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Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity. By Gerd Ludemann, translated by John Bowden. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996. xvi + 335pp. $24.00 (cloth).
Gerd Ludemann has expended considerable energy in exploring the hearesies of the early church in the more than twenty years since the appearance of his 1975 work on Simon Magus. In the present study, the author once again takes up a challenge that was issued in 1934 bv Walter Bauer that te early Christians who acquired the label of "heretic" deserve to be considered in light of their own time, and not judged lav the criteria of (usually) later "orthodox" thinkers to determine the value and acceptability of the doctrines they promoted (9). In stronger terms, Ludeman challenges the rE ader to reject the previously commonplace notion that heresy is inevitably a rebellion against orthodox; instead, any attempt at a "li\ing -view of religion" is bound to result in a judgment of heresy (216).
Ludemann insists that in the first two centuries of Christian history, there was a high level of uncertainty concerning what would eventually emerge as acceptable doctrine, and that the early heretics actually made significant contributions to the emergence of orthodox teaching and practice. This assertion is supported...