ABSTRACT

One potentially could find a set of believers who engaged in different rituals, followed different disciplinary practices and also lived under a totally different ecclesiastical leadership structure than the great church, and yet evaluate them as 'insiders', as long as there was no evidence of doctrinal disagreement. Thus was born the notion of internal 'dissent' or renewal as an historical reality for early Christianity. A watershed of the new discussion was the 1971 work of James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, where they laid out the evidence for early Christianity being a multiform reality, with differing characteristics dependent upon the geographical, social, and cultural location in which it was found. The new 'theologies of liberation' both arose out of and expanded upon this social and political analysis. One of the earliest attempts to read dissenting voices from their own point of view was Elaine Pagels' study of the Gnostics.