The first 300 years of Christianity were troubled times. As Christians, inspired by their new faith, created churches all over the Roman Empire, they were persecuted and often cruelly executed because they refused to make sacrifices to the Roman gods. The persecutions were not continuous, and some Roman governors made a point of tolerating Christians, but the threat was always there.

One threat they did not face, however, was persecution by other Christians. Christianity was such a fledgling religion that it had no clear hierarchy or even ruling group immediately after the apostles died. It had no orthodoxy and no political power in those early years.

That would change. Heresies led to the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition; the deaths of so-called heretics like Jan Hus (burned at the stake in 1415), Sir Thomas More (beheaded in 1535), and  Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (burned at the stake in 1556), to name a few. Those later internecine persecutions could be just as horrifying as Jesus’s crucifixion was.

But that was in the future.

Christianity Before It Became Powerful

After the deaths of the apostles, there were alternative versions of Christianity. What we see is a flowering, in my view, of interpretations of what Jesus’s life, crucifixion, and resurrection meant to believers. In this column I will share a few of the major heretical groups but I can’t touch on them all, such as the Ebionites, Valentinians, Sethians, Manichaeists, Donatists, Montanists, and others. [1]

Marcionites (followers of Marcion). The easiest sect to understand is Marcion’s. He was a Greek Christian born in Pontus (located on the Black Sea). He went to Rome during the late 130s CE and began to write. Marcion was an enthusiast for Paul. In fact, he was so persuaded by Paul’s concept of Jesus Christ as the world’s savior (“through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free” [Romans 8:2]) that he decided Jesus Christ could not be the Son of the same God who appeared in the Hebrew Bible. That God, he thought, was too vindictive.

Marcion developed the idea that the God of the Old Testament was the Demiurge (a figure suggested by Plato). The Demiurge or “creator God” had made the Earth and humankind but was not the true God. Marcion’s real God was a God of Light.

Thus, Marcion rejected the Hebrew Bible as a precursor to Christianity. In his Antitheses, he compares 17 claims in the Hebrew Bible with contrary concepts in the New Testament.  A typical one:

“3. Joshua conquered the land with violence and terror; but Christ forbade all violence and preached mercy and peace. . . .” [2]

Not surprisingly, Marcion was expelled from the church in Rome (I’m not sure the concept of excommunication was in existence then). But he went on to found other churches, at least one of which lasted till the mid-300s.

• Gnostics. The ideas of Gnostics resembled some of Marcion’s; both had Platonic roots. Gnostics were various sects that believed Jesus had brought secret knowledge of salvation (gnosis) to a very few—an elite. But parsing gnostic views is difficult. Historian Charles Freeman observes that “the more the so-called gnostic texts are examined the more elusive their message seems to be.” [3]

Some Gnostics created a complicated cosmology that placed the true God above the creator God (the Demiurge). The true God had emanations of other beings called aeons. In the gnostic view, the world created by the Demiurge was corrupt. After all, the Demiurge had told Adam that he would die if he ate fruit from the tree of knowledge. But Adam did not die, and he received the secrets of the tree of knowledge.

There was another God, and another world, the world of the spirit, that could be attained by those who had gnosis. The Apochryphon (Secret Book) of John, a gnostic text, describes this true God. Here is one sliver of the lengthy description:

“He is immeasurable light, which is pure, holy (and) immaculate. He is ineffable, being perfect in incorruptibility. (He is) not in perfection, nor in blessedness, nor in divinity, but he is far superior.”[4]

• Docetics. Rather than being a separate group, docetics included Gnostics and possibly others. The term comes from the Greek word dokein, which means “seem” or “appear.” The idea was that Christ was entirely God, not a human being. Thus, the person who died on the cross was not Christ. Some docetics thought Christ had only seemed to be human; others thought Jesus was a human being on Earth into whom Christ entered and then, at the crucifixion, abruptly left. The true God could not die.

How the Church Changed

Gradually—perhaps starting with Ireneaus, Bishop of Lyon (ca. 130–ca. 200)—the Christian church became more orthodox and hierarchical. Increasingly led by the Bishop of Rome, the church accepted a scriptural canon that included the Hebrew Bible (thus rejecting Marcion) and a New Testament composed of 27 books. The church began to create a statement of faith. The idea of the Trinity began to take shape. The church became more institutional—bishops’ administrative regions (sees) were specified, and the bishops weren’t allowed to move from one see to another.

In 313 CE, Emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion—although he himself was not baptized  until he was on his deathbed in 337.  During Constantine’s reign, the church faced a theological crisis over another supposed heresy: Arianism. Arius, a presbyter (elder) from Libya,  argued that Jesus Christ was not the same as God; he was from God, or, in Charles Freeman’s words, “a later, but distinct creation of God the Father. . . . an inferior but still divine creation.”[5]

This outraged many Christian leaders. Emperor Constantine tried to reconcile the two views—Arianism and the view that God and the Son were of the same substance. In 325 he brought  Arius and his chief antagonist, Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, together at Nicaea  to settle the question. But the creed approved at Nicaea didn’t solve the problem and may have made things worse.

After Constantine died, the church remained  split over Arianism—in fact, a successor emperor, Valens, was an Arian. Commenting on the relatively few years between Constantine’s death and the reign of Theodosius I,  Freeman says, “In view of what was to follow in the 380s these years were the swansong of creative theology in the ancient world.” [6]

When Theodosius I took office in 380, he made non-Arian Christianity  the official religion. He issued an edict saying that heretics (such as Arians) “will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict.”[7]

And the persecution of heretics began in earnest. It would continue for more than a thousand years.