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Popular scholarship over the last 20 years or so has captured public attention by focusing on marginal or doctrinally suspect groups within early Christianity. Such scholars claim that these alternative forms of faith were just as authentic as early "orthodoxy"—and in some cases, perhaps even more so. These "lost Christianities" reveal that the earliest Christian church was not uniform but was rather like a religious kaleidoscope. Some recent books leave the impression that there were no shared definitions upon which most churches agreed. But do esoteric Gnostic texts or lost gospels mean that early Christians shared no common "core" of belief?

Such popular scholarship too often overlooks the fact that a common denominator of belief did exist in what ancient Christians called the "Rule of Faith" (in Latin) or the "Canon of Truth" (in Greek). This was a brief description of what Christians believed about God and his story of salvation. The Rule of Faith was what the church was preaching and teaching even before the various gospels and epistles then circulating became canonized into one "New Testament." Indeed, the way the New Testament was formed is part of the legacy that emerged from this early tradition.

The apostles themselves began to develop a norm or model for proclaiming the central doctrines of the Christian faith. Best known is Paul's brief citation of what he calls "tradition" in 1 Corinthians 15:2-8—that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, etc. In Acts 2:33, Peter provides essentially the same points about the Messiah's crucifixion, resurrection, and exaltation to the right hand of God, "having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit."

Within a few decades, these proclamations took the form of confessions, short formulas that were easy to remember and offered a basic structure for thinking about God. One such confession found in a Greek liturgical manuscript, called the Dêr Balyzeh Papyrus, was discovered in Egypt and probably written in the early second century:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
And in his only-begotten Son
  Our Lord Jesus Christ,
And in the Holy Spirit
  And in the resurrection of the flesh,
  And in the holy catholic church.

Around A.D. 125 or shortly after, Aristides of Athens wrote his Apology to the emperor in order to defend Christians against false accusations by giving a true account of what they believed. Aristides claimed that there was a "doctrine of the truth" preached by the apostles and still observed in his day:

Now the Christians trace their origin from the Lord Jesus Christ. And he is acknowledged by the Holy Spirit to be the Son of the Most High God, who came down from heaven for the salvation of men. And being born of a pure virgin, unbegotten and immaculate, He assumed flesh … and tasted death on a cross … and after three days, He came to life again and ascended into heaven.

The early church was committed to establishing standards for distinguishing true teaching and practice from false. As Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna admonished the Philippians, "Let us, therefore, forsake the vanity of the crowd and their false teachings, and turn back to the word delivered to us from the beginning."

The first use of the term "canon" did not refer to Scripture, but to a condensed form of the church's oral tradition. In the opening of his Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, a handbook for teaching converts, Irenaeus of Lyons said Christians must adhere strictly to the "canon of faith" because it linked the churches of his day back to the apostles. He also called this simply "the preaching," "the faith," or "the tradition." Irenaeus articulated it this way:

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