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Lost Christianities

The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

By Bart D. Ehrman

(8)

| Hardcover | 9780195141832

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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 human but not diviContinue

1 Review

This book is an insightful, informative, and yet easy to read journey among several Christian cults in the first 4 centuries of our era. That was a time when the canonical books of the Christian Bible had not been decided yet, so the differences between various Christianities were enormous. There we ... (continue)

This book is an insightful, informative, and yet easy to read journey among several Christian cults in the first 4 centuries of our era. That was a time when the canonical books of the Christian Bible had not been decided yet, so the differences between various Christianities were enormous. There were Christians believing in 2 or more gods, or believing that Jesus was 100% human or 100% divine. Some Christians believed that salvation came from the death and resurrection of Jesus, while others did not care for that because salvation came from his words and his message. It’s a fascinating trip among proto-orthodox Christians, Ebionites, Marcionites, Gnostics and other Christian cults.
This book tells us how centuries of theological and personal struggles and opinions of great thinkers, forgers, bishops, and copyists shaped Christianity. Eventually, only one form of Christianity defeated the competition and emerged from those early centuries.
Was this victory due to a higher ability of proto-orthodox Christians to make up convincing tales and acquire power, or was it due to a true divine inspiration? I’ll leave that to you.

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