Reddit Reddit reviews Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

We found 25 Reddit comments about Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Oxford University Press, USA
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25 Reddit comments about Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew:

u/rebellion117 · 20 pointsr/AskHistorians

The Gospel of Judas gets a good deal of action in academic circles devoted to the study of ancient Christianity, as /u/anoldhope mentions. (Take a look around JSTOR or Google Scholar, for instance.) In fact, it gets just as much scholarly attention as any of the many other ancient, non-canonical gospels.

As for GosJudas' lack of "impact" in modern religious practice, that depends on several factors. (N.B.: I am a Christianity scholar, so I will limit my discussion to modern Christianity.)

In Christianity, the focus has historically been placed on the canonical New Testament, and any books outside that canon were treated with scorn and condemnation.

Many modern Christians (specifically those from conservative traditions) maintain the same scorn towards these other Christian texts. Other modern Christians (usually, those who are more progressive) do not actually feel any animosity towards ancient, non-canonical Christian literature, but still neglect it, because of the longstanding focus on the canonical NT. Finally, a somewhat smaller portion of modern Christianity actively embraces non-canonical literature (as exemplified by the New New Testament.)

Further reading:

-On the varieties of ancient Christianity, see Bart Ehrman's books Lost Christianities and Lost Scriptures.

-For a conservative Christian reaction to the Gospel of Judas, which typifies the tradition's views on non-canonical gospels in general, see Albert Mohler's blog post, "From Traitor to Hero? Responding to 'The Gospel of Judas.'"

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

u/missshrimptoast · 14 pointsr/TrueAtheism

There are two that I quite enjoyed. One is right up your alley, the other less so.

First one I recommend is "Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists". I found it to be well-written, sincere, and remarkably intense.

Second is "Lost Christianities", which is more a historical text than an atheist one. This one delves into the almost innumerable versions of Christianity vying for dominance following the alleged death of Jesus. It's written from the perspective of a Christian who wanted to learn more about his faith, and was overwhelmed and shocked at the sheer amount of differences and digressions he discovered.

Happy reading.

u/rriggs · 14 pointsr/TrueAtheism

I'd recommend Lost Christianities: The Battles For Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman. It gives a great overview of the first couple of centuries of the xtian faith from a historical perspective.

u/shady_mcgee · 7 pointsr/history

Most of my knowledge comes from Misquoting Jesus, and Lost Christianities and a bit of resultant self study. Unfortunately my copies are out on loan right now so I can't pull out and direct examples. In lieu of that I did find some examples of changes/omissions between different branches of copies.

There's an entire field of study which seeks to discern the original from all of the different copies. It's my understanding that the result of this work has been the elimination of most of the copy errors which occurred after ~300AD or so, but as /u/TheIceCreamPirate states, we don't have any complete copies, and very few fragments, of the gospels prior to then, so any errors which would have been introduced prior to that time are hidden from us.

u/OtherWisdom · 7 pointsr/AcademicBiblical

There are a couple of books that you may be interested in which deal with other beliefs/practices during the rise of early Christianity.

u/bitjazzy · 5 pointsr/todayilearned

Worth checking out: Lost Christianities.

u/tbown · 3 pointsr/Christianity

St. Irenaeus of Lyons talks about the Gnostics in his book here and actually gives a pretty good account of what they believe.

Gnosticism has not been a "serious" religion for over 1400 years, so most of the things you will find on the internet are a kind of neo-gnostic that get super excited when reading "scripture" that was written way past the death of the apostles/authors they are claiming to be from. If you want to actually learn about Gnostics, please read an academically accepted book such as by Bart Ehrman.

Gnostics were extreme dualists, believing that the flesh, world and matter are bad, if not evil. The only good things are made of spirit.

Gnostics were extremely deterministic.

Gnostics believed the way an individual made it to their form of heaven was learning certain truths/knowledge (gnostic comes from 'knowledge' in Greek). You could only obtain this secret knowledge by reading certain texts and having enlightened people explain them for you.

There were many versions of Gnosticism, but the things I listed above hold true for most of them.


Also:

>Zoroastrianism and they possibly hold that their Triune God is the one from Judaism and Christianity

What? Where did you hear this? Nothing in their scriptures point to a Triune God. They share some things with Christianity, but that is def not one of them. If that is even a belief they have, I highly doubt it existed before the 20th century.

u/Diabolico · 3 pointsr/atheism

Many instances in which Jesus is referred to as actually being God or of divine origin in the bible were antiadoptionistic changes made to the texts by theologians in order to discredit a group best described as messianic Jews (the Ebionites). They believed that he was born via the natural union of Joseph and Mary, and that he was given a special calling by God that invested him with divinity only after his birth.

By this theology Jesus did not preexist creation and was truly a normal human being until after his crucifixion. The prevailing Christian groups who opposed this wen to extreme measures to wipe the group out, especially because they demanded that all Christians would also have to be Jews, as Jesus was, and this required circumcision and kosher eating practices: two things not very popular in the classical Roman empire.

See these excellent books for extensive details about Biblical alterations and pre-orthodox Christianity:

Misquoting Jesus

Lost Christianities

u/LadyAtheist · 3 pointsr/atheism

I have read most of Bart Ehrman's books, which are very good. I missed this one but I think it probably includes what you're looking for:

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

He also wrote a book called Lost Christianities, which is about early splinter groups. That's a fascinating book too.

u/Notmyaltaccount12345 · 3 pointsr/churchofchrist

Posting a comment to someone else as top-level, because the original isn’t appearing:


>However, your full disclosure makes it seem like you are posting with a prerogative being a non-Christian in a Christian sub.

I don't think that's the right word you were trying to use, but I think I get what you are trying to say: An agenda, if you will? I'd say that's actually a pretty fair assessment. If you check my post history, you'll come to an understanding rather quickly on my feelings towards the CoC in general. In a broader sense, my "agenda" is to shed some light on the simplified, white-washed history the church sets itself upon, but more specifically calling out legalistic, fundamentalist beliefs and behaviors for what they are.

>I would encourage you to use sources to back up your claims.

Well, then. Sources incoming.

>If you Google “early church used musical instruments” the first few sources I clicked on said the early church did not use instrumental music. I challenge you to do the same and see for yourself instead of taking my word on it.

A challenge? Are you making an assumption that I am unfamiliar with how to perform research? I will point out: simply taking the first couple links' "word for it" is a poor way to research. For example, performing this search of yours results in the the entire first page being nothing but christian news articles or apologetic pages, neither of which approach things from a critical, scholarly perspective. Secondly, I'd like to point out that very little is known about music in the first century, especially among the Jews and Christians, because so much was either never written down or has been lost to the ages. What you'll find, however, is that the use of music was on the tongues of several church fathers. These church fathers made mention of separating themselves from ancient Jewish traditions as well as from pagan practices...these arguments, however, appear to be of man-made opinion, do they not? Here are some sources:

  • LINK - Here is a Master's dissertation by (now) Dr. Jade Weimer. This dissertation explores the Jewish and Pagan roots of instruments used for both liturgical purposes and in idol-worship and describes in detail the factors associated with the early churches' departure from instrumental usage. One thing to point out here is that early Christianity was primarily comprised of former pagans, who had grown up worshiping many gods in various ways. The early church didn't divorce themselves from instruments because God wished for it to be so, but because the leaders in the church wished to separate themselves from their former pagan, idol-worshiping practices.

  • LINK - Here is another Master's dissertation with a similar outline

  • LINK - Here is a research paper detailing, specifically, the church father's thoughts on instrumental music.

  • LINK - Here is a book that covers the pre-Christian musical practices of ancient Israel. This should provide an expanded background on the truncated backgrounds detailed in the first two papers.


    I located these by using simple keyword searches on Google Scholar and SagePub. I'm sure I could find more resources, given more time. If you'd like to read the texts associated with the cited 1st century sources in the above papers, you can find a catalog of nearly everything HERE.

    Edit: clarity

    Edit 2: missed a point:

    >Secondly, no one should think the Old Testament is an apostasy.

    That's not what I meant; apologies for not being clear enough. When I say the NT was all that was and that anything else was apostasy, what I was referring to was not the OT, but to the multiple Christian groups that were coming about and evolving in the 1st century. For example, the only thing we knew about the Gnostics was the polemics against them by other ancient writers. That is, until the 1940's when the Nag Hammadi library was discovered. In fact, there were many Christian sects that were in existence in the first century, from the Essenes, to the Gnostics (although, this is really a compilation of many different groups that all kind-of based their understanding of Christianity and Jesus on the Platonic thought prevalent during the Hellenistic period), the Maniches, etc. A good synopsis of these can be located in Bart Ehrman's book, Lost Christianities. Bart also has a Great Courses class on audible under the same title; the course text can be found HERE. So when I say that all else is apostasy, what I mean is that holding to such a strict adherence to "NT-only Christianity" ignores much of the history on the how and why those letters were chosen, how and why the orthodoxy that "won" among the other sects, etc. This in itself is a huge topic and has been covered time and again by modern scholarship, however, if you'd like me to point you in a direction I can recommend some readings.

    Edit 3: it appears I've been reported or something, so this comment isn't showing up. Sweet

    One more edit to address this point:

    >However, I think the goal is to match the Church how it was in the beginning as closely as possible.

    I actually don't think this is as clear of a picture as some would describe. With the "commands, examples and necessary inferences" mantra, a majority of the 5 acts of worship are built upon inference only. For example:

  • Singing
    • The verses often cited for this are Eph. 5:19 and Col 3:16. In their contexts, neither of these are in reference to a worship setting, as they are both in reference to holy living.
    • There's also 1 Cor 14, which is nearly entirely dedicated to speaking in tongues, however v. 15 is sandwiched in the middle that says "sing with understanding". The greater context of this reveals, however, that one should be singing in an intelligible language, not in a tongue no one understands.
  • Giving
    • The primary verse for this is 1 Cor 16:2, which states "On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made." What the context reveals is that Paul is collecting funds to give to the brethren in Jerusalem, which is the finale of his journey. He even asks the congregation to write letters that he will give along with the monetary gift (v3). So, again, there is no command here, but yet another inference.


      I'm sure I could go on, but 2 is enough for now (and I'm running late on some plan's I've made). When approached critically, what we find is that "matching the church of the first century" is a little harder to do than what is proposed. One can infer, sure! One can infer many things about the practices of the early church, but there is no clear biblical picture painted on the topic at all. We do have an extra-biblical text that outlines some practices within the church, The Didache, and this is dated somewhere between 50-120 AD, so it could be rather early, around Paul's writings, or it could be much later...but it outlines in quite a bit of detail on what could be considered "acts of worship."
u/N8theGr8 · 3 pointsr/atheism

A) what evidence, outside of the Bible, makes you think that Jesus actually existed? There is no contemporary writing of Jesus, and the earliest mention of him was approximately 70AD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_jesus

B) Same question as A

C) The Bible wasn't written so much as it was compiled. All I can recommend for reading is this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-Scripture-Faiths/dp/0195182499/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322637315&sr=8-1

and other books by Bart Ehrman.

D) I could write pages to answer this question. First, there are many parts of the Bible which advocate things we wouldn't consider to be moral: slavery, rape, genocide. Secondly, the Bible makes a lot of claims. Many of these claims are in opposition to science, history, and even itself. Believing these claims without supporting evidence allows for credulity to creep into our lives. This can make us content with the way things are, both with the level of knowledge and the current social inequalities.

u/HaiKarate · 3 pointsr/badhistory

Actually, Christianity was very fragmented from the start. The various beliefs that we understand to be "orthodox" today among Catholics and even Protestants took several hundred years to formalize.

u/bogan · 2 pointsr/history

A couple of books that discuss some of the early competing Christian groups:

  • Early Christian Heresies by Joan O' Grady.

    Some information on the book from the inside of the dust jacket:

    >Early Christian Heresies describes the events, the people, the philosophies, the cults, and the ideologies that influenced the new religion at its birth and during its growth; and it attempts to disentangle the main threads that emerge from this labyrinth of ideas, beliefs, and passions.
    >
    >The first five centuries of Christianity are covered here because this was a fluid time when doctrines and beliefs were being formed and many important changes were taking place in the world.

  • Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman, an American New Testament scholar and the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    >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 divine, while others said he was divine but not human. In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost scriptures"--including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin brother--to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox Christians"--those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief--and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame. Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail.
u/craklyn · 2 pointsr/politics

> I'm not arguing the whole "he was just a guy like anyone else" bit because that just reeks of religious apology.

That's what this conversation is about.

The person you responded to says "I'm pretty sure he was a real guy. No idea if he did all that coming back from the dead, but he probably did exist."

Your response begins "Actually, IIRC, the historical record is pretty vague about a guy named Jesus." So you're replying to the claim that Jesus historically existed, not to any claim of supernatural phenomena.

> There is ONE and only ONE reference to Jesus, and that's the New Testament.

The NT is a collection of documents, some independent of one another and some dependent on one another, written by different authors at different times. It is disingenuous to call it a single reference.

> Without it, Jesus is literally just a footnote, a nobody.

Jesus movements began before the books of the Bible were written. These movements grew into early "Christianties" (see http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-Scripture-Faiths/dp/0195182499) and finally Christianity as we know it today. To these movements, that did not have a Bible, Jesus was not a footnote.

> We aren't arguing about an unimportant peasant living in an illiterate and barbaric time and place. We are discussing the claims of supernaturality from a religion.

If you trace this conversation back to its start, you can see we're discussing historicity.

> You would think a deity would get more attention than book 15, chapter fucking 44 of a book about faraway ROME written over a century after his death.

From this I conclude that Jesus wasn't important to people who were not involved in Jesus movements. (I am not responding to the assumption of Jesus' divinity as that is a religious question, not a historical one.)

> I'm not simply saying Jesus didn't exist, I'm wondering if he wasn't just a pauper selected by a mob to be famously misunderstood as ruler of the Universe ...

If this is what you want to discuss, the post you replied to was probably the wrong place to start the discussion.

Edit: Added the following

> As for whether or not he existed as a human being, why do we need to know more than that about him? If he isn't a deity, why should we care?

Whether or not Jesus is a deity, the religion that sprang up around the circumstances of Jesus' death remains a part of human culture to this day. According to the first google result I got when I searched, there are over 2 billion Christians alive today. Even if that figure overestimates the number, there are certainly many Christians alive today. Even if a person has no interest in religion, Christianity is a part of our shared culture.

u/captainhaddock · 2 pointsr/Christianity

A few book suggestions you might not get elsewhere:

The Pre-Nicene New Testament by Robert M. Price — a fresh translation of the New Testament plus twenty-seven other early Christian documents and apocrypha.

Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman — a more popular-level discussion of early Christian texts (but does not include the texts themselves).

The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thought — seems comprehensive, but I haven't read it yet. It's rather expensive.

One Biblical scholar and author who is very popular among Mormons (though she is not one) is Margaret Barker. Her focus is on the influence of temple theology and Jewish polytheism in the formation of Christianity. Her books include The Great Angel and The Great High Priest. They are scholarly reading and might be difficult for the casual reader to follow.

If you listen to podcasts, Robert Price ("the Bible Geek") and Mark Goodacre both have popular podcasts on the New Testament and early Christianity. The former was a Jesus Seminar member and has some fairly radical views; the latter is a more conservative evangelical.

u/bdwilson1000 · 2 pointsr/Antitheism

Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman: http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-Scripture-Faiths/dp/0195182499

Click the "used" tab for a super cheap copy.

u/MarcoVincenzo · 2 pointsr/atheism

>Who the hell made up Christianity, why, and how did they convince people?

It was a long torturous process that took centuries. There were also many different versions of Christianity that vied to become what is now taken as orthodoxy. There wasn't a single version that was gradually adopted--they argued, they fought, and there were winners and losers. Take a look at Ehrman's Lost Christianities. It's a good history of the competing factions.

u/redshrek · 1 pointr/exchristian

There is a wide variety of beliefs within christianity. For example, there are some christians that hold to trinity theology while others do no. There are some who believe that you need only grace to be saved while some others think those who will be saved through predestination while some yet believe you need works too to be save. All of these people can point to chapters and verses in the bible to support their beliefs. To quote Jeff Dee, "the bible is the big book of multiple choice."

When it comes to reading the bible, I don't know that I have the only correct approach but what I did was get some really good scholarly books and videos on the bible. Some of the things I used are:

Videos

Introduction to the Old Testament

New Testament History and Literature

Divine Inspiration and Biblical Inerrancy: The Failed Hypothesis

Matt Dillahunty's Atheist Debates Project


Books

Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman

The Human Faces of God by Thom Stark

The Oxford Bible Commentary

Podcasts

Reasonable Doubts Podcast

Thinking Atheist Podcast

u/octarino · 1 pointr/Christianity

>I wonder at times what gospels we have lost that could have helped us more.

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-Scripture-Faiths/dp/0195182499

u/Semie_Mosley · 1 pointr/atheism

I own both books and they are terrific. You might also consider Ehrman's Lost Christianities

u/hedgeson119 · 1 pointr/atheism

There is no single argument to deconvert a person. For a person to go from theist to atheist is potentially hundreds of hours of research, debate, and argument, the the biggest one is, they have to be open, truly open to change.

I can offer a few resources but pretty much none are comprehensive to attack each different point of a theist's belief.

Here are some:

Why I am no longer a Christian

Christianity Disproved

Anything by Bart Ehrman:

Youtube Books: Misquoting Jesus, [Jesus, Interrupted] (http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Interrupted-Revealing-Hidden-Contradictions/dp/0061173940/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1372755420&sr=8-3&keywords=bart+ehrman), Lost Christianities

A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Mistakes of Moses by Robert Ingersoll, which I think is free on the internet.

There are tons of things listed in the Recommended reading and viewing

I will update with more if you want, there are tons of things out there. do a youtube search for Christopher Hitchens, or any other atheist.

Keep in mind these will not work unless she is actually open to considering their arguments.

u/ABTechie · 1 pointr/atheism

I haven't read these books, but I like their author, Bart Ehrman. I have heard several interviews with him.
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament

u/thesunmustdie · 1 pointr/atheism

Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianies is good and scholarly: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-Scripture-Faiths/dp/0195182499

u/fatty2cent · 0 pointsr/AskHistorians

No one has mentioned 'Lost Christianities' by Bart Ehrman.