Fragments of a Faith Forgotten

About this book

The earliest Christian centuries held more competing ideas about salvation and the soul than later histories often reveal. Many of those voices survive only in scattered writings, quotations and the accusations of their opponents.

G. R. S. Mead attempts to reconstruct the beliefs of Gnostic teachers and communities from scattered writings and later quotations. His sympathy for esoteric religion is evident throughout. Many accounts come from opponents who condemned the movements they described, giving Mead an unusually difficult body of evidence to work with.