2 THE DILEMMAS OF DIVERSITY

When you come together in assembly, I hear that there are divisions among you.

PAUL, 1 CORINTHIANS 11.18

Heresy shall be considered a public crime, since whatever is committed against divine religion redounds to the detriment of all.

THEODOSIAN CODE 16.5.39

From the earliest sources we have, Paul’s letters and the later Gospels, the message of salvation in Christ was clearly interpreted in a variety of ways. This very variety became a source of bitter internal arguments. Later gentile Christianities also produced many different interpretations of the Christian message; its spokesmen condemned diversity as deviance, “heresy.” Once imperial politics, with Constantine, came into play, charges of heresy had serious social consequences. Heretics were considered a danger not only to the church, but also to the state.

The War of Words

“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ ” warns Matthew’s Jesus, “will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” He continues: “On that day”—the day of judgment—“many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And cast out demons in your name? And do many deeds of power in your name?’ ” Not good enough. “Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you. Go away from me, you evildoers’ ” (Matthew 7.21–23).

This passage provides an interesting glimpse at a formative moment in the gospel traditions. Already by the time of Matthew’s writing—circa 85?—the movement in Jesus’s name was clearly developing in various directions. Matthew does not celebrate this diversity. These other Christ followers might acknowledge Jesus (“Lord, Lord”). They might even work miracles in his name. But such confessional loyalty and charismatic power endowed no legitimation. To be counted among the redeemed, the Christ follower presumably had to adhere to Matthew’s view of things, which his Jesus describes as doing “the will of my father in heaven” (Matthew 7.21).

Some three decades earlier, mid-first century, Paul had already voiced similar sentiments against other members of the movement—also Christ-following apostles, like himself, who were going to gentiles; also Jews like himself. (“Are they Hebrews? So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ? … I am a better one!”; 2 Corinthians 11.22–23.) In his view, these “super-apostles” (said with heavy sarcasm) were teaching a different message from his own. He too threatens them with a bad result: “Their end will match their deeds”—their deeds, evidently, being to speak the message about Christ in any way different from Paul’s.

What precisely these super-apostles taught in Corinth is now impossible to say. We are in a better position to assess the situation when Paul loses his temper with his gentile assemblies in Galatia. Opening his letter with a rousing anathema against any gospel different from his own (Galatians 1.6–9), Paul only eventually names the problem with his Galatian competitors: they are urging proselyte circumcision on Paul’s ex-pagan communities (Galatians 5.2; circumcision would presumably not be an issue for adult Jewish males). Paul is having none of it. His letter contains his most strident and polarizing rhetoric. The law, flesh, slavery, and circumcision fall to one side; faith, spirit, and freedom, to the other. Through Christ’s spirit, he says, these non-Jews have (already) been adopted into the lineage of Abraham, and thus can be heirs, along with Israel, to God’s promise to Abraham (4.4–7). Flesh—the site of circumcision—cannot effect this eschatological adoption and cannot effect these gentiles’ being made righteous: only spirit, Paul insists, can do that. Through Christ’s spirit—and through spirit alone—are gentiles rendered a “new creation” (6.15).

When we reflect on how few Christ followers of any sort there must have been in the mid- to late first century, this level of heated hostility—Paul’s, Matthew’s—might seem astonishing. But condemnation of difference characterized the intersectarian infighting that marked much of late Second Temple Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls, in this respect, provide a useful comparison. They too condemned other Jews of different persuasions; they too focused on internal community discipline. Unanimity bolstered claims to revelation. Divergence, in this view, was damnable and dangerous. We see similar responses to such splintering in other texts that were eventually collected in the New Testament. The letters of John, for example, condemn those who go “out from” John’s group. Says this writer, such people are no less than antichrists (1 John 2.18–19).

Eventually some second-century gentile Christian authors will provide internal diversity with a name and a pedigree. Adapting the Greek word hairesis, which had originally meant “school of thought,” these writers will lambast Christian difference as a late deviation from “orthodoxy” (“right teaching”) into “heresy.” The true church is the (only) one founded by Christ. “Other” churches, in this rhetoric, deviating from the original apostolic orthodoxy, were founded by errant individuals and sustained by their wayward followers. They were “heretics.”

This emphasis on unanimity, homonoia (concord), and homodoxia (same opinion), replicated concerns current in second-century pagan philosophical circles, known as the Second Sophistic. Pagan thinkers were no less focused on keeping “pure” those traditions conceived as stemming from Pythagoras or from Plato. Diversity implied error. Truth is one. One claimed unanimity for one’s own side, while asserting that diversity and mutual contradiction characterized another side.

“Heresy” preserves the language and the outlook of history’s winners, those second- and third-century writers whose usefulness for the fourth-century imperial church ensured their texts’ later survival. These earlier authors—Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and, with a difference, Origen—we designate as “proto-orthodox.” That in itself is an anachronistic label, since their “orthodoxy” was a status conferred on them by fourth-century thinkers who chose to place them retrospectively within the intellectual lineage that they were constructing for themselves. (Some of the teachings of these proto-orthodox thinkers will, in the fourth-century context, be quietly ignored as not quite orthodox; and Origen himself will not weather the changed historical context. His works will be condemned.)

In their own day, however, as this heated rhetoric attests, there was no one single authoritative interpretation, only vigorous variety. The churches condemned we know by the names of their teachers: followers of Valentinus are called “Valentinians”; of Marcion, “Marcionites”; of Montanus, “Montanists,” and so on. Their “proto-orthodox” critics, by contrast, are called, simply, “Christians.” The implication is that these other teachers—goaded by pride, said their critics; or by demons; or by too much philosophy; or by Jews; or by philosophy misunderstood; or by unseemly and destabilizing curiosity—deviated from a stable and defined original doctrine laid down by Christ, guaranteed by apostolic succession, and preserved once for all in the writings of the “proto-orthodox” author himself.

Many of these other groups have been characterized by historians as “Gnostics,” “knowers.” But that label was itself contested in antiquity: proto-orthodox writers sometimes claimed it for themselves, too, while imputing false knowledge to their competitors. Valentinus and others like him (or those lumped together with him) clearly thought of themselves simply as followers of Christ—not as “Gnostics” and not, for that matter, as “Valentinians.” And all these intellectuals characterized their respective interpretations of Christ traditions as imparting knowledge of salvation.

Further, despite the notion of “apostolic tradition,” all forms of second-century Christianity had to differ from any form of the original Christ movements of the mid-first century, the generation of the apostles, not least because of the simple passage of time. The due date of apocalyptic prophecy was necessarily readjusted and postponed, its message of redemption rethought. Different ways of thinking philosophically produced different theologies. And as these movements spread, they were inflected locally: different places had different cultures, and their own vernaculars (Coptic in Egypt; Syriac in eastern Syria). The individual temperament and training of their spokesmen mattered: different thinkers voiced different commitments and convictions. A unified translocal church, in short, was a notion created not by social reality but by the demands of rhetoric—my side, since true, is uniform; yours, false, must therefore be pluriform. And, by the fourth century, this idea of translocal uniformity was also demanded (if never achieved) by imperial politics, which sought to support a unified empire.

One thing that all these second-century intellectual contestants had in common was a high level of pagan rhetorical education. That curriculum, surprisingly stable across centuries, had spread in the Hellenistic period after the conquests of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BCE). It had continued, augmented by Latin texts and grammars, in the Roman schools. The learned and the literate were trained in the art of oral argumentation. They practiced presenting a persuasive case for or against a given proposition by orally rehearsing traditional arguments and their coordinating traditional counterarguments. Arguments particularly about the meaning of a text—a law, a treaty, a will, a passage of poetry, a valued philosophical writing—were imagined, practiced, and performed as an agōn, a trial or contest. (The word originally derived from athletic competitions.) The goal of oral exercise was not to present a fair picture of an opposing view, but to make one’s own view as persuasively as possible. Indeed, the construction of a view as if it were opposing—the proverbial straw man—was itself a stratagem of agonistic rhetoric, the better to present clearly one’s own position.

This fact explains both the contentious tenor of so much early Christian literature, and the reason why we cannot take its presentation of alternative Christian views at face value, as a fair description of those views. The goal of an agōn was to win, to persuade the listener that one’s own interpretation was the only correct interpretation. The more incoherent or offensive one could make one’s opponent look, the stronger one’s own position appeared. Indeed, we might consider ancient agonistic rhetoric as the art of skillful misrepresentation. Since we rarely have the documents of those “heretical” others who lost the fourth-century power sweepstakes, we are left with the second-, third-, and fourth-century characterizations by their ideological opponents. These must be taken with more than a grain of salt. Agonistic rhetoric offers caricature, not description.

One last caveat. Since we deal with rhetorical texts when we deal with heresiological writings, we ipso facto deal with the views of a literate upper crust. Literate elites in antiquity wrote mainly to and for and against each other. Christian communities, especially in the second century, were porous, unbounded, without strong institutional structures. This very porousness accounts for the loudness of the learned invective: these writers were insisting on (indeed, in a certain sense, “performing”) principled, clear difference in a period when ideas and ideologies were under construction.

In the second century, for example, Christian “institutions” were often, at higher social registers, more like literary salons. Texts were read within the social networks of the author. Many different teachers floated between these salons. The goal of the heresiologist—the Christian rhetorician, if you will, a “specialist” of heresies—was to cement allegiance to his point of view. Accusations of intellectual incoherence and of moral profligacy, of a lack of unanimity and discipline, of female dominance in leadership roles (a gendered code for confusion and disorder): all were tropes of derogation aimed variously at pagan, Jewish, and especially Christian contemporaries. Intra-Christian diversity, if we consider how heresiology bulks in Christian literature, was perceived as the gravest threat of all.

We have little access to the thoughts of the un- or undereducated illiterate members of any Christian group. The ideological clarity and stylized belligerence of learned heresy hunters do not translate into broad social fact. As we will see when we look to other bodies of evidence—later sermons and church councils complaining about and interdicting actual social behaviors; magical papyri, invoking a dizzying array of divine forces; amulets, protecting the wearer from demons and, thus, disease; descriptions of singing and dancing around martyrs’ tombs—most people’s heads were positioned well below the intellectuals’ line of fire. Despite the ideology of unity, diversity—even within the notionally same community—always prevailed, no less after Constantine (his best efforts notwithstanding) than before.

The rhetorically charged works of the heresiologists, nonetheless, cast a long shadow over modern attempts to write a history of the growth and development of Christianities. It is their works that are canonized as “orthodox,” and, thus, it is their works that have remained. It is their conceptualization of a unitary “Christianity” that has been normalized. It is their texts that are readily available online in English translation. It is their view that dominates reconstructions. The works of those Christians they characterized as “heretics” have largely been lost.

The Knowledge of God

A recent book on second-century Christianities names twenty-six different teachers who were denounced by their patristic contemporaries, the “church fathers.” Some of them are known only through piecing together the hostile reports of their repudiators. Like their more familiar counterparts, these other Christians too drew on various Jewish writings in Greek both ancient (especially Genesis) and more recent (such as assorted gospels, revelations, and Pauline letters). And again like their more familiar counterparts, these Christians also built their worldview with ideas current in philosophy and, thus, in science. We might look at all this intellectual production as Christian versions of paideia, Greco-Roman higher learning.

Elite Christian ways of reflecting on the nature of the physical universe well illustrate this point. For ancient thinkers, the order of the cosmos bespoke metaphysical truths. Astronomically and geologically, their map of reality brought together what we consider the separate domains of “religion” and “science.” With earth at its center and the sphere of the fixed stars at its outermost edge, the ancient cosmos reflected both value and order. The higher up one passed from earth, the more stable, luminous, and beautiful, the better both morally and metaphysically, the heavenly spheres became.

The moon demarcated a cosmic zone between the confused and chaotic conditions on earth (where the heaviest matter had sunk) and the increasing perfections of the sun and five known planets (made of better matter, beautiful and eternal). Beyond the spheres of the moving planets, the fixed stars—luminous, immortal, and (a mark of their superiority) unmoving—described the edge of visible cosmos. All these celestial bodies were regarded as divine intelligences. Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish philosopher, had referred to these stars and planets, quite simply, as “manifest and visible gods” (On Creation 7.27)—created by Philo’s god, the god of Israel, thus subordinate to him; but “gods” themselves, nevertheless.

“Manifest and visible,” however, implied “lower and lesser.” For those thinkers (like Philo) of Platonic bent, these visible celestial bodies depended for their existence on an invisible god, a god beyond space, time, and matter. Solitary; transcendent; unique; immaterial; unembodied; self-generated; radically changeless and, therefore, perfect; visible to the mind alone: this deity was the “unborn,” the “highest god.” Philo identified this deity with the god of Israel. Some later gentile Christian thinkers were not so sure.

How was one to obtain knowledge, gnōsis, of this highest god, the “One”? Such was the goal of theology, a specialized subfield of philosophy—thus, the concern of an educated elite. Pagan thinkers turned to their treasured texts, especially to Plato’s story of creation, the Timaeus, to work out the relation of divinity (theos) to the organized material universe (cosmos). Jewish thinkers such as Philo, esteeming Jewish writings as their revelatory texts, read Genesis through a Platonic lens.

According to Christian theologians, knowledge of God was particularly revealed through Christ. How that revelation had occurred, and what the content was of the knowledge so conveyed, were (inevitably) matters of dispute. The importance of cosmogony, however, of “universe making,” was not. This issue drove them to consider and to reconsider the text of Genesis. How did this Jewish text relate to Christian revelation? But the driving question for all these intellectuals was the problem bequeathed by Platonism itself: If the highest god was perfect, immutable, and immaterial, how and why had material cosmos come to be at all? What is the relation of the One (that is, the highest god) to the many (that is, to everything else)? And why, if the world was the creation of an all good and all powerful deity, were things as bad as they were?

Pagan philosophers, free of the narratives of Genesis, had provided answers to these questions. Matter, they said, was the substratum of visible cosmos. Matter too was coeternal with theos, “God,” though it had been originally unformed and utterly without aspect. As such, unformed matter, called hylē, was virtually the opposite of theos. This eternal formless matter logically protected the highest god from any imputation of change: in the time before time, theos and hylē had always coexisted. But then, how had hylē become organized as cosmos? That was a work tasked to a lower deity, a demiurge or (as in Philo’s thought) God’s Logos, a sort of contractor god and principle of divine, organizing rationality. (Logos can be translated as “word,” as “speech,” or as “reason.”) The demiurge or logos in the time before time had brought the impress of divine form to hylē, thus transforming shapeless matter into order (cosmos).

In pagan and Jewish systems, this contractor god was the lieutenant of the highest god. In Christian systems, however, the question of the relation between the highest god and the lower deity became more complicated. Clearly—so philosophy—the god of Genesis could not be the highest god: his very activity told against that identification. (Philo had avoided this conclusion by positing God’s Logos as his creative surrogate.) The Jewish deity, said these Christian thinkers, clearly functioned as a demiurge, the lower god who ordered cosmos. (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” Genesis 1.1.) How then could this scriptural god’s activity cohere with the characteristics of highest divine being? What, indeed, was the identity of this demiurgical deity? Was he working in concert with the highest god? Or was he in some sense merely a dim subordinate, or a defective craftsman, perhaps even an opponent of the highest god? Further: did the defects of this demiurge account for evil—thus, for the situation from which Christ was to redeem the believer?

Three highly educated theologians struggled with this cluster of questions: Valentinus (fl. 130), Marcion (fl. 140), and Justin Martyr (fl. 150). Their influence lingered long after their lifetimes. Valentinus hailed from the philosophical powerhouse of Alexandria in Egypt; Marcion, from Pontus on the Black Sea; Justin, from Neapolis in Roman Palestine. Their places of origin attest to the wide spread of gentile Christianities already in the second century. For a time, all three men lived in Rome. All three grappled with the identity of the god depicted in Genesis, and with the relation of that god to their respective versions of Christianity. Thus, all three dealt with the fundamental problem of cosmogony, “world making,” and of the ways that knowledge of God brought through Christ corresponded to concepts of cosmos.

Valentinus

Valentinian Christianity was at once more elaborate and more poetic than other, more familiar forms of Christian tradition. Some of the texts of Valentinus’s “school,” long lost, have been recovered in the fourth-century Nag Hammadi library, translated from their original Greek into Egyptian vernacular, Coptic. With these retrieved texts, and with cautious use of the characterizations of their heresiological opponents, we can reconstruct Valentinian cosmology and, thus, theology.

Valentinus stretched out the cosmos considerably by positing a whole new order of nonmaterial being, a spiritual world above and preceding the material one. He called this upper world the Pleroma, the “Fullness” or the “All.” At the apex of this immaterial universe was the ineffable god, the Father. He was the ultimate source of all else. Out of him, in gendered pairs, spilled personified aspects of his divinity: Depth (a masculine noun in Greek) and Silence (a feminine noun), from which emanated Mind (masculine) and Truth (feminine); thence Logos (masculine) and Life (feminine), and so on. According to the Gospel of Truth (associated controversially with Valentinus), these entities—“aeons,” meaning “ages” or “eternities”—emanated effortlessly from the ultimate divine One; according to Nag Hammadi’s Tripartite Tractate, they were generated by the highest god’s self-contemplation.

In a daring revisioning of the template of Middle Platonism, Valentinian Christians asserted that matter was not coexistent with the Father. It was, rather, the result of a mistake, an error committed by one of the personified divine attributes, erring Wisdom (Sophia). Sophia had quit her place in the Pleroma, the upper heavens, in her desire to know the Father. The fog of error and anxiety; the unnerving ignorance of the Father; the passion that characterizes the longing for knowledge of God: all these personified emotional states filled Valentinian cosmogonies, characterizing Sophia’s quest for the highest god. Matter, in this view, had a beginning: it was the cast-off consequence of Ignorance. The immaterial upper world, the Pleroma, was the really real. The lower, material realm was a distorted shadow cast by the upper world. Indeed, it was something to be escaped altogether by the knowing believer. In his or her postmortem state, the saved Christian would slip beyond matter’s grasp and ascend to the spiritual world above.

Knowledge—gnōsis—separated the saved from the doomed. And this knowledge was brought to the lower, material world by Christ. But how? Reading Genesis as an allegory of redemption, the Gospel of Truth reversed the meanings of the story. Only a lower god would prevent humans from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: a good god would want humans to have such knowledge. Accordingly, said this gospel, Jesus was the fruit of Eden’s tree of knowledge, “the fruit of the knowledge of the Father” (Gospel of Truth 18.20). The fruit/Jesus “did not cause ruin because it was eaten.” Rather, to eat of the fruit of this tree was to gain saving knowledge of God, available only through Christ.

What then is the relation of God the Father, and thus of Christ, to the god of Jewish tradition? Thanks to the report of a fourth-century heresy hunter, Epiphanius, we have preserved a second-century Valentinian text, the letter of Ptolemy to his Christian “sister,” Flora. Ptolemy’s reading of Jewish scriptures structures his catechetical lesson. The Ten Commandments, he explained, nodding to the Gospel of Matthew, was “pure legislation unmixed with evil … which the Savior came not to destroy but to fulfill.” This law was ordained by the Jewish god, a god of justice, whom Ptolemy identifies as this world’s demiurge and maker. This god was thus distinct both from the Father (the unmoving god above this god) and from Christ (the Father’s divine Son). But he was also distinct from another divine force, “the adversary, the devil.”

Note: Ptolemy is no “dualist,” positing two separate and equal spheres of divine being. One highest god presided over the whole. Like his pagan, Jewish, and other Christian contemporaries, Ptolemy was a monotheist, though an ancient monotheist. Ancient “monotheism” spoke to the hierarchical structure of heaven, not to its absolute population. As long as a single highest god reigned on top, many other subordinate divine forces could range beneath. Ptolemy names three other chief divine powers below the Father: first, Christ; then, the demiurgical god associated with the god of the Jews; and last, the devil. Basilides, another Christian thinker, posited 365 lower divine forces. The ancient cosmos was a crowded place. Hierarchy, however, preserved divine unity: the highest god was One.

Ptolemy assures Flora that more “apostolic tradition” will be forthcoming, “which we have also received by succession, because we can prove all our statements from the teaching of the Savior” (Epiphanius, Medicine Chest 33.7, 9). To appeal to apostolic succession was to assert authority, invoked here by Ptolemy as it will be invoked against him by heresiological opponents like Irenaeus. We see here, also, how Jewish scriptures (in Greek) are held as mediating knowledge of Christ if they are read “correctly”—that is, in light of the gospel (itself variously interpreted). And we also see how the main narrative character of Jewish scriptures, the god of Israel, is not, in Valentinian teaching, the father of Christ. Israel’s god has been demoted to the status of the lower, contractor god of Middle Platonism.

Marcion

Marcion’s theology was both like and unlike that of Valentinus. Like Valentinus, Marcion distinguished God the father of Christ from the god of Israel, whom he—again, like Valentinus—identified as the lower world maker and world ruler. But Marcion conceived a sharp moral distinction between these two gods. In his lost writing the Antitheses, Marcion contrasted passages in Jewish writings to those now deemed Christian: a version of Luke’s gospel, and a collection of letters by Paul and by later authors who wrote in Paul’s name. Marcion posited a purely benign, all good, unchanging god, the father of Christ, and another, lower god who was unrelievedly “just.” That lower god was invested in blood sacrifices and in sexual procreation (“Be fruitful and multiply”): he was the god of the Jews. Part of Christ’s mission had been to unveil this lower god, to annul his laws, and to reveal the prior, unknown god, highest and best, the epitome of moral and metaphysical excellence (so characterized by Tertullian, Against Marcion 1.6, 1).

One of our earliest sources of information about Marcion is the five long books of his bitter opponent, Tertullian of Carthage (fl. 200). Tertullian accused Marcion of “mutilating” Christian writings by excising offending “Jewish” passages from them. This was a good rhetorical accusation: if an opponent could not make sense of a text as it stood, claimed his opponent, he would cheat by changing it. Justin had resorted to a similar complaint against “the Jews” who, he claimed, had deliberately excised Christian passages from Jewish scriptures (Trypho 71.1; 73.1–6; the verse in question seems to have been a Christian interpolation). In fact, Marcion’s gospel, which lacked a birth narrative, might attest to the textual fluidity of these second-century written evangelical traditions. On this reconstruction, Marcion did not cut up Luke’s text. Rather, he used the text as he knew it.

Marcion particularly emphasized the letters of Paul, the apostle. His other lost work, the Apostolikon, collected a grouping of ten Pauline letters. Seven of these represent letters genuinely dictated by Paul: in (probable) chronological order, these are 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. Three others—Colossians, “Laodiceans” (a version of Ephesians), and 2 Thessalonians—were written in Paul’s name by later followers. This last letter, intriguingly, itself contains a warning against pseudonymous letters circulating under the apostle’s authorship, urging its recipients “not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us” (2 Thessalonians 2.2)—further attestation to the known fluidity of texts in a manuscript culture.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Marcion’s thinking for later Christian theologies. Marcion’s creation of a delimited gathering of specifically Christian texts—gospel plus letters—had a long future as later communities, even those opposed to him, took up the idea itself. Opposing churches would have their own collections of Christian authoritative writings. Indeed, modern New Testaments, though larger than Marcion’s, duplicate his basic structure of gospel plus letters. Marcion in this sense can be credited with composing and conceiving of the Christian canon, a first New Testament. Before him, scriptural authority resided in Greek Jewish scriptures. Even after him, Justin Martyr still referred to apostolic writings as “memoires” (Dialogue with Trypho 29.2). Only once the idea of a “New Testament” took hold could Jewish writings in Greek become the Christian “Old Testament.”

Marcion’s emphasis on Paul’s letters, with their polemical contrasting binaries of law and gospel, flesh and spirit, works and grace, supported his theological polarization of the higher (good) god and lower (just) one. His renowned championing of celibacy—a pagan philosophical ideal as well as a Pauline one (1 Corinthians 7)—certainly pitted Marcionite ethics against those of the creator god, the god of Genesis, who had enjoined people to “be fruitful and multiply.” Was Marcion introducing a new teaching, deliberately distancing Christianness from Jewish traditions and practices? Or was this the form of Christianity familiar to him from his native Pontus, which he sought to protect, preserve, and promulgate by constructing a delimited, specifically Christian canon? It is hard to say.

Later opponents held that Marcion was forced out of Rome, frustrated by having been denied the position of “bishop.” In his own day, however, mid-second century, there was no central authority in Rome or anywhere else. Networks of household assemblies—whether overlapping or competing—comprised various members with various interpretations of the Christian message and various forms of organization. Stable institutional infrastructure built around ordained church offices would be a while in coming. Marcion did eventually quit Rome, founding many of his own assemblies (like “wasps build nests” complained Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.5, 3). Later church fathers attest to the Marcionite presence throughout the Roman Mediterranean: in Rome, Italy, North Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, Roman Palestine, and Syria; on through the Mesopotamian region touching Persia. Despite the best efforts of his opponents, and the stringencies of his teachings on Christian celibacy, Marcion’s communities continued to thrive. Through the missions of a third-century Christian teacher, Mani, many of Marcion’s theological principles would go on to affect no less a figure than Augustine.

Justin Martyr

Justin fumes that Marcion’s people are called “Christian.” He complains similarly about Valentinians, Basilidians, “and others by other names” (Trypho 35.6). Such “so-called Christians” are “really godless and impious heretics” who “teach blasphemy, godlessness and stupidity in all respects.” Justin goes on to impugn their ethics, to question their intelligence, and to deride their impiety for teaching about a god above God. “Do not consider them Christians” (Trypho 80.3–4).

To Celsus, a thoughtful late second-century pagan critic, all these querulous sects certainly looked Christian, while their mutual recriminations attested to the movement’s intrinsic lack of coherence and unity. Christianity thus compared poorly, he said, with the concord that characterized philosophy, the “true Logos,” the title of Celsus’s work. “These [Christians] slander one another with dreadful and unspeakable words of abuse,” Celsus notes. “And they would not make the slightest concession to reach agreement, for they utterly detest each other” (Against Celsus 5.63). Of course, Christian writers mobilized this same rhetoric against pagan philosophers, whom they accused of a similar lack of unanimity: they “express opinions that contradict each other … for each one hates the other,” says Justin’s student Tatian (himself later accused of heresy; Oration to the Greeks 3). The force of this argument—that factionalism undermined truth claims—in turn accounts for the heresiologists’ assertion that “heretics” were, ipso facto, not Christians. To concede the name would have been to concede the pagan critics’ point: that Christianity was itself multivocal, thus in an essential way untrue.

For all his insistence on difference, however, Justin as Christian philosopher—a persona that he indeed claimed for himself—thought with the same Middle Platonic template as had Valentinus and Marcion. The highest god, he said, “abides eternally in the heavens, invisible, holding personal intercourse with none … the Father of All” (Trypho 56.1). Unbegotten and without passion, this god was also without form, unchanging, unnamed (1 Apology 9.1; 10.1; 13.4; 25.2). Then who was the busy god so active in Genesis? It was “another god,” Justin said, in this way agreeing with his two competitors. Another god was by definition a lower god. But this second god, Justin explained, was in fact God’s Logos, Christ, before his incarnation. Justin’s divine Christ, in other words, assumed the role of cosmic demiurge. It was he who had spoken with Moses; it was he who had given the Law (1 Apology 63.1). That the Jews did not read the texts this way did not trouble Justin’s position: the prophets, as Justin read them, had foretold that their people would not understand.

With this argument, Justin killed the proverbial two birds—Christian rivals (to him, “heretics”) and Jews—with one rhetorical stone. To those arguments made by his competitors that the Jews’ fate at the hands of Rome proved that Jews worshiped a lesser god, Justin could respond: No. The Jews were punished by the highest god through the agency of his son, whom they killed—for which sin they were now in “exile,” proving Justin’s multiple points.

Like his Christian competitors, Justin too could deplore blood sacrifices, and fault the Jews for having performed them. But Jewish blood sacrifices, he insisted, did not prove his rivals’ point, that the god worshiped in Jerusalem was a lesser god. It simply proved that the Jews did not recognize an allegory when they saw one: such sacrifices as were detailed in scripture were actually prophetic models or “types” pointing ahead to the sacrifice of Christ. It was the Jews’ (mis)understandings of their own texts, rather than the texts themselves, that were “lower,” “fleshly” rather than “spiritual.” Of course, argued Justin, God had never wanted blood sacrifices to begin with. Had Jews been less inclined to idol worship, they would not have needed so much distracting legislation seemingly about sacrifices. That Jews disagreed with Justin’s reading, insisted Justin, merely proved Justin’s case—which he made as much against Valentinus and Marcion as he did against “the Jews.”

Strategies of Control

Philosophy, cosmology, traditions of biblical interpretation, constructions of canon: all were configured coherently but differently by different Christian intellectuals. In the arguments of the heresy hunters, these other theologies represented madness and sickness, lowly misreadings of scripture, demonic inspiration, pride muddled with excessive philosophy, merely knowledge falsely so called.

In order to sharpen their own views, these heresiologists also sometimes invented teachings that they then attributed to theological rivals. Heretics, they claimed, preached a “docetic” Christ, one who only appeared to have flesh but actually had not. (Dokeo is the Greek verb for “appear.”) Both Valentinus and Marcion were pilloried for holding such a teaching. Valentinus however had in fact taught that Christ had a body, though it was of a special sort. Jesus, he maintained, “ate and drank in a special way, without evacuating food. So great was the power of continence that food was not corrupted within him” (Miscellanies 3.7). So similarly Marcion. His version of Luke lacked a nativity, and his vision of the resurrected body (whether that of Jesus or of the believer) was spiritual, not fleshly, in keeping with Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15.50: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.” Opponents accordingly accused Marcion of claiming that Christ did not have a fleshly body and that he did not truly die. Both theologians had emphasized Christ’s role in revealing the knowledge of salvation. Their opponents’ accusations of Docetism served by way of contrast to emphasize Christ’s fleshly incarnation, the better to foreground his death as a blood sacrifice and his resurrection as a physical, embodied event—as indeed, they insisted, the believer’s would also be.

Heretics emphasized gnōsis, “knowledge,” complained the heresy-hunting Irenaeus toward the end of the second century. The true Christian, he insisted, emphasized obedience to the rule of faith: universal apostolic teaching, the assertion of the identity of God the Father with “the creator” (though creation was worked through Christ); belief in Christ’s Second Coming, in the bodily resurrection of the dead, and in the eternal punishment of the damned (Against Heresies 1.10). Against both the Valentinians (who wrote many revelatory texts, and who especially favored the Gospel of John) and Marcion (who championed a single gospel, a version of Luke), Irenaeus invoked the fourfold gospel. “Four,” after all, corresponded to the number of zones of the world, to the four principal winds, and to the number of faces borne by the cherubim (11.8). A generation earlier, Tatian had asserted the authority of these four evangelists in a different way. He rewrote them, combining them into a single continuous narrative, the Diatessaron. This harmony remained the standard form of the gospel in Syria until the fifth century.

False Christians, conceded Irenaeus, might indeed work miracles, but such powers only proved that they consorted with spirits and demons. False Christians, like “true” Christians, might advocate celibacy, but this only masked their secret decadence. The authority of apostolic tradition, he insisted, was the only safeguard against the deceits of false teachers and pseudoprophets. But as we have seen, other teachers also invoked apostolic tradition. The Valentinian Ptolemy, instructing Flora, had appealed to exactly the same rhetoric of authentication.

Another weapon against diversity—though contributory to it—was pseudepigraphy, writing in the name of a past authoritative figure. Within this tradition, the figure of Paul holds pride of place. The second epistle of “Peter”—itself a late first- or early second-century Greek pseudograph—attests to the apostle’s literary afterlives. Warning against end-of-the-world enthusiasms and their opposite, disconfirming despair (“Where is the promise of his [second] coming?,” referring to Jesus), “Peter” cautions that Paul’s letters contain “some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other writings” (2 Peter 3.16). “Peter,” similarly to but differently from 2 Thessalonians, attests both to Paul’s posthumous authority and to the plasticity—and reinterpretability—of his written legacy.

Other authors controlled Paul’s message in new and changing contexts by continuing to write in Paul’s name. Almost half of the fourth century’s New Testament Pauline canon—2 Thessalonians; Ephesians and Colossians; and 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the so-called pastoral Epistles—preserves these writings. Hebrews was anonymous, but early on, Pauline authorship was assigned to it, too. Second Thessalonians reconfigured apocalyptic eschatology, introducing a cycle of trouble around a dark figure, the “man of lawlessness,” who will “proclaim himself to be god.” The author reassures his listeners that Christ will ultimately prevail over this end-time villain. By introducing another whole cycle of final events, this author—while warning against pseudonymous letters himself!—stretched out Paul’s own apocalyptic scenario to accommodate the continuing delay of the End.

Ephesians, echoing Pauline vocabulary, picked up the themes of cosmic conflict and of ethnic difference, which, for this author, resolved in ethnic erasure, the annulment of Jewish law. Colossians trumpeted the already accomplished heavenly triumph of the Christ assembly, while directing stable household relations on earth (“Wives, be subject to your husbands; … children, obey your parents; … slaves, obey your earthly masters.”). “I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand,” claims the otherwise anonymous writer. The Pastorals—perhaps written in response to Marcion—emphasize hierarchical community structures and the importance of male leaders who were married. (Marcion’s group—as, indeed, many groups—championed celibacy as a preferred lifestyle.) Another writing that domesticated Paul for later heresiological tradition is 3 Corinthians. Its “Paul,” too, positions himself clearly against those other forms of Christianity that placed less emphasis on incarnation, and which held that creation was the work not of God but of subordinate powers, “angels.”

If writing in Paul’s name was one way to control how Paul was interpreted, writing about Paul provided another means. Canonical Acts, composed probably in the early second century (when it was not “canonical”!) had carefully coordinated Paul’s message with the directives of the Jerusalem community: no fissures in the foundation of the movement, whose apocalyptic eschatology the author also tamped down. Still later writings, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla, present Paul as the perfect celibate, a miracle worker, and a master missionary. A fourth-century Latin correspondence has Paul trading learned compliments with the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Direct attack and disavowal; pseudepigraphy; insistence on a closed body of authoritative texts; credal interpretive positions; creative narrative compositions: in all these ways, the contested figure of the apostle could be pulled into line with later constructions of Christian “orthodoxy.”

Neither Male nor Female

At the end of his letter to Rome, Paul had sent greetings to acquaintances who were currently in the capital city. Among them he named Phoebe, a “sister” (meaning a follower of Paul’s message), a “helper” in one of Paul’s assemblies, and a “patron” of many as well as of Paul himself. He likewise greeted Prisca and Aquila, a married couple (according to Acts) and Paul’s “co-workers,” evidently people of some means, because they host a Christ assembly in their house. “Mary” was noted as an active member of this group; Junia designated a messenger (“notable among the apostles”); he also greeted Tryphaena and Tryphosa and Persis; and Julia and Olympas (Romans 16.1–16).

This is an intriguing roster of female names. Elsewhere, Paul mentions that Peter and other apostles traveled with their “sister-wives” (1 Corinthians 9.5). Philippians names Euodia and Syntyche among “co-workers” (Philippians 4.2–3). And women in Paul’s assemblies in Corinth clearly prophesied and enacted other charismatic deeds along with the men (1 Corinthians 11, 12, and 14). Paul seems ambivalent about this: he says both that women should be quiet in the assembly (1 Corinthians 14.33–35: is this a later interpolation?), and that when they prophesy, they should be veiled (1 Corinthians 11.20: Paul is concerned about the presence of male angels). Clearly, women as well as men were involved with spreading and sustaining this first generation of the evangelion.

Other female figures are named in later first-century gospel traditions: Mary and Martha, Mary the mother of James, Mary Magdalene, Joannna, Salome. Were these women also itinerant? Or did they stay in situ in villages, hosting the traveling members of Jesus’s followers? They clearly went up to Jerusalem as pilgrims (as did Jewish women who were not Jesus followers). Women appear in the crowds that listen to Jesus; they also appear as characters in parables. Women as well as men, it would seem, are depicted as participating in the earliest Jesus movements, both in the homeland and in the Diaspora.

Did this participation distinguish the Christ movements from the broader culture, whether Jewish or pagan? Modern scholarship has often painted a dark picture of ancient patriarchy, both pagan and especially Jewish, the better to highlight a supposed gender egalitarianism in what would become Christianity. Research into women’s lives in Roman antiquity more broadly has laid such caricatures to rest. As always, social class, financial status, education, and legal status (especially whether one was slave or free) had determinative effects on the lives of all women. Elite women served as important benefactors within both pagan and Jewish communities, not just Christian ones. All elite women enjoyed privileges and freedoms, and tolerated constraints, that lower-class women did not. Property law and family law everywhere favored men. Mediterranean gods of all ethnicities seem most concerned with the public behaviors of Mediterranean males, though gods and priests could be male or female, depending on the particularities of a given cult.

The language of value was itself highly gendered. Whether in medicine or in philosophy or in literature, when deploying gendered binaries, “male” was construed positively, “female” negatively. For medical science, the male seed provided the rational and organizing principle of human being, organizing the passive matter of the female. Men and women were constitutively different: men were hot and dry, women cold and wet—also less intellectually endowed, more emotional, less rational, easily duped or led astray, and so on. (Foreign men, ethnic “others,” could also be characterized as effeminate. To be feminine was to be lesser.) Virtuous women were praised for transcending their sex, displaying male excellences: indeed, the Latin virtus has as its stem the word for male, vir. (One fourth-century male Christian writer praised the aristocratic and intellectual Melania the Elder as a “female man of God.”) So many of these stereotypes survive today that they scarcely need review here.

But it is exactly these stereotypes that make difficult our assessment of the historical role of Christian women within Christian communities of all sorts from the second century onward. Heresiological writers frequently claim that women were prominent in “heretical” Christian circles. Irenaeus had named Simon Magus, a character in Acts of the Apostles 8.9–24, as the founding father of Christian heretics; Simon, according to Justin, took as a coworker a former prostitute, Helena. A century later, Origen of Alexandria reports on Simonians who also call themselves Helenians. Another disputed Christian teacher, Carpocrates, was associated with one Marcellina who (so Irenaeus) came to Rome, where she gained a notable following. Harpocratians follow Salome, says Origen; others, Mariamne; others, Martha—names generated from the gospel stories. The Valentinian Ptolemy, as we noted, exhorted Flora to receive apostolic tradition. Another Valentinian, Marcus (supposed founder of the eponymous Marcosians), encouraged women in the Rhône Valley and in Asia Minor to prophesy and have ecstatic experiences (so Irenaeus). The Marcionite Apelles wrote down the prophecies of one Philumena. The spirit gave revelations, in Phrygia, not only to Montanus but also to Priscilla, Maximilla, and, later, to Quintilla. His own Montanist sympathies notwithstanding, Tertullian ridiculed other Christian sects as being dominated—to their detriment—by females. “The women of these heretics, how wanton they are! For they are bold enough to teach, to dispute, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, perhaps even to baptize!” (Prescription against Heretics 41).

How reliable is heresiological polemic for social description? The accusation that women have leadership roles in “the other” community does not tell us, directly, whether women indeed had leadership roles in that other community. It does tell us that the accuser—Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen—is gendering confusion, bad management, intellectual muddiness, and social disorder, imputing those flaws to the rival group that he so describes. The same author can flip these stereotypes, and praise his own form of Christianness for making “even women” self-disciplined and virtuous; this trope especially shapes martyr narratives. Again, the goal of the rhetoric determines how a trope is used. Pagan critics—Celsus in the second century and Porphyry in the third—ridiculed Christianity in general as appealing to slaves, women, and minors: their intention is insult, not description. We do know from a letter of Pliny, the Roman governor of Bithynia in the early second century, that two enslaved women served a local community as “assistants” or “deaconesses.” But which Christian communion did they serve? And what, within their church, did they do? Nothing that Pliny says about them can help us to identify them further.

The Nag Hammadi codices have yielded many texts that were not received into the fourth-century imperial canon. Some of these, like The Gospel of Mary, seem to elevate the status of women. (Jesus gives her special teachings, contested by Peter.) But other writings, like the Gospel according to the Egyptians, seem to do the opposite. “I came to destroy the works of the female,” Jesus teaches in that gospel, preserved in Clement (Miscellanies 3.63). Gospel of Thomas 114 presents Jesus as promising to make Mary male so that she can gain the kingdom of heaven. Esteem for female figures in Valentinian myth, like that of Wisdom/Sophia, no more maps onto social terrain than does the medieval veneration of the Virgin Mary. And it is perhaps relevant to this question of actual female agency that the women teachers named by the heresiologists are usually depicted as linked to heretical males: they seem not to be completely independent authorities.

What was the status of women within Christianities? The answer we find depends on where we look. We have the names of only a few women teachers, repudiated by heresiologists. We have examples of female Christians who, possessed by a spirit—or by the spirit—were enabled to utter prophecies. Itinerant ascetic charismatics and desert solitaries might be of either sex, and we later hear of mixed groups both wandering and stationary. For heresiologists and, later, bishops, females literally embodied the dangers of unregulated charisma. Roman aristocratic women had a lot of freedom of movement, but this was because of their wealth and their status, not because of their Christianity.

Could women hold church offices? Male prelates dominate our literary sources. Inscriptions, though (and not many), hint in other directions, where women are designated presbytera or episcopa. Later church canons will rule that women should not hold ordained office; perhaps this means that some did. Our slender evidence cautions against generalization. And the tendencies of the broader cultural context are clear: Roman antiquity was not marked by gender egalitarianism in any register, whether within Christian communities or outside of them.

Mani and Pelagius: The Politics of Orthodoxy

Constantine’s conversion in 312 resolved some of the confusions of Christian diversity. Orthodoxy was what the emperor said it was. Charges of “heresy” became a weapon in the hands of enterprising bishops.

Some heresies were born; others were made. That is, Christianity as we see it emerging in the second century sponsored many genuinely different (and competing) visions and versions of the gospel, with all sides condemning the others. But later Christians who were themselves originally committed to imperial (i.e., “orthodox”) Christianity could be targeted as deviants as well. Manichaeism exemplifies the first type of heresy. Donatism and Pelagianism exemplify the second. Interestingly, Augustine (354–430) figures prominently in the stories of all three.

Manichaeism was a genuinely new form of Christianity, one that combined elements of Zoroastrianism (an ancient Persian religion that posited the cosmic opposition of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil) and of Buddhism with the Christian message. It thus had a genuinely different metaphysics from that of western Christianities. Light and Darkness, or Good and Evil, were locked in an ongoing battle. The universe as currently constituted was the result of and witness to this eternal antagonism: particles of Light had become entrapped in dark matter, captured in an ancient skirmish between these two kingdoms. Collectively, these particles of captive goodness constituted the divine presence in the cosmos, the “suffering Jesus” or the “Cross of Light.” Through ascetic discipline and rituals of purification, the believer could liberate these divine sparks to return to their native sphere.

Mani, a visionary ascetic in Persian Mesopotamia, had received this revelation sometime in the early decades of the third century. He then set about organizing and promulgating a new universal form of Christianity, modeling himself on the apostle Paul. Influenced by Marcionite sensibilities, Mani repudiated Jewish scriptures as unsuited for the true Christian; and he also held that Paul’s letters and the Gospels had been corrupted by Judaizing interpolators. Against this compromised literary legacy Mani juxtaposed books of his own revelations, establishing a new canon of scriptures. And he took his mission out on the road. Teaching in Persia—where, in 276, he was executed at the behest of Zoroastrian clergy—Mani spread his message far and wide. It eventually spanned from Spain to China.

Mani taught a strict asceticism to a church organized in two tiers: a celibate, vegetarian, mendicant elite, the Elect—both male and female—and a lay group, the Hearers, who supported them. This latter group, bound by less drastic vows, attracted Augustine’s loyalty in the early 370s when he was a student in Carthage. He remained with this church for years, converting to imperial Christianity only in 386. It is thanks to his later, informed antagonism that we can reconstruct so much of the western sect’s teachings.

Both the pagan emperor Diocletian in the late third century and the Christian emperors Valentinian and Theodosius in the late fourth targeted the Manichees for persecution: their leaders were to be exiled, their books burnt, their property seized, their communities disrupted, their legal rights abridged. In a period marked by wars on Rome’s eastern front, both pagans and other Christians reviled Manichaeism as a “Persian” poison. Manichees nonetheless carried on proselytizing, continuing a clandestine existence within the empire. Their answer to the problem of evil—that sin was a force independent of the individual, who was an internalized miniature instance of the cosmic struggle of good against evil—would continue to haunt Augustine’s own later theology of original sin.

Manichaeism represented a genuinely new form of Christianity. Pelagianism, by contrast, was largely invented by Augustine. Pelagius himself was a reformer, moving among the same Roman aristocrats as would Jerome. His teachings emphasized the importance of human effort to living a truly Christian life, by which he meant a dedication to asceticism (both moral and, accordingly, financial, meaning a commitment to support of the poor). In bringing the importance of individual effort to the fore of his message, Pelagius likewise foregrounded the importance of the freedom of the will, aided by divine grace. Sin was not a condition, but a choice; otherwise, God would not be just in punishing the sinner. Sin to be justly punishable, in other words, had to be committed freely.

Pelagius and his circle were pushed from Italy into North Africa, refugees from Alaric’s siege of Rome in 410. It was there that his way of thinking clashed with traditions of African thought on the nature of sin. Augustine, against Pelagius and his younger spokesperson, Julian of Eclanum, thought in terms of the transmission of sin: human nature, he held, had been compromised after Adam’s fall, and the guilt of the original sin had been inherited by each following generation. In consequence, human will as now constituted suffered from diminished capacity: it could choose only to sin unless grace intervened. Sin in this sense was not a choice, but a condition. And because all humanity had been contained “in” Adam, God was just in punishing all later generations for Adam’s sin.

Augustine’s political context explains the success of his anti-Pelagian actions. North Africa, where he was bishop, by this point had long been mired in a local ecclesiastical civil war. The orthodox church had split over issues of community discipline in the wake of the last great pagan persecution under Diocletian, between 303 and 306. Some prelates had complied with the government’s demand to turn over the scriptures; others had refused. Once the persecution was over, the question lingered: which clergy was valid? Constantine, entering this controversy shortly after his victory in 312, had ultimately decided in favor of those who had handed over the scriptures: theirs was the side that was “universal,” catholica. His decision only hardened the will of the opposition, now called the “Donatists” after one of their bishops, Donatus. They proclaimed their community the only true church. But the Donatists were actually and only dissident catholics: both sides were doctrinally all but identical. A century on, in 405, this polarized situation was brought under the control of the catholics who, after heavy lobbying of the emperor, had their schismatic opponents legally declared heretics by imperial decree.

Augustine was primed, in other words, to use the same techniques of censure against Pelagius as he had used against the Donatists. He accused Pelagius and his followers of heresy. Julian of Eclanum responded that Augustine was the heretic; indeed, that he was still a Manichee. The North African bishops then attempted to interfere in the decisions of two councils called in the East to determine Pelagius’s status, where he was adjudged to be orthodox. Importuning the bishop of Rome (who initially sympathized with Pelagius), again heavily lobbying the imperial capital, Ravenna, Augustine finally triumphed: in 418, Pelagius was banished from Rome by the emperor’s decree. The pope was constrained to oblige. He excommunicated the losing side. The question of Pelagius’s “orthodoxy” had been settled by imperial fiat.

Etiologies of Error

Orthodoxy’s true enemy is time. What is right belief in one period becomes wrong belief in a later one. For Justin as for Irenaeus, right thinking encompassed a vivid commitment to millenarianism, the belief in a final thousand-year reign of the saints in an earthly Jerusalem (Trypho 80–81; Against Heresies 5.25–36). To Origen, a scant century later, such thinking was too fleshly, too “Jewish” (On First Principles 2.11.2). A champion of Christian sexual self-discipline, Tatian will eventually be condemned as an extremist “Encratite” and posthumously excised from the “orthodox” fold. The ecstatic, apocalyptic prophecies of the Montanists, too, will be edged out of acceptability by later imperial communion. And the name and work of the great Origen himself, a prodigious champion of the “true” church, will be devoured in the fourth century by controversies that he could not have imagined in the third. Despite its rhetoric of radical stability, “the faith” is itself a labile concept. “Orthodoxy” has a shelf life.

Before Constantine’s unanticipated decision to align himself with the Christian god in 312 (to be explored in chapter 5), accusations of deviance from “true” Christianity were hostile exchanges between contestants, be they Irenaeus or the (Valentinian?) author of the (no less heatedly heresiological) Testimony of Truth. With Constantine, things change. What was once a species of internal name-calling now had serious social consequences. Championing one Christian denomination—and trying mightily to weld it into the unity that it so insistently claimed for itself—Constantine turned on those other Christian communities condemned by his church. He ordered their assemblies outlawed, their leaders exiled, their buildings confiscated, their books impounded. Eusebius of Caesarea, the emperor’s biographer and historian, reports with satisfaction that, subsequently, “the parts of the common body were united together and joined in a single harmony, and alone the catholic [that is, “universal”] church of God shone forth gathered into itself, with no heretical or schismatic group left anywhere in the world” (Life of Constantine 3.66.3).

This rhetoric of unity and victory did not correspond to the reality of diversity, as Eusebius himself full well knew. Constantine’s chosen church was fractured by dissention and would indeed be ripped apart by disagreements over the theological status of Christ, the so-called Arian controversy (discussed in chapter 5). Disenfranchised communities long continued, and new forms of Christianity like Manichaeism evolved, joining the ranks of the repudiated. The rhetorical bark of imperial legislation, then, seems not to have corresponded closely to social bite. Yet such laws could be mobilized by motivated bishops. In the late fourth century, Priscillian, the bishop of Ávila in Spain and a charismatic ascetic, was denounced to the secular authorities by episcopal rivals. They accused him of Manichaeism and witchcraft. Despite protests from other bishops, the charge of ritual malfeasance, “magic,” stuck. In 385, Priscillian the Christian bishop was executed by the Christian state.

It is in this period after Constantine, when constructions of community were wed to appeals to state power, that heresiological writings reach their apex. Eusebius catalogues “false Christians” in his Church History, tracing a genealogy of error from Simon Magus (Acts 8.9–24) while listing as well those works to be accepted as “sacred,” distinguishing them from the books of the heretics. Later, and exhaustively, Epiphanius in his Medicine Chest against Heresies will identify (and in some cases, generate) no fewer than eighty categories of religious error, twenty pre-Christian and sixty post. Demons and overdependence on philosophy were called to account. Augustine, in his late work On Heresies, will catalogue eighty-eight religiously deviant groups, spanning in time from the ancient biblical past up to his own day.

Unless we imagine Christians committing these categories to memory and peering at other Christians like birdwatchers keying out birds, the practical import of these heresy catalogues seems largely elite and internal. That is, these writers construct “wrong” Christianities as a way to articulate, by means of contrast, the principles of their own “right” revelation. The focus on heresy only intensified with the empowerment of imperial patronage. Nondoctrinal distinctions between theologians and communities, under the glare of hostile scrutiny, will be magnified to the point that schisms—divisions within a single church—will come to be regarded as “heresies” as well. In the wake of anti-Christian persecutions, several communities advocated a higher bar for readmission of the lapsed: the Novatianists after Decius mid-third century, the Melitians and Donatists after Diocletian in the early fourth. These schismatic groups, too, will eventually be pressured as “heretics” to join the “universal” church. Such reclassification had real benefits: rival churches could be stripped of their assets.

Imperially sponsored creeds, generated by imperially sponsored councils, ultimately set the limits of Christian theological diversity. In principle the product of consensus, creeds functioned to signal episcopal allegiance to the emperor’s will. After Constantine, whether by withholding of financial benefits or by applications of force, concord could be coerced—though often only with mixed results.

Eventually, heresy in the late imperial period will become a legal category, with defined disabilities, part of the taxonomy of religious deviance detailed in book 16 of the fifth-century compendium of Roman law, the Theodosian Code. “The insanity of the heretics must be restrained” declared the code: assemblies outlawed, property confiscated, careers in imperial service forbidden, inheritances annulled (16.5.65).

Yet, while the code’s conceptualization of religious deviance is specifically Christian, the motivation for articulating these laws seems entirely and typically Roman. Rome from before the days of empire had always been fastidious about right religio: the best way to secure well-being on earth was to ensure that no impiety alienated heaven. This was why, since the days of Augustus, the emperor was also the pontifex maximus, “greatest priest,” charged with overseeing right religio in Rome. After 312, the denomination of heaven may have shifted, but this practical concern to promote religio and to suppress dangerous superstitio remained paramount. Good relations with heaven were the key to security and well-being—salus—on earth. Religious uniformity, now specifically Christian, and a specific kind of Christian, had with Constantine become a concern of the state.