Heretic by Catherine Nixey

Heretic by Catherine Nixey is about the hundreds, if not thousands, of versions of Christianity that flourished in the hundreds of years after Jesus. It was a Book of the Year from The Economist. It seemed like an well-written book.
The story of the “Lost Christianities” is fairly well documented by church historians, academic historians, and others. The first real conflict over what Christianity is and what it means to be a Christian was among James, Peter, and Paul in the Acts of The Apostles. From that first disagreement, there was an absolute explosion in the variations of Christian belief, practice, and message. All these variations were also interacting with the massive numbers of new religions being formed in the first few centuries of the Roman Empire.
All that is not new or disputed. Heretic, though, focuses specifically on how the Roman world went from hundreds (if not thousands) of religions plus hundreds (if not thousands) of versions of Christianity alone to a single version with a single, specific belief system (Nicene Creed), enforced by a single individual person (the Bishop of Rome).
Traditionally, the answer (or at least the answer that I heard in high school & college) is that, well, there weren’t that many versions and there wasn’t that much disagreement. And, over time, persuasion & thoughtful argumentation from the Church Fathers won out until basically everyone was in agreement when Constantine showed up and asked what religion should the Empire enforce.
Heretic argues that, first, yes, there was that much disagreement. And second, the winners won through physical force, abuse, censorship, shame, and persecution. And then, like any human winner, they rewrote history to make themselves look good. In fact, she goes further to argue that, contrary to popular belief that the biggest threat to Christianity was Roman persecution, it was Christians who were the biggest threat to other Christians.
What I Liked
Heretic is a fast-paced, well-written book. Wow, I wish I could write like the author. It moves along and never gets bogged down in the weeds.
The book is deeply researched, footnoted, and sourced. I have no idea how someone who is not a full-time academic even begins to review & organize the amount of source material that the author works with. The bibliography alone has thousands of hours of deep, difficult reading material. This is the kind of non-fiction that we need more of.
The author is even-handed, candid, and forthright. It’s obvious that she’s driven by shedding light on known, but forgotten & overlooked facts rather than any driving animosity towards Christianity per se. She’s the daughter of a monk & a nun. Due to her background, she understands the subtleties and the people of the Christian faith. She’s out to tell a story that, like the Crusades, is an era of human history that absolutely happened, and is worth discussing openly and soberly rather than covering up in embarrassment.
What I Did Not Like
Not a whole lot – this is exactly the kind of non-fiction book that should exist in the world. Now, it is a fairly niche topic…but also not so niche either, since there are ~2.4 billion Christians in the world and most of the rest of the world has heard of it.
In *Heretic*, Catherine Nixey explores the diverse early Christian landscape, highlighting how it transformed from countless beliefs to a single doctrine enforced by the Bishop of Rome. I found her argument compelling, as she challenges the traditional narrative that downplays the intense disagreements among early Christians. Instead, she suggests that the consolidation of power came through force and persecution, not just persuasion. The writing is engaging and well-researched, making complex history accessible. Overall, I think this book is a vital addition to non-fiction, shedding light on a crucial yet often overlooked part of history.
- Fast-paced and well-written narrative
- Deeply researched with extensive sourcing
- Even-handed and candid approach to the subject
- Not a whole lot; it's a niche topic.
My Excerpts
I pulled out a lot of excerpts from this book via Google Lens, with my note after.
Celsus tartly put it: there are ‘others who go about begging [and] say that they are sons of God who have come from above’.”
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.
Christianity started during a time of extreme diversity of new religions. The established Roman intellectual class was having none of it.
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.”
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.
The author on why she titled the book Heretic.
This was a world that flickered with the supernatural: when one early Christian wanted to argue that Christ had indeed risen from the tomb, he turned to the phoenix to support his claim. Cannot the phoenix, which ‘builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices’, rise again from the dead? Can it not be resurrected? Well, then, this Christian argued: so too can Christians. 16 The Christian writer Origen made a similar argument. The unbelievers mock at the resurrection of Jesus Christ,’ he wrote, but such stories were common. ‘Several people are recorded to have returned even from their tombs, not only on the same day, but even on the day after. Why then is it amazing if [Jesus] who performed many miracles of a super-human nature also had something extraordinary about his death so that, if he so wished, his soul might leave his body and, after performing certain services without it, might return to it again when it wished?’
Understanding ancient history is very difficult, because even though humans are still the same, the world that we live in in drastically different.
This wealth of resurrection stories would be used as a weapon against Christianity when it started to claim that its saviour was in any way unique. Unique? Hardly, said Celsus. There were so many other almost identical stories of people who had come back to life or been to the underworld and back – not just Salmoxis, but Pythagoras, Orpheus, Heracles, Theseus The list went on. ‘How many others’, Celsus asked with typical disdain, ‘produce wonders like this to convince simple hearers whom they exploit by deceit? It was such a common trope that in the first century AD there was even a play that involved the resurrection of a character who, having apparently been killed by poison, then began to stir slightly, as though recovering from a profound sleep, and lifted its head and looked about.’ Everyone in the theatre witnessing this resurrection and the audience included the elderly Emperor Vespasian was delighted and ‘much moved’. Their enthusiasm was by no means diminished by the fact that this particular resurrected character happened to be a dog.
Resurrection stories were very common. It was like A Thing People Did, which is one (of many things) in the ancient world that misleads so many modern-day Christian pop-writers into “anachronistic apologetics” – or writing about Christianity completely out of context.
Almost from the first moments of its existence, Christianity became engaged in a ferocious war about whether it was a religion or whether it was merely magic, with pretensions. Ancient Christians fought back – though not perhaps in the way that modern minds might expect. They tended not to deny that other people in the ancient world performed miracles or exorcised demons – few Christians had any interest in denying that this was a world that thrilled to the supernatural. Instead, they merely claimed a competitive edge over these other wonder- workers: those who performed exorcisms in the name of Christ, they argued, were better than the other exorcists, who were frauds.
As the Christian author Justin bragged, Christians could be seen ‘driving the possessing devils out of the men, though they could not be cured by all the other exorcists, and those who used incantations and drugs’.35 One Christian text features a Jesus who argues, with an accountant’s precision, that other magicians have been weakened by his arrival because ‘I took from all of them a third of their power.’36 In a similar vein of competitive quality-control, Augustine later argued that bad miracles were performed by practitioners of the art of wicked curiosity: the art which they call magic. 37 Such wicked miracles depended on ‘the fraudulent rites of demons. Christ’s miracles, he argued, were better as they were ‘performed through simple faith and pious trust, and not by means of incantations and charms. ‘
Again, a very different world.
Eventually, one form of Christianity would dominate. It produced a Bible, and it claimed that this book was authoritative. Eventually, other texts and all other sects – those that said Mary was not a virgin, or that Joseph was Jesus’ father – would start to fade away in the West. Eventually, each Christmas, the story of the virgin birth would be hymned across the world as one pure note: ‘the Christian story’ in the singular. In the end, if not in the beginning, there would be ‘the Word’. But it was not always so. Look in the right places – peer at the right painting by Giotto, or at a Christmas card that shows an ox and an ass, or a Nativity scene that pictures Mary in a cave and you are seeing the descendants of these tales. To hear these notes, with their discordant ideas and ancient harmonies, is today an eerie experience. For they are the sound of a world that has been lost, and of a world that – had history tilted slightly differently – might have been.
The saddest part of the story is simply that the winners erased the art, literature, thought, and any evidence associated with belief systems that didn’t conform to orthodox thought. All we have now are pieces here and there.
To modern eyes, such confusion can seem baffling: it is ‘naturally’ clear to modern readers that the ‘true’ stories about Jesus are those which are contained in the New Testament. But in the earliest days not only was there no authoritative Bible, but no one had written these stories down at all. The four gospels in modern Bibles were written down between AD 70 and AD 110, long after the death of Jesus. When, in the first century AD, some among the faithful started to put such stories on the page, others were suspicious of this innovation. As one first-century bishop called Papias explained, he preferred to hear stories from the mouths of living men since, ‘I did not imagine that things out of books would help me as much as the utterances of a living and abiding voice. ’20
The structure of the Christian Bible hints that, despite the later confident rhetoric, there was some doubt about what the true story was. As the biblical scholar Bruce Metzger has written, ‘if it is necessary to have not one but several accounts of the one life of Jesus… this is as good as admitting that none of them is perfect. Consider the virgin birth: not only is it attested in just two of the four gospels, but it is flatly contradicted in numerous places within them, as Joseph is referred to repeatedly and explicitly as Jesus’ ‘father’. This was not always obvious: for centuries, pious scribes, evidently aware of how problematic this idea was, had substituted out the word ‘father’. But, once upon a time, it had been there.
This period of time is fascinating. A global network before any modern communication networks or printing technology.
There is one supremely pleasing text in which St John banishes bed bugs from a hotel, with full biblical bombast. Having spent half the night being bitten by the creatures, the holy John comes to the end of his tether and suddenly declares, ‘I say unto you, O Bugs, behave yourselves, one and all, and leave your abode for this night and remain quiet in one place, and keep your distance from the servants of God’. The bed bugs duly depart. And with them – and with all of these tales – went some of the unquestioned authority of the Bible.
This quote (emphasis mine), referencing the Acts of John, is simply absolutely amazing. There is just so much going on here. Of all the passages that highlight the “regular person-ness” of the Apostles (like Paul making tents, or Peter catching a nap, etc), the image of John yelling at roaches in his hotel is grade A gold.
As M. R. James pointed out, such stories are clearly implausible and many Christian historians have, for centuries, discounted them as absurd. Texts such as the Infancy Gospel of James or the Infancy Gospel of Thomas were routinely dismissed and ignored by scholars, well into the second half of the twentieth century. One twentieth-century academic disparaged them as ‘the schlock that is supposed to pass for “literature”” and added that it is mystifying, indeed, why serious scholars continue to talk about the pertinence of apocryphal material to the study of the New Testament. But this is to miss the point. Such texts matter not because they are believable – but because they were believed and read by Christians for centuries. It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them – but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology, with dates,
Moreover, when evaluating the apparent implausibility of apocryphal tales, it is worth remembering how implausible those tales that are contained within modern Bibles once seemed to many readers. Today, time and tradition and long handling have worn the tales of the Western Bible smooth; we do not notice their rough edges or inconsistencies. In the ancient world, these now familiar biblical tales had no such antique grandeur, no well-worn lustre. And classical critics duly attacked them mercilessly, in prose rich in synonyms of the word ‘stupid’. ‘Preposterous’, snorts Porphyry when considering one biblical story; ‘the absolute stupidity of it all, he scoffs at another. He accuses one revered Christian saying of being full of ‘obscurity and stupidity’ and another of being the sort of thing that ‘no one is so uneducated or stupid’ enough to believe. Celsus is blunter yet: he describes Christian stories as being the sort of thing that ‘a drunken old woman would have been ashamed to sing… to lull a little child to sleep’.
Again, a fascinating and wild time – all before modern communications networks. One day at church some Christian shows up and is like “hey, here’s a letter from John about bed bugs in his hotel” and another shows up and is like “hey, here’s a letter from John about a seven-headed red dragon trying to eat a baby” and then the bishop and deacons all have to figure out which one is definitely legit and which one is definitely ridiculous by like writing a letter to some other bishops and, then waiting, I guess? Which, that’s basically what Paul’s letter were…it’s just the practice kept on for hundreds of years.
Ethiopian church ‘are possessed with a strange notion that they are the only true Christians in the world; as for us, they shunned us as heretics. Similarly, when envoys were sent from the Vatican to India in the sixteenth century, they were distinctly put out to find that the Indian Christians considered ‘the Patriarch of Babylon’ to be ‘the universal pastor and head of the Catholic Church’ which, as all Catholics knew, was a title that ‘was due only to the most holy father, the Bishop of Rome’. A synod was promptly convened, and the Roman Christians forced the Indian Christians into line. From now on, to use their old title for the Patriarch of Babylon was declared a ‘heresy’, punishable with excommunication. Each was orthodox unto themselves, and looked upon other iterations of religion with suspicion, puzzlement, and often frank contempt.
This section was fascinating. Even though so much diversity was killed off by the orthodox version & the Roman state, there were many old (like older than Roman Catholic) versions that just kept on keeping on. They are still around and just doing their thing.
Almost everything about the Christian obsession with heresy struck classical observers as strange. Not least of all its ironic consequences. For, as Greek and Roman authors did not hesitate to point out, the followers of this God of love were prone to tearing themselves apart with startling viciousness over bafflingly small disputes. Christians, Celsus wryly observed, are all ‘divided and rent asunder; and each wants to have his own party’. Indeed, pretty much the only thing on which Christians seemed to agree, he noted, was the name ‘Christian’ itself.46 In truth, they rarely agreed on that. Even Christians admitted the truth of Julian’s point: as Augustine dolefully wrote, while pagans worshipped numerous gods and Christians worshipped one, nonetheless, ‘they, under their plurality, have no division yet we, under our one, have no unity. And, no peace – for theological disputes could quickly become physical ones. As the non-Christian historian Ammianus Marcellinus disdainfully saw it, ‘no wild beasts are such dangerous enemies to man as Chris- tians are to one another. ’48
Yeah…this is a thing that goes all the way back.
The dawn of this new Christian era would dazzle historians for centuries. When Constantine came to power, a day bright and radiant, wrote the Christian historian Eusebius, with no cloud overshadowing it, shone down with shafts of heavenly light on the churches of Christ throughout the world.” The literature of this era is luminous with delight. The moment when an emperor who favoured Christianity sat, for the first time, on the throne of Rome was a time of ‘dazzling festival; light was everywhere’ Men ‘who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes. They danced and sang in city and country alike.’Men ‘had now lost all fear of their former oppressors.” According to Eusebius, even laws softened in this new era. In ‘every city the victorious emperor published decise sewera humanity and laws that gave proof of munificence and true piety. Thus all tyranny had been purged away.
Eusebius told one story. The Theodosian Code tells another. Read it carefully and another world appears before your eyes. Not the jubilant world of Eusebius, but an oppressive world in which first this liberty and then that one are slowly pared away. There may, initially, have been ‘decrees full of humanity’ and laws that gave evidence of ‘true piety’ in this newly Christianizing world. But within fifty years the legal mood of Rome can be seen, clearly, to have darkened. And among those for whom this period would become the darkest were the so-called heretics.
At first, as with that law of AD 326, the signs that anything was changing were few; a nudge here; a confiscation there. And then suddenly, in August AD 379, after just a little over fifty years of Christian rule, the tone changes.
In 379, the most powerful Christians realized that they could be even more powerful with the law & monopoly of violence on their side.
Such authors were following in a venerable tradition. From its earliest days, Christianity had a habit of denying that it owed anything to the classical world from which it had sprung, in either ntual or thought. In fact, many Christians vehemently argued that the reverse was true: the classical world had stolen its ideas from them. The second-century Christian writer Clement of Alexan-dria claimed that Greek authors (those ‘pilferers’) had ‘imitated and copied the marvels recorded in our books’ and, moreover, have ‘plagiarized and falsified’ Christian ideas. Greek philoso- phy, Clement wrote, was ‘like the torch of wick which men kindle, artificially stealing the light from the sun.” Pythagoras and Plato had, whatever the Greeks might claim, not been original at all: they had stolen their ideas from Moses. Elaborate travel plans were invented by ancient Christians to argue that Plato had picked up Moses’ writings while on a tour of Egypt.
Again, all before modern communications networks.
But the real danger of Apollonius was, for Christianity, precisely the reverse. The real danger was that he was to magical, too – to use the Christian word – miraculous. Apollonius life was touched by miracles and shone with the borrowed glory of heaven. He lived in a world in which gods were made incarnate in mortal women, in which the sick were healed, the dead were raised, and in which one man, the son of a god ascended into heaven. He was a mortal rebuke to the idea that Christ had been in any way unique. So Keats was right and he was wrong: Apollonius could destroy great mysteries – but not through logic. It was through his miracles that Apollonius could clip an angel’s wings. Through his miracles, Apollonius could unweave the rainbow.
Interesting passage & highlight on Apolloniius.
In Carthage, in the middle of the AD 340s, some Christians had been pursued by the local governor (for other Christians). One of them, Maximian, was arrested and tortured, beaten with lead-tipped scourges until his limbs dislocated, and ‘this mangling of the limbs created one big wound. Other Christians were executed en masse, in a manner that was, even in a vicious period, notably cruel. They were put in boats, rowed out ‘into the billows of the sea’, then two casks of sand were tied around each person one around the neck, one around the feet- and they were dumped into the water: a brutal method of execution, but one that would, as their executioners knew, prevent other Christians finding their bodies then reverencing them as martyrs. Non-Christians looked on in disgust at what they saw as barbaric violence as did many Christians. It is likely that the vast majority of Christians of all kinds were far less interested in religious difference than the rhetoric or the violence of their rulers might make them seem.
Even Constantine himself seems to have been taken aback by Christianity’s bitter sectarianism. He had embraced one form of this religion imagining that, in doing so, he embraced unity: one God, one emperor. Instead, in Christianity he found himself with a fissile, feuding mass, and the more he exerted pressure on it, the more it seemed to fracture – much to his irritation. Like a father forced to referee between warring children, Constantine shows every sign of being less interested in these squabbles than deeply irritated by them, later raging against the ‘malignant per- versity and disloyalty’ of the Christians who were fighting with each other in North Africa.” He was often conspicuously uninterested in the theological nitty-gritty of their debates and even counselled people against harming their heretical neighbours, for ‘it is one thing to take on willingly the contest for immortality, quite another to enforce it with sanctions.’
Emphasis mine. Constantine channeling another dude from the early Roman Empire.