Those damn Ebionites

Early Christianity is fascinating. Less than a century removed from the Resurrection, groups of people were sorting it out. Was Christ divine? Was Christ man? How does this relate to salvation? We can only look at it backwards. Survivorship bias, that phenomena where only those who prevail are observed, clouds our ability to clearly see this past. How can we understand the prevailing views, if many of those who lost were eradicated and only spoken to polemically? Those who were deemed heretical felt as orthodox as their accusers. So the proto-orthodox (and they are that only because they won out) fostered our current Christianity, but why did they get to win? Providence?