[split] Hello everyone

[Minimalist]

You should find this book and read it: Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman.

You have much to learn Lambert.

Here's a review.

http://www.biblesabbath.org/tss/512/earl...tians.html

The orthodox victors had little interest in preserving the teachings of yet earlier Christians/Christianities which were in disagreement with their doctrine. It would not be helpful to their claims of orthodoxy to admit that they had departed from earlier Christian traditions. In fact, there was an active effort to destroy competing Christian theologies, discredit their leaders, and often, to mischaracterize their teachings. But like a difficult murder mystery where the killer has tried his clever best to cover his tracks, good detective work can often find enough facts and clues to paint the true picture of what happened.

Modern scholars have attempted to do just such a reconstruction of those "lost centuries" between the Primitive Church of the apostles and the emergence of orthodox Christianity of the fourth century. One such scholar is Bart D. Ehrman, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is widely known and respected in scholarly circles as an authority on the Early Church. He has written many books on the subject and is frequently featured on A&E and the History Channel. I have read several of his books and had the pleasure of meeting him two years ago where he lectured at the Society of Biblical Literature's annual meetings held that year in Denver.

Ehrman's most recent book is Lost Christianities— The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003, $30). His focus is that mystery period of church history during which the cherished faith of the earliest Christians came to be abandoned, destroyed, and forgotten. What can be know of those times? One of Ehrman's purposes is to bring back in view for us moderns what was lost amid the sands of time.