views that ended up winning the early Christian battles over what to believe. There were lots of Christians who held other views, as we will see later in the book. For further reflections, see my book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Thus, for example, Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.2–4; 4.26; see also Tertullian Prescription Against Heresies. This is why there is such a close connection in Christian antiquity between the content of a writing and its claim to authorship, as we will see. It was widely thought that if a writing promoted “false teachings,” then it certainly could not have been produced by an established authority. In other words, the decision about who authored a work (an apostle?) was often made on the basis of whether the teachings in the work were acceptable. See the discussion of the Gospel of Peter in Chapter 2. Chapter 1: A World of Deceptions and Forgeries The authoritative discussion of the Hitler diaries, told with flair and in precise detail, is found in Robert Harris, Selling Hitler (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986).
