Season 2 · Episode 22
Full episode description
The history Christianity later told itself was a story of one faith handed down from the apostles, with heretics breaking off from a settled centre. That story is backwards. The second century was a field of competing Christianities, and the version that became orthodoxy was one stream among several.
This episode walks the lost Christianities:
- Marcion of Sinope, the wealthy outsider who published the first Christian canon, decided the God of the Hebrew Bible was not the God of Jesus, and built a network of churches that survived for centuries
- the Gnostic schools, especially the followers of Valentinus, who turned salvation into liberating knowledge and read the New Testament as code
- the Jewish Christian communities, including the Ebionites, who kept the Sabbath, observed Torah, and considered Paul a dangerous innovator
- the Syrian tradition around the Gospel of Thomas, where sayings of Jesus survived in a form the canonical gospels lost
- the Montanists, who claimed continuing prophecy from the Holy Spirit and refused to accept that revelation had stopped with the apostles
- the multiple Christologies, where Christ was variously a divine being who only appeared human, a man adopted by God, a pre-existent Word, or a Jewish messiah
- the proto-orthodox, who were not yet the majority, but who held the line that would eventually become Catholic and Orthodox Christianity
What unified them was the name Christian. Almost nothing else. The canon, the creeds, the church structure, the priesthood, the sacraments, all of these are the result of two centuries of fight, not the inheritance of one tradition.
Not from tradition. From evidence.