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, eusebius would have "rewritten the history of early christian conflicts, so as to validate the victory of the orthodox party that he himself represented." eusebius claimed that orthodoxy derived directly from the teachings of jesus and his earliest followers, and had always been the majority view; by contrast, all other christian views were branded as "heresies", that is to say, willful corruptions of the truth, held by small numbers of minorities.