Heresy by Catherine Nixey review – book of revelations
Second-century Gospel of James starts off telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s arm is frozen and the stars stand still. A few minutes later, a woman arrives and, sceptical about whether Mary can really be a virgin, insists on shoving her finger up the new mother’s vagina, whereupon her hand is immediately burned off.
This is just one of the hundreds – thousands, probably – of alternative versions of Christianity that teemed in the centuries following Jesus’s life and death. Take the Ophites, who believed that Christ had appeared on Earth in the form of a serpent. They celebrated mass by encouraging a snake to crawl over the altar on which loaves had been placed, consecrating them in the process. Another sect from the first century AD believed that King Herod rather than Jesus was the Messiah they had been waiting for. In Ethiopia, meanwhile, Pontius Pilate was looked on as far more than a Roman middle manager with a tendency to dither. He is revered there as a saint to this day.
The reason that we haven’t heard of these disreputable variants of the Christian story, suggests Catherine Nixey in this enthralling book, is that the early Church Fathers moved heaven and earth to ensure they were nipped in the bud. Whenever they came across something – a text, a practice, a belief – that they hadn’t authorised, they labelled it as “heresy” and threw the book at it. Flogging, fining and banishment were the obvious sanctions. But if you really wanted to send a message, then rowing heretics out to the middle of the sea, weighing them down with a sack of sand tied to the neck and legs, and pushing them overboard was the way to go. The idea was to make sure that no body could be recovered and turned into an object of veneration.By dint of such repressive measures, only one version of Christianity survived and flourished.
In Nixey’s words: “heresy would tilt European history for centuries”. It would lead to the excommunication of Martin Luther and the house arrest of Galileo. Heresy – or rather fear of it – pushed Thomas Cranmer into writing the Book of Common Prayer in 1549.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/m...evelations
Second-century Gospel of James starts off telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s arm is frozen and the stars stand still. A few minutes later, a woman arrives and, sceptical about whether Mary can really be a virgin, insists on shoving her finger up the new mother’s vagina, whereupon her hand is immediately burned off.
This is just one of the hundreds – thousands, probably – of alternative versions of Christianity that teemed in the centuries following Jesus’s life and death. Take the Ophites, who believed that Christ had appeared on Earth in the form of a serpent. They celebrated mass by encouraging a snake to crawl over the altar on which loaves had been placed, consecrating them in the process. Another sect from the first century AD believed that King Herod rather than Jesus was the Messiah they had been waiting for. In Ethiopia, meanwhile, Pontius Pilate was looked on as far more than a Roman middle manager with a tendency to dither. He is revered there as a saint to this day.
The reason that we haven’t heard of these disreputable variants of the Christian story, suggests Catherine Nixey in this enthralling book, is that the early Church Fathers moved heaven and earth to ensure they were nipped in the bud. Whenever they came across something – a text, a practice, a belief – that they hadn’t authorised, they labelled it as “heresy” and threw the book at it. Flogging, fining and banishment were the obvious sanctions. But if you really wanted to send a message, then rowing heretics out to the middle of the sea, weighing them down with a sack of sand tied to the neck and legs, and pushing them overboard was the way to go. The idea was to make sure that no body could be recovered and turned into an object of veneration.By dint of such repressive measures, only one version of Christianity survived and flourished.
In Nixey’s words: “heresy would tilt European history for centuries”. It would lead to the excommunication of Martin Luther and the house arrest of Galileo. Heresy – or rather fear of it – pushed Thomas Cranmer into writing the Book of Common Prayer in 1549.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/m...evelations
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"