For more than two thousand years, Christian history has been told by its victors—bishops, emperors, career theologians, and popes who wielded both scripture and swords. The rest—the so-called heresies, the “errors,” the marginal sects, the apocryphal gospels, the female preachers, the rebel deities, the defeated Messiahs—was swept into silence.
This is the premise of Defeated Christianities, the unsettling and meticulous book by philologist and historian Antonio Piñero. A work that seeks precision, not scandal. A work that dismantles the official narrative of early Christianity by comparing canonical writings with Gnostic, Ebionite, Docetist, and Marcionite sources—and demonstrating what many have suspected: orthodoxy was a political construction, not a divine revelation.
And that Jesus of Nazareth, the historical man, would likely have been expelled from the very Church that claims him.
Piñero writes without resentment. He writes with facts. His thesis is blunt: there was never one original Christianity, but many. In the plural. And the least violent ones lost.
Multiple Christianities, One Empire
From the first century onward, Christianity was a mosaic of competing movements. The Ebionites saw Jesus as a human prophet. The Docetists claimed he never took physical form. The Marcionites rejected the God of the Old Testament as cruel and inferior. The Gnostics insisted salvation came through inner knowledge, not the cross or resurrection.
The future Catholic Church labeled them all “heretics.” Piñero calls them what they were: suppressed voices.
Heresy, in reality, meant “thinking differently” before a catechism even existed.
But the heart of Piñero’s work is institutional archaeology. He reconstructs how, between the second and third centuries, the proto-Catholic faction gained dominance—not because of superior theology, but because of bureaucracy, political alliances, and systematic censorship.
With the rise of Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, Christianity became a political institution armed with dogma. A creed was written. Books were burned. A canon was chosen. Salvation was legislated. Dissent was criminalized.
As Piñero writes: “The religion of martyrs became the religion of executioners.”
The Vanished Gospels
Some of the book’s most striking moments feel like historical science fiction:
- In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus neither dies nor resurrects—he only teaches.
- In the Gospel of Mary, a woman is portrayed not as a prostitute, but as a leader and apostle.
- In the Gospel of Philip, hierarchies collapse entirely.
What if those had become the central texts of Christianity?
What if the Church had evolved around community circles instead of imperial structures?
What if salvation were based on self-knowledge rather than guilt?
Piñero is not fantasizing. He is reconstructing a world that existed and was erased.
The Empire Chose the Doctrine
Christianity as we know it was not the only option. It was not even the majority option in some regions. It was the option backed by the Empire.
Orthodoxy triumphed because it became the faith of bureaucracy, the faith of Rome, the faith of councils enforced by imperial power.
The others did not “err.” They lost.
Christianity as Manufactured Memory
Piñero’s work is not theological—it is historiographical. It seeks neither to convert nor to deconvert. Its purpose is far more subversive: to reveal how the history of religions is written by erasing alternatives.
In an era in which religious populism resurges, and orthodoxies rebrand themselves as eternal morality, recovering these “defeated Christianities” is not an academic luxury. It is a political necessity. A reminder that spiritual diversity existed long before the Vatican—and that faith, like power, also has its victims.
If God wrote history through men, then men also edited God.
English 
Spanish 