Video from Wrestling with God
The Gnostic Gospels and Orthodox Christianity
"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." from video introduction
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