Blog

So were there a lot of different versions of Christianity early on, and did our version just happen to win out by luck or by force?  If we found another type of early “Christianity”, does that mean we must change the way we believe?

The view that there were different types of Christianity in the early church has been put forth by a number of scholars, including Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, as well as popular books like The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. They teach that there were many diverse beliefs about Christ in the early church, and the official version of Christianity we have today won out only after a power struggle and elimination of the rival views and gospels.

But this view is not accurate, according to New Testament scholar Dr. Craig Evans. “It’s not true at all. . .the question is, what really did happen in the first century? What’s the evidence?. . .the early Christian movement certainly did have disagreements. But these weren’t ‘Christianities.’ There wasn’t one Christianity that thought Jesus was the Messiah and another Christianity that didn’t; another Christianity that thought He was divine and another Christianity that disagreed. . .this is nonsense.”[1]

The evidence shows that most of the so-called “lost gospels” were written in the mid to late second century, long after the canonical  Gospels, and were heavily influenced by a school of thought called Gnosticism, which was a kind of mystical version of pantheism and Christianity blended together, which depended on secret knowledge (gnosis).   Even though other heresies were starting to surface in the first century, Gnosticism did not reach its full development until the second century.   

 Evans comments again: “The New Testament writings reflect the testimony of the first generation church, which very much depended on the testimony of Jesus’ own handpicked disciples. To take second-century diversity and exaggerate it, and then to try to smuggle those controversies into the first century by hypothesizing that there was some earlier version of second-century documents, is just bogus. Real historians laugh at that kind of procedure.”[2]

 Strobel asked Evans about what the core message of Christianity was in the first century. Evans replied, “Jesus is the Messiah, he’s God’s Son, he fulfills the scriptures, he died on the cross and thereby saved humanity, he rose from the dead―those core issues were not open for discussion. If you didn’t buy that, you weren’t a Christian.”[3]

 In his book Searching for the Original Bible, Randall Price outlines how at first the church was not too concerned about a “canon” because they still had living authoritative apostolic witnesses. But in the second century the witnesses were dying off, and more diverse and contrary ideas were being introduced, hence the need for a more structured, established canon of books.[4] The so-called “lost gospels” were not on the same level as the canonical Gospels at all.

Price comments: “There was not a comfortable diversity in the early church, where ‘alternative Christianities’ flourished side by side. Rather, there was a pure stream of truth and tradition―coming from Christ and His apostles and preserved through their successors―that experienced conflict with heretical views and groups that arose. . .This is what history has taught us. . .it was not because one group won that it became orthodox; it won because it was orthodox and all others were heterodox.”[5]

 So the “DaVinci Code”, while an entertaining read, does not give us a true picture of early Christianity at all.