In recent posts I gave brief overviews of issues from the earliest centuries of Christianity that would take (and have taken) entire books to cover in adequate length — Christian relations with Jews and their relationship to hostile outsiders (persecutions). In this post I deal with the third key antagonistic social situation that arose early on in the faith, the relationship of “orthodox” Christians with “heretics.”
For long-time readers of the blog, this will probably be more familiar territory — I’ve dealt with related issues a lot; but whether you have a firm grasp on the matter or no grasp at all, here is a nutshell discussion to provide some of the basics one should probably know.
Again, this is from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press).
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Christianity was highly unusual among the religions of the ancient world because it insisted that it mattered what you believed. As we have seen on the blog before, in pagan religions, “beliefs” played very little role at all: what mattered was how you worshiped the gods in the sacrifices and prayers you made. This was not so for Christians. There is only one God, Jesus is his Son, and he brought about the only way of salvation. If you don’t believe the right things, you are condemned.
But different Christians and Christian groups advocated different forms of belief, as we have seen repeated. Paul’s Christian opponents in Galatia maintained that you had to keep the Jewish Law to be a follower of Jesus, as did later Jewish Christian groups such as the Ebionites. These later groups were avidly monotheistic: there is only one God. And as a result, many of them insisted that Jesus himself could not be God. Otherwise there would be two gods, not one. Contrast that with the view of Marcion, who thought that in fact there were two gods and that Jesus was so much divine that he was not at all human. But which was it? Was Jesus a man but not God? Or was he God and not a man? Are there two gods or just one?
And then there were the Gnostics who did not believe that there was just one or two gods but many gods—and that this world was not the creation of the highest God but was a cosmic catastrophe created by lower, inferior divinities as a place of entrapment for sparks of the divine.
Why didn’t these various groups simply read the New Testament to see that they were wrong? The answer should be obvious: there was no New Testament. The books that finally came to be embodied in the New Testament emerged out of these conflicts and came to be placed in a sacred canon by church fathers who were striving to combat each and every one of these other groups (as well as many more). These church fathers insisted that these groups all erred in one way or another.
At the same time, these other groups insisted that the church fathers were the ones who had gotten it all wrong, that their own views were the ones taught by Jesus and his early followers. And they too had writings to prove it—Gospels, for example, that set forth their Gnostic, Marcionite, or Ebionite points of view, all of them claiming to be written by apostles.
How do we know that these other groups were wrong and that the church fathers were right? Ultimately, of course, that is a theological question about what is the right thing to believe. And I am not writing this book as a theologian trying to convince you about what you should believe. I am writing it, as I explained in chapter 1, to show how the books of the Bible can be understood literarily and historically. What, then, can we say about the historical relationship of these different perspectives on the Christian religion? This is usually discussed as the relationship between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” in the early church.
These terms themselves need to be explained. Technically speaking, “orthodoxy” is a word that means “correct belief,” and “heresy” is a word that means “choice”—that is, the choice not to believe the right belief.
These terms themselves pose problems for historians because history has no way of demonstrating whether there is one God, two gods, or thirty-six gods. That is a decision for theologians, not historians. But historians are able to look at the history of Christianity and decide which Christian views were dominant where and when and which views ended up “winning out” in the struggle among various groups.
Scholars call the group that won the theological arguments “orthodox” not because this group was necessarily right but because it won and decided for all time what Christians were to believe. The other groups that lost (Marcionites, Gnostics, Ebionites, etc.) are therefore called “heresies”—not because they were wrong but because they were declared wrong by the group that eventually won the majority of believers.
What is the historical relationship of orthodoxy and heresy? For most of Christian history, the view of this relationship has been the one that was advocated most strongly by the first major historian of early Christianity, Eusebius, a fourth-century church father who wrote a ten-volume work called The History of the Christian Church.This work traced the history of Christianity from the time of Jesus down to Eusebius’s own day at the beginning of the fourth century. In it, he had to deal with many of the varieties of Christian belief that had been found in the Christian church over the years.
Eusebius’s view of this variety is clear and straightforward. As a member of the “orthodox” church—that is, the side of things that ended up winning the debates—he maintained that the views of his group had always been the dominant and majority and correct view from the very beginning. Jesus preached an “orthodox” form of Christianity to his disciples; they taught their followers this orthodoxy, who passed it along to their successors, and so on—for 300 years. This “orthodox” view was that there was only one God; Jesus was his son, who was both fully human and fully divine; that the world was the true creation of the true God; that the Jewish Scriptures predicted the coming of Jesus into the world; and so on.
In Eusebius’s view, “heresies” sprouted up only when willful, mean-spirited, and demonically inspired people infiltrated the church and tried to corrupt its beliefs. That was true of the Jewish Christians, of Marcion, of different Gnostic leaders, and so on. But orthodoxy had been the original point of view and had always been the dominant point of view from the very beginning.
This “Eusebian” view was accepted for many centuries because the groups that supported other perspectives were squashed by the winning group by the time the Roman Empire converted to Christianity. It just seemed right to people that their own theological beliefs had always been the majority and true beliefs of Christianity from the beginning. Most people still think that today.
But scholars are not so sure that this simple view of the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy is correct. In 1934, an important German scholar named Walter Bauer wrote a significant book called Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity in which he disputed Eusebius’ point of view and argued something different. In Bauer’s view, from as far back as we have historical sources, the earliest point of view in many parts of the Christian church was one that later came to be declared a heresy.
And so, for example, in parts of Syria and Asia Minor, the original form of Christianity was Marcionite; in Egypt it was Gnostic; and so on. Eventually all these groups tried to gain more converts than the others and to squelch their opponents. It was the form of Christianity located in Rome that proved most successful in this attempt to establish itself as dominant. The “catholic” church (i.e., the one with universal appeal) was the result of these struggles; and it ended up being, in fact, the Roman Catholic church.
There has been a lot of scholarship on these questions over the past eighty years, and no one thinks that Bauer is completely right. In many of the details of his exposition, in fact, he appears to be wrong. But with new discoveries—such as the Nag Hammadi library mentioned in chapter 20—it appears that Bauer’s basic instincts were right. Early Christianity was incredibly diverse: there were all sorts of views in very many places; all of these views claimed that they were right and that their views were propagated by both Jesus and his apostles. Only one form ended up winning out; when it did so, it declared itself “orthodox” and insisted that all other views had been heresies from the beginning. And it then rewrote the history of the conflict to make it appear that its views had always been the majority views (in authors such as Eusebius).
More than the other groups, this orthodox group stressed the importance of a clerical hierarchy that could call the shots and tell people what to believe (as we saw with the Pastoral epistles). They insisted on a set creed to be recited in which their theological beliefs were embodied (e.g., the two creeds still recited today by many Christians: the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed). And they established a canon of scripture—a collection of books that claimed to have been written by the apostles and that supported and advanced the points of view that were considered orthodox.
