Laments for the lost variety of early Christian thought
HERESY Jesus Christ and the other sons of God
CATHERINE NIXEY 384pp. Picador. £25.
RESISTANCE TO CHRISTIANITY A chronological encyclopaedia of heresy from the beginning to the eighteenth century
RAOUL VANEIGEM Translated by Bill Brown 600pp. Eris. Paperback, £35 (US $40).
SINCE THE ENLIGHTENMENT intellectuals have entertained themselves by criticizing and questioning the received story of the origins and primitive nature of the Christian faith. Some of the evidence and arguments have been borrowed from Protestant historians of religion, who for their own reasons sought to show that the first Christians were different from the Church of the Middle Ages. However, the philosophes attacked on a broader front: they challenged the toxic combination of imposed doctrinaire uniformity and alliance with political power that the (plural) churches embraced in the early modern “confessional age”. In many respects it served the churches right.
These two books, consciously or not, stand rather in the tradition of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. Both demonstrate that the story of the emergence of “mainstream” Christianity was a far more complicated story, full of multi-branched possibilities and blind alleys, than is allowed in the triumphal narratives of the traditional churches. Over the past few decades the less-travelled roads of early Christianity have made for many successful books for the popular market. The idea that one is getting access to secret knowledge, which “the establishment” or even “the Inquisition” has somehow hidden from the ordinary reader, is seductive.
Catherine Nixey describes herself as a journalist, but she is also a classicist by training. Her The Darkening Age: The Christian destruction of the Classical world (2017) offered a threnody for the world of classical Greek and Roman civilization overthrown and ruined by Christianity. In Heresy: Jesus Christ and the other sons of God we read a different kind of threnody. The book offers a lament for the lost variety and diversity of early Christian thought and its many images of Jesus. The villain of the piece, once again, is the Christian Church as it developed into an authoritative, unifying force in allegiance with imperial authority. Despite the title, this book is only partly about those people conventionally called heretics. In large part it consists of an exploration of the non-canonical scriptures of the New Testament period (readers may already know of a few, such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which a young Jesus performs miracles such as bringing clay birds to life and cursing people with death and blindness), and of the struggles for intellectual credibility be
