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A Smorgasbord of Heresies
A fascinating panoply of Christian ideas emerged over time in the Eastern
Mediterranean, most of which later came to be marked as heresies. These
heresies matter. They tell us a lot about the dynamics at work in the power
politics of the Byzantine Empire. They reveal much about the religious culture
and mind-set of the time—even setting the stage for many of the theological
views of Islam. An understanding of dynamics of heresy shows us again and
again how religion acts as the vehicle, and not the cause, of conflicts, splits, and
confrontations based on other quite worldly interests and rivalries. What better
way to promote one’s ambitions than to cloak them in religious and godly garb?
One of the earliest and most persistent heresies was Marcionism. According
to the Christian scholar G. R. S. Mead, Marcion (110–160 CE) was a rich
shipowner in Sinope, on the Black Sea coast of today’s Turkey. Marcion
followed in his father’s footsteps to become bishop of Sinope. He reportedly
made major contributions of his own money to the church and visited Rome as a
known figure to promulgate his vision around 140 CE—approximately 160 years
before the empire legalized Christianity. Even then, the church was hostile to
Marcion’s message, excommunicated him in 144 CE, and returned all the funds
he had contributed.
Marcion’s error in the eyes of the church was to become more Pauline than
St. Paul himself. Paul had, of course, posited that Jesus had preached an entirely
new religious vision, quite distinct from Judaism. Marcion, as a consecrated
bishop of the church in the second century and a recognized leader in Asia
Minor, declared the entire Old Testament to be irrelevant to Christian doctrine.
He drew up elaborate tables of the characteristics of the Hebrew God as
described in the Old Testament, alongside the qualities of God preached by
Jesus. Marcion concluded that the characteristics of jealousy, wrath, violence,
and vengeance of the Hebrew God were incompatible with the God of love and
forgiveness as preached by Jesus, and that therefore the Hebrew God was not the
true God, not the God of Christianity at all, but a lesser deity whose power was
transcended by the power of the God of Jesus. Marcion even rejected most of the
Apostles as unreliable witnesses, declaring only Paul to have clearly understood
the nature of Christ’s message; he concluded that it was fruitless and
unnecessary to try to reconcile Judaism with Christianity.
Despite his being declared a heretic, Marcion’s community was strong, and
he established large numbers of churches that rivaled Rome for centuries in Italy,
Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Asia Minor, and Persia. The Marcionite Church

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was the second most influential and important movement among early Christian
communities after the official church itself.
Elements of Marcion’s message have persisted to today, in the form of groups
and organizations that propagate his views. The remarkable longevity of
Marcion’s thinking lies in the fundamental theological dilemma that he posed:
how can the parochial Semitic tribalism and violence of much of the Old
Testament, with its often wrathful, arbitrary, and fickle God, be reconciled with
the God of the New Testament, along with Jesus’s message of love? And so the
question remains: is there continuity, or a sharp break, between Judaism and
Christianity? If there is continuity, then Christianity is clearly heretical from the
perspective of Judaism; if there was a complete break from Judaism, then
Christianity cannot be perceived as a Jewish heresy but rather as an independent
body of faith in which the relevance of the Old Testament to Jesus’s teachings is
questionable. These questions do not go away. They also represent an early
version of an argument, still regularly encountered today, that rejects the idea of
any “common God” of the three Abrahamic faiths, and declares the Gods to be
different. But Marcionism, in any case, represented a major challenge to
Christian state authority in Byzantium.
After the legalization of Christianity in the empire in 313 CE, the next major
and long-lasting heresy to arise was that of Arianism. Once again, the nature of
Christ lies at its center. Arius (c. 250–336 CE) was a prominent theologian who
was born in Libya, educated in Antioch (today’s Turkey), where he absorbed a
great many of his ideas, then lived and taught in Alexandria, Egypt, one of the
major (rival) centers and patriarchates of early Christianity. He preached that
Jesus had been created by the Father, just as the Holy Spirit had been, and that
both were therefore subordinate to God the Father, who was the “true” God, the
Creator. Jesus thus had a beginning, but God never did. God is self-existent,
whereas the Son is not, who therefore cannot himself be God. Jesus thus
becomes a lesser being.
Such a belief sharply undermined the orthodox position of the church that
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have always existed and
all continue to exist simultaneously as coequals. The Arian doctrine was
denounced and declared as heretical in the Nicene Creed negotiated at the
Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. But the movement maintained great power and
attracted even the sympathy of the Emperor Constantine’s successor. Arianism
became deeply established among the Germanic tribes of Europe and across the
Middle East, especially Alexandria, where there was strong predisposition to
accept this kind of thinking about Jesus as a “secondary” being and not on a par
with God the Father. The doctrine became the vehicle for an Alexandrian bid for

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influence. The persistence of this Arian view reflects discomfort with the
complex concept of the Trinity and of the position of Jesus himself as on a par
with God; in short, there is an abiding sympathy for elements of a purer
monotheism that does not dilute the One God—the essence of Jewish belief and
of Muslim doctrine to come. It is also the theology of the modern Unitarian
Church.
Despite being officially declared heretical and anathema, some heresies
actually succeeded in breaking away and permanently establishing themselves.
Indeed, debate over Christ’s true nature could never, and has never, been fully
laid to rest in any kind of Christian consensus.
While Arianism rejected granting Jesus “equal status” with God, another
major heresy, Monophysitism, tilted the pendulum in the opposite direction,
maintaining that Jesus did have some human qualities but that he was essentially