Early Church

Flip to the front of almost any Bible and you’ll find a table of contents split into two halves. Old Testament, New Testament. Most of us never ask who decided there should be a second list at all, or why the first one stayed. The answer runs through a rich shipowner from the Black Sea coast named Marcion. In the second century he drew up the first Christian canon we know of, a short list of books he considered authentic. He left out the entire Jewish scripture on purpose, because he’d concluded it was the word of a different God. ...

“They call us unspiritual, common, and ecclesiastic.” That’s a bishop talking, around the year 180. Irenaeus of Lyon is complaining about Valentinian Christians who still sat in his congregation and took communion with everyone else. They just treated him as a man who couldn’t follow the conversation. If you’ve spent any time with Gnostic texts, you’ve probably met the charge that grows out of complaints like his. Gnosticism, it goes, split humanity into the saved few and the hopeless many, and the few decided they were the few. I want to give that charge its full weight, because some of it lands. Then I want to show you a few texts that pull hard the other way. ...

Picture the church in Rome around the year 140. There’s no cathedral and no Vatican, just a scatter of house congregations that speak Greek, argue constantly, and look to a handful of gifted teachers. One of the most gifted is a man from Egypt named Valentinus, and by one ancient account he expects to be made bishop. He wasn’t. Someone else got the job, and within a generation Valentinus had become a favorite target of the heresy hunters. Bentley Layton, whose translation of the fragments I’ll lean on throughout, says that if things had gone the other way, “the whole future of Roman Christianity might have been unimaginably altered.” ...