joelr
Well-Known Member
It's known the church took over pagan churches to make Christian churches. The 2nd century was at least 50% Gnostic, there were over 40 Gospels and 20 Acts.
But once the church was fully established, yes it was heretical to have anything but the canon. This is why the Dead Sea scrolls were hidden, you would be killed for it.
There was one Gospel being written, a "sayings" of Jesus being copied from another philosopher and in the middle of the text it was suddenly hidden.
Besides what we recovered there is a black hole of information for the early period. We don't get to hear much from opposing writers.
The 4 Gospels survived because Bishop Irenaeus, late 2nd century was calling for a power structure where only specific people could read and teach/interpret the scripture, with Bishops, priests and so on. He hated the Gnostics and was first to mention a four Gospel tradition.
Later in Rome they also adopted this and in 385 it became law. Other versions were punishable. If you read the letters of Irenaeus he clearly wanted power. That is why those Gospels survived. Everything else eventually became heretical.
Before him was the Marcion canon and he swore by a longer version of Luke. So it's completely subjective.
The 2nd century looked more like this:
"These various interpretations were called heresies by the leaders of the proto-orthodox church, but many were very popular and had large followings. Part of the unifying trend in proto-orthodoxy was an increasingly harsh anti-Judaism and rejection of Judaizers. Some of the major movements were:
- Gnosticism – second to fourth centuries – reliance on revealed knowledge from an unknowable God, a distinct divinity from the Demiurge who created and oversees the material world. The Gnostics claimed to have received secret teachings (gnosis) from Jesus via other apostles which were not publicly known, or in the case of Valentinius from Paul the Apostle. Gnosticism is predicated on the existence of such hidden knowledge, but brief references to private teachings of Jesus have also survived in the canonic scripture (Mark 4:11) as did warning by the Christ that there would be false prophets or false teachers. Irenaeus' opponents also claimed that the wellsprings of divine inspiration were not dried up, which is the doctrine of continuing revelation.[citation needed]
- Marcionism – second century – the God of Jesus was a different God from the God of the Old Testament.
- Montanism – second century – a pentecostal movement initiated by Montanus and his female disciples, featuring prophetic continuing revelations from the Holy Spirit.
- Adoptionism – second century – Jesus was not born the Son of God, but was adopted at his baptism, resurrection or ascension.
- Docetism – second to third century – Jesus was pure spirit and his physical form an illusion.
- Sabellianism – third century – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three modes of the one God and not the three separate persons of the Trinity.
- Arianism – third to fourth century – Jesus, while not merely mortal, was not eternally divine and was of some lesser status than God the Father.[note 1]
Frankly Justin Martyr's apologetic text is something you are talking about. He claims Jesus is just like all the Greek demigods, and lists many ways. He just then says the devil went back in time to influence these writers to create similar stories to fool Christians. At the time it was like "oh, ok, yeah, Satan was trying to fool us, way to go Justin!" But it's really an admission by someone who grew up Greek that it's a representation of typical Hellenistic culture.
