in the 4th century, held by people before the 4th century."

Ehrman expands on the thesis of German New Testament scholar Walter Bauer (1877-1960), laid out in his primary work Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934). Bauer hypothesised that the Church Fathers, most notably Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History, "had not given an objective account of the relationship of early Christian groups." Instead,