gregor

Alternatively, you could read the NT and realize that as early as anyone was putting anything on paper there were interest groups marketing their brand of Christianity. Paul complains that early churches were being led astray by heretical preachers; the Jerusalem church fathers were disagreeing with the gentile sects; and the author of Luke/Acts had read other writings which the author presumed to improve upon and spin the stories differently.

The argument of initial orthodoxy, followed by later (and purportedly malevolent) heterodoxy is not supported. Feel free to read Lost Christianities by Ehrman for a nice summary.

Doug Shaver

I saw it several months ago.

I don't remember that part, but I would not have believed it if I had. Groups didn't use books as recruitment tools in those days. It cost too much to produce them.

I have no idea what you would consider a genuine gospel. If you mean a gospel that told the truth about Jesus, there was none. I believe they were all works of fiction.

Diogenes the Cynic

Roger, you're arguing from a position of pure faith belief, not evidence. "Heterodox and orthodox" are not meaningful divisions for early Christian groups. They were all orthodox and all heterodox. Those terms are as relative as "up and down." You might as well talk about which texts were or were not written in "foreign languages."

I think you need to both define and justify what you mean by calling some groups "Christians" and other groups non-Christian heresies "rejected by Christians." That seems completely tautological to me. What is your justification for saying the other groups were not Christian?

jakejonesiv

The winners of the doctrinal wars defined what was "orthodox" and retrojected it into the past to promote the myth of harmonious Christian origins.

Jake Jones IV

Roger Pearse

I'm afraid that the 'faith' here is your own, although you don't state why this belief is important to you, or why the rest of us should believe so extraordinary an idea. Do you believe the same about every ideology, that none of them can possibly be subject to attempted hijack?

That every ideologically-centered movement has to practise self-definition or cease to exist is of the nature of things. Even the communist international could get nothing done until they expelled the anarchists, and modern Christians have to cope with people whose guiding principles are actually drawn from contemporary society rather than Christian teaching. I know of no reason why these things should be different in antiquity.

If I did, nevertheless the fathers tell us quite clearly, from Irenaeus Adversus Haereses, from Paul's letters, from almost every writer of the church in every period, of this very same problem and their determination to avoid it. I know of no reason to ignore this huge mass of evidence, particularly when I see it going on.

Likewise I see no need to suppose a heresy is of apostolic origin, when I can see no evidence of this, nor any evidence that they are concerned to transmit uncorrupted even their current teaching.

I reply to your point out of courtesy, but you must excuse me if I feel no urge to debate something so obvious.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Diogenes the Cynic

I have "faith" in what? The definition of words? Orthodoxy and heterodoxy don't mean anything except "what I thinK" and "what they think." You are presuming an orthodoxy based on some kind of original, clearly defined "Christian" movement from which all other early "Christian" movements were merely deviations from the "correct" one. This is an assumption with no evidentiary basis. Paul's movement itself was (by his own admission) a heterodox deviation from the Jeruslaem cult. You're seeing Pauline Christianity as the "tree trunk" and so-called "heresies" as branches from that tree trunk but the truth is there is no tree trunk. All we have is branches, and we have no reason to believe that any one of them is any more similar to the trunk than any other, or even that any original trunk necessarily existed at all.
See what I said above. Your definition of what constututes the central movement is completely faith-based.
You're begging the question with this kind of "evidence." You're using the assertions of one particular doctrinal branch as a way to try to prove that their claims were "orthodox." "They were the REAL Christians....see...they SAID so." Forgive me if I find this less than convincing. This is methodologically no different than trying to prove the claims of the Bible by quoting Scripture.
Aye. There's the rub. The problem is that you also don't have any evidence or reason to believe that what you define as "orthodoxy" has either apostolic origin or uncorrupted transmission from any original Jesus movement. You can't even really prove there ever WAS an original Jesus.

In the first two centuries of Christianity, we have a bunch of competing movements. all claiming to be the "true" one, and no evidentiary basis for declaring that any of them were correct. In fact, I would argue that the chances are very slim that any of them were. One of those movements "won" in the sense that it became dominant and got to decide what was "heretical," but that really means nothing empirically and is not an argument for deciding that other early Christian movements weren't really 'Christian."

gregor

So you'll assert mendacious statements contradicted by Paul and Luke, yet not chose to defend them. Okay.