Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Ehrman Bart D.
Title : Lost Christianities The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Year : 2003

Link download : Ehrman_Bart_D_-_Lost_Christianities.zip

This is a book about the wide diversity of early Christianity and its sacred texts. Some of these texts came to be included in the New Testament. Others came to be rejected, attacked, suppressed, and destroyed. My goals are to examine some of these noncanonical writings, see what they can tell us about the various forms of Christian faith and practice in the second and third centuries, and consider how one early Christian group established itself as dominant in the religion, determining for ages to come what Christians would believe, practice, and read as sacred Scripture. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of texts are my own. I would like to thank a number of people who have provided their generous support, without whom the book could not have been written. First is Bruce Nichols, who suggested the book and helped me refine its character at the preliminary stages. Robert Miller, senior executive editor at Oxford University Press, and Laura Brown, president of Oxford University Press, USA, convinced me that Oxford was the best venue for publication; I am grateful for their support all along the way, and especially for the extensive help Robert has given over the years. In the early stages of my research, I was helped by my reliable and insightful graduate students, Stephanie Cobb, now teaching at Hofstra University, and Diane Wudel, now teaching at Wake Forest Divinity School. An inordinate amount of the research assistantship fell on the shoulders of my current graduate student, Carl Cosaert, who bore the burden with remarkable ease. I have been given unusually helpful advice by those who read the book in manuscript, Robert Miller and Peter Ginna at Oxford University Press, and scholars and friends who went well above and beyond the call of collegial duty in lending a hand to another scholar in the field: Elizabeth Clark at Duke, Michael Holmes at Bethel College, Andrew Jacobs at the University of California Riverside, Dale Martin at Yale, and Elaine Pagels at Princeton. The world would be a happier place if all authors had such careful, knowledgeable, interested, and generous friends and readers. Finally I would like to thank my wife, Sarah Beckwith, a medievalist in the Department of English at Duke, whose scintillating intelligence, uncanny intellectual range, and broad generosity make her not only a dialogue partner extraordinaire but also a woman I plan to be around the rest of my life. I have dedicated the book to her. ...