"Heresy" by Catherine Nixey

Christians claim theirs is the true faith but “In the beginning there was not ... one single Christian message.” (Introduction). The form of Christianity we have inherited persecuted all other forms out of existence. The word 'heresy' means choice and the pagan philosophers believed that it was good to choose, rationally, who and how one would worship. But "within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’.” (Introduction)

In this scholarly but always entertaining book, Nixey continues what she had started in her best-seller The Darkening Age which chronicled the violent persecution of the pagans unleashed as soon as Christianity became the officially endorsed religion of the Roman Empire. Now she shows how most of the manifold versions of Christianity which existed in those first few centuries were branded heretical and had their exponents criminalised and killed and their books burned. Nevertheless, some vestiges of them survived. The ox and the ass of the nativity scene only appear in a banned gospel. 

On the journey, we learn about alternative sons of god, born of a mortal virgin woman who healed the sick and even raised the dead, such as Apollonius of Tyana.

We learn that the three 'wise men' should properly be translated as magicians and that Jesus could be seen as a magician too: “In Greek and Roman texts, wands had long been associated with magicians: Circe held a wand when she transformed Odysseus’s men into pigs; Mercury held a wand when he led the dead back to life. ... In early Christian art, Jesus holds a wand when he is performing miracles. In one fifth-century wooden panel, he holds one when he is changing water into wine and when he performs the miracle to multiply loaves; in a third-century image from the catacombs, he holds one when he raises Lazarus from the two ... While the sign of the cross is almost entirely absent from early Western Christian art, wands are widely seen.” (Ch 4)

We learn that our image of Jesus is one of many originals: “In the early years and centuries of this religion ... Sometimes he appears as a bearded old man, at others as a beardless young one; in some images he is shown bare-chested and as macho as a Greek god, while at other times he is depicted as far more sexually ambiguous" (Ch 6)

Our images of Hell are not found in the canonical gospels but in pagan authors and non-canonical writings such as the Apocalypse of Peter  and the Apocalypse of Paul (Ch 7)

We are told that all these non-canonical versions (not 'apocryphal' because they were rarely hidden and were often the most popular accounts) should not be regarded as not important because they can be unbelievable: "that is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable - but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them - but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology with dates.” (109)

This is an immensely readable and important book. 

Selected quotes:

• “Most people do not require being a flogged with leaden weights to abandon their ideas; for most, the fear that they might lose their job, or that they might merely lose a friend, is enough to make them change their beliefs - or at least stop talking about them." (Introduction)
• “Things first become unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.” (Introduction)
• “A great deal of all ancient religion was a little more than healthcare with a halo.” (Ch 2)
• “For all the brilliance of Greek and Roman medicine, doctors nonetheless struggled to identify the difference between the seemingly obvious conditions of ‘being dead’ and ‘being alive’.” (Ch 2)
• “There were spells in the Greek magical papyri that offered a far larger menu than Jesus managed ... not only loaves and fishes but side orders too.” (Ch 4)
• “A Roman gladiator had better odds of surviving a fight than an emperor did of enjoying a peaceful conclusion to his reign.” (Ch 12))
• "Bishops had been consolidating their power for centuries ... Bishops started to command that everything in a church must go through them: baptism without a bishop did not, or so bishops argued, count; Eucharist without a bishop did not count either. Prayers, bishops argued, worked better with a bishop present.” (Ch 15)
• “It was perfectly clear to numerous ancient observers that religions were less separate entities, virgin-born and pristine, than variations on a theme ... The names were different perhaps, but the deities were fundamentally the same.” (Ch 16)
• “It was a common complaint that the church persecuted less from a love of righteousness than from a love of real estate.” (Ch 18)
• “Books are not being burned maybe to bring about controlled today: they are being burned for posterity; they are being burned to control the memory of the future.” (Ch 19)
• “The past is not merely today in togas; it is far odder and more eccentric than we often expect.” (Ch 19)

May 2025; 279 pages

Published by Picador in 2004

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God