"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

"The Early Church" by Henry Chadwick

 A classic authoritative account of the history of the Christian church from c 35 CE (immediately after the crucifixion of Jesus) up to the late 500s CE. 

I was seeking some information on the doctrinal disputes of the early church: I wanted to understand the theological bases for heresies and orthodoxies; this wish was not well satisfied. Although Chadwick does spend some time explicating the theologies, he is much more interested in the power struggles. These could get tedious.

The final chapter summarises the overall historical trends and, for my money, could well have come first to structure the narrative. Chadwick suggests that the priorities for the first century was to move away from the apostolic tradition, with its availability of actual witnesses, towards a written tradition: this was a period in which the development of some sort of authorised canon was important. Simultaneously, the church was endeavouring to develop its organisation from a few local cells, each of a few believers, to an empire-wide religion; the speed with which Christianity spread surprised even the faithful. Once Christianity became a state sponsored religion, there were tussles for power and influence between the head honchos of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch and other places; these were at about the same time as the Roman Empire was splitting into two, or three, or four, and warring claimants were trying to unify the empire (under themselves). 

A thorough account of a turbulent time, but I have found it difficult to develop a clear overview.

Some interesting moments:

• “Paul perceived that the doctrine of the imminent end of the world was a liability rather than an asset in evangelizing the Greek world where the dominant speculative interest was in the beginning of things." (C 1)
• "The Ophites (i.e. serpent worshippers) argued that since through the serpent Adam and Eve had come to have knowledge of good and evil, he was a good power, the Leviathan encircling the cosmos with his tail in his mouth to symbolise eternity, who had out-maneuvered the inferior creator and his son Jesus.” (C 2)
• "The existence of four versions of the gospel was a troublesome puzzle in itself. Marcion ... accepted only one.” (C 2)
• “Christianity did not give political emancipation to either women or slaves, but it did much to elevate their domestic status by its doctrine that all are created in God’s image and all alike redeemed in Christ; and they must therefore be treated with sovereign respect." (C 3)
• “In Christian eyes the intense particularity of Judaism was incompatible with its own monotheistic principles: was not their God the God of the Gentiles also? (cf. Rom. iii, 29–30).” (C 3)
• “Tertullian’s conception of the Christian life is first and foremost as a battle with the devil. This led him to ... conceive of the intellectual task of the Christian thinker as a conflict with diabolical forces. ... If he could outmanoeuvre the devil by dialectical subtlety, so much the better.” (C 5)
• “Throughout the fifth century poetry and secular historical writing tended to remain in pagan hands.” (C 11)
• “Detachment from vanity fair was easier to those who expected the end of the world in the imminent future than to those who expected the historical process to roll on and who possessed some modest property to pass on to their children.” (C 12)
• “A force of peasant monks was an ideal instrument for destroying pagan temples and for conflicts with heresy.” (C 12)
• “Evagrius loved sharp, pregnant, obscure maxims.” (C 12)
• “since nature also is the good gift of the Creator. Nothing ‘natural’ can be evil. The sex instinct is only wrong when used in a way outside the limits laid down by God,” (C 15)
• “dancing did not succeed in becoming a natural and approved vehicle of religious expression, except in Ethiopia.” (C 18)
• “The representation of Christ as the Almighty Lord on his judgement throne owed something to pictures of Zeus.” (C 18)

November 2020

"The Darkening Age" by Catherine Nixey

The prevailing perspective is that the glories of the Roman Empire were destroyed by the Barbarian invasions and that learning during the European Dark Ages was kept alive by monks in their scriptoria. Nixey radically revises this thesis. She shows that fanatical Christians destroyed a largely tolerant Roman culture and that Christianity was, to a large extent, responsible for the darkness.

First, she suggests that Roman persecution of Christians was largely a myth. In three centuries there were thirteen years of persecution:

• “Roman Emperors wanted obedience, not martyrs.” (p 78) 
• Trajan tells Pliny "these people must not be hunted out.” (p 73) 
• “As the early Christian author Origen admitted, the numbers of martyrs were few enough to be easily countable.” (p 61) 
• “It is now thought that fewer than ten martyrdom tales from the early Church can be considered reliable.” (p 62) 
• “The Romans did not seek to wipe Christianity out. If they had, they would almost certainly have succeeded.” (p 62) 
• “In this world today, there are over two billion Christians. there is not one single, true ‘pagan’.” (p 100)

In fact, it was the other way around. After centuries of tolerance, “From almost the very first year that a Christian emperor has ruled in Rome in AD 312, liberties had begun to be eroded.” (p xxvii - xxix) and within fifty years there were laws banning paganism. 

Many authors acknowledge that there were iconoclasts. “Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground.” (p xxxi) But they seem to excuse them. “In modern Histories those carrying out and encouraging the attacks [against heathen shrines] are really describe as violent, or vicious, or thuggish: they are merely ‘zealous’, ‘pious’, ‘enthusiastic’ or, at worst, ‘overzealous’.” (p 115)

People were also attacked, often by gangs of marauding monks: “Monks - anonymous, rootless, untraceable - were able to commit atrocities with near impunity.” (p 215) People were mutilated. “Eyes of the erring were gouged out because those who couldn't see the true religion were ‘blind’ anyway. Another Bishop was seized, his hands chopped off and his tongue, which had preached falsehoods, cut out.” (p 223) This could be excused. Citing Deuteronomy the learned Doctor of the Church St Jerome suggested that “a Christian might take the defeated prisoner, enjoy them, rape them - so long as they mutilated them first.” (p 164) The parabalani were “de facto militaries of the faithful” who threatened violence and killed the philosopher Hypatia (p 127) Even this was excused. Fanaticism perverts morality. “Murder committed for the sake of God, argued one writer, was not a crime but actually ‘a prayer’.” (p 222) Justice was rare. “Courtrooms in the east of the empire with disrupted by sinister groups of dark-clad, psalm-chanting monks.” (p 225) Judges fled.

Christianity has a reputation for condemning slavery but even this was perverted by the early church.“When one bishop advised slaves to desert their masters and become ascetics, the church was appalled and promptly excommunicated him.” (p 204)

As for sex. “Male homosexuality was outlawed.” (p xxxiii) “It would be well over a thousand years before Western civilisation could come to see homosexuality as anything other than a perversion.” (p 196) It seems to use that we live in a uniquely tolerant time; one wonders and worries that a cultural pendulum will swing back in the future. But this book suggests that it is perhaps the last millenniium and a half that has been the aberration and that what is 'unnatural' is not gay sex but the intolerance that leads to its condemnation.

Culturally perhaps the most damaging consequence of Christian fanaticism was the destruction of ancient writings. “It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era ... It is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.” (p 166) In an age when manual copying was the only way to preserve ancient texts then simply ignoring an author could consign their work to obliteration. But worse was done. A shortage of parchment led to overwriting: “Palimpsests - manuscripts in which one manuscript has been scraped (psao) again (palin)” repeatedly show Christian texts overwriting classical texts." (p xxxii). And, of course, books were burnt.

Christians distrusted knowledge “To a proto-empiricist like Galen ... intellectual progress depended on the freedom to ask, question, doubt and above all, to experiment. In Galen’s world, only the ill-educated believed things without reason. To show something, one did not merely declare it to be so. One proved it, with demonstration. To do otherwise was for Galen the method of an idiot. It was the method of a Christian.” (p 30) 

There were reasons why Christians hated pagan learning. First of all, it was sexually frank:

• “The famously learned St Jerome, himself an inveterate reader, weighed in advising against ‘adultery of the tongue’.” (p 141)
• “Marcus Aurelius, with queasy precision, described sexual intercourse as ‘the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus’.” (p 142) 
• Catullus (Carmen 16) says “I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths.” (p 141)
• Martial’s Epigram 1.90 describes lesbianism as “rubbing cunts together ... to counterfeit the thrusting of a male.” (p 141)
• “In the Greco-Roman pantheon, not only did brother fight against brother but, worse, brother sometimes did quite unmentionable things with sister. Or with anyone else they could get their hands on.” (p 143)

Perhaps, worse, classical learning challenged Christian ideas. This was made worse because “it was painfully obvious to educated Christians that the intellectual achievements of the ‘insane’ pagans were vastly superior to their own.” (p 150):

• Roman intellectuals had a version of evolution: “The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism ... Nature put forth many species. those that had useful characteristics ... survived, thrived and reproduced.” (p 36) 
• “Ovid’s Metamorphoses ... opened with a version of the Creation myth that was so similar to the biblical one that it could hardly fail to make an interested reader question the supposed unique truth of Genesis. ... Where the biblical Creation begins with an earth that is ‘without form’, Ovid’s poem begins with a ‘rough, unordered mass of things’. ... a god appears and ‘rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land’ before instructing the seas to form and the ‘plains to stretch out’.” (p 39)

Philosophy actually dared to challenge religious beliefs, including Christianity:

• “The works of Greek and Roman philosophy were full of punchy one-liners poking fun at religion.” (p 143)
• Celsus points out that the crucifixion was seen by many but the resurrection by very few. (p 35)
• Celsus asked why did Jesus prefer sinners? “What evil is it not to have sinned?” (p 35)
• Why did God wait so long to send Jesus? Porphyry asked: “what has become of the men who lived in the many centuries before Christ came? ... [Why] did He who is called the Saviour withhold Himself for so many centuries of the world?” (p 47)

The non-Christians urged tolerance and freedom of thought. Pliny the Elder wrote that “God ... is one mortal helping another.” (p 44) Symmachus (a pagan) said: “We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?” (p 121) But this didn't duit the narrow-minded Christians. “Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect.” (p 148)

Other fascinating asides:

• “The feast of the Liberalia was on 17th March ... at which Roman citizens celebrated a boys first ejaculation” (p 177)
• “Young men didn't go to the baths with their fathers for fear of the uexpected erection; even for liberal Romans, it seems that seeing one's son's hard-on was felt to be a bit much.” (p 194)
• “Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live ... or are we alive and is life dead?” (Palladas; p 169)
• Hypatia was “devoted to the life of the mind rather than of the flesh and remained a virgin. ... it is said that one of her students fell in love with her ... Hypatia responded briskly. She brought some of her sanitary towels and threw them before him.” (p 127)
• Hypatia's father, Theon, wrote commentaries on Euclid that “were so authoritative that they form the foundation of modern editions of his texts.” (p 130)
• “Demons stalk through the pages of Augustine's City of God.” (p 14). 
• “One consequence of the concept of demons was that wicked thoughts were the fault of the demon not the man ... the monkish id is laid bare as monks confessed to being tormented by visions of naked women” (p 17) 
• “Temples to the old gods served as centres of demonic activity. Here they settled in swarms, gorging on the sacrifices made by Romans to their gods. Creep into a temple late at night and you would hear petrifying things: corpses that seemed to speak.” (p 19)
• “Those who criticized Christianity, warned the Christian apologist Tertullian, were not speaking with a free mind ... because they were under the control of Satan and his footsoldiers.” (p 21)
• “Strepitus mundi, the ‘roar of the world’” was “the sound of Christianity pouring, as unstoppable as a tide, across towns, countries and continents” (p 23)

This is a fascinating book which authoritatively challenges a fundamental trope of western history. Coming at a time when western Europe is appalled at the cultural vandalism being wrought by groups such as the Taliban, and ISIS it is a timely reminder that suppression of art and culture and thought and learning is not a trait of one particular religion but seems to be a consequence of people believing that there is only one God.

Also by this author:

• Heresy

A must-read. July 2011; 247 pages

Published by Pan-Macmillan in 2017

I recently came across corroborative evidence for Nixey's thesis when reading the Preface to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Great Artists (which was written in 1550) in which he says “Christianity ... strove to cast out and utterly destroy every least possible occasion of sin; and in doing so it ruined or demolished all the marvellous statues, besides the other sculptures, the pictures, mosaics and ornaments representing the false pagan gods.”

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