The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept of ôdeviant Christianity.ö This will involve attempts to answer three main questions: What is the mainstream of Christian faith and practice? What deviations from that mainstream have occurred historically? What are the appropriate theological criteria for deciding whether a deviation has gone so far afield that it is no longer a part of the Christian mainstream? These are not easy questions to answer, and they never have been, since there has never been only a single variety of Christianity in existence.
In order for there to be a Christian mainstream, there must first be a Christian community with a self-conscious identity. This came into existence during the period when the New Testament documents were being written. One can usefully dwell on this period, since the seeds of many later developments can be found in the details of how the New Testament documents were written, collected, and canonized.
Among the earliest documents, those that fall before or were contemporary with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 69, e.g., Paul and Mark, take it for granted that Christians are a special class of Jews -- specifically, Jews who know who the Messiah is -- and their theology would make no sense outside a Jewish context. On this, consider PaulÆs dense argument in Romans about why Christians, now including Gentile converts, have inherited the benefits of the covenant with Moses.
In contrast, Luke, whom many scholars consider to be the last of the four Evangelists and the only Gentile among them, looks back on Judaism almost nostalgically. In Luke/Acts, the Pastorals, and the other late epistles, the relationship of Christianity to Judaism is simply not a problem. In them, Christianity is assumed to be sui generis, pursuing its path without any more concern for Jewish beliefs than for pagan beliefs.
In the middle documents, e.g., Matthew, John, and Revelation, t...