Bauer Thesis (2)

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.
Andreas Kostenberger
The Heresy of Orthodoxy

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Andreas Kostenberger 1st Century Bauer Thesis

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

Andreas Kostenberger

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Bauer Thesis (2)

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