That is what Kostenberger and Kruger do in The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Crossway 2010). Ehrman is resuscitating the Walter Bauer thesis that he wrote in German in 1934, but it was not published in English until 1971, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (ed. Robert Kraft and Gerhard Krodel, trans. Paul J. Achtemeier. Philadelphia: Fortress).
Ehrman has made Bauer's thesis his own and is promoting it in mainstream and liberal religious culture. Some of the fellows of the Jesus Seminar are promoting the same thesis which is: There was diversity of doctrine in the earliest of Christianity. There was no one Christianity but Christianities - different versions of belief. For them, early Christianities did not differentiate between orthodoxy and heresy. That did not come until centuries later. When applied to the canon of Scripture, the Bauer-Ehrman thesis is that there was early diversity and that what has become canonical and extra-canonical were not differentiated in the early church.
This view has been dismantled, line by line, by scholars down through the years, but Bart Ehrman has resurrected it to try to confuse Christians and get them to think of diversity in early Christianity. The end result is that the books such as the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel to the Hebrews, etc. are just as valid as the NT canonical gospels.
The Bauer-Ehrman thesis has been shown to be flawed over and over, but Ehrman, Pagels and the Jesus Seminar would not admit that.
That's why I highly recommend the recent publication by Andreas J Kostenberger & Michael J. Kruger 2010. The Heresy of Orthodoxy. Wheaton Illinois: Crossway, as it is a marvellous critique of the Bauer-Ehrman false doctrine. Here is part of their conclusion (and they have argued the case)
In Christ, Oz
