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THE EBIONITES
The earliest of the now banned faiths might be described as Christianity still climbing out of its Jewish shell. Jesus was a Jew, and groups like the Ebionites insisted a person had to be Jewish to be his follower. They made use of ritual baths and prayed facing Jerusalem. They believed in Christ but saw him, as Ehrman puts it, "as the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of Jewish Scripture." The Ebionites' Jesus was not a member of an eternal Trinity. They claimed he was a man whose original distinction was that he kept the entire Jewish law-with its hundreds of commandments handed down from God through Moses-to perfection and that God recognized this extraordinary righteousness by adopting him as his son and assigning him a special mission: to sacrifice himself in atonement for human sin.
Several of these ideas obviously run counter to today's Scripture, notably the Gospel of John's celebration of Jesus' divinity from the dawn of time ("In the beginning was the Word"). But then the Ebionites' good book excluded John. It consisted of the Old Testament and most of the Gospel of Matthew, which emphasizes Jesus' Jewishness. The Ebionites had a particular dislike for Paul, referring to him as an "enemy," owing to his claims that belief in Christ made the entirety of Jewish law irrelevant for salvation. In the Ebionites, you can see a people struggling to digest into a much loved set of beliefs an element so radical that it would eventually separate itself entirely. That they were able to maintain themselves for centuries suggests how flexible early Christianity was.
THE MARCIONITES
The ebionites' mirror opposites, the Marcionites, made a point of eliminating even the smallest speck of Judaism from their Christianity. And they achieved spectacular success, dominating the new faith in parts of Asia Minor and influencing it elsewhere for hundreds of years. In order to do so, however, they created two Gods.
The sect's founder, Marcion, a shipping magnate in the Black Sea port of Sinope, traveled to Rome in about A.D. 139 and impressed himself on its Christian church with a princely donation of 200,000 sesterces. He then produced two books of theology and convened church leaders to discuss them. Upon reading the works, the leaders excommunicated him and returned his money.
Like other theologians, Marcion struggled with the existence of suffering and death in the world. But his explanation for them differed vividly from the eventual Christian conclusion that Adam's original sin had corrupted God's good creation. Instead, Marcion decided that the world and its complaints had been created by a bad God, a harsh Jewish deity who imposed a death sentence on humanity when it could not meet his law's impossibly high standards. The "God of Jesus," meanwhile, was a totally unrelated and unanticipated figure. This loving deity appeared one day from heaven and sacrificed himself to free humanity from his vengeful predecessor. Those who accepted him would be relieved of sin and would triumph over death; those who did not would remain in the Jewish God's angry clutches and hence, eventually, go to hell.
By neatly separating the two Gods, Marcion, says Ehrman, managed to emphasize what many in the Roman Empire found most enchanting about Christianity-love, grace, opposition to this harsh world and salvation from it-while getting rid of its less appealing aspects-law, guilt, judgment, eternal punishment and close ties to Judaism, a faith many saw as odd. Ehrman imagines that for many Marcionites "there was probably a burst of energy that came with being relieved from the law and the God that gave it, a little like the one born-again Christians have today when they realize that the burden of sin has been lifted from them and they have been saved. I think it was a type of ecstasy."
The price of that ecstasy, however, was the abandonment of the idea of monotheism and the acceptance of a totally otherworldly Christ, whose nonmembership in breathing, bleeding humanity would seem to negate his agony on the Cross. This angered the founders of today's church, many themselves facing martyrdom for the faith. It might make Marcion's vision unappetizing even today. Yet Ehrman reports that as he describes parts of it, he often sees people nodding. Many, he thinks, tend to see Jesus as primarily heavenly. Others, when confronted with some of the harder Old Testament stories, retreat to the (inaccurate) notion that the Jewish God is a "God of wrath" and different from the New Testament's "God of love." These people would not get up today and follow the man from Sinope, says Ehrman, "but they're kind of closet Marcionites."
THE GNOSTICS
Gnosticism may have originally been an adaptation of Greek philosophy. Ehrman summarizes it as follows: "The world is miserable, a cesspool of ignorance and suffering ... and it's not even really our world. We come from somewhere else, and salvation is finding our way back." Like Marcion, the Christian Gnostics believed that our troubled world and deteriorating bodies were created by an inferior (they would add malign) deity. Their particular conviction was that at the last instant a higher, better God inserted in each of us a spark of his divinity. If we could attain enough knowledge (gnosis in Greek) to conquer our delusional attachment to material reality, we could free our spiritual selves to join our real Father in a better place. The world, to paraphrase James Joyce, was a nightmare from which the Gnostics were trying to awake.
And Christ was the alarm clock. Gnosticism saw him as the envoy of gnosis, sent by the true God to enlighten and free us. The Crucifixion was secondary; after all, Christ was merely shucking off his fleshly body. His real task was to transmit a special wisdom (alluded to in Gnostic writings but not spelled out) that would liberate us.
There is something simultaneously repellent and seductive about this myth. Repellent because most of us today tend to see our world as a mixed bag of good and bad, and the Gnostic references to it as a "corpse" seem harshly dismissive. Seductive because the Gnostics, suggests Ehrman, "were saying religiously what we tend to say psychologically." Or fictionally, as when Morpheus explains to Neo that humans are "born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch" but promises to set him free.
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