THE FIRST HERESIES
Light on the Early Church - Part 3
by Peter MastersFROM SWORD & TROWEL 1999 No 3
(See also Parts 1 and 2 in Sword & Trowel 1999 Nos. 1 and 2)
THE TIME OF THE early church was a period of fervent preaching, incessant witness, total
loyalty to the teaching of the apostles, and great spiritual power. It was a power which lifted the spirit of
believers above all persecution, deprivation of liberties and even martyrdom. Yet within a few centuries
purity and power had given way to weakness and confusion, leaving a comparatively small section of the
professing church truly resembling the early days.
One of the most valuable and serious studies which can be made is that of tracing the break-up of those glorious early days. Heresies started to appear in New Testament times as soon as groups of
Christians began to elevate human opinion and reason above the revealed Truth of God.
The apostle Paul, for instance, contended vigorously with the so-called Judaizing brethren, who
insisted that strict adherence to the law of Moses was still essential. Judaizing teachers toured the
churches to draw believers away from justification by faith alone. Some of the Judaizers held extreme
views, particularly a sect called the Ebionites, who rejected as uninspired the Epistles of Paul along with
the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John. They stripped Christ of His divinity, saying that He was born as an
ordinary man and died as an ordinary man, being endowed with divine power only during His ministry.
This denial of the person of Christ was not exclusive to Ebionites. Cerinthus had been teaching
this while the apostle John was still alive. He was one of many who claimed that the birth and crucifixion
of Christ had nothing of God in them, and that they occurred only as a kind of mysterious mirage.
Some said that Jesus had been a phantom throughout His entire life, only appearing to have a
real body. This teaching was part of ‘Docetism’ which John firmly contradicts when he condemns anyone
who denies that Christ came in the flesh.
The apostles were emphatic in refuting teaching which would blind men and women from
seeing the salvation of God.
Probably the most serious and widespread of the early heresies was so-called Gnosticism,
particularly as it filtered into the most genuine of circles, demonstrating the power of heresy. It began in
the minds of people who wanted to combine the security of a belief in God with the scientific ideas of the
day.
Mankind had just realised that the earth was a sphere, but they thought that it was contained in
a series of hollow, transparent spheres, each having a spiritual ruler who governed the next lesser sphere.
‘Christian’ Gnostics fitted their beliefs into this, saying that God, Who lived outside the spheres, had no
immediate contact with the earth, but worked through the rulers of the spheres, as intermediaries.
Gnostics divided mankind up into different classes: those who could understand spiritual
knowledge; those who could believe, but not achieve understanding; and those who were completely and
hopelessly in the grip of the flesh.
They believed that when man fell, something spiritual and divine became imprisoned in flesh -
flesh and matter always being evil. Salvation was to be achieved by overcoming the body and the material
world. People must cut out of life anything which resembled bodily enjoyment and live the most
painstaking lives, in slavery to abstemious rules and regulations.
‘Beware,’ said the apostle Paul, writing to the Colossians, ‘lest any man spoil you through
philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after
Christ.’
It was against the early form of Gnosticism that Paul reminded the Colossians that the human
race was completely fallen (not a divine particle in a prison of flesh), that only through Christ could
spiritual life be obtained, and that the Gospel brought people directly to God, not to mediating spirits in
the universe. ‘You, being dead . . . hath he quickened together with him.’ Salvation could not be earned
by suppressing or defeating the body. ‘Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the
world, why . . . are ye subject to ordinances, (touch not; taste not; handle not; which all are to perish with
the using;) . . . Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting
of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh’ (Colossians 2.20-23).
Gnosticism varied very greatly in detailed content, always borrowing heavily from currently
popular science and mythology. All too often it found a nesting place among Christians who frequently
had too much trust in the learning of the world.
Marcion was a man who founded his own Gnostic cult during the second century. Perhaps no
other heretic ever did so much good to the true churches, for he stimulated them into defining their faith
more clearly. At the same time, however, he introduced into Christian thinking an idea which became one
of the greatest enemies of Truth - the organised, territorial church.
Marcion was born in AD 85, the son of the local minister at Sinope. He came into some money,
enabling him to go into business as a shipowner. He never entered fully into the life and teaching of the
church in his district because the early influence of Gnostic teaching had left him with grave doubts.
Having been ‘conditioned’ in his thinking by the Gnostics, he developed the practice of making up
theories to answer his doubts, rather than attempting to solve them from Scripture. His first great problem
was his inability to see how the Old Testament God and the New Testament God could be one and the
same. He developed the theory that there could be two distinct Gods.
Few people knew anything much about Marcion, or his ideas, until he went to Rome in his
fifties. There, in AD 138, he was received into the church by unwitting elders, at the same time making a
very generous cash gift to the church. Clearly he hoped to influence the church, particularly with his
longing to see the independent town congregations rearranged into an organised, national church.
For six years he remained in the church, presumably by appearing outwardly to be orthodox in
belief, while at the same time using quieter, subtle means of changing the church. When he eventually
gave up and left, the church returned his joining-gift, indicating that they no longer felt able to regard him
as a brother in Christ and had no sympathy with his views.
Marcion, now in his sixties, went out from them to win thousands of followers from every race.
Like the Gnostics, his followers were severe in their rules, forbidding even marriage at first. But their two
most noticeable characteristics were their rejection of all Scripture (except for cut-down versions of
Luke’s Gospel and Paul’s Epistles), and their tightly organised ‘denomination’ under a centralised
leadership. The local Marcion churches had nothing like independence.
Marcion’s work produced a great wave of reaction from churches and individual writers.
Explicit lists were drawn up in answer to Marcionism, affirming the Christian canon of Scripture - all
those books of the Bible that were recognised as inspired and authoritative. Marcion was denounced in
person by Polycarp, and rejected in books by many, including Justin Martyr and Tertullian. But the idea
and example of an organised, territorial church took some root, to be taken up with innocent zeal by a
great Christian leader towards the end of the second century.
Half-way through the second century the churches looked in a sorry state. It was true that
Gnostic teaching had by now polluted many churches and triggered off a cult of intellectualism. At this
time, in Western Phrygia, a group of professing Christians felt that things were at the lowest possible ebb,
and only one solution existed. There must be a new manifestation of the fervour of early days.
Their leader was Montanus, a former priest of the pagan god Cybele. The rugged hills and
valleys of Western Phrygia harboured the villages and homesteads of an excitable, emotional people.
They worshipped Cybele - the mother of the gods - with wild music, fantastic dances, and blood-
shedding rituals. Montanus believed he had received a revelation from the Holy Spirit, and launched into
a series of highly emotional revival meetings among the people of the valleys. So successful were his
meetings that he became sure that the Spirit was directing him to supplant the unworthy (as he thought),
dying orthodox churches.
While in many respects the teaching of the Montanists was evangelical, they went to extremes
in a number of respects. They knew a great deal about rigorous fasting, visions, the hearing of divine
voices, spirit possession, and ‘holy ecstasy’. It was believed that when Montanus himself went into an
ecstasy, the entire Godhead was speaking through him.
Together with two rich ladies who had served him as prophetesses, Montanus exercised a
completely authoritative leadership over his followers, paying preachers from a central fund, and
maintaining rigid control over his churches. Wednesdays and Fridays were always set aside for fasting,
and three times a year great central rallies were organised in the city of the foremost church. Great
emphasis was placed on the Second Coming and on prophecy.
While orthodox churches, their respectability ruffled, sought to curb the imaginative, unruly
and extremist Montanists, the martyrs in prison awaiting execution praised them. They wrote to the
orthodox churches urging them to look kindly upon the ‘New Prophecy’. Even Tertullian, the great
lawyer, and writer from Carthage, joined them. There can be little doubt, therefore, that the very basic
elements of Montanism were orthodox.
As a whole, however, the movement demonstrated the great danger of emotionalism. Far from
correcting the deficiencies of believing churches, Montanism inflicted immense harm. Its preachers
discredited prophecy, together with the doctrine of the return of Christ. By the emotional excesses of its
preachers, it made other churches recoil away from the practice of fervent preaching. Indeed, it drove the
orthodox churches into an opposite extreme of cold, formal worship.
Despite the influence of Montanism, the overall picture of the church, as the second century
drew near to its close, was that of many independent congregations led by their own ministers. The
Gospel had been sown in Britain, penetrating even beyond Hadrian’s Wall. There was no authority in
Rome, the only organised groups of churches being the cults.
It was at this point, however, that hard-pressed Christian leaders decided to organise the
scattered congregations into one general church, in which - or so they imagined - truly apostolic
Christianity would be maintained. The Church Fathers were about to begin their work.
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