to early church history, and it doesn't sound like most New Testament scholars are very clear, either.

You might be interested in The First New Testament which has a unique perspective on the first century and a half of Christianity. (The site appears to have been taken down in the last month, but is archived on The Wayback Machine.)

Although it's not written from a scholarly viewpoint, its proposals make a surprising amount of sense and are unique as far as I know. (This is from the perspective of a non-scholar who lurks on historical Jesus boards for academics.) It also contains a discussion of pagan Gnosticism throughout the ancient world which gave an amazing amount of context.

The author or authors argue that Paul was a gnostic, and so was most of what we think of as early Christianity. They argue that the orthodox position developed in the mid-to-late 2nd C as a reaction to Marcion's gnosticism and to his Bible, which was primarily Paul's epistles. They date the final versions of the New Testament books extremely late because, for example, the nativity accounts are seen as an attempt to flesh out Jesus' earthly existence.

I have some reservations in their understanding of the original Jewish followers. There may be some gnostic-like elements in what's left of that tradition (eg, The Ascents of James). Everything I know about James, Jude, the author of Revelation, etc is that they were fundamentally opposed to some of gnostic's basic principles. But OOH gnosticism was in the air and seems to have influence everyone.