Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity [Paperback]

Walter Bauer (Author), Robert A. Kraft (Editor), Gerhard Krodel (Editor)

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Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Product Details

• Paperback: 326 pages
• Publisher: Sigler Pr; 2 edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0962364274
• ISBN-13: 978-0962364273
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,087,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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54 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Our Christianity was not the first Christianity, November 2, 2006

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John Harrison (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Paperback)

For hundreds of years everyone assumed that the earliest Christians were orthodox New Testament Roman Christians, and"heretical" Christianities--like Gnosticism and Marcionism--developed later, branches off the original orthodox trunk.

Then in the 1930s this German guy named Walter Bauer decided to actually look at the evidence. Imagine! What he discovered was that pretty much everywhere he looked--Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc.--the "heresies" weren't branches off any trunk, they were the original local Christianities. And they weren't small marginal sects, they were the main local Christianities.

The evidence shows that all around the Mediterranean, outside Rome, the orthodox New Testament Roman Christianity was a secondary sect, a sect that became dominant only after the conversion of Constantine gave it the advantage of Roman swords. Wow.

No wonder the big boys call this as a paradigm shattering book. Scholarly and technical, especially in the tedious first section of chapter one. Stick with it, because it gets fun and exciting.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Want to know about "primitive" Christianity?, June 19, 2009

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Paul Stevenson "Linguist" (Duhok, Iraq) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Paperback)

Many conservative Christians say they want to return to pure, primitive New Testament Christianity. In the United States this is most often heard from Protestant fundamentalists. But many Catholics and Orthodox Christians also believe that their version of Christianity is the original one.

However, if you want to see what *real* early Christianity was like, you have to look at ancient sources. A fascinating one is the Odes of Solomon, a collection of first century Palestinian hymns in Syriac (Aramaic). But for a more synthetic scholarly approach, Walter Bauer's book is one of the best. It is important to remember that "orthodoxy" is defined differently by different groups. Whatever your group believes is orthodox; whatever other groups believe is heresy. For many centuries, "orthodox" in the West has meant "Roman Catholic." But well before this version of orthodoxy existed, and for many centuries after it began, there were other Christianities.

Jewish Christianity and Gnosticism probably have the claim to being the oldest forms of Christianity. Marcionism, starting in the second century CE, quickly became the most widespread form of Christianity, and it remained so for centuries. Local varieties, such as that of the Syriac-speaking Bardaisan in Edessa, also sprang up. Eventually, though, the local variety of Christianity that sprang up in Rome managed to spread most effectively. Initially this was due to the natural organizational skills that characterized Roman culture. After Christianity was legalized in the Empire, Roman Christianity could avail itself of the resources of the state to aid its spread. (Even so, this only worked within the Empire. Outside of it, East Syriac Christianity was even bigger than Roman Catholicism for several centuries. See The Church of the East: A Concise History.)

Bauer takes us on a long guided tour of early varieties of Christianity. He begins in Edessa and Egypt, "so as to obtain a glimpse into the emergence and the original condition of Christianity in regions other than those that the New Testament depicts as affected by this religion" (p. xxii). He then surveys the development of Christianity in other areas around the Mediterranean world. In each case he discusses what can be gleaned from ancient documents about the progress of Christianity in the local milieu, and how "orthodoxy" eventually became prominent.

Bauer's last chapter summarizes the advantages Roman Christianity was able to make use of as it pressed itself onto populations around the Mediterranean. He has telling statements, such as, "The form of Christian belief and life which was successful was that supported by the strongest organization..." (p. 231). With relation to the original Jewish Christianity in Palestine: "Thus, if one may be allowed to speak rather pointedly, the apostle Paul was the only heresiarch known to the apostolic age--the only one who was so considered in that period, at least from one particular perspective" (p. 236). However, the Jewish Christians--called "Judaists" by Bauer--were too inflexible in dealing with would-be gentile converts, while Paul was quite adaptive. "Thus the Judaists become an instructive example of how even one who preserves the old position can become a 'heretic' if the development moves sufficiently far beyond him" (p. 236).

Much has been written on this topic since Bauer's time, but his book remains a classic in the area. If you have a serious interest in the early Christianity, you owe it to yourself to get Bauer's perspective.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars To the Victor Falls the Prerogative of Rewriting the History of the Conflict, July 4, 2008

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Old Timer (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Paperback)

Walter Bauer (1877-1960) found in early church heresy and orthodoxy a ready application of the proposition that to the victor falls the prerogative of rewriting the history of the conflict. His thesis is that the church in Rome, being better resourced and more developed institutionally, was able beginning in the second century not only to suppress doctrinal lines differing from its own but even to suppress evidence of their prior local dominance. Stated differently, heresy did not represent deviance from orthodoxy but rather was the survivor among early, competing traditions of Christianity. Bauer rejects Origen's maxim that "All heretics at first are believers; then later they swerve from the rule of faith." Eusebius is discounted as what we would call a "company man."

Bauer's methodology of 1934 has been regularly criticized for relying, for instance, on the absence of textual evidence, but subsequent manuscript discoveries have validated many of Bauer's conclusions, if not his methodology.

This is not a book for the amateur. Most of the references to the early writers presuppose the readers' familiarity with these early personalities. The 1970 translation by members of the Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins from the second, posthumous German edition (1963) does not conceal its Germanic textual base. The original footnoting has been updated, augmented, and Anglicized. The appendix "On the Problem of Jewish Christianity" has been revised by Robert A. Kraft, Professor of Religious Studies at UPenn, one of the American editors.

That said, the book is worth reading to discover firsthand Bauer's technique and the limitations of its factual basis on Bauer's foundational thesis.