Before Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy was not the beginning of Christianity. It was the outcome.

For centuries the story ran in one direction: first the pure faith of the apostles, then the heresies that corrupted it. In 1934 Walter Bauer reversed the sequence and argued that in much of the ancient world what later counted as heresy came first. Nearly a century of scholarship has been spent testing that reversal.

Before Orthodoxy follows the argument from the beginning, and follows it fairly. It runs from the Jesus movement in Jerusalem to the Council of Nicaea in 325: the tensions inside Paul's mission, the fracture of the Johannine community, Jewish Christianity, Marcion and his two gods, the Gnostic systems, the New Prophecy of Montanus, the apologists, the women whose practice the sources half conceal, the ordinary believers of the apocryphal literature, and Celsus watching it all from outside.

Then it turns to the current that won, from Irenaeus and the canon to Tertullian and Alexandria, and asks the harder question: what actually held the movement together while it argued?

The final part weighs Bauer's thesis region by region and refuses both easy endings. What the sources show is neither an original purity later spoiled, nor a plurality without a center in which orthodoxy is merely the name of the winning party, but what this book calls a centered plurality: real differences and genuine conflicts, oriented by a common core.

Written for readers who have read Ehrman and want the sources, the objections and the limits of what can be known. With a chronology, a glossary of figures and terms, and a selected bibliography.