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Power, Heresy, and
the Evolution of Christianity
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods
are on the side of the Government.
—Bertrand Russell
The fourth century was fateful for Christianity: it marks the period in which
Christianity came to be embraced by the Roman/Byzantine Empire; doctrine was
now to fall directly under state control. We will note how politics affects
theology directly. Religion and heresy become the chief instruments, the banner,
and rallying point of diverse cities, regions, groups, and ambitious patriarchs in
the internal political struggles of the Roman/Byzantine Empire. The groundwork
is being laid for the further development of regional conflict in the Middle East,
even within Christianity. The Middle East will be moving eventually into a three-
way struggle among Rome, Constantinople, and Islam, but for the moment we
will observe how power and heresy affected the geopolitics of the area even
before Islam existed, including rising antipathy between East and West, that is,
between Constantinople and Rome. Islam will soon adopt and share this
geopolitical distrust and wariness toward the West. It may come with the
territory.
The issue of heresy came up almost immediately after the life, mission, and
death of Jesus, when divisions sprang up among his followers over how to
interpret those dramatic events, thereby laying the groundwork for the
development of later heresies. Over time, the state and competing political
powers were inexorably drawn into the definition and management of theology
and heresy, impacting directly upon the state’s own policies as well. Who was
promoting one or another theological principle mattered as much as the principle
being promoted.
Politics was involved from the start, beginning with the execution of Jesus.

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Most of the Jewish religious leadership in Jerusalem had viewed Jesus as a false
prophet, the movement heretical, and had called for Jesus’s death. The state—the
local authorities of the Roman Empire—finally bowed to the leaders of the
Jewish community in putting him to death. On the part of Rome, this was a
political decision, not a theological one. One can readily argue that for the
leaders of the Jewish Sanhedrin itself, it was also a political act to eliminate
Jesus because of the threat he posed to their authority in the community.
Right away, the potentiality of heresy was present. What would the linkage
be, if any, between Judaism and the new faith? Naturally, virtually all of the
early followers of Jesus were Jewish and thought of themselves as Jewish
Christians. Yet if Christianity was really a sect of Judaism, did new pagan
converts to Christianity have to accept Judaism before they entered Christianity?
For most Christian theologians today, it was Paul, not Jesus, who really
established Christianity as a distinct new religion quite separate from Judaism;
after Paul, one no longer had to be a Jew in order to be a Christian. And it was
Paul who broke new theological ground in establishing faith as the essential
component of salvation, rather than personal fulfillment in one’s life of Jewish
Law. The new direction of the church under Paul created the most shattering
schism in the history of Judaism. The new Christian faith would lay claim to
being a universal religion, open to all, in which ethnic or religious origin had no
role to play. There was no longer a Chosen People; all could become “chosen”
by choosing Christianity. Faith, not Law, was the road to salvation.
So, from early on, diverse views on Jesus emerged as the early Christian
community sought to make sense of his life, mission, and teachings. At the heart
of these early controversies in Christianity lay the issue of Christology: what is
the true nature of Jesus Christ? These arguments would inevitably affect Islam.
Was Jesus man, or was he God, or both?
Was he truly biologically conceived and born of a virgin, or had he always
existed prior to birth? If he had always existed, had he existed as long as
God had existed?
Is Jesus coequal to God, or is he God?
Did God come first, and then create Jesus? If so, does that not make Jesus
“number two” to God?
Is God one, or truly a dual personality combining Jesus and God? Or a
triple personality combining the Holy Spirit?
If Christ is both man and God, which is the more important element: the
element of man, or God? Can God actually come down to earth and live as

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a human being, be killed, die on the cross?
What happened to Jesus after he died and rose again from the dead? Does
he still exist independently or did he fuse with God? Or has he always had a
separate existence?
These questions and many others roiled the church and later the Roman
Empire, incited rebellions, created new sects, sparked civil and military conflict,
and divided earthly power. They remain without consensus and still roil the
ranks of Christianity.
For the first three centuries, of course, Christianity had no official legal
status. It was still only a movement, rejected and periodically persecuted by the
Roman state; Christians sometimes refused to pay even basic lip service to the
state religion of Rome—a loose and flexible affair involving brief obeisance to
the few symbols of imperial power, even as one went about one’s own personal
religious practice. But refusal to acknowledge even this minimalist state religion
alongside one’s own personal religion was taken as an act of rejection of the
state, an act of rebellion.
Meanwhile, competing views of Jesus coexisted for long periods of time,
until the church began systematically to reject numerous alternate visions of
Jesus, seeking to extirpate them and forge unity around a single “orthodox”
view. The ultimate formal adoption of Christianity by Roman imperial power in
Constantinople only hastened the process of enforcing, with new muscle, the
unanimity of Christian creed.
For the state, theology is too important to be left to the theologians.
Theological decisions could not be limited to the obscure proceedings of
theologians sitting solemnly in council, but rather included a constellation of
competing authorities—believers, diverse theologians, politicians, and ultimately
the Emperor—all vying to determine the true message of Christianity in line
with their own interests. They had one all-important goal: to ensure that church
and state maintained sole monopoly over doctrine. To challenge monopoly over
interpretation was to challenge church and state power itself. In the zeal of the
new faith, the nature of Jesus was publicly debated among Jewish and Gentile
communities around the ancient world—particularly in the Levant, Anatolia,
Greece, and Egypt. There are tales of popular debates within barbershops and
taverns in Constantinople about the nature of Jesus. Hellenized Jews, who made
up a large proportion of the Jewish community, were at the center of such
debate. The issues of Christ’s nature would not go away, but would resurface
again and again in later heresies, even in the emergence of Islam itself.

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With the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman/Byzantine state, the
state moved to bring under control all interpretations and schools of thought that
existed in the empire, to establish a degree of orthodoxy and define “right
opinions.” Partisans of differing views were brought to reconciliation, overruled,
or suppressed. Not surprisingly, the power and influence of particular dissenting
officials inevitably affected the calculus of state decisions. How would the state
identify, organize, rationalize, codify, collate, integrate, reconcile, and ultimately
impose the manifold religious ideas swirling in the public space since Jesus’s
time? The first step was to convoke a series of ecumenical councils to hash out
and codify the formal nature of the faith. When the Emperor Constantine I
convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to hammer out the basic principles of
Christian theology in the Nicene Creed, the Council thought it had crafted the
decisive statement on Christian faith for all time.
Yet it was not so: more Councils had to be held, more changes had to be
made. One of the first tasks of the official church was decision on scripture.
Among the many writings about Jesus, his apostles, and the early Christian
movement, which ones would be consecrated as the heart of Christian doctrine?
And which versions of which books, when there were often several? Acceptance
of one book and rejection of another had direct consequences, generating clear
winners and losers; certain books were considered “inside” books and
canonized; others were rejected as noncanonical, or “outside” books. Criteria for
acceptance into the canon varied widely: some books were considered to have
been written too late to speak authoritatively of Jesus’s life. Or Rome weighed in
to support and promote certain of its popular texts that were not especially
popular or well-known in the Greek-speaking world of Constantinople. Some
books were popular within certain specific communities, others were not; some
accounts were considered unreliable, yet others considered so far outside of
standard church teachings as to be downright heretical. Some books were seen as
possessing historical value in documenting the early movement but could not be
considered as scripture.
And what is “scripture” in the end? It is the body of texts adopted by
recognized authority as authentic, thus canonized and later regarded as “sacred.”
The quality of the sacred in the end is determined by a judgment call on the part
of quite interested parties. As a result, numerous important Christian texts were
rejected by the authorities on one or another of these grounds. Yet the
authenticity of these texts, even though rejected from the canon, included
documents of vital importance to understanding Christianity, impressive works
such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocryphal Acts of the
Apostles, and others. (Islam would undergo much the same process in sorting

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out the authenticity of thousands of Hadith relating to the reported sayings and
doings of the Prophet in his lifetime—and they, too, are still under debate and
examination today.)
It was not just texts that ended up losers. So were certain bodies of ideas and
beliefs; whole communities that embraced them were excluded as the church
authorities, acting with state sanction, passed judgment. Old and cherished ideas
die hard. And to the various ecumenical councils that were convened, who
would be invited? Who would be heard? How would decisions be made? Church
leaders and communities whose views were not accepted were required to
renounce their views or be pronounced heretical.
The power of the state became evermore intrusive in the process of the
authentication, spread, and imposition of religion. Although much of the process
of conversion to Christianity took place peacefully through evangelization, it
was often buttressed by state takeovers of earlier “pagan” shrines, temples, and
institutions from the pre-Christian era, and the banning of their rites and
practices. In later years, some conversions were not peaceful at all; take the
conquest and conversion of the Saxons by Charlemagne in the extremely violent
thirty-year Saxon Wars beginning in 732. Here “conversion” was basically an
ideological justification for the expansion of Charlemagne’s Frankish
Carolingian Empire. Capital punishment was imposed on those Saxons who
continued to practice rites of their traditional gods; the campaigns were so
violent that some Frankish bishops feared the long-term consequences of such
bloody conversions by the sword.
The backing of the state, with all its coercive and persuasive power, greatly
facilitated the evangelical process; the advisability of appearing loyal to state
doctrine made such conversions easy and politic. The church employed different
techniques to discredit and eliminate paganism. It would often demonize the
pagan gods, declaring them devils or witches worshipped at one’s peril. In other
cases, the church compromised with local pagan practices, accepting some of the
native pagan gods, to be rendered into instant “saints” so that they could remain
as a comforting presence in the new Christian environment, albeit diminished in
importance. Sacred pagan sites were often retooled into sites for local “saints.”
These practices were widely conducted among the barbarian tribes of Europe
and into modern times in the Roman Church’s conversion of native populations
of Latin America and Africa. Islam faced almost precisely this same problem as
it spread east and west, north and south, encountering earlier faiths, cults, and
saints, many of whom were at least informally maintained, now in Islamic guise,
by new converts to Islam.
The cult of the Virgin Mary represented another expansion of the realm of the

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divine as it moved to include evermore figures in the church’s pantheon. Mary’s
official adoration took place some four hundred years after Jesus, and against
considerable opposition. It was not until the sixth century that the veneration of
Mary took on broad public dimensions in the Eastern Church, and only later still
in the Western. (The religious scholar Karen Armstrong even suggests that the
adoption of the Virgin Mary into the Catholic pantheon was an unconscious
compensation for the abolition of the vital presence of female deities in so many
early eastern religions, under the sternly patriarchal monotheism of Judaism and,
much later, Protestant Christianity.) The book When God Was a Woman, by
Merlin Stone, reflects this transition from societies that were often matriarchal,
with worship of female deities, to patriarchal, which tended to associate women
as a source of temptation and sin. All three Abrahamic faiths picked up on the
idea.
Responsibility for most of these early political decisions on theology and
doctrine fell to Constantinople rather than to Rome. Rome may have been the
capital of the Roman Empire, but by the time of the legalization of Christianity,
the Eternal City had fallen onto hard times, an uncomfortable place reeling from
regular barbarian invasions and occupations. Meanwhile, the new city of
Constantinople had been chosen as the alternative, and increasingly dominant,
capital of the Roman Empire, where the Roman emperor would now reside
almost exclusively. It was the Eastern Roman Empire that took the decision to
formally adopt Christianity. The huge Eastern Empire, or Byzantium, would
maintain the full trappings of an imperial state for another thousand years, even
as Rome dwindled to geopolitical insignificance as an imperial power. It was
Constantinople that took on most of the early task of determining orthodoxy,
identifying the corpus of canonized texts and deciding which were heretical. It
was also the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire that ultimately spread
Christianity throughout most of the Middle East, the Mediterranean world, up
into the Balkans, and through much of the Slavic world. The empire at its high
point had conquered the lands encompassing most of North Africa, Egypt, the
Levant, Syria, and most of what is today’s Iraq and Asia Minor (Anatolia).
Christianity’s only rival at all in the region was Zoroastrianism in Persia—until
the emergence of Islam.

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