The Pattern of Christian Truth: A Study in the Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church (Bampton Lectures)

Walter Bauers Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity created a stir with its argument that the teachings later condemned as heresy in the later second century onward were in fact dominant in the earliest decades of the church. This full-scale response by H. E. W. Turner has not enjoyed the attention it deserves. Turners volume represents a learned and sophisticated restatement of the traditional view: what became official orthodoxy was taught early on by the majority of church teachers albeit not in fully developed form.