Various Christianities

I've started what looks like a "scholarly" book called "The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture" by Bart Ehrman. He has a more recent and popular, even best sellling, book called "Misquoting Jesus" which you could very well have noticed. "Misquoting" is really a popularization of some of the basic ideas in the first book, which basically revolve around the notion that early copyists of the bible (of course mass printing didn't happen until 1500 years or so after the time of Jesus) when they made their copies, would change the wording to fit their own theologies. His thesis is that there were many different "Christianities" at first, each distinguished at least in part by how they viewed the nature of Jesus (was he just a man, a man whom god entered in some way, or was he not really a man but only appeared to be one? The Docetists were the people who advocated this last point of view). The issue was "finally" decided (but not really) at some of the church councils that occurred in the 3d and 4th centuries out of which came things like the Nicene Creed. Anyway, bother all that -- as the bible was copied by individuals, variations appeared in the text, usually by accident, but sometimes by design. And Ehrman's books talk about the examples of textual variants that are probably due to someone changing the text to benefit his particular theological point of view. The title of his first book ("The Orthodox ...") just refers to the fact that what we now call "Orthodoxy" -- mainstream western christianity -- happens to be the particular sect of early Christianity that won the contest among various early christianities, and he studies the variations in the text that can be associated with various theologies that the contending points of view had.

The thing that interests me in the topic is the possibility of plumbing what the diversity of views of Jesus was like in the early church, and that is the main application of "The Orthodox ..." as well. Many modern Christians just sort of "know" that Christianity started out as a more or less pure thing, and then as history moved along corruption ("backsliding") occurred and the story of the church has been the story of the struggle to get back to that original pure thing, of which is the best, most successful effort to date. I think I agree with Ehrman's general notions, although some of his detailed arguments seem here and there somewhat stretched.

I see an analogy between Ehrman's view of how the church arrived at orthodoxy and my view of how many CEO's of major companies have gotten to be the CEO. Thirty years ago the company hired a bunch of entry level guys in various fields, with all of them being more or less ordinary and undistinguishable. I like to think of the bulk of them as having been interior offensive linemen on their high school football teams. Most of these guys professionally were accountants or business guys, with an occasional liberal arts person thrown in. Anyway, the real point is they were a bunch of ordinary unremarkable guys (even in high school the cheer leaders preferred the quarterback and the halfbacks). Thirty years and a half dozen layoffs later there is one guy standing and he is the CEO. The outcome was no more determined by qualifications than if at the beginning of the thirty years they had all played "rock-scissors-paper" until one guy was left. Of course the last guy, the CEO, has a staff and they make up a story about how he has to be paid a bunch of money because of all the responsibility he has and because there are so few people like him (well, yeah).

It may seem a bit antiseptic, but with a few substitutions in the above story (change 30 years to 300), I think that is how Ehrman thinks we arrived at Christian orthodoxy.

[I say it's "scholarly" but what that means is the guy here and there uses greek words that I can't understand, but there aren't too many of them and the balance of the text is so well written that I'm immensely enjoying reading it. Perhaps I'll manage later a rundown of the various views of Jesus that he "ferrets" out.]