Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Bart D. Ehrman
Number of quotes: 22
Book ID: 420 Page: 4
Section: 4B
But virtually all forms of modern Christianity, whether they acknowledge it or not, go back to one form of Christianity that emerged as victorious from the conflicts of the second and third centuries.
Quote ID: 8590
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 420 Page: 4
Section: 3A1,3A2A
And then, as a coup de grâce, this victorious party rewrote the history of the controversy, making it appear that there had not been much of a conflict at all, claiming that its own views had always been those of the majority of Christians at all times, back to the time of Jesus and his apostles, that its perspective, in effect, had always been “orthodox” (i.e., the “the right belief”) and that its opponents in the conflict, with their other scriptural texts, had always represented small splinter groups invested in deceiving people into “heresy”….
Quote ID: 8591
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 420 Page: 14
Section: 3C2
In his ten-volume Church History, Eusebius narrates the history of the Christian Church from the days of Jesus down to his own time, in the early fourth century. This writing is our best source for the history of Christianity after the period of the New Testament to the time of the emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.
Quote ID: 8592
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 420 Page: 15
Section: 2D3B
For them, Jesus was a real flesh-and-blood human. But Christ was a separate person, a divine being who, as God, could not experience pain and death. In this view, the divine Christ descended from heaven in the form of a dove at Jesus’ baptism and entered into him;{7} the divine Christ then empowered Jesus to perform miracles and deliver spectacular teachings….
Quote ID: 8593
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 420 Page: 33/34
Section: 2E2
…here he proclaims a message of sexual renunciation, in which those who choose the life of chastity will be saved. Thecla is his main convert, who commits herself to Paul’s gospel of abstinence, much to the chagrin of her fiancé and at least one other man in her life.….
Thelca’s own mother pleads for her execution.
Quote ID: 8594
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 420 Page: 35
Section: 2E2
As I have indicated, even though the story of Thecla is not widely known today outside of circles of early Christian scholars and their students, at one time it was extremely popular, with Thecla becoming a cult hero in widespread and often remote regions of Christendom from the third century down to the Middle Ages.
Quote ID: 8595
Time Periods: 34567
Book ID: 420 Page: 41
Section: 2E2
As it turns out, it is not Thomas at all but his identical twin, Jesus, who has come down from heaven to persuade the bride and groom to refrain from consummating their marriage: “If you refrain from this filthy intercourse you become temples holy and pure, released from afflictions and troubles, known and unknown, and you will not be involved in the cares of life and of children, whose end is destruction” (Acts of Thomas 12).{22}
Quote ID: 8596
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 420 Page: 47
Section: 3A1,3A2A
As with political and broad cultural conflicts, the winners in battles for religious supremacy rarely publicize their opponent’s true views. What if they were found to be persuasive? It is far better to put a spin on things oneself, to show how absurd the opposition’s ideas are, how problematic, how dangerous. All is fair in love and war, and religious domination is nothing if not love and war.
Quote ID: 8597
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 420 Page: 91
Section: 4B
In some ways, this matter of being “right” was a concern unique to Christianity. The Roman Empire was populated with religions of all kinds: family religions, local religions, city religions, state religions. Virtually everyone in this mind-bogging complexity, except the Jews, worshiped numerous gods in numerous ways.{1} So far as we can tell, this was almost never recognized as a problem.
Quote ID: 8598
Time Periods: 2347
Book ID: 420 Page: 100
Section: 2A4
The Ebionite Christians that we are best informed about believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish Scriptures. They also believed that to belong to the people of God, one needed to be Jewish. As a result, they insisted on observing the Sabbath, keeping kosher, and circumcising all males.*John’s note: Remnants from Paul’s time?*
Quote ID: 8599
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 420 Page: 101
Section: 2A4
Obviously they [the Ebionites?] retained the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) as the Scripture par excellence. These people were Jews, or converts to Judaism, who understood that the ancient Jewish traditions revealed God’s ongoing interactions with his people and his Law for their lives. Almost as obviously, they did not accept any of the writings of Paul. Indeed, for them, Paul was not just wrong about a few minor points. He was the archenemy, the heretic who had led so many astray by insisting that a person is made right with God apart from keeping the Law and who forbade circumcision, the “sign of the covenant,” for his followers.
Quote ID: 8600
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 420 Page: 140/141
Section: 2C,3A2B
His opponents, including the young and already feisty John Milton, argued that the letters of Ignatius were forgeries of later times, fabricated, in part, precisely in order to justify the later creation of the office. Among all the participants in this debate, it was Ussher himself who cut through the Gordion knot by showing that of the thirteen widely circulated letters of Ignatius, six were forgeries and the rest had undergone illicit expansion by the author of the forgeries. But there were authentic Ignatian letters as well, and we still have them, preserved in their shorter, more original form in several surviving manuscripts.This Judgment, with some slight modification, is still the consensus among scholars who work in the field today.{5} We have seven of Ignatius’s letters. And even stripping away the fabricated expansions, these give a clear picture of one proto-orthodox author’s view of church structure.
Quote ID: 8601
Time Periods: 257
Book ID: 420 Page: 141
Section: 2D3B,3A1
He wrote the entire church with instructions concerning how to handle the situation. But why did he not write the person in charge? It was because there was no person in charge. Paul’s churches, as evident from 1 Corinthians itself, were organized as charismatic communities, directed by the Spirit of God, who gave each member a special gift (Greek: charisma) to assist them to live and function together as a communal body, gifts of teaching, prophesying, giving, leading, and so on (1 Cor. 12).An organization like that may work for the short term, for example, in what Paul imagined to be the brief interim between Jesus’ resurrection and his imminent return in glory. But if Jesus were not to return immediately, and as a result, the church has time to develop and grow, having no one in charge can lead to serious chaos. And it did lead to serious chaos, especially in Corinth.
Quote ID: 8602
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 420 Page: 165
Section: 4A
According to Justin Martyr, living in mid-second-century Rome, Simon became entirely persuasive in his claims that he was a divine being. Justin notes that the Romans set up a statue to Simon on the Tiber island, with a Latin dedicatory inscription that read, “Simoni Deo Sancto, “ meaning “To Simon, the Holy God” (Apology 1.26). Unfortunately, Justin appears to have gotten things muddled. As it turns out, the inscription was discovered many centuries later, in 1574. It actually read, “Semoni Sanco Sancto Deo.” What a difference a word makes. Semo Sancus was in fact a pagan deity worshipped by the Sabines in Rome, and this was a statue dedicated to him. Justin mistook the inscription as referring to the Holy Simon.{5}
Quote ID: 8604
Time Periods: 27
Book ID: 420 Page: 249
Section: 3B
Christians of all sorts had been subject to local persecution from the beginning of the religion (2 Cor. 11:23-25); but it was not until the mid-third century that there was any official, empire-wide attempt to eliminate the religion. From about 249 CE onwards, starting with the brief reign of the emperor Decius (249-51), there were periods of persecution, sporadically and inconsistently enforced, along with times of peace.
Quote ID: 8607
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 420 Page: 250/251
Section: 3C,3D,4B
As a result of the favors Constantine poured out upon the church, conversion to the Christian faith soon became “popular.” At the beginning of the fourth century, Christians may have comprised something like 5 to 7 percent of the population; but with the conversion of Constantine the church grew in leaps and bounds. By the end of the century it appears to have been the religion of choice of fully half the empire. After Constantine, every emperor except one was Christian.{3} Theodosius I (emperor 379-95 CE) made Christianity (specifically Roman Christianity, with the bishop of Rome having ultimate religious authority) the official religion of the state.
Quote ID: 8608
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 420 Page: 251
Section: 3C
If any other form of early Christianity had established itself as dominant within the religion, would Constantine have embraced it?*John’s note: Bart does not ask about Arius.*
Quote ID: 8609
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 420 Page: 251
Section: 3A1,3C
All things considered, it is difficult to imagine a more significant event than the victory of proto-orthodox Christianity.
Quote ID: 8610
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 420 Page: 253
Section: 3A2A
That is to say, as orthodox Christianity moved on to refine its theological views to a level unanticipated by its forebears, the views of proto-orthodoxy became not just surpassed but proscribed. In one sense, proto-orthodoxy itself became a lost Christianity.
Quote ID: 8611
Time Periods: 24
Book ID: 420 Page: 254
Section: 2D3A
…as the idea that direct revelation from God could take precedence over the written Scriptures led to the condemnation of the Montanist movement.
Quote ID: 8612
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 420 Page: 254
Section: 1A,3A2A
Other examples could well be chosen, in which the early proponents of the faith, attempting to uncover its mysteries in ways that laid the foundation for later reflection, were themselves condemned by their own successors, who refined their understanding to such a point that the partially developed, imprecise, or allegedly wrongheaded claims of their predecessors were necessarily seen not simply as inadequate but as heretical and so not to be tolerated.
Quote ID: 8613
Time Periods: 24
Book ID: 420 Page: 255
Section: 4B
Moreover, since the gods sometimes punished individuals or communities that failed to acknowledge them, Christians could be seen as being at fault when disasters struck. As Tertullian famously exclaimed:They (the pagans) think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is, “Away with the Christians to the lion!” (Apology 40)
Jews were not blamed for such disasters, even though they, too, did not worship the gods, because Jews were following ancestral traditions that forbade them to engage in such worship. Since the antiquity of religious tradition was so important in the ancient world, and since Jews could justify their practices through ancient tradition, they were normally not compelled to abandon their religious commitments to participate in civic cult.{6}
Quote ID: 8614
Time Periods: 2
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