In 2015, I published an ambitious book titled The Many Faces of Christ The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. The counter-intuitive argument was that most of the ancient “lost” or Gnostic gospels had survived at least in some parts of the world, and continued to exercise a surprising influence. This was part of a larger argument of mine, namely that the teeming torrent of ideas and beliefs that characterized ancient Christianity did not just simply vanish when the Roman Empire accepted the faith in the fourth century. Rather, most if not all those ideas continued, often designated as heretical, and many resurfaced in the Protestant movement of the sixteenth century.
In this sense, the Middle Ages constituted what I sometimes call a Missing Millennium, when Europe’s religious life superficially appeared so tranquil and orthodox, but in fact, it was nothing of the kind. It was rather marked by a Torrent of Faiths.
I had a whole book project planned on that topic, titled One Spring, Many Rivers: How Ancient Alternative Christianities Endured, although (as yet) it has never been developed fully. But I retain a key interest in the area, and may well pursue this one day. And Torrent of Faiths remains another potential title.
I here offer the working proposal I developed on these matters.