Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
How The Ancient Christian Heresies Lasted A Thousand Years Longer Than We Think

How The Ancient Christian Heresies Lasted A Thousand Years Longer Than We Think

Last updated on: September 21, 2023 at 7:12 am by Philip Jenkins

0 Comments

How The Ancient Christian Heresies Lasted A Thousand Years Longer Than We Think 2023-09-21T07:12:47-04:00 Philip Jenkins

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Historians sometimes have the bad habit of assuming that laws and edicts passed in bygone eras actually meant something. They note a law that prohibits Behavior X, and assume that this somehow suppressed that behavior, without noting that the same government continued to pass similar laws regularly and frequently over the following decades or centuries, suggesting that the original prohibition had little if any effect. In reality, ancient and medieval states were far weaker than we ever assume, and deviant beliefs and behaviors were stubbornly resilient.

In a Western and Christian context, that observation applies particularly to the history of alternative and non-orthodox forms of belief and practice, of the kind that were termed heretical. We note how stringently empires and kingdoms tried to suppress such beliefs and their attendant scriptures, from the fourth century onward, and commonly assume that these must have had some effect. In reality, alternative and deviant scriptures continued to be read and used, within the Christian Roman Empire and its successors, but also far beyond those borders, where the imperial writ did not run. In my 2015 book The Many Faces of Christ, I traced the lengthy survival of such suspect and alternate scriptures through the Middle Ages and beyond.

This gap between official condemnation and actual survival has been glaringly obvious to me in writing my most recent book A Storm of Images, which concerns the Iconoclasm struggle in the Byzantine/Roman world in the eighth and ninth centuries. I stress the date, almost a half millennium after the conversion of Rome to Christianity, and a long era in which multiple regimes issued regular edicts against heresies of all kinds, commonly backed with the death penalty. Well, that should have had some effect, right?

One very surprising feature of the Byzantine world was its sprawling religious diversity. Such a statement might sound incredible given the accounts we regularly read of the savage persecution of heretical groups, and those horrors undeniably did occur. But these accounts also make us realize not just that those groups existed but that they remained in place for lengthy periods, and for much of that time they were little molested by the authorities in church or state.

The empire contained within itself multiple sects and schools of thought, some of which were very much at odds with the orthodoxy of the patriarchal palace. Besides Jews, there were also groups holding rival Christologies, in addition to survivors of some of the famous heresies of antiquity, and those in some numbers. The Montanist sect of Phrygia dated back to the second century, when it was utterly condemned by the mainstream Great Church, but the emperor Leo III still found Montanists to persecute in the 720s, when he demanded their baptism into orthodoxy. And this time we mean it!

As we know well, a great many dissident sects and belief systems had circulated within the Early Christian world, many of which were harshly critical of the mainstream Great Church and its clerical hierarchy. Those heresies were very diverse in their opinions and ranged far beyond the familiar “Gnostic” ideas that have been so much explored in modern times. There were powerful Jewish-Christian sects that refused to break from the authority of the Jewish law and its customs. Some groups were Dualist, viewing the whole of material creation as evil. Some sects denied the belief that Jesus Christ was a material human figure: rather, he was always a divine being who only seemed to assume human form. From the word for “seem,” dokeo, such groups were known as Docetic. Popular accounts of those venerable heresies imply that they must have perished in the fourth or fifth centuries, owing to forcible repression by a newly Christianized empire, which thoroughly destroyed their scriptures. But the struggles to defend orthodoxy against these alternative ideas persisted far longer than conventional accounts suggest.

One truly radical sect with ancient roots was the Athinganoi, the Untouchables, who began in Phrygia and Lycaonia, and persisted at least into the ninth century. Although their history is obscure, they were anti-Trinitarians who believed in the absolute unity of God, and the group may have grown out of early Jewish-Christian sects, or even from a crypto-Jewish movement. They maintained a close association with Jewish communities. They followed the Mosaic law and kept the Jewish Sabbath but did not practice circumcision. Among other doctrines, they reportedly viewed Jesus as the human son of Joseph and Mary, whom God adopted as his Son at his baptism. Following from that Jewish orientation, they rejected material images of faith.

Pro-image authors regularly denounced their enemies as followers of Mani. Whether actual Manicheans existed clandestinely in the Byzantine world in my era is open to debate, but those ideas influenced another group that emerged around 650, which reputedly combined the older heresies of Adoptionism, Marcionism, Docetism, and some strands of the larger Gnostic worldview. (I will explain that qualification about “reputedly” shortly). The new movement became known as Paulicianism. It had Dualist elements, (probably) teaching that Christ represented the God of the New Testament, while rejecting the Old Testament. They rejected the veneration of Mary, associated as it was with ideas of material incarnation, as well as many aspects of orthodox devotion. They loathed the established institutional church, its monks and clergy. As always, it is hard to gauge the support for such movements, but we know that the Paulicians actually ruled major territories in the vital land of Armenia, and they extended deep into the Roman Empire. In the mid-ninth century, the Byzantine Empire slaughtered many thousands of them.

I should say that the actual content of what the Paulicians believed is subject to debate, and some see them as less egregiously heretical. See now Carl Dixon, The Paulicians: Heresy, Persecution and Warfare on the Byzantine Frontier, c.750–880 (Brill, 2022), which sees accounts of the sect’s Dualism as “outmoded.” This appeared too late for me to engage or debate it properly in my own recent book, as I certainly would have done. Dixon’s book is extremely well researched and eminently worth reading, but his argument is anomalous and, I would say, contradictory. He writes that the Paulician idea “was not rooted in the formative disputes of the 3rd and 4th centuries, but a contemporary Christianity that thrived through being of its own time and place. It was also not a static faith: The Paulicians retained a memory of an era when only the Gospels, Acts, and the Pauline letters were admissible” (322).

So while asserting that the movement did not trace back to the ancient heresies, to the disputes of the third and fourth centuries, he goes on to say that they “retained a memory” of the much earlier debates of the mid-second century. Specifically, he says, they held scriptural views that were distinctive to Marcion, and to Marcionism. It is just unacceptable to portray the Paulicians as “broadly conventional Christians inspired by the apostle Paul.”

I ask a specific question. The history of Christian heresies and alternative belief systems is immense, and very well studied. Is there any example of a movement or individual arising based on this particular set of attitudes to Paul and that particular selection of scriptures, except where we can undeniably associate it with a Marcionite origin? I can’t think of one.

On a point of methodology, the fact that a given writer cites texts that Marcionites disliked – most obviously, the Old Testament – does not mean that they did not follow the larger theological system. As a parallel, we might recall the example of Martin Luther, who was painfully aware of the flaws of the Vulgate text, and created his own more accurate translations. Yet throughout his career, he often quoted the Vulgate alongside the newer versions, because that was what he had grown up with. Habit is a hard thing to lose, especially in the matter of sacred texts.

The Paulicians sound to me very much like a surviving sect rooted in the oldest debates over the definitions of orthodoxy, which is what I am arguing here. It also raises the question of how on earth such authentically ancient views had survived over time, unless we imagine whole alternative institutional structures.

Emperors who rose through military service commonly came from border regions and backgrounds where such deviant beliefs were familiar. At the start of the ninth century, the emperor Nikephoros was described as a dear friend of both the Paulicians and the Athinganoi, who received land at his hands. In 820 the soldier Michael II took the imperial throne and began a dynasty. Michael was born in Amorion, in Phrygia, whence the name of the Amorian dynasty that he founded. The main orthodox (and pro-image) historian of the era reports that Michael’s parents followed the Athinganoi. We are told that Michael publicly doubted the final Resurrection and the doctrine of final rewards and penalties at the Last Judgment. He even counted Judas among the saved. He rejected the existence of the Devil, on the grounds that no such figure appeared in the Old Testament.

Perhaps Michael was, as the standard orthodox history recounts, an ignorant man who despised learning and theology but just felt free to express his own common-sense peasant skepticism on these weighty issues. But on so many points, the ideas attributed to him resonate with those of early Christian sects and heresies. Besides the Athinganoi, Phrygia had been the original home of the ancient Montanists.

At various times, Byzantine emperors struggled to deal with the heresies by means other than simply passing futile laws. From the eighth century, they had the wonderful idea of deporting large numbers of those tough Paulicians to the Balkans, where they could guard the frontiers against invading Slavic barbarians. In fact, this turned out to be a superb but unintentional strategy for heretical church planting. Paulician ideas spread rapidly through the Balkans, where they generated a very influential new sect call the Bogomils. Like the Paulicians before them, Bogomil views harked back to the long-stigmatized heresies of the early Christian era, including Gnostic and Dualist survivals. That movement in turn shaped the famous Albigensians of Western Europe, who persisted into the fourteenth century.

Obviously, ancient heresies survived happily in the orthodox Byzantine empire, but do recall that in the eighth century, that empire ruled only a tiny fragment of the former Roman world. Most of that vast territory was under the power of Muslim regimes, who cared not at all about the persistence of ancient Christian heresies – not in Egypt, or Syria, or their former homelands. Those ideas flourished happy under that rule.

Many accounts of ancient heresies focus on the era between around 250 and 450AD, and then largely stop. This gives the false impression that those ideas simply vanished at the end of that era, presumably because of imperial repression. Actually, what is happening is that most historians are not bothering to look after that period. The heresies marched on, scarcely molested. That is a critical lesson for how we write Christian history.

Previous Post

September 20, 2023

The Old Home Place: An Evangelical Conservative Mennonite Writes a 788-Page Novel

Next Post

September 25, 2023 “God is a God of Action”: A Conversation with Felipe Hinojosa on Latino Religious Politics, Scholarship, and the Public Good

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"The TV sitcom BEWITCHED was an old favorite of mine"

philipjenkins

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"From now on whenever I see a clipper ship, see a certain brand of Scottish ..."

Terry

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"There are no such things as witches. They were just unmarried or elderly women with ..."

Dot Newkirk

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"The book of THE KEEP is wonderful, but I was not such a fan of ..."

philipjenkins

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was king of Israel during the ministry of Elijah?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Ahab Jeroboam Joash Jehoram