Ehrman – författare

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.

This book is the most authoritative, arguably the definitive appraisal of some of the claims that are directly made or are imbedded in the incredibly successful work of popular fiction by Dan Brown, ^ The Da Vinci Code^; it is not an essentially partisan Christian rebuttal of ^ The Da Vinci Code^ (as are virtually all the books currently available) but a truly historical assessment by a noted early Christian scholar. Brown's novel is unusual in that the author makes the statement up front that the historical information in the book is all factually accurate, and many readers presumably have taken the author at his word. Some of these "facts" are surprising and provocative, such as that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that this union produced an offspring whose holy lineage has been preserved down to today, that Emperor Constantine suppressed secret Gospels that attest to these stories, etc. Ehrman discusses the historical truth behind these claims from a scholar's perspective. His focus is on the historical Jesus, the historical Mary, the development of the early Christian church, the writings of the early Christian Gospels, and the role played by Constantine in the formation of what has come down to us as the beliefs and scriptures of the Christian religion. Ehrman writes: "I should stress that I am not objecting to Dan Brown's inventing claims about early Christian documents as part of his fictional narrative; the problem is that he indicates that his accounting of early Christian documents is historically accurate, and readers who don't know the history of early Christianity will naturally take him at his word. But there is more fiction than fact, not just in the plot of ^ The Da Vinci Code^, but also in its discussion of the early documentary record about Jesus."

In this book Bart Ehrman deals with the three followers of Jesus who are arguably the most significant and intriguing: Peter, his closest disciple: Paul his most important apostle; and Mary Magdalene, his most prominent female follower. What do the New Testament and other, non-canonical texts tell us about each of them? What legends developed about them? What can we say about them as historical figures? In a separate section on each, Ehrman lays out what is fact and what is fiction and how we know. Ehrman deals with complex historical issues in clear and informative ways, explaining anecdotes culled from the traditions of these three followers of Jesus. In this way, he explains what we can know about each of these figures as real historical people, and what legends sprang up about them in the centuries after their deaths.