THERE IS TODAY A GREAT DEAL OF CURIOSITY about the earliest years of Christianity. We see it whenever a bestselling novel proposes an alternative story line (or bloodline) for the Church’s origins. We see it whenever an archeologist turns up a previously unknown apocryphal gospel—and the news media say that it calls everything into question. We see it in the cottage industries that have grown up around the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic
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