To the Victor Falls the Prerogative of Rewriting the History of the Conflict:
Walter Bauer (1877-1960) found in early church heresy and orthodoxy a ready application of the proposition that to the victor falls the prerogative of rewriting the history of the conflict. His thesis is that the church in Rome, being better resourced and more developed institutionally, was able beginning in the second century not only to suppress doctrinal lines differing from its own but even to suppress evidence of their prior local dominance. Stated differently, heresy did not represent deviance from... more info
Our Christianity was not the first Christianity:
For hundreds of years everyone assumed that the earliest Christians were orthodox New Testament Roman Christians, and"heretical" Christianities--like Gnosticism and Marcionism--developed later, branches off the original orthodox trunk. Then in the 1930s this German guy named Walter Bauer decided to actually look at the evidence. Imagine! What he discovered was that pretty much everywhere he looked--Syria, Palestine, Egypt, etc.--the "heresies" weren't branches off any trunk, they were the original... more info
