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Originally Posted by photon
This is actually a fascinating topic. A great place to start is a series of lectures by Bart Ehrman ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman).
Early Christianity looked very different than current Christianity.. none of the books in the NT are first-hand accounts of Jesus, they're all written well after his life (decades or even centuries), and there are no direct accounts from other sources, so knowing exactly what Jesus said and did is problematic.
Early Christianity had many different beliefs (Jesus as divine but not human, human not divine, there was 1 God who wasn't the God of the OT, there was 3 gods, there was 30 gods, there was 365 gods), all of which used Jesus as their source. Over time as the church grew and the struggles over which writings were used, one set of beliefs and set of scriptures won out, eventually being ratified 400 years after Jesus or so. |
Your information is faulty and biased. The last book written in the New Testament was Revelations and it was written within the first century at about 90A.D. About 57 years after Jesus' resurrection. Churches were small and under constant persecution within the first few centuries. No church had copies of all the 27 books of the New Testament at first. They would slowly gather them whenever they could. The older and larger churches would have a more complete collection then the younger churches. Of course just like today there are false teachers and literature that is trying to influence Christianity. What you've described above is doctrines associated with Gnosticism. It was a blending of Greek mysticism with Christianity. The gospel of John was written in part to counter this heresy. Actually if it wasn't for the Gnostics and the Ebonites much of the New Testament wouldn't have been written. The Ebonites were Jews who were trying to mix Old Testament law and ritual with Christianity.