If you are looking for a historical look at what were the essentials for the early church, I’d recommend Darrell Bock’s excellent book The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities. Bock, as always, does a superb job addressing current, popular myths and academic trends with even-handed, gracious, devastating logic. One of the main tenets of Bock’s argument is that Christianity, from the beginning, was defined by orthodoxy. That is, there was such a thing as Christianity before there were Christianities.
Bock takes the reader on a tour of early Christianity and demonstrates that there was a broad consensus in four areas–the view of God, the view of Jesus, the nature of salvation, and Jesus’ work–that defined traditionalist Christianity. “I believe our tour has shown enough unanimity of belief in these four topics among the traditionalists,” writes Bock, “that, for them, these ideas were the core of Christianity.”
Bock continues:
This core of orthodox teaching could also be stated negatively.
So, contrary to outsider-skeptics, Christianity did have an orthodoxy from the beginning.
And, I would add, contrary to insider-revisionists, Christianity still needs an orthodoxy. If, that is, newer kinds of Christianity are still intent on being Christian.
