(January 12, 2015 at 6:11 am)Godschild Wrote: Writings attributed to the apostles circulated amongst the earliest Christian communities. The Pauline epistles were circulating in collected forms by the end of the 1st century AD. Justin Martyr, in the early 2nd century, mentions the "memoirs of the Apostles," which Christians (Greek: Χριστιανός) called "gospels," and which were considered to be authoritatively equal to the Old Testament.[16]
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GC
My understanding, based on years of (admittedly layman's) reading and picking the brains of various scholars, is that these "memoirs of the apostles" were not the synoptic Gospels + John, but rather included various writings which today are called the "gnostic gospels."
In the Early Church, there was a huge variety of opinion among believers. These opinions can be roughly divided between Christian Gnosticism on the one hand (Early Christian Writings, Gnosticism), and what was to become the Catholic church on the other.
Gnosticism is far closer to today's Charismatic movement than to Roman Catholicism. Its focus is the individual's relationship with Christ, with a strong emphasis on "knowing" which can be likened to the "Born Again" experience. Christian Gnosticism was a strongly spiritual movement, and was decentralized by its very nature. This decentralization posed a problem for those who wished to impose a political structure on the church, and was bitterly opposed as heresy by the early founders of what became the Roman Catholic Church.
Prior to the founding of the Roman Catholic Church, there was no accepted new Testament canon of scripture. The Biblical Canon was established in part to strengthen the centralized, top-down structure of the RCC. Writings which encouraged individual spiritual experience were discarded and often destroyed, and those which were useful to a top-down, priest-based system were edited to fit the RCC doctrine and declared to be the Word of God.
Current-day Evangelical Protestantism is far closer to the spirit of Gnostic Christianity than most Christians know.
