with online reviews is when they don't review the book. I'll keep this brief: Edward Lopez goes on a rant about Christianity ("no historical evidence for Jesus"--look, Ed, how about a little intellectual rigor here: there is tremendous historical evidence. Whether or not your buy he was divine is your decision) rather than review the book. Grandstanding like Lopez's is ridiculous, especially since his claims lack credibility).Bart Ehrman is a fine scholar and his book is thought-provoking, especially if you've never considered these views before.
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Summary: Has Not God Made Foolish the Wisdom of the World?
Review: This Book is trying to pass personal opinions and speculations by so called "experts" as facts. Very little new information about the subject matter. Disappointment.
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Summary: Incredible knowledge and detail
Review: This book offers a lot of information that that the diversity of belief during Christianity's formative centuries is considerably greater than churches would like us to think...But rather than a lot of pseudo-historical stuff, it gives hard data ... like how the Apostle Paul was not a misogynist and that the parts of his gospels that relegate women to second class status were forged!
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Summary: Should be Required Reading in Seminary
Review: This book presents an excellent (quite readable) coverage of the internal battles that occurred during the first 3 centuries of the Christian Church. Far too many people act as if the Bible they purchased at the local book store was delivered directly by an angelic being, not realizing the evolutionary process that really occurred. This book explains that there were vast doctrinal differences (far more even than between today's Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, and Jehovah's Witness sects) between "Christian" groups and that each thought they were the true followers of Jesus. Not surprisingly, the group that eventually came to dominate was located at the hub of political power during that era. Ehrman does a great job of bringing complex historical issues (normally only addressed by professional historians) to an understandable level. Yet he doesn't talk down to his audience and provides extensive footnotes. This book should be mandatory reading in every Christian seminary. Far too many Pastors I've met seem completely ignorant of many of these issues. Reading this book would be beneficial to lesson the intensity of present-day doctrinal wars (at least one would hope).
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Summary: The mysteries of Christian variety, 3.5 stars
Review: This is fundamentally a popular treatment of the topic that doesn't tell us that much new about the subject. But it is not a bad introduction. Indeed, if you are not aware that the Christian New Testament was not agreed upon until more than three centuries after the death of Jesus, that there is a whole host of other "Christian" literature some of which has as good (or bad) a claim to holy inspiration as the canon, that there were a whole host of Christian sects which radically deviated from the eventual orthodoxy, that in many areas these Christian sects were the original representatives of Christianity, and that what we now know to be Orthodoxy won its battles by, among other things, altering the text of holy scripture, then you should read this book. Ehrman's book is divided into three parts. The first looks at four Christian works that failed to enter the New Testament. Ehrman first looks at the remainder of "The Gospel of Peter," which survives to this day as an account of the crucifixion. Interestingly, Ehrman suggests we have about as many copies and references to it from this time as we do with the Gospel of Mark. We also learn about "the Apocalypse of Peter," which gives a guided tour of hell (women who braided their hair are especially miserable.) Ehrman then discusses the Acts of Thecla, a supposed apostle of Paul. We then get a discussion of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of supposed sayings of Jesus. Some scholars believe that the Gospel of Thomas may go back to the mid-first century, but Ehrman is rather sceptical. Then we look at the Secret Gospel of Mark. According to leading Biblical scholar Morton Smith there is a seventeenth/eighteenth century copy of a letter of Clement of Alexandria (2nd century) which quotes from the supposed secret gospel. It tells of Jesus raising a man from the dead, and then insinuates a homosexual encounter between the two. Unfortunately, we have only photographs Smith took of the letter, and no-one has been able to find it in the Israeli monastery where Smith supposedly discovered it. Indeed, we cannot rule out the idea that Smith forged the letter himself. Ehrman then discusses the many groups whom emerging proto-orthodoxy eventually condemned as heretics. There were the Ebionites, who saw Christianity as part of Judaism, and viewed Jesus as fully human. There were the Marcionites, after their founder Marcion who viewed the God of the Old Testament as fundamentally flawed, and viewed Jesus as an emissary from the true God who would liberate humanity. They were the producers of the first Christian canon: ten Pauline epistles and an edited Gospel of Luke. Then there are Gnostics who promoted a variety of views about Jesus, usually denying his humanity. Some, the Docetists, thought that Jesus's suffering was illusory since the real Jesus did not have a real body. Others, known as Adaptionists, thought that Jesus was only adapted to receive the power of the Christ at the time of his baptism, and that it left him on the cross. Ehrman provides interesting reasons why these groups were not successful. Ebionites were too Jewish, the Gnostics were too spiritually elitist, while Marcion's religion was too new to fit the conservative religious prejudices of the day. We also learn that one of the pillars of Orthodoxy had to become an antipope, because the properly elected pope believed in "heresy": the idea that Jesus was not God the son, but God altogether. The majority of the Roman church had come to this view because they believed a) Jesus was God and b) there is clearly only one God in the Bible. The antipope Hippolytus argued correctly that Jesus and God are clearly two separate people in the New Testament, and then argued, not so correctly, that Jesus must therefore be divine in a separate sense from his father. Ehrman then discusses Orthodoxy's response. By the third century there was consensus about most of the books of the New Testament, though there were heated debates over books such as Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and the Apocalypse of John. Opponents correctly realized that the apostles did not write these books. (Over the past two centuries scholars would realize that seven Pauline letters are the only books in the New Testament correctly attributed to their author.) We read about the Epistle of Barnabas, an early Christian letter that almost made it into the Bible. It would have been extremely embarrassing had it done so, since it claims that weasels conceive through their mouths, that hyenas change their sex every year, and that rabbits grow a new orifice every year. The most interesting part is Ehrman's discussion of the corruption of the New Testament text. We know that "heretics" altered biblical texts. The Ebionites changed a couple of letters and turned John the Baptist into a vegetarian. Ehrman also discusses Orthodox "corrections." We know about some of them because enough alternate texts survive to see the manipulation. For example the Proto-Orthodox altered passages in Luke where Mary refers to Joseph as Jesus' father. Other Christians tried to alter Jesus' final statements in Mark ("why have you forsaken me,") because it fit too well with the adoptionist heresy mentioned above. But other manipulations are harder to track. It appears that Luke's reference to Jesus "sweating blood" may have been an addition to counter Docetist beliefs. While the addition of "by the Grace of God," to a passage in Hebrews may have countered another heresy. As we do not have the original texts, we cannot tell how much of the New Testament was altered to fit the desires of Orthodoxy.
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Summary: Lost Opportunities
Review: This is really a valuable and refreshing read. Prof. Ehrman seems considerably less frothingly partisan than many "historic Jesus" writers, and steers a most welcome course between modern Fundamentalists on the one hand, and the Jesus Seminar group on the other. Finally here is a skeleton key to all those intriguing but incomprehensible Gnostic works in the Nag Hammadi library - Ehrman provides a concise summary of some key terminology, "aeons, the Pleroma, Sophia", of that long-lost but fascinating "intellectual" alternative to quotidian Christianity. The works remain very strange Blakean semi-monstrosities in many ways, and it is hard to imagine Jesus actually talking with his disciples like this (but possible, conceivably). There seems every reason to believe that Jesus did convey a second, more advanced (or at least more complete) doctrine to his closest followers, and there are some suggestions in the Gospels as we have received them, in which He explains His parables privately to this elite group. The "Secret" Gospel of Mark, which Ehrman concludes tentatively (and not very convincingly) is a modern forgery (by its "discoverer," the highly respected Morton Smith), provides another example. It would not be surprising if Jesus' actual teachings in fact were considerably more Gnostic (and "New Age", and for that matter Marcionite) than is currently recognized: despite the famous quotation to the contrary from Matthew, Jesus' teachings do not seem to "fulfill" the Law imposed by the (disturbingly human and most un-Christian) "Old Testament" Yahweh. Probably His teachings shared elements of all these early "heresies," and more. If Ehrman can be faulted for anything, it is probably his unexamined haste in concluding that the (brilliant and convincing) Gospel of Thomas is a "forgery" (i.e., was not written by Thomas) and his agreement with (apparently most) modern NT scholars that the attributions of the four familiar Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are mere second-century guesses. The reasoning behind the rejection of these gospels as the work of eyewitnesses and the second generation seems to be: (1) the miracles and particularly the Resurrection can't possibly be true; (2) therefore, the gospels can't possibly be eyewitness accounts; (3) therefore, they must be sufficiently separated in time from the life and death of Jesus as to permit a period of extravagent "mythologizing"; and (4) therefore, they must date from the 70s CE at the earliest. This "knowledge filter" ignores Paul's own clear (and indisputably early - 50s CE) attestation to the resurrection and post-crucifixion appearances. Something much stranger (and much grander) than Ehrman and others imagine must have happened. Certainly the other main conclusion with which the reader emerges is that the non-canonical gospels (including Thomas) really never gave the Big Four anything like a run for their money as even the earliest canons were being assembled. While there was clearly competition in terms of their interpretation, there really seems to have been little serious competition as to the Four Gospels themselves, which frankly surprised me to learn. A fine book, and Ehrman is to be congratulated -- and read!
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Summary: A Fascinating Look at the Early Forms of Christianity
Review: Those who decry the fragmentation of contemporary Christianity into so many denominations and sects would do well to take notice of Bart Ehrman's carefully chosen title --- LOST CHRISTIANITIES, plural. As much as we'd like to believe that early Christians worshiped in unity and held to a unified doctrinal viewpoint, historical evidence indicates otherwise. The faith of the followers of Christ in the first three centuries took such diverse paths that even those denominations that seem to be polar opposites today have far more in common than some of the Christian sects that flourished in the early years of the church. Due in part to the rapid and widespread growth of Christianity but without a corresponding improvement in communication, local churches were at the mercy of a host of influences and a diversity of beliefs about God, Jesus, and the interpretation of apostolic teaching. Numerous writings, most of which were later omitted from the New Testament canon, were considered authentic and true representations of the teachings of Christ. That diversity of belief gave rise to sects like the anti-Jewish Marcionites, who dismissed the Old Testament as irrelevant, loved the writings of Paul, and believed Jesus did not have a flesh-and-blood body; the Ebionites, who considered Paul a heretic and believed Jesus was born of the (...) union of Joseph and Mary, later to be "adopted" by God as His son to fulfill His mission; and the Phibionites, who allegedly engaged in orgiastic and cannibalistic activities, though the accounts of those activities are highly suspect. Those are just three examples of the numerous sects that flourished at the time, all of which Ehrman examines in fascinating detail. Ehrman, of course, also gives plenty of ink to the non-canonical writings, many of them a part of the now well-known collection of Gnostic literature. Because the canon had not been established, these writings were widely read and circulated and considered by many Christians to be just as authoritative as the books we now have in the New Testament. That created a fair amount of conflict when the bishops of the church began meeting in the fourth century to try to sort out all the divergent views and to separate the "correct" writings from the obvious and not-so-obvious forgeries as well as the writings that were authentic but expressed views that the bishops considered unorthodox. There are plenty of other books on the market now that offer a glimpse into the somewhat complicated world of early Christianity. But what sets LOST CHRISTIANITIES apart is Ehrman's ability to convey such an abundance of historical information in such an enjoyable way. As an academic --- Ehrman is the chair of the religious studies department at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina --- he provides a thorough overview of what it meant to be Christian in the three centuries immediately following the resurrection without ever lapsing into a dry, scholarly (also known as "boring") mode. Throughout, he speculates on a series of "What if?" questions ("What if the Marcionites had had their way?" and the like), eventually drawing the conclusion that had one of the more peculiar expressions of Christian faith become the dominant one, Christianity itself would be little more than a footnote in today's history books. Some believers may have their most cherished notions about the early church rocked to the core, but in reality there's nothing here that should threaten anyone's faith. If you're looking for a single book that pulls together an enormous amount of information on the early years of Christianity and presents it in a highly readable and entertaining way, you'd be hard-pressed to find a book that surpasses LOST CHRISTIANITIES. --- Reviewed by Marcia Ford
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Summary: A non-hostile book with great info
Review: True, there are tons of books on this information, and maybe it is sensationalized, but I found this book to be a very non-aggressive approach to how the Bible was put together. So many books like this tend to have an agenda with an angry tone. I agree that there are tons of different Christianities even now. What I'd really like is a huge grant (not an actor)so that I can take time to study and write my own book on more detailed info such as the education of the times or who the people were that didn't vote on the cannon (and who were). Let me know if you know of one. This book has certainly confirmed my theory that the new testament is not the irrefutable, undeniable, 100% accurate Word. I enjoyed it.
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Summary: Send a copy to Mel Gibson
Review: Want a quick, succinct critique of this book? Scroll down four or five reviews to the review by Orvin Parrot from North Idaho. It tells all in one sentence.
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Summary: They don't have negative stars to give.
Review: What else need be said of yet another modern mind "in the know" about something beyond its depth, experience or even ability to understand. The great apostle to the Gentiles summed it up best when he said: "we struggle against pretensions and lofty arguments that set themselves up in opposition to the knowledge of God". This book is pretentious, lofty and most definitely opposed to truth. This issue the of modern discovery of such and such fundamentally altering our view of Christianity is getting as old as Christianity. I frankly find it remarkable that so many people (including professed Christians) are surprised to learn of these contending and competing early "schools" since it is the refutation of these heresies that form the primary structure and purpose of most of Pauls epistles and ALL of John's and Peter's! Who or what did you think they were talking about?! The author has done a tremendous job of regurgitating the spurious and untenable nonsense of the early heretics. Unfortunately, we do not have a Paul of Tarsus or a C.S. Lewis to refute it today. This "critical" genre is getting old and tired. Nothing new to be discovered here.
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