I’m reading Catherine Nixey’s new book Heresy: Jesus Christ And The Other Sons Of God (I reviewed her previous one, The Darkening Age, here). Among other things, she demonstrates in Heresy how Christianity is a product of its age,  an age when dime-a-dozen saviours, miracle cures and resurrections were seen as real. Nixey also shows how, from the start, there were many ‘Christianities’, not just one. The set of beliefs that eventually became, by fair means and foul, the orthodoxy, jostled alongside hundreds of others for well over a century. Despite their proliferation, however, early Christianities remained an insignificant cult for almost two centuries.

Those who recognised these early forms of Christian beliefs for what they were, were vociferous in their criticism of them. Much of what they had to say no longer exists, unfortunately, thanks to later Christians who frequently destroyed it. We know of it, however because of what survives in the works of Christian writers who in their refutations quoted from it.

The arguments offered by these early critics still sound remarkably relevant today; the objections of modern sceptics are not really new. The likes of Celsus (b. circa AD140) and Porphyry (b. circa 234) came up with them first. Their early criticism bears repeating:

Celsus:

If these people proclaim Jesus, and others proclaim someone else, and if they all have the common glib slogan, “Believe if you want to be saved, or else away with you – well then, what will those do who really want to be saved? Are they to throw dice in order to divine where they may turn, and whom they are to follow?’ (Heresy, p26)

Those who claimed to have witnessed the resurrection were either ‘deluded by… sorcery, (or through) wishful thinking had an hallucination due to some mistaken notion. (An experience which) has happened to thousands’. (p47)

…while he (Jesus) was in the body, and no one believed upon him, he preached to all without intermission; but when he might have produced a powerful belief in himself after rising from the dead, he showed himself secretly only to one woman, and to his own boon companions.(sourced here)

According to Porphyry,

Christian parables were ‘fictitious’… no more than imaginative little stories… replete with stupidity, written in a ‘comical and unconvincing style. (Heresy, p24)

Responding to Christians’ belief in bodily resurrection, Porphyry points out that many ‘have perished in the sea and their bodies eaten by fishes and many have been eaten by wild birds and animals. How then is it possible that these bodies should return?’ (pp47-48)

How indeed.

Critics like these were soon silenced, their work burnt – Celsus’ survives mainly in Origen’s rebuttal – and, as the church assumed greater power, so too were later authors.

As Nixey demonstrates, the word heresy originally meant ‘choice’. For Christians it soon came to mean making the wrong choice, the adoption of beliefs that did not conform to those who, in the ascendancy, came to control ‘Christian Truth’. Whoever chose otherwise, including those of alternate Christianities, were condemned as heretics in the new meaning of the word.

(Edited for sentence drop-out)