What explains our current fascination with long-discounted stories and the long-dead communities that told them? For one thing, it is the latest expression of mainline Christians' ongoing challenge of their received verities. In the 1990s this impulse fueled the "historical Jesus" debates as liberal scholars questioned the historical accuracy of the New Testament and whittled the Gospels down to the few verses that seemed factually plausible to them (yes to Jesus' healings, no to his Resurrection). Now the same restlessness is causing some believers to look beyond the established texts to heretical or noncanonical Scriptures. If we were willing to question the Gospel writers' historical accuracy, goes the implicit argument, why should we blindly accept their institutional successors' judgment that other texts were utterly devoid of the spiritual truth? Or as Marcus Borg, author of The Heart of Christianity, bluntly puts it, "There's a lot of interest in early Christian diversity because many people who have left the church-and some who are still in it-are looking for another way of being Christian."

The recovered texts also feed America's ever sharpening appetite for mystical spirituality. At least since Eastern disciplines became popular in the 1970s, some Christians have searched their own tradition for an inner path to the divine, hoping to balance or even supplant the sometimes dry diet of Sunday churchgoing. Yoga, the Cabala and Marianne Williamson have been taken up by those seeking a relationship with God that is not strictly tethered to Christianity. But some of the lost Christianities encourage esoteric knowledge and practice while maintaining Christ's teachings as their center. Pagels quotes an American-born Zen priest as joking, "Had I known the Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn't have had to become a Buddhist!"

The ancient texts also address questions-about evil and suffering in the world, about the relationship of body and soul, about God's simultaneous closeness to and apparent distance from us-that never seem totally settled in this age of second-guessing and postmodern mix and match. Traditional Christianity, for example, may explain alienation-the feeling that we don't really belong here-by saying we are all just passing through this sin-stained world on our way to Christ's Kingdom. But the feeling of disjunction continues to gnaw at many and, especially for young people, seems only to worsen. Hence we toy with the Gnostic idea that our seeming reality is an evil sham-even if only within the safe confines of cyberpunk fantasy, as when The Matrix's Morpheus tells Neo, "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth."

That these yearnings are finding such expression, however, owes everything to a recent scholarly reappraisal of the early development of Christianity. The faith's historical silhouette was traditionally thought to resemble that of a hardwood tree: bushy with denominational profusion on top, but plumb line straight in its bottom half, theologically unified down through the hardy "primitive church" and on, through apostolic roots, to Christ. To be sure, there was some record of early deviations, or heresies. But they seemed minor, perverse curiosities of limited interest.

Later, however, as more "heretical" artifacts surfaced, scholars began suggesting that early Christianity may have been far more diverse than was previously acknowledged. This theory received a significant boost in 1945, when the discovery of a remarkable trove of noncanonical Gospels (biographies of Christ), epistles and apocalypses near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi enabled several previously mute traditions to speak for themselves. Gradually, the more liberal historians came to view early Christianity not as an oak but as a mangrove, a welter of trunks with names like Gnosticism, Ebionism and Marcionism, each offering a different vision of Christ and Christians. The "orthodox" stem, they concluded, had only gradually strangled or absorbed the others. The scarcity of lost texts, the revisionists decided, did not reflect unpopularity in their day so much as a later campaign by the church to eliminate what it deemed misguided teaching.

Haltingly, then with increasing enthusiasm, cultural interpreters have explored this reversal's possible implications. Examining the Nag Hammadi trove, Pagels has identified a bouquet of elements attractive to the modern spiritual seeker: echoes of Buddhism and Freud and a lively appreciation of women's spiritual role. She claims to have found a Christianity less keyed to make-or-break beliefs like the virgin birth or even Christ's divinity and more accepting of salvation through ongoing spiritual experience. Some of the texts, she has written, deserve to be considered "not as 'madness and blasphemy,' but as Christians in the first centuries experienced them—a powerful alternative to what we now know as orthodox Christian tradition."

The current flurry of popular interest in the subject can be traced to Brown's The Da Vinci Code. A rowdy carnival barker of a thriller, it accuses the Roman Catholic Church of concealing the "true" sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene by suppressing early alternative Scriptures. In a much watched ABC news special on Magdalene that aired in November, Brown extended the lure of the forbidden to the entire noncanonical library, saying "The question historians ask themselves is, If the church was making such a concerted effort to destroy this information, you have to assume that it was fairly explosive." Presumably, this sentiment will gain a yet wider audience when Ron Howard delivers his film The Da Vinci Code, scheduled for release in 2005.

Darker imaginations, meanwhile, have fixed on grimmer aspects of the recovered texts. Writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski have been intentionally coy about their debt to Gnosticism. But their Matrix trilogy's catchy yet disturbing message that our waking world is an illusion and that we can somehow break out of it by using esoteric knowledge (in this case, hacking) might have been ripped straight from 1,800-year-old noncanonical classics such as the Gospel of Truth and the Origin of the World.

The recovered manuscripts don't speak unanimously. Lost Christianities author Ehrman, who chairs the religious-studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, notes that some of the early Christians believed in one God, some in two, and others in 30. "There were some who believed Jesus' death brought about the world's salvation," he says, "and others who thought it had nothing to do with it. Others said Jesus never died." But all the lost Christianities shared one conviction: that Jesus Christ's relatively recent presence, activity and fate on this earth were of transcendent importance. They grappled with essential questions of sin, death and Christ's nature. Some of their answers are interesting now mostly for their oddity (one text tells the Garden of Eden story from the serpent's viewpoint; another speaks in the voice of a female divinity). Others illustrate stages, eventually left behind, in the development of the Christianity we know today. And still others are compelling enough to stir both conservative fears and liberal hopes. A charting of the full theological kaleidoscope would take volumes, but it is possible, using Ehrman's book as a jumping-off point, to examine some of the more striking and widespread of the Christian roads not taken.

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