The Gnostic Gospels and Orthodox Christianity | Bible Hunters

Charles Freeman A New History of Early Christianity :This stimulating history of early Christianity revisits the extraordinary birth of a world religion and gives a new slant on a familiar story. The relevance of Christianity is as hotly contested today as it has ever been. A New History of Early Christianity shows how our current debates are rooted in the many controversies surrounding the birth of the religion and the earliest attempts to resolve them. Charles Freeman’s meticulous historical account of Christianity from its birth in Judaea in the first century A.D. to the emergence of Western and Eastern churches by A.D. 600 reveals that it was a distinctive, vibrant, and incredibly diverse movement brought into order at the cost of intellectual and spiritual vitality. Against the conventional narrative of the inevitable “triumph” of a single distinct Christianity, Freeman shows that there was a host of competing Christianities, many of which had as much claim to authenticity as those that eventually dominated. Looking with fresh eyes at the historical record, Freeman explores the ambiguities and contradictions that underlay Christian theology and the unavoidable compromises enforced in the name of doctrine.
Jamesian Jewish Christianity represented by the Ebionites was too close to Earth and Gnostic Christianity was too exclusive and close to heaven. The Pauline theology had the middle ground that was able to be universal and flexible.

Uncovering the difficulties in establishing the Christian church, he examines its relationship with Judaism, Gnosticism, Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society, and he offers dramatic new accounts of Paul, the resurrection, and the church fathers and emperors.Christians have proved oddly unwilling to dig into the particularities of their faith, beyond familiarizing themselves with a few tentpole doctrines. They share this reluctance with one of Christianity’s most spectacular converts, the Roman emperor Constantine, who credited his victory at the Milvian Bridge in A.D. 312 to the auspices of the Christian deity, despite not knowing much about Christianity, including the degree to which it was riven by sectarian disagreement. The following year, Constantine co-issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christians the right to practice their faith unmolested.
In “The Triumph of Christianity,” Ehrman describes the Edict of Milan (which was neither an edict nor written in Milan) as the Western world’s first known government document to proclaim the freedom of belief.
When the emperor Valentinian II removed the altar of the goddess Victory from the Roman Senate house in A.D. 382, for instance, a pagan statesman named Symmachus reminded him, “This worship subdued the world.”
When Constantine converted, the New Testament didn’t formally exist and Christians disagreed on basic theological concepts, among them how Jesus and God were related.
Christianity went far beyond henotheism’s hesitant claim upon ultimate truth. It was an exclusivist faith that foreclosed — was designed to foreclose — devotion to all other deities. Yet it was different from Judaism, which was just as exclusivist but crucially lacked a missionary impulse.
Ehrman, summarizing the argument of the social historian Ramsay MacMullen, imagines a crowd of 100 pagans watching a persuasive Christian debate an equally persuasive adherent of the healing god Asclepius: “What happens to the overall relationship of (inclusive) paganism and (exclusive) Christianity? … Paganism has lost 50 worshipers and gained no one, whereas Christianity has gained 50 worshipers and lost no one.” Thus, Christian believers go from roughly 1,000 in A.D. 60, to 40,000 in A.D. 150, to 2.5 million in A.D. 300. Ehrman allows that these raw numbers may look “incredible. But in fact they are simply the result of an exponential curve.” At a certain point, math took over. (Mormonism, which has been around less than 200 years, has seen comparable rates of growth.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0....2/13/books/review/ba

The diversity of early Christianity met the bottleneck of the Roman Jewish wars where adaptation and survival were paramount on what was transmitted and protected. With the crushing Roman victories over the Jews the story could not be carried by Apocalyptic Judaism alone it had to be a story that carried within it the Universalism of Hellenism and the familiarity of the mystery cults within the Roman Empire. Who has the best (adaptable and inclusive) universal story and who can survive the sword and eventually wield the sword itself was important in what story could sit on the throne of orthodoxy. The Story must be able to reach universally (Apostle Paul/Gospels) and it must be protected and propagated with the Sword (When Christianity became the official religion of Rome) The Gnostics were too exclusive and too close to heaven to win the battle on Earth. Secret knowledge vs universal knowledge.