Lost Christianities
"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' 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' closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus' 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."--Jacket.
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What Hacker News says
- One of the books that I've come across that gets into the development process of the gospels is:
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
According to that book, there was a fair bit of religious conflict between the gonastic branch and the proto-orthordox (and some others too) with gospels and edits that attempt to discredit the other sects or build up their own narrative that is in agreement with their faith.
- Bart D. Ehrman has written a lot of interesting books on Christianity (some of his work might be considered controversial to some practitioners). E.g.,
"Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior"
"Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics"
"Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew"
And, many more. I don't know of a commercial book site where I can just link to a search by author:
https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Bart+D.+Ehrman&lg_topic=lib...
- (aside - Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew is an interesting book. There were arguments and heresies and divisions in the early church between the Gnostic and proto-orthodox (and other) branches that played out in the scriptures, forgeries, and later edits to each)
- It likely came that way via the Vulgate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate ) which was a translation of Greek into Latin in the fourth century. It was the official Catholic version in 1545 - 1563 (the KJV was translated in 1611).
in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum
Though going back to logos - even that word changed meaning over the the centuries from Heraclitus (5th century BC) ( https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/17-the-heraclitean-logos/ https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/12/logos-of-hera... https://modernstoicism.com/heraclitus-and-the-birth-of-the-l... ) to the neoplatonist school (3rd century AD)
The early Christian church traditions were a battlefield of dueling scriptures and philosophies.
Some books that I'd recommend on that area. Note that my approach to the Bible isn't one of a believer but rather as another work of ancient philosophy (which was my favorite philosophy class of my almost not getting a CS degree) and stoicism is the branch within there that I've read the most of.
https://www.amazon.com/Stoicism-Early-Christianity-Tuomas-Ra...
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Christianities-Battles-Scripture...
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Scriptures-Books-that-Testament/...
