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BOOK REVIEW The
Battles for Scripture by Bart D. Ehrman Oxford University Press - October 2003 Reviewed by Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty If you like mysteries, true detective stories,
and historical controversies, Professor Ehrman's
newest book is just right for you. It is about
early Christianity, or more accurately, early
"Christianities." Why the plural? Simply because in
the first centuries after Christ, there was no one
single group which could be called the authentic
"Christian" religion. There was, instead, a
diversity of Christian groups, each with its own
beliefs, practices, and sacred texts. There was no
New Testament. There were many other books,
gospels, epistles, and so forth, other than those
that would eventually become the New Testament as
we know it today. These other books were widely
read and fervently followed by various groups of
early Christians. |
Lost
Christianities: The Battles
for |
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Some of these early Christian groups held beliefs that today would be considered bizarre. Some of them believed there were two Gods, not one, and some believed there might be twelve, or as many as thirty gods. Some believed that a malicious deity, rather than one true God, created the world. Some taught that Jesus' death and resurrection had nothing to do with salvation. Still others insisted that Jesus never really died at all. If such beliefs were once common, why do they no longer exist? What were these other books which were considered as Christian "Scriptures"? What did these other Scriptures say? Do they still exist? Ehrman's book is about the struggle for orthodoxy, or "right belief," in early Christianity. You will see the process by which certain Christian beliefs gained legitimacy, while others were relegated to be mere footnotes to history. You will see how Christianity developed in those early years, hear about the early Christian writings, many lost to history but some newly discovered, and you will witness the development of the New Testament into an approved canon of Scripture. But how did this take place? Who decided which books should be included in the today's Canon? Since there were so many books available at the time, who decided, and on what grounds, which should be included? How do we know they got it right? Many of the early writings were known to be forgeries. How can we sure that forgeries weren't included in the New Testament? Along the way in this adventure story you'll meet the Ebionites who kept Jewish customs and strictly followed the Jewish laws. They thought that Jesus was the most righteous man on earth and because of this was "adopted" by God to be his son when he was baptized by John the Baptist. They denied that Jesus was himself divine, but insisted that he was fully human and the result of a sexual union between Joseph and Mary. They did not hold to the doctrine of the virgin birth. You'll meet the Marcionites, whose founder, Marcion, argued that the Christian God of love could not have also been the Creator God of the Old Testament. He believed that the gospel of Jesus Christ is entirely a gospel of love to the exclusion of the Mosaic Law. He believed that the original gospel of Jesus had been corrupted by Judaizing tendencies among the earliest disciples and that the Old Testament had no validity for Christians. And you'll meet the Gnostic Christians. They believed in a pervasive dualism. Good and evil, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, spirit and matter were opposed to one another in human experience as being and nonbeing. The created universe and human experience were characterized by a radical disjunction between the spiritual, which was real, and the physical, which was illusory. This disjunction resulted from a cosmic tragedy, described in a variety of ways by gnostic mythology, as a consequence of which sparks of deity became entrapped in the physical world. Ehrman discusses the Nag Hammadi documents, a group of gnostic writings which were found in 1945 and now constitute the only significant body of gnostic works known to modern scholars. For those who want a mystery with controversial overtones, an entire chapter is devoted to the Morton Smith affair and the alleged Secret Gospel of Mark. Smith was a renowned professor of ancient history at Columbia University. Some years ago he spent time in scholarly research at Mar Saba, a famous Orthodox monastery, some twelve miles from Jerusalem. There he claimed to have discovered a previously unknown letter by Clement of Alexandria, an important early church father of the third century. In this letter, Clement goes on to quote two passages from a Secret Gospel of Mark, both dealing with activities in which Jesus was involved. The story involves Jesus becoming "acquainted with a young man who loves him and comes to him wearing nothing but a linen cloth over his naked body. Jesus then spends the night with him, teaching him about the mystery of the Kingdom." Smith's interpretation of this story, including his suggestion regarding homoerotic overtones, created a furor in the academic community. The question is, as Ehrman notes: "Is this an authentic letter of Clement, or was it forged? And if it was forged, forged by whom?" In summary, Ehrman's book considers the varieties of belief and practice in the early days of Christianity, before the church had decided what was theologically acceptable and determined which books should be included in its canon of Scripture. Part of the struggle over belief and practice in the early church was over what could be legitimately accepted as "Christian" and what should be condemned as "heresy." It considers the struggle for "orthodoxy," that is, what beliefs are "right" or "true," and the attempt to label, spurn, and overthrow "heresy," that is, what beliefs are "wrong" or "false." Christians today typically think of the New Testament as the basis for a correct understanding of the faith. But what was Christianity like before there was a New Testament? Read Professor Ehrman's book and you may discover some clues.
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