Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity

by Gerd Lüdemann

Examines the scriptures of Chritianity and their authority, and asserts that the Bible is the word of human beings, not the word of God

Genres: Religion, History, Theology, Christianity

335 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Gerd Lüdemann is Professor of New Testament at the University of Göttingen, Germany, Director of the Institute of Early Christian Studies, and Founder and Director of the Archive Religionsgeschichtliche Schule at the University of Göttingen. He has also served as Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, and as co-chair of the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar on Jewish Christianity. He is a Fellow of the Westar Institute.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want a well researched look into the schisms of the very early (first century) Christian church, then this is the book. It isn't an easy read - Ludemann follows a path of close textual analysis rather than sweeping polemic, but if you can stick with it, it is fascinating. The section examining the split between Paul and the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem is particularly illuminating if you want to know the origins of the churches rapid disassociation with Judaic law, and the bitter results of this which have colored the last 2000 years of anti-antisemitism.

[Rory Fox · Rating 1 out of 5]

Presenting what became the minority perspectives in early Christianity.

The author had a well-established expertise with Scriptural texts and so the focus of this book is unsurprisingly upon the Scriptural side of heretics. This means that the book provides a thorough summary of those heresies which involved taking an attitude to Scriptures, such as Marcion(ism). But it completely ignores other heresies which were less interested in the Scriptures (such as Montanism and Valentinism).

It is understandable that the author was less interested in some heresies than others, but I expected the book to be more consistent and thorough in covering the contemporaneous heresies of the era which it focused on. Or at the very least, I thought that it would flag up its methodological approaches, so that gaps could be better anticipated by readers.

What the book did cover, it did so thoroughly. The author’s interest in Pauline Christianity was particularly evident in the amount of coverage that it got and in the very thorough presentation of the idea that Paul was considered a heretic by some parts of early Christianity.

What I appreciated less was the author’s rather self-confident and supercilious attitude. The book started by bemoaning critics of his previous book which had rejected the traditional Christian interpretation of the Resurrection. He dismissed those critics as having ‘abysmal ignorance’ and he took a swipe at the ‘schizophrenia’ of Christians who claimed to be able to combine a scholarly historical attitude with a practising faith (p.15). Really? How can an author possibly be so arrogant as to dismiss people taking an alternative view to his own, as thereby showing that they have a mental deficiency !

That same excessive self-confidence led him to also take a strident view on issues within the era he covered. For example, he confidently dismissed aspects of the Pseudo Clementines as fake, but then suddenly identified a paragraph which seemed to him to be authentically recording the voice of Peter (p.58). Really? How could he possibly be so sure of that?

Later he confidently identifies 2 Thessalonians as a fake letter which deliberately sets out to dismiss 1 Thessalonians as the fake. He describes that as a ‘foolhardy undertaking’ (p198). But again, what he is advancing is just a (controversial) hypothesis. It is not an established fact which is so established that it can justify an interpretation of foolhardiness.

And how on earth was he so convinced that ‘Paul’s life and work… ended in a fiasco… He left behind almost nothing that lasted’ (p103). Really? Even if Paul had never wrote a single letter, he still traveled extensively setting up Christian communities which survived long after his time. Even three centuries after Paul, Corinth was still proudly proclaiming its Pauline heritage.

When I picked up this book I expected to read a dispassionate historical analysis by an established scholar in the field. What I feel I ended up with was a slanted and opinionated polemic.

Not a book to be recommended.

[Richard Worden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative.