For more than two thousand years, Christian history has been told by its victors: bishops, emperors, theologians with permanent positions, and popes with swords. The rest—the heresies, the “errors,” the marginal groups, the apocryphal gospels, the women preachers, the rebel gods, the defeated Messiahs—was swept into silence.
This is the starting point of the book Los cristianismos derrotados (Defeated Christianities), by the philologist, historian, and enlightened heretic Antonio Piñero. An uncomfortable work that seeks precision not scandal: it dismantles the official accounts of early Christianity, compares them with Gnostic, Ebionite, Docetist, and Marcionite sources, and methodically demonstrates what many intuitively suspect: that orthodoxy was a political invention, not a divine revelation.
And that Jesus, the man from Nazareth, would have been the first to be expelled from his own Church.
Piñero doesn’t write from resentment, but from facts. His thesis is straightforward: there wasn’t just one original Christianity, but many. In the plural. And it was the least violent who lost.
From the first century on, profoundly different currents existed: some saw Jesus as a human being inspired by God (Ebionites), others as a divine being who never set foot on Earth (Docetists). Some rejected the God of the Old Testament as cruel and vengeful (Marcionites); others affirmed that salvation came only through inner knowledge, not through the cross or resurrection (Gnostics). The Imperial Church labeled them “heretics.” Piñero’s book calls them by their name: silenced voices. Heresy, in reality, was thinking differently before the catechism existed.
The most uncomfortable aspect of the book is its institutional archaeology. The author demonstrates how, in the second and third centuries, the movement that would later be known as “Catholicism” began to gain ground, not through spiritual superiority, but through bureaucratic organization, geostrategic alliances, and systematic document censorship.
With the rise of Constantine and the Council of Nicaea (325), Christianity transformed into a power structure armed with dogmas. It was decided which gospels were “inspired” and which would be destroyed. A creed was written. Faith was institutionalized, salvation was regulated, and dissent began to be punished.
“The religion of martyrs became the religion of executioners,” Piñero summarizes with a painful irony.
There are moments in the book that seem like historical science fiction. For example, when analyzing the Gospel of Thomas: there, Jesus neither dies nor is resurrected, he only teaches. Or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, where the woman is not only a disciple, but a leader. Or that of Philip, which directly dismantles any hierarchical structure.
What if those versions had been the dominant ones? What would the Church be like today? What if, instead of the Vatican, we had community circles without hierarchies? What if salvation were not through the cross or guilt, but through inner knowledge?
What Piñero proposes is not just a historical revision, but a possibility: that Christianity could have been something else. That its current form was not inevitable, but the result of a military victory in the realm of ideas.
Piñero’s work is not theological. It is historical. It does not seek to convert or atheize. It seeks to remind us that the history of religions is written in erasures.
In an era of resurgent religious populism, and where orthodoxy once again masquerades as eternal morality, recovering “defeated Christianities” is not an academic exercise. It is a political act. A way of remembering that spiritual dissent existed before the Vatican, and that faith, like power, also has its victims.
If God wrote his history through men, then men also edited God.
Defeated Christianities: The Gospel According to Those Who Lost
It wasn’t God who chose the Church. It was the Empire.
There was a time when being a Christian was a form of resistance. Before cassocks, before the Vatican, before crowns and crusades. There was a time when there was no single way to believe in Jesus. Not even a single way to write about him. What we call “Church” today was, in its origins, one of many possible versions. A faction. A side. A hypothesis. And it won the war.
That is the original sin that Antonio Piñero denounces in Los cristianismos derrotados (Defeated Christianities). And he does so without heresies or sermons. Only with history. With documents. With archaeological remains, forgotten texts, and a brutal warning: the Christianity that survived was not the truest. It was the most violent.
The One with an Emperor Won
What Piñero demonstrates—with philological precision and suppressed rage—is that during the first three centuries after Jesus, many Christianities existed. Like political parties campaigning: all fighting to interpret the same message, each with its own gospel, its own leader, and its own worldview.
There were the Ebionites, who believed in a human and Jewish Jesus. The Marcionites, who rejected the cruel God of the Old Testament. The Gnostics, who preached salvation through inner knowledge. The Docetists, who claimed that Jesus never had a physical body and that it was all an illusion. A divine performance.
And of course, there were the proto-Catholics: hierarchical, authoritarian, obsessed with doctrinal control and, above all, bureaucracy. They had bishops. They had letters. They had martyrs. And eventually, they had Constantine.
The rest was history. Or rather, suppressed from history.
Heresy as Political Defeat
Deciding what is orthodoxy and what is heresy was an act of power, not revelation. A committee of men chose which books were inspired and which were dangerous. They burned writings. They persecuted ideas. They condemned entire communities. Mary Magdalene was degraded to a prostitute. The Gnostics were erased from the map. Women were deprived of the right to speak. Faith ceased to be a path and became a frontier.
Piñero explains it calmly, but the conclusion is stinging: “There was no single truth. What there was was a victorious truth.”
And like every imperial victory, it was built through symbolic violence: a canon was imposed, diversity was eliminated, a creed was written with semicolons. From then on, doubt was treason. And in the name of truth, much was killed.
The Jesus Who No Longer Fits in His Own Church
What would have happened if the others had won? What if the Church had not adopted the Roman logic of vertical power, but rather the Gnostic logic of horizontal knowledge? What if Mary Magdalene had been recognized as an apostle? What if the Gospel of Thomas, which mentions neither the cross nor the resurrection, had been canonical?
The answer isn’t in heaven. It’s in the archives. Defeated Christianities is not a book about religion. It’s a book about memory. And about how official history is fabricated by silence.
Piñero doesn’t propose a new faith. He proposes something more disturbing: that contemporary Christianity is not the religion of Jesus, but the religion of its censors.
The future heretic will be the one who remembers
We live in a time where the sacred is recycled, but not thought about. Where much is preached and little research is done. Where dogma is a trending topic, but history is invisible. That’s why books like this are disturbing. Because they bring back to light what the councils buried.
What Piñero does is give a voice to those who were lost. And in doing so, he debunks the founding myth of Christianity: that there was only one faith, one truth, one path.
No. There were many paths. And only one was paved by the Empire.
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