Walter Bauer's 'Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity' created a stir with its argument that the teachings later condemned as heresy, in the later second century onward, were, in fact, dominant in the earliest decades of the church. This full-scale response by H. E. W. Turner has not enjoyed the attention it deserves. Turner's volume represents a learned and sophisticated restatement of the traditional view: what became official orthodoxy was taught early on by the majority of church teachers, albeit not in fully developed form.

Walter Bauer's 'Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity' created a stir with its argument that the teachings later condemned as heresy, in the later second century onward, were, in fact, dominant in the earliest decades of the church. This full-scale response by H. E. W. Turner has not enjoyed the attention it deserves. Turner's volume represents a learned and sophisticated restatement of the traditional view: what became official orthodoxy was taught early on by the majority of church teachers, albeit not in fully developed form.