Each midwinter, in chapels and churches and cathedrals, it begins.
A single, small voice breaks the silence. ‘Once in Royal David’s city,’ it sings, ‘Stood a lowly cattle shed.’ The carol goes on, telling a story so well known it hardly needs repeating. It is the story of how, in that lowly stable, a maiden (gentle, mild) laid her baby in a manger; and of how that baby became a boy (obedient, good); and of how that boy was in truth a saviour – the saviour – who now sits in heaven.
To listen to it is, as anyone who has heard it will know, a moving experience – almost less for its words than for how they are performed. For it opens with that child’s voice, smooth as a pebble, bright as a star and all alone. As it moves into the second verse, the solo is joined by voices from the choir; and then finally the whole congregation joins in, a great swelling surge of sound, and the single note becomes a chorus and the message is in the mouths of all: Jesus has come. Christianity is here.
The history of Christianity – the tale of how this tiny insignificant sect came to dominate the West – is often told in similarly stirring terms. In this story, Christianity begins as a single voice – the voice of Jesus. It then gathers around it a small chorus – a fisherman here, a tax-collector there – before even more people are drawn to it, won over by the message of how that boy became a man who healed the blind, cured the lame, was crucified and rose again. First tens of people start to believe, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions, until, in one miraculous, triumphant moment, the Roman Empire itself converts and the fate of the world is changed.
This story is familiar not merely because we have been told it, but because Christianity infuses the art and architecture of the West: it spans the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it thunders through Handel’s triumphant Messiah and it weaves through the lines of Milton and Dante and Donne. It has changed things both big and small: it has shaped the skylines of our cities – for it raised the dome of St Peter’s and the towers of Notre-Dame and spreads its outstretched arms over Rio de Janeiro – and it has put words into our mouths, for when we talk of lands of milk and honey, or thieves in the night, or of turning the other cheek – or, indeed, of putting words into our mouths – we are speaking phrases shaped by it. Even our calendar conforms to Christianity, since in the West we celebrate on saints’ days, rest on Sundays and holiday at Christmas and at Easter. Time itself is measured out in a Christian tread. This, it seems, is a message written in stone and just as immovable.
Except this certainty is an illusion. The Gospel of John might begin with the magnificently lapidary line declaring that ‘In the beginning was the word’ – but in the beginning there was not one, singular ‘word’, or one single Christian message.* The idea is a nonsense. In the first centuries of Christianity, there were instead many words, many voices – many of which disagreed with each other vehemently, and at times violently, on almost every aspect of this story. Because, in the years after the life and death of Jesus, there was absolutely no consensus on who he had been, or what he had done, or why he mattered – or even whether he did matter. In the earliest centuries of Christianity there were indeed Christians who said that Jesus was meek and mild and gentle, but there were many other Christians who believed equally fervently in a saviour who blinded those who criticized him and murdered those who merely bothered him. And there were some Christians who happily believed in both.
Differences are to be found everywhere. Consider, for example, the story of Jesus’ birth. While there were, it is true, early Christians who believed that Jesus had been born of Mary, a virgin, there were large numbers of others who said: bunkum. Jesus was simply a normal man, who had been fathered by Joseph, ‘just as all men were generated from a man’s seed and a woman.’1 Other Christians entirely rejected the idea that a god would grow inside a mortal womb as mere men did – it was too undignified. Instead, they argued, Jesus had been pre-assembled in heaven, then arrived on earth when he came down ‘from above and passed through the Virgin Mary like water through a pipe.’2 Which was apparently considered a more decorous solution. And one extremely ancient text, which can be dated to the middle of the second century, explained in some detail how Jesus had impregnated his own mother himself.3 In this somewhat surprising account, Jesus explains how he, in the likeness of an angel, appeared to his mother Mary, who laughed, and how he then entered her himself, and ‘I, the Word, went into her and became flesh.’*4
The differences go on. For almost any aspect of Jesus that is ‘known’ in the West today, there were once alternatives. While some ancient Christians venerated a Jesus who – like the familiar Jesus of Sunday schools and sunbeams – advised his followers to suffer the little children to come unto him, other ancient Christians venerated a Jesus who warned his followers in the strongest possible terms not to have any children at all, because all children turn out to be either ‘lunatics or half-withered or crippled or deaf or dumb or paralytics or idiots.’5 And while there were indeed some early Christians who believed, as Christians do today, in a Jesus who was crucified, there were others who considered that idea absurd, for why would a god allow himself to be crucified? These Christians were said – at least by their critics – to believe instead that Jesus had magically swapped his body with that of another man at the last moment, then stood opposite, ‘laughing’, as the other man died in agony.6
Almost every early Christian text offers a different view; a different strand to ‘the’ Christian story that is familiar today. The differences are dizzying. Take the Virgin Mary. Honey-haired and head bowed, for centuries Mary epitomized an ideal of feminine meekness. But she was not always such a milquetoast: one ancient telling of the Nativity includes a Mary whose vagina can, and at one point does, roast human flesh. The text that contains this tale is in many ways very beautiful. At the moment of the birth of Jesus, the world quite literally stops turning: birds are stilled in mid-air; a shepherd who has raised his arm to strike his sheep becomes frozen, arm aloft; even the stars pause their nightly procession across the sky. Then, shortly after the birth of Jesus, a woman arrives at the familiar Nativity scene, with its ox and its ass, and – in a slightly less familiar twist to this story – inserts her hand into Mary’s vagina to test whether she really is a virgin. The woman’s hand is immediately burned off. ‘Woe,’ says the woman, as well she might.7
But, perhaps most importantly, not all of the voices that could be heard in the darkness of these early centuries were Christian. Despite what Christian histories and sentimental Christian hymns might make modern minds think, Jesus did not arrive into a world that was spiritually silent – and certainly not into a world that was in any way short of prophets. On the contrary: read ancient satirists and there appears to have been a glut of men around at this time who claimed to be able to heal the blind, cure the lame – and who were similarly fond of making hair-raising predictions about the future. As a Greek critic called Celsus tartly put it: there are ‘others who go about begging [and] say that they are sons of God who have come from above’.8
To educated Greek and Roman minds, all of these so-called ‘prophets’ deserved not pious reverence but parody – and Greek and Roman writers duly parodied them mercilessly. ‘It is an ordinary and common custom,’ wrote Celsus, for these so-called prophets ‘to say: “I am God (or a son of God, or a divine Spirit). And I have come.”’ Their irksome spiel was always the same: after declaring their divinity, they would go on to declare that, ‘Already the world is being destroyed. And you, O men, are to perish because of your iniquities. But I wish to save you. And you shall see me returning again with heavenly power.’9
I still remember where I was sitting when I first read Celsus. It was a grey autumn afternoon, and I was in the British Library, and the readers around me were starting to switch on the lights above their desks. As I looked at the words on the yellowing page before me (to this day, Celsus is a far from fashionable author), I saw passages that seemed to me to be so rude, so sceptical, so shocking – so, frankly, funny – that they took my breath away. I had to resist the temptation to nudge the person next to me and say: Look. Did you know this?
I certainly didn’t, and I had been brought up in a house that was quite religious. Before they met and married, my mother had been a nun and my father had been a monk – and, even when they left religious orders, they didn’t leave religion behind entirely. We all went to church every Sunday, said grace before meals and prayers before bed. Each Christmas, I helped my mother put out our crib, with its little pink baby Jesus and its ox and its ass; each Lent, I gave up chocolate; each Halloween, I was piously scandalized by those who painted their faces and went trick-or-treating, a habit that I considered both wicked and American. Until I was well into my teens, I believed in God – and it wasn’t until my late twenties that I would be confident enough to say that I actively did not. Although for much of that time, my idea of God was rather hazy: as a young child, I thought that God was called Peter because, throughout Mass, we seemed to say, at intervals, ‘Thanks Peter God.’
Even though I eventually gave it up, Catholicism had settled on me like dust, falling in places visible and invisible. Long after I stopped believing, I would come across corners of Catholicism in my mind that had lain unnoticed and undisturbed for years. When I was in my late teens, I learned that a friend of mine hadn’t been baptized and, just for a moment, I was shocked that her parents could have been so careless: her name seemed to me to be less securely attached to her if it wasn’t held on with holy water. A moment later, I felt shocked that I had been shocked – and yet I had been.
But, then again, it requires little to shock the child of a monk and a nun: I also used to feel alarmed when friends’ parents played loud pop music in their cars, and even by people who wore jeans, which seemed to me startlingly modern. I am not proud of my prissiness; I simply note it. And, long after I stopped believing in the truth of the Christian God, I still believed in the truth of Christian history, and of how this religion had been received and spread. Which is why, when I started reading Celsus in the library on that dull autumn day, I was shocked once again – but this time by my own ignorance: how had I not known that in the ancient world people had said such things?
I started reading, and didn’t stop. I now know that there are good reasons why I didn’t know this – and why some people still don’t. In certain circles – among those with an interest in the history of Christianity, for example – the views of writers like Celsus are widely known. But they certainly aren’t familiar to everyone, and they are rarely taught in schools. This is not surprising. Simply because something is a historical fact – and that there were many different forms of ancient Christianities is such a fact – does not mean that it will become widely known. The historian E. H. Carr once wrote that historical facts are ‘like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in.’10 For many centuries, Christian historians did not, typically, spend much time fishing in waters where they might find alternative saviours, or tales of a murderous Jesus – and they certainly rarely chose to serve these up to their readers.
In truth, the absence of these stories is also due, at least partially, to more sinister causes than that. Many of the stories in this book were buried, in some cases quite literally, when Christianity came to power in the fourth century. Under the influence of Christianity, the noisy, critical, quarrelsome habits of the Roman Empire started to change. As the thunderous words of one fourth-century law declared, public discussion of religion was, in this newly Christian world, to cease; while those who continued to ‘contend’ about religion in public would ‘pay the penalty of high treason with their lives and blood.’11
Other laws appeared soon after. Within a few decades of Christianity coming to power, so-called ‘heretics’ started first to be deprived of certain legal rights, then of certain jobs, then of their places of worship and even, eventually, their homes. One typically aggressive ruling proclaimed that ‘the polluted contagions of the heretics shall be expelled from the cities and driven forth from the villages.’12 In this new world, heretical books (and indeed books that were merely critical of Christianity) were outlawed and burned, while heretics could find themselves pursued, at times violently. Within fifty years of Christianity coming to power, as one observer noted, ‘many whole communities of those who are called “heretics” were actually butchered.’13 This book will look at this story and at how, as the great Oxford historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix put it, the Catholic Church became ‘the greatest organized persecuting force in human history.’14
At the heart of many of these persecutions was the new Christian concept of ‘heresy’. Heresy came to be closely associated with Christianity, but as a word it long predated it. ‘Heresy’ comes from the Greek word haireo, which means ‘I choose’.* In the form ‘heresy’ – haeresis, in Greek – it merely meant something that was chosen; a ‘choice’.15 In the pre-Christian Greek world, ‘heresy’ had been a word with positive connotations – to use your intellect to make independent-minded choices was, then, considered a good thing. It did not retain that positive feel. Within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison’. Heretics started to be spoken of not merely as people but as a disease to be ‘cured’, a gangrene to be ‘cut out’ and a pollution to be eliminated in order to purify the Christian body as a whole. As St Augustine – always a man with enviable mastery of metaphor – would later put it, heretics were those whom the church ‘voids from itself like shit.’16
Though it is worth being cautious of the word heresy, chiefly because it pretends to a precision that it lacks. Books on this era have, for centuries, referred to ‘the heretics’ and ‘the orthodox’ as though these terms are absolute ones, with clear-cut and unmoving definitions. They are not; they are relative – little more than the religious equivalent of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, or perhaps, in the context of history, of ‘winner’ and ‘loser’. ‘Everyone’, as the philosopher John Locke later wrote, ‘is orthodox to himself.’17
This book is called Heretic, though not all the beliefs it chronicles are heretical – far from it. Some were schismatic; some were merely disapproved of – and many of the more surprising stories recounted here were (despite occasional harrumphing from the Church) an accepted part of Christian worship for centuries. I have taken Heretic as the title less because of its Christian meaning than its original Greek one. For this is a book about choice, and how choice can be lost.
This can happen in far more subtle ways than is often thought. When most people think of heresy, and of how heresies are wiped out, they will tend to turn to moments of violence: to slaughtered villages and ferocious laws; to tongues that are cut out and hands cut off; to beatings and scalpings and killings. And this story does have many of those things, certainly – as it should: not only does such violence have an effect on beliefs, it also, at the distance of a millennium or two, makes for splendidly entertaining history.
But violence can also be a distraction. Thomas Carlyle objected to history ‘written in hysterics’ – and that should be guarded against here, too.18 Many in the ancient world will have converted to Christianity for positive reasons. This new religion brought many benefits, both spiritual and material, to its adherents, since early Christians, like later ones, cared generously for the needy. And while some were forced to convert by violence or its threat, the number of such conversions will have been small. Few societies, and certainly few ancient societies, can staff the violent repression of belief on a large scale. Certainly Rome could not: even at its height, the empire was administered so lightly that there was, on average, one member of senior imperial staff per 330,000 inhabitants.19
Violence is, in fact, rarely necessary. Most people do not require being 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. ‘You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbour,’ as Walter Bagehot, the Victorian journalist and editor, wrote. ‘Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself.’20 This, then, is a book about heresy and about how beliefs and ideas are violently silenced. But it is also about the ways in which people silence themselves. It is about the far more insidious ways in which things become first unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.
This book will itself do some things that are, in the world of history, if not heretical then mildly frowned upon. For one thing, it will unapologetically consider Christianity alongside other classical religions. To do this is relatively unusual (though much less so than it once was). For centuries, there was almost a gentlemen’s agreement between classicists and theologians that the Greek and Roman gods, which fell into the categories of ‘history’ and ‘mythology’ (and, tacitly, of ‘absurdity’), should be dealt with by classicists; while the Christian God and his followers, which fell into the category of true religion, should be dealt with by theologians.
This reluctance to bracket Christianity with other ancient religions is understandable. As the pioneering psychologist William James observed when he gave a series of lectures on religious belief, ‘we instinctively recoil from seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by the intellect as any other object is handled.’21 But it is also poor history. Theologians and classicists might shelve their books in different corners of different libraries, but the classical world was far more promiscuous: a statue of Orpheus might, so one ancient author said, stand happily alongside one of Jesus; the name of Helios might appear alongside that of Christ in a single spell.22 This book will mirror that ancient approach and mingle and compare Christian habits and non-Christian ones. Christianity was uniquely successful; it was not – despite its later claims – unique.
This book will also move briskly: it will skip across centuries and leap across continents – and it will do so without apology. Christianity spread with extraordinary rapidity across the known world, and its consequences would last for many centuries; to give even a sense of this it is necessary to be nippy. This book will therefore head to ancient Syria and listen to a spellbinding Syrian ode in which the Holy Spirit milks the breasts of a Christian God who is far less masculine than the one most now know.23 It will travel to Africa to listen to an Ethiopic Christian text that records how Jesus resurrected a cockerel from a chicken dinner and sent the bird into the sky for a thousand years. It will leap forward in time, too, to watch as ‘crusaders’ gather on the bend in a river in medieval France, then surge into a small town and slaughter every man, woman and child who they find sheltering in a cathedral, because some of them – not all, but only some – were heretics.
This book asks not only for your attention but for your imagination. It asks you to go to that moment of silence at the start of that carol and to imagine not just that there were other voices in the darkness, but that there was a time – a time long, long ago – when those other voices actually mattered. It is hard to make this imaginative leap: well aware that almost all those other voices would be wiped out in Europe, historians have tended to grant them oblivion in the pages of history, too. But they were there, these voices – and they did matter. In some places, they still do.
In late 1950, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger arrived in Iraq and travelled to its marshlands. He was bewitched by what he found. There, he saw people living a life that had hardly changed in 2,000 years. He also found a people who practised a religion that looked a little like Christianity: its followers believed in God, and in Adam, and in John the Baptist. But this religion was also very different, for these people believed that Jesus was not a saviour but a fraud and a malevolent sorcerer. To this day, in Ethiopia, many Christians still read that text about the resurrected cockerel; in India, Christians were influenced by a text that told how Jesus sold one of his followers into slavery.
The form of Christianity that survived in the West argued, for centuries, that its victory over its rivals was natural and preordained. It was nothing of the kind. Other forms of Christianity, and other ancient religions that closely resembled it, survived for centuries elsewhere. Had history tilted slightly differently, they might have survived in Europe, too. They did not. One kind of Christianity won in the West, then crushed its rivals out of existence. One single form of Christianity enjoyed serendipity and called it destiny. It was not. It could all, so very easily, have been different.
Although, in some ways, these early differences did not wholly die out. Many of those early iterations of Christianity are now largely forgotten – but they are not gone. Just as long-buried ancient walls leave lines in modern wheat fields, so these ancient beliefs have marked modern Christianity in ways big and small. Gospels and stories that would later seem shocking to modern readers were, for centuries, central to the calendar, readings and thought of the Church; many have infused the art and thinking of Western Christianity. Look carefully, listen closely, and you can hear whispers of them to this day. They are there in the poetry of Milton and in the damned of Dante; they are there in the paintings of Giotto, and they are there in the Christmas images that we in the West celebrate still.
Of course, I had little idea of this when, as a child, I set out that crib with my mother. Each year, we put out Mary and Joseph, and the three wise men. And, each year, we put out the ox and the donkey on which Mary had ridden. Our crib, we were certain, was correct: the perfect representation of the story of the birth of Jesus, as told in the Bible. And yet the ox and the donkey – seen in so many cards and carols and paintings – are not mentioned in the Bible. They are mentioned instead in another ancient gospel – a gospel in which, at the moment of the birth of Jesus, the world stopped turning, and the vagina of the Virgin Mary burned off another woman’s hand.