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The Bauer-Ehrman thesis is invalid. Earliest Christianity was not infested with a plethora of competing heresies (or "Christianities," as Ehrman and other Bauer paragons prefer to call them); it was a largely unified movement that had coalesced around the conviction that Jesus was the Messiah and exalted Lord predicted in the Old Testament. Consequently, the apostles preached Jesus crucified, buried, and risen on the third day according to the Scriptures. There were heretics, for sure, but the trajectory spanning from the Old Testament to Jesus and to the apostles provided a clear and compelling infrastructure and mechanism by which the earliest Christians could judge whether a given teaching conformed to its doctrinal christological core or whether it deviated from it.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Thus, the Muratorian Fragment does not appear to be establishing or "creating" a canon but is expressly affirming what has already been the case within the early church.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Thus, any suggestion that the church creates the canon, or that the canon is simply and solely the outcome of a long period of "choosing" by the established church, would not only unduly reverse the biblical and historical order but would have been an idea foreign to the earliest Christians.50 This is why the early church fathers speak consistently of "recognizing"51 or "receiving"52 the books of the New Testament, not creating or picking them.53 In their minds, scriptural authority was not something they could give to these documents but was something that was (they believed) already present in these documents—they were simply receiving what had been "handed down" to them.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
In the end, the New Testament canon is not so much a collection of writings by apostles, but rather a collection of apostolic writings—writings that bear the authoritative message of the apostles and derive from the foundational apostolic era (even if not directly from their hand). The authority of the New Testament books, therefore, is not so much about the "who" as it is about the "when." It is about the place of a particular book within the scope of redemptive history.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Jude classifies the heretics as "people . . . relying on their dreams" (v. 8), that is, mystics who claimed to enjoy privileged access to esoteric knowledge.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
The opponents of Gnosticism all recognized that the root of the problem lay in the opposition the Gnostics made between God the Father and the creator, whom they regarded as an inferior being.God Has Spoken, 130
"Gnostic" is the name now used to describe people who believed that the pathway to salvation lay through esoteric knowledge that was given only to a few enlightened ones, who were truly spiritual... The rest remained unspiritual, or "soulish"... and of course they were the great majority, even within the church.God Has Spoken (122)
The apostles were horrified and urged Simon to repent of his wickedness, which he apparently did. No more is heard of him in the New Testament, but a century later he was credited with having invented a creation myth that had become the origin of the so-called Gnostics.God Has Spoken (122)
the "Bauer thesis": the view that close study of the major urban centers at the end of the first and early second centuries reveals that early Christianity was characterized by significant doctrinal diversity, so that there was no "orthodoxy" or "heresy" at the inception of Christianity but only diversity-heresy preceded orthodoxy.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
What used to be regarded as heresy is the new orthodoxy of the day, and the only heresy that remains is orthodoxy itself.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
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