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Lesson 3.5: What Demons Whisper
10 Plays1 month ago
Ante orthodoxiam, chaos erat.
In the centuries after Jesus, Christian thinkers, mystics, and radicals offered wildly different visions of who Jesus was, what salvation meant, and whether the material world was a divine creation—or a cosmic mistake.
Topics Discussed:- Competing early Christian views on Jesus’ divinity and humanity, including Adoptionism, Docetism, and Arianism
- How dualistic worldviews and secret knowledge shaped Gnostic and Manichaean heresies
- The political pressures behind the Church’s drive to define orthodoxy—especially under Constantine
- The evolving doctrine of the afterlife, from Sheol and resurrection to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory
- Augustine’s role in responding to heresies like Donatism and Pelagianism
- Why “heretics” were often more numerous—and sometimes more philosophically interesting—than their orthodox opponents
For more, go to theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Early Christianity: Formation and Diversity
00:00:02
Speaker
Our primary aim today is to try to get a glimpse, an idea as to what was going on in the first couple of centuries of Christianity.
00:00:12
Speaker
So in particular, we're looking at what I will be calling, you know, the period after Jesus, but before Christianity. Now, I've said this before, there is no uniformity of thought here. That's why I'm i'm calling it a period before Christianity.
00:00:29
Speaker
If you want to label for this period, maybe paleo-Christianity or proto-Christianity might be fitting.
Paul's Influence and Mission
00:00:36
Speaker
But the set of doctrines that today we identify with Christianity was just not present or at least not recognized widely as being the correct interpretation of you know the Jesus movement, Jesus life.
00:00:52
Speaker
So let's pick up the story after Jesus. So he was crucified, Jesus. and his followers claimed that they saw him and that he resurrected.
00:01:04
Speaker
Well, let's bring in Paul the apostle into the picture. Now, Paul was probably a Pharisee. This means that he was a believer in strict adherence to Jewish law and Jewish tradition.
00:01:18
Speaker
In fact, early on, he persecuted these proto-Christians that we are talking about. However, One day on the road to Damascus, Paul basically received a vision.
00:01:33
Speaker
And this was a life changing moment to him. By the way, Historians and even neuroscientists have some ideas as to what that vision entailed.
00:01:47
Speaker
So some people say that, many people actually say that religious visions are a result of temporal lobe epilepsy. i will only cite one person here, but David Eagleman, the neuroscientist, claims that this is what happened in the case of many religious experiences, including that of Joan of Arc.
00:02:09
Speaker
that's who he focuses on. In any case, maybe this is what happened to Paul. We're not sure. But suddenly, Paul shifts over to a more apocalyptic worldview.
00:02:21
Speaker
Suddenly, he is now, in other words, an adherent of apocalyptic Judaism. And in that tradition, The idea is that God will reconstitute the nation of Israel.
00:02:35
Speaker
That means that all the Jews in the diaspora, they're going to be brought back. There will be one kingdom of Israel once more. God will defeat to all the enemies of the Jews, which is quite the number at this point.
00:02:50
Speaker
And a new era of prosperity will be initiated. And this era, by the way, will include, quote unquote, the nations. That means non-Jewish peoples, right? So it'll just be glorious. It'll be a kingdom of God on earth.
00:03:08
Speaker
And not only will the Jews be central, there will be a new messianic figure that will be like a king, but non-Jewish people will also participate in the worship of Yahweh.
00:03:19
Speaker
So given that Paul believes this, he thought it was his mission to preach to what I said earlier, quote unquote, the
Spread and Divergence of Proto-Christianity
00:03:29
Speaker
nations, right? So basically Gentiles, non-Jewish peoples.
00:03:33
Speaker
And so that's why Paul begins to try to spread the message of Jesus to people outside of Judaism, because he believes the apocalypse necessarily requires that, you know, the nations come into the fold and realize what's about to happen.
00:03:52
Speaker
So again, apocalypticism, right? He thinks this new kingdom of God on earth is imminent, happening soon, right? If you go back to some of Jesus' sayings, Jesus thought it was happening that night, he'll say things like, tonight we dine in heaven, that sort of thing. So this is the same thing for Paul. He thought it was coming soon, and soon right? So One other thing that we should mention about Paul is that he did have a background in Greek thinking.
00:04:24
Speaker
ah He was a Hellenized Jew, or at least a little bit. And thus, you do see him infusing some philosophical language into his writings. And these are the earliest writings that we have of what would eventually be called Christianity or proto-Christianity. Let's call it that for now. So we do see this hint of Greek-ness in there.
00:04:50
Speaker
By the way, we should also mention that this is the case, despite him having a little bit of sourness, maybe about intellectuals in general, he was rejected in some philosophical circles, and you can read about this in Acts of the Apostles.
00:05:05
Speaker
And then subsequently, He sort of talked about you know the foolishness of worldly wisdom and that kind of thing. So you know you can check that out. Corinthians is a good example of that, 1 Corinthians. So if you want to know more about this, um I'll have lots of things in the reading list for this lesson.
00:05:24
Speaker
So the point of all this, of course, is that the message of Jesus was spread beyond just you know Judea and Galilee, you know past the Levant, into much of the rest of the Roman Empire. Slowly but surely, it it permeated the different regions of the empire,
00:05:46
Speaker
And so what we get, though, is not a unified and coherent movement, but a very heterogeneous proto-Christianity.
00:05:57
Speaker
What this means is that people took the ideas that they heard about Jesus, about Paul, and they sort of went in different directions with them.
00:06:08
Speaker
As we mentioned in another lesson, maybe the first Christian gatherings or proto-Christian gatherings, I should say, were more like alternative families trying to provide some sense of community for people who had been brutalized and marginalized by Rome.
00:06:27
Speaker
So maybe that's how it started, supper clubs and chosen families. But eventually, once these ideas keep spreading, we see that some proto-Christian groups emphasized things like visions and secret knowledge and personal encounters with the divine. Now, we will talk about these in more detail later when I bring up something called Gnosticism.
00:06:54
Speaker
But for now, let me just say that that's what some people thought Christianity was. Secret knowledge, right? Mystical experiences. Okay. Other people were attracted to Christianity because of the promise of healing and other kinds of miracles, right?
00:07:12
Speaker
It was the case that in the gospel stories about Jesus, he did perform some miracles. He did heal some people. Well, people wanted some of that. And you can see that in a world full of suffering, in our an empire full of suffering, with people that had been traumatized by Roman imperial policy,
00:07:32
Speaker
Healing and miracles seemed kind of nice, right? So that's something that might be appealing to you. And let me give you just one more example of how heterogeneous proto-Christianity was.
00:07:45
Speaker
Some Christian groups primarily emphasized just the promise of eternal life, just this idea that one day you will get what you deserve. There will be some kind of cosmic justice.
00:07:58
Speaker
And you, for having been good, will get a wonderful afterlife and justice will be restored. So this idea was going around in early Christianity. Of course, this would eventually be the dominant idea in Christianity.
00:08:15
Speaker
ah But during this proto-Christian stage, this was just one of the many ways to be a Christian. And I should mention, that quite a few other mystery religions were making similar promises about eternal life.
00:08:29
Speaker
For example, the cult of Mithras and the Orphic traditions, they were saying the same thing. And I think we can understand this, you know, without getting into too many details, as a marketplace of ideas, right? There were some Christians, proto-Christians, I keep slipping here, but there were some proto-Christians, they were spreading the good news of Jesus, right?
00:08:51
Speaker
And when they you know encountered other people, the other people would ask, oh, but can I get healed, right? Can i get some miracles? If I go over there to the cult of Mithras, they do promise these things for me, right? How about eternal life?
Valentinus and Marcion: Heretical Views
00:09:07
Speaker
And so you can imagine Christians kind of infusing elements from paganism and from other religious movements into their message. And this is why, depending on the region that you're in,
00:09:20
Speaker
you get a different flavor of proto-Christianity. So let's do a little deeper dive into this whole idea. And we're going to do that by talking about suffering in the world.
00:09:58
Speaker
One thing that people have had to deal with forever when one is engaging in theological thinking is what we might call the problem of the material world. Sometimes it's also called the problem of evil. But basically, why is there suffering?
00:10:16
Speaker
If the world is supposed to be good or if there is a good God who created everything, why people suffer? And more specifically, why do good people suffer?
00:10:29
Speaker
There are many responses to this theological puzzle in the history of theology. Let's look at some views that would eventually become heresies, even though they were widely accepted for a time.
00:10:47
Speaker
These would be rejected by the Catholic Church when it is finally formed. So let's begin with the work of Valentinus.
00:10:58
Speaker
He was around between the year 100 and 160 of the Common Era. And the way I would describe this is as a radically dualistic theosophy.
00:11:10
Speaker
So it was a philosophical type of religion. but it's dualistic in the sense that it really does have an extreme stance on the physical world and God. The physical world is dark and evil and bad and everything that is negative is associated with the physical world.
00:11:33
Speaker
And there is a higher realm, a divine realm, a good realm, where that's where we really are from. and we want to go back to that. So we want to push away the material world and ascend into a more spiritual realm of existence.
00:11:49
Speaker
This kind of theosophy from Valentinus seems to weave together different elements from Judaism, from pagan philosophy such as Platonism, and of course from mystery religions, which were increasingly prominent during the Roman imperial era.
00:12:10
Speaker
What is so controversial about Valentinus? Let me just say one thing that you'll see as immediately, you know evidently heretical. According to Valentinus, Jesus never took on ah human form.
00:12:27
Speaker
In other words, the Jesus that we saw walking around, that was simply a let's call it a hologram. Because think about what it would mean for Jesus to take on a human form.
00:12:44
Speaker
That would mean that the divine, right? The perfect spiritual being that Jesus is, would degrade itself into a material form. Remember, material things are cheap copies of the divine realm, according to Platonism.
00:13:03
Speaker
And according to this radically dualistic theosophy, Everything that is material is bad, is negative, is the wrong direction, basically. You want to move up towards a divine existence.
00:13:17
Speaker
So this idea that Jesus' body was like a hologram has a label. It's called docetism. And we will look at it a little bit more later. But you can see how this is really not good for Valentinus if you want to have your view not deemed heretical by the church later on.
00:13:36
Speaker
Because this would mean that Jesus's crucifixion was not real. You can't crucify ah hologram.
00:13:47
Speaker
And so that was all just an elaborate, well, there's many ways you can go with this, but the main point here is that it didn't really happen. There wasn't any suffering going on.
00:13:59
Speaker
So that is a key element of Valentinus's theosophy. I should mention one other thing here about this particular view.
00:14:11
Speaker
According to Valentinus, the real God, right, that already should cue you into something really weird happening here. But the real God wants us to have divine knowledge. It wants us to know our true nature.
00:14:26
Speaker
It wants us, in other words, to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. who doesn't want us to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil?
00:14:37
Speaker
That would be Yahweh, the God of the Jews, which means that according to Valentinus, Yahweh is not the real God. In fact, Yahweh created the world that causes us to live in ignorance and confusion about our true divine natures.
00:14:58
Speaker
So this is basically Jesus. just shy of calling Yahweh evil, right? And flips the script in that, well, who's the one that wants us to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil?
00:15:14
Speaker
That would be the serpent. So we have a turning upside down of conventional doctrines in Christianity today, right? So this is highly heretical ah from our vantage point.
00:15:28
Speaker
At the time, it seems to have been fairly well accepted. So real interesting there. Also, last thing I mentioned about Valentinus, this means that Jesus Christ, he is of course the son of God, but he's the son of the real God, not of Yahweh. Yahweh the bad one.
00:15:48
Speaker
the real God, the universal God, and not the God of the Jews. That's who Jesus is the son of. So that's Valentinus. A very nearby view is that of Marcion.
00:16:01
Speaker
Marcion was around the same time. He was born maybe in 85 CE, also died in 160 CE, so they died in the same year. And he came to very similar views, even though he generated them by studying the letters of Paul, right? So Paul, you know, Paul is a complicated guy.
00:16:23
Speaker
And if you read it, um you can sort of generate multiple interpretations about what's going on. and it is the case, I did reread Paul with ah kind of a, you know, a Marcion lens, and I could see it. I definitely see that in Paul's letter, you can find a dualistic element to them.
00:16:45
Speaker
And so that's what Marcion picked up on. And so what he did is he argued that the Hebrew scriptures should be abandoned completely or just leave them to the Jews.
00:16:56
Speaker
And the only scriptures that are to be accepted are 10 of Paul's letters and ah certain version of the Gospel of Luke.
00:17:07
Speaker
Now, Marcion generated these for us so we can just, you know, accept what he sees as the, you know, right scriptures for proto-Christians. What he did, by the way, is he, this is a quote here that I'm getting from um a book by Paula Fredrickson called s Sin.
00:17:27
Speaker
But Marcion de-Judaized them, basically took out some pernicious Jewish ideas, according to Marcion, in these letters of Paul and the Gospel of Luke, and he made his own version of them. And that's what's supposed to be the proto-Christian scripture.
00:17:46
Speaker
And of course, just like Valentinus, since he's sort of inverting things, Yahweh was only the God of the Jews, not the real universal God.
00:17:57
Speaker
And just as with Valentinus, Jesus is the son of the real God, not Yahweh. So things getting turned around here and the material world is bad.
00:18:09
Speaker
And of course, the divine realm is what we want to go for. And so everything gets switched around here. That means the God that made the world is the bad one. Probably not surprisingly, both of these views were deemed heretical a couple of hundred years later, i should.
00:18:26
Speaker
add. um But obviously, first of all, these thinkers rejected Jewish scriptures and what eventually became Christianity accepted what they call the Old Testament.
00:18:39
Speaker
But maybe more importantly, they denied Jesus' humanity, right? They said he was a hologram. This was, shall we say, deal breaker for what would eventually become Catholic Orthodoxy.
00:18:54
Speaker
And so, yeah, they were deemed heretical. Despite that, I should mention, Marcionism at least was around for another few hundred years.
00:19:06
Speaker
We can still see hints of Marcionism around 300 years died. after marcian died We're talking in the mid 400s.
00:19:17
Speaker
So heresies are hard to kill, it seems, because even though they were deemed heretical, they stuck around a little bit.
Gnosticism: Secret Knowledge and Heresy
00:19:27
Speaker
Let's go into a quick sidebar here on Gnostic thought. I did mention this earlier and i also have like a pet peeve here. So maybe this is just me personally wanting to clarify this, but let's say this, Marcionism and Valentinianism, these are typically labeled as Gnostic.
00:19:48
Speaker
But this label Gnostic is a little troublesome. There is no cohesive philosophy that sort of captures every group that called themselves Gnostic.
00:20:00
Speaker
The best you can do is see some similarities between these different groups. Maybe family resemblances is what you might call them. But they aren't really one unified doctrine.
00:20:11
Speaker
So accepting that this is, you know, a very problematic label, um I should teach you what Gnosticism is. It's basically this view that the material world is evil,
00:20:26
Speaker
And that through enlightenment experiences, mystical experiences, we can break free of this illusion and we can come to know our own hidden divinity.
00:20:39
Speaker
If this sounds a lot like Neoplatonism to you, yeah, probably, right? Why are they so similar? We're not quite sure. It's probably the case that both Neoplatonism and some of these Gnostic groups were influenced by earlier Platonic ideas mixed in with a little bit of mystery religions in there.
00:20:59
Speaker
So that's probably the case that both of these have a common root, not that they influence each other. But whatever the case may be, I just want you to know some general points about Gnosticism because it wouldn't really be ah complete description of this time period without sinking your teeth into some of these Gnostic ideas.
00:21:20
Speaker
So very general points about this problematic concept of Gnosticism. First of all, the material world is not only bad, it's actually a prison created by an evil or maybe an ignorant force. Sometimes evil equals ignorance. So, you know, you can think about it that way.
00:21:41
Speaker
Humans, though, we contain ah divine spark. clearly some stoic influence here. And this divine spark is trapped in a physical body. There's some platonic influence there. And the way to break free from these physical body prisons that we're in is through secret knowledge. That would be the gnosis.
00:22:04
Speaker
So through this gnosis, you will reveal to yourself your true divine nature. What do the Gnostics have to do with Christianity? Well, we don't know. Sometimes some Gnostic groups definitely did see Jesus as a teacher who would help you receive Gnosis.
00:22:25
Speaker
Other Gnostic groups saw Jesus as a cosmic savior that was doing battle with dark forces. Other groups can be labeled Gnostic but don't seem to care much about Jesus, so it's complicated.
00:22:40
Speaker
Why would they not mention Jesus? Well, it seems that Gnosticism, maybe sort of in general, is a product of Jewish apocalyptic thought interpreted through the lens of pagan philosophy and mystery religions.
00:22:56
Speaker
And this was done by Jews in the diaspora, right outside of the Levant region, as well as non-Jews too. Some non-Jews saw Jewish apocalypticism as appealing because it is an era of prosperity and justice. And that sounds kind of nice, right?
00:23:14
Speaker
So in any case, its origins lie within Judaism, but not all Jews accepted Jesus as you know the son of God. So that's why there might be some Gnostic groups that are not having much to do with Jesus.
00:23:28
Speaker
Hopefully that clarifies that. too ah One more thing on Gnosticism. It looks like some key ideas from the Gnostics were absorbed into Manichaeism.
00:23:40
Speaker
Manichaeism is a Persian religion. I won't get into that here. I'll put some extra stuff on the website so you can look into that if you'd like. In any case, Gnosticism was absolutely condemned.
00:23:53
Speaker
ah We already heard about Marcionism and Valentinianism, but in general, Gnosticism was also targeted as heresy. And i mean, i think, you know, it's fairly obvious that it says some things that are controversial.
00:24:08
Speaker
Let me add to that. um We can read in Genesis that creation was fundamentally good. And so the Gnostics as a group would say the opposite. And of course, then that would make it heresy.
00:24:23
Speaker
Nonetheless, some kind of Gnosticism was practiced at least until the 400s. So again, heresies, hard to kill.
00:24:36
Speaker
Let's look now at some disagreements about the nature of Jesus.
Debates on Jesus's Nature
00:24:41
Speaker
So basically, many proto-Christians debated how to understand Jesus' divinity.
00:24:48
Speaker
Was he ah complete God, fully God? Was he fully human? Was he somewhere in between? Was he both? Does that even make sense? So lots of views here. Let me begin actually with what seems to have been fairly prevalent in proto-Christianity.
00:25:06
Speaker
It's a view known as adoptionism. And if you are an adoptionist, you basically believe this. Jesus had not always been the son of God. He was adopted at some point.
00:25:20
Speaker
In other words, Jesus was ah very exceptional human being and thus God or Yahweh or the universal God, whichever God you want to pick, I guess at this point, chose Jesus as his inheritor, adopted him as his son.
00:25:39
Speaker
So let's get some jargon in here to help you understand this. There's a difference between a low Christology and a high Christology. ah low Christology is the notion that Jesus was born a man and was eventually adopted as a son of God. That's low to high, basically. So low Christology, Jesus was a man.
00:26:02
Speaker
High Christology, Jesus was basically already God, right? He started off as God and he just became incarnated as a human. So that would be a high to low, right? So what the adoptionists are basically saying is beginning with a low Christology and moving to a high Christology. You can go the other direction if you'd like, but the adoptionists go low to high.
00:26:27
Speaker
And this is fairly... counterintuitive from our point of view, but very intuitive in the perspective of people from the ancient world.
00:26:38
Speaker
That's because in the Roman Empire, adoption was kind of a big deal. In fact, your adopted son, unfortunately, it is always sons who inherit, but your adopted son was actually entitled to more than your natural son because you actually get to choose your adopted son. There's something special about that to the Romans.
00:27:04
Speaker
And your natural son, you didn't get to choose that person, right? So it means something to get adopted in the Roman world. So the fact that some people believe that God himself adopted Jesus, that's obviously quite the exaltation. That's that's a massive deal because if you are adopted by someone, you get to inherit what they have.
00:27:29
Speaker
And so that means that if you are adopted by God, What do you inherit? Well, I mean, everything, right? So this is very intuitive.
00:27:40
Speaker
I just want to stress that from an ancient perspective. In fact, we actually know of another person who was adopted by God and this person got to rule the empire.
00:27:55
Speaker
I'm talking here about Augustus, the first full-blown emperor of the Roman Empire. He was adopted by Julius Caesar and Julius Caesar had been deified after his death.
00:28:11
Speaker
In other words, Julius Caesar was considered a god. And that means that the emperor of Rome, Augustus, could say he was a son of God, right? And he did.
00:28:23
Speaker
So this made a lot of sense to Roman ears and anyone in the Roman empire. This kind of made sense, this low Christology to a high Christology idea of adoptionism.
00:28:35
Speaker
Of course, this was eventually condemned. The condemnation happened in the late 200s. So for ah about 250 years or so, adoptionism was not heretical and viewed by some Jewish proto-Christian groups as being true.
00:28:57
Speaker
But of course, it was decided that this is heresy and that Jesus was divine from the beginning, just like it says in the Gospel of John. So that view is eventually taken out.
00:29:10
Speaker
Here is another view that eventually becomes heretical. We've already mentioned this, but let me do a quick clarification on it. So we've already mentioned docetism.
00:29:23
Speaker
This is a view that Jesus was fully divine and not at all human. Moreover, he wasn't even physical. His human appearance was purely an illusion, right? It was ah hologram. So this is the Marcion heresy, in other words.
00:29:43
Speaker
And now that we know about adoptionism, you can see that this view is basically the opposite of adoptionism. Jesus was never human at all. So of course, this view was deemed heretical.
00:29:58
Speaker
along with Gnosticism in general. And this happened at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. So this view, although common in Gnostic groups, did get condemned eventually.
00:30:16
Speaker
In the interest of being complete, let me give you this other view called Sylanthropism. And this is a belief that Jesus is merely human. He actually never became divine.
00:30:28
Speaker
So that whole idea is totally out the window. In this view, he's just a dude, right? That's all it really is. So that's a view. I don't think it was very popular, but that is another view that was around.
00:30:42
Speaker
Let's move on to a very sticky heresy, one that just kind of kept persisting and kept popping out and was really hard to stamp out.
00:30:53
Speaker
It's called Arianism. This is a view that Jesus was divine, right? Definitely ah God, but not co-eternal with the Father.
00:31:07
Speaker
In other words, Jesus was God's first creation, which means he's not eternal. There was a point where he didn't exist. So he is divine, but he is subordinate to the Father in a sense.
00:31:23
Speaker
This was a hugely influential view, especially, by the way, among Germanic tribes. I mentioned earlier that sort of the flavor of proto-Christianity that you accepted more or less had to do with the region you were in, because certain flavors of proto-Christianity just kind of flourished in certain areas.
00:31:46
Speaker
So the people that converted Germanic tribes... They just happened to have been Aryans in many cases. And so this idea was around in Germanic tribes forever, for centuries, right? So that's a little interesting factoid.
00:32:01
Speaker
Of course, it was condemned. What eventually became orthodoxy is the belief that Jesus is co-eternal with the Father. And that gets codified in the Nicene Creed once more at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, 300 years after Jesus died.
00:32:25
Speaker
Again, just in the interest of being very complete here, Let me mention one other view, i guess two other views. So Arianism is the view that Jesus was created at a point in time and thus subordinate to God the Father. There's also anti-subordinationism, which eventually became Orthodox.
00:32:44
Speaker
That's the view that the Son and the Father are co-equal. So those are the two we've covered. There's also Nestorianism. This is a belief that Jesus was two persons, one fully divine and one fully human.
00:32:58
Speaker
Yes, you did hear that correctly. Jesus was two persons. So that view also, by the way, um prevalent in Germanic tribes, the Jesus was two persons view.
00:33:10
Speaker
ah Very interesting. I'm not sure i can really understand it, but that is a view. and any case, let me give you the view that eventually became Orthodox.
00:33:23
Speaker
This is known as the doctrine of hypostatic union. Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, right? So all these different views intersect in weird ways, right? So when you pair the doctrine of hypostatic union with anti-subordinationism, that's what becomes orthodox.
Orthodox vs. Heretical Beliefs
00:33:47
Speaker
This was done 451 at Council of Chalcedon, at the council of chalcedon So that's when adoptionism and docetism are both deemed as heresies.
00:34:02
Speaker
Before we stop talking about these particular heresies, let me say one more thing here. And this is a comment on the numbers that we're talking about here. So not the dates, but How many people believed in these heresies?
00:34:19
Speaker
This is a point of scholarly dispute. There is one group of scholars within this dispute that follow the work of Walter Bauer.
00:34:30
Speaker
And Bauer basically says that heretics were probably more numerous than what would eventually be called orthodoxy.
00:34:41
Speaker
In other words, there's more heretics than non-heretics. And this is because, well, if you just think about how many heresies there are. and And let's just assume that they're even, right? and So there's a couple of different heresies. Let's just say three heresies.
00:34:57
Speaker
Let's focus only on adoptionism, docetism, and hypostatic union. Let's just focus on those three. The one that was eventually labeled accurate, someone decided it was the accurate one, is hypostatic union.
00:35:14
Speaker
And so if we assume that there were equal amounts of believers for each of the three different views, That means that two out of three people believed the wrong thing.
00:35:26
Speaker
In other words, two out of three people that were believers in proto-Christianity were heretics. So the Orthodox were outnumbered two to one.
00:35:40
Speaker
Do these numbers work out? No, not exactly. This is not the way you should look at it. It's the case that different heresies flourished in different regions. For example, Marcionism was strongest in Rome.
00:35:54
Speaker
But nonetheless, through arguments like this, some scholars make the case that what eventually it becomes orthodoxy is really a minority position, meaning less than 50% most cases.
00:36:08
Speaker
So that's very interesting to hear. And we will talk about how that was decided upon a little bit later in the course. But I want to leave you with that thought for a second.
00:36:20
Speaker
Most proto-Christians were probably heretics.
Evolving Concepts of Afterlife
00:36:56
Speaker
I want to move on to a different topic. And this is, I think, very illustrative of how much proto-Christianity changed over time and how what would eventually become Christianity doesn't have many similarities sometimes with proto-Christianity.
00:37:21
Speaker
I mean, let me just kind of make this point as bluntly as I can. By the time that you get someone like Thomas Aquinas in the late Middle Ages, I don't think you can say that he believed the same things about heaven and hell that Jesus believed in.
00:37:39
Speaker
In other words, the doctrines of heaven and hell change so much that literally most Christians today don't believe what Jesus believed about heaven and hell.
00:37:51
Speaker
So if that sounds controversial to you, awesome. Let's get into this. Here's the overall trajectory of these views that I'm going to outline here for you.
00:38:04
Speaker
In the earliest Hebrew scriptures, death was it. That was it. There was no heaven and no hell. There was no promise of eternal reward. There was no threat of punishment.
00:38:16
Speaker
The afterlife, if it is even mentioned, was like a shadowy existence and something called Sheol. I'm not even sure I'm pronouncing it correctly, but that's their underworld, the Jewish underworld far back in Jewish history.
00:38:32
Speaker
And it is basically a place of silence, forgetfulness, oblivion maybe is a good word. and But over centuries, the doctrines of heaven and hell start to materialize.
00:38:46
Speaker
And you can see this evolution over time. What you have to do is look at the different writings that contributed to these doctrines, because that's all we have. We can't you know go back and look into the minds of ancient people. What we have left are writings.
00:39:01
Speaker
And you have to look at both Christian and non-Christian writings in the order and in which they were produced. And once you do that and read everything, basically, you can see the pattern. You can see the doctrines of heaven and hell evolving over time.
00:39:21
Speaker
Now, you can write an entire book about this evolution. In fact, people have. Check the reading list. I will give you the best I can do, right? A little truncated version of this history.
00:39:36
Speaker
Let's start. with early Israelite writings, we're talking about Job, Psalms, second book of Samuel. In these, when you read them, they depict death as final, right? You don't come back.
00:39:50
Speaker
There is no consciousness after you die. That's it, right? So in these early writings, You can see that God's justice was supposed to play out in this life, not the next. This idea of cosmic justice happening at some later point was not a thing yet.
00:40:11
Speaker
So that's the earliest Israelite writings on death and the afterlife, basically no afterlife. Then you get this idea of resurrection. So this comes about during and after the Babylonian exile. What is the Babylonian exile?
00:40:34
Speaker
Well, this is sometimes called actually Babylonian captivity or Babylonian exile. But right around the 580s BCE, the Babylonian empire conquers Jerusalem and large numbers of Jews are forcibly relocated to Babylon as slaves, of course.
00:40:57
Speaker
Well, during this time period, Jewish thinkers really had to grapple with this idea that I mentioned earlier, the problem of evil. Why do the righteous suffer?
00:41:08
Speaker
And why does it seem like bad people flourish sometimes? How could this be if God is good? So now we get a theological revolution, resurrection.
00:41:22
Speaker
It only seems like the righteous suffer because you have too narrow a perspective, right? The faithful will enjoy ah future kingdom on earth.
00:41:34
Speaker
They will be resurrected and then they will live in prosperity. The wicked, well they will be destroyed. If they've already died, they would actually be raised from the dead and then be destroyed.
00:41:50
Speaker
Two things I should mention here because they're kind of interesting and weird. This is a bodily resurrection. When many people think today about heaven and hell, They think of it more like a spiritual kind of thing, right? Your your spirit goes to heaven or hell.
00:42:06
Speaker
So this is not this idea. This is a bodily resurrection. You literally would have your body reconstituted by God and you would go to the kingdom of God. Or if you were wicked, you would be destroyed. So you'd get put back together just to get destroyed.
00:42:22
Speaker
Second thing I want to say here, you are destroyed. You are annihilated. You are not tortured forever. That idea would come much later on. So that is during the captivity in Babylon.
00:42:37
Speaker
Now comes a new revolutionary idea. And these are the beginnings of Judaic apocalypticism. Eventually, Cyrus the Great, the Persian king of kings, liberates the Jews. And I'm saying that in scare quotes because really he just conquers everything around there, around him.
00:43:02
Speaker
And because he did really nice things for the Jews, including rebuild their temple, Cyrus gets really good press in the Jewish writings and they call him a messiah even.
00:43:14
Speaker
But in any case, Cyrus now incorporates the Jews into his empire and their Judaic thought makes contact with Zoroastrianism.
00:43:26
Speaker
Now, during this time period is when we get this idea probably coming from a Zoroastrianism. of cosmic dualism, good versus evil, God versus Satan, angels versus demons.
00:43:42
Speaker
These ideas make it into Judaism. And now we have ah sort of synthesis takes place where these ideas come in. And so to explain how this will eventually resolve itself, Jews come up with the idea of an apocalypse.
00:43:59
Speaker
So you can read the book of Watchers. You can read the book of Daniel. You can read Ezra. And these are books where you get these ideas that at some point a judgment would come.
00:44:11
Speaker
And during that judgment, there would be a final sorting of humanity, right? And the good will be put over here and the bad will be put over there. And of course, if you're good, you get good stuff. The kingdom of God on earth, prosperity, awesomeness.
00:44:27
Speaker
And if you're bad, you are annihilated. That is your punishment. Again, still not eternal torture. Oh, and still the afterlife is bodily. these These are bodily resurrections. You get a physical body. You are not a spirit.
00:44:45
Speaker
Now the story gets complicated because basically have to tell two parallel stories.
Philosophical Influences on Beliefs
00:44:52
Speaker
This is because we're moving into the Hellenic time period. And in this time period, there's the Jews that stay in the Levant.
00:45:01
Speaker
And there's the Jews that are Hellenized and they live in places like Alexandria. So let's try to tell these parallel stories. Let's begin with Hellenized Jews, right?
00:45:13
Speaker
Jews that have been influenced by Greek thought. So in Greek thought, especially in Plato, you get this idea of the soul's immortality.
00:45:25
Speaker
If you need a reminder, Plato taught that the soul was naturally eternal, that it existed in platonic heaven before it came down to earth.
00:45:37
Speaker
And it has that divine nature in it already. We need to just kind of remind it of what it already knows. Well, Plato's ideas spread along with other pagan philosophical ideas during the Hellenic Age, right?
00:45:53
Speaker
Through Alexander's conquest and later on Rome, all these pagan ideas came into contact with Judaism. And so now some people, for example, Philo of Alexandria, began to blend Judaism with Greek philosophy, right?
00:46:09
Speaker
We've already talked about that a little bit. Let me just mention this then. This is where the concept of a soul that could be judged after death individually comes in.
00:46:22
Speaker
So prior to this point, people were talking about an apocalyptic moment when there's a big final sorting. What if you don't have to get sorted, you know, along with everyone else? What if you are sorted when you die?
00:46:36
Speaker
Well, that idea comes from Plato. You can read The Republic and in near the end, you'll find that the myth of Ur, And so once this idea makes contact with Judaism, we get a shift to a different kind of you know afterlife. there's Some people call this vertical dualism, where it's not some later time period that...
00:47:04
Speaker
is the final judgment, but we all get our own final judgment and go to either heaven above or hell below, right? That's why it's vertical. So it's not a time kind of thing, but a place kind of thing. Where are you going to go when you die?
00:47:21
Speaker
So that's going on in the Hellenic world. Back in Judea, you have people like Jesus and later on the apostle Paul developing their own independent ideas. So, reminder, Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet.
00:47:39
Speaker
And he was saying, hey, the world is going to get turned upside down pretty soon. And that's a good thing because currently things are very unjust. But remember, Jesus was a Jew. There is a wonderful book called When Christians Were Jews that shows you that the way you want to understand these people, the way that it makes sense The way to make sense of what they're saying is to remember, oh yeah, they're Jews.
00:48:04
Speaker
So for Jesus, punishment was coming for sure for the people who were being wicked and not doing the right things.
00:48:17
Speaker
But and for Jesus, being wicked was basically not following Jewish law. And so if you are one of those, when the end of days comes, you would be condemned to the fire and you would be destroyed.
00:48:32
Speaker
Again, the torment is not eternal. You don't get tortured for all existence like in later conceptions of hell. So that's probably what Jesus believed.
00:48:45
Speaker
Paul is interesting because he adds his own ideas to this doctrine of the afterlife. I'll just mention two innovations from Paul. One, now it's the case that if you want to live eternally in the kingdom of God here on earth still, then you need to believe in Jesus, right? You need to believe that he was incarnated as a human and then died and then resurrected.
00:49:13
Speaker
So that wasn't a requirement at any time before. But now Paul said, yeah, you have to believe that. Second theological innovation courtesy of Paul is this.
00:49:25
Speaker
Now there's this idea that you can exist in a bodiless state until the end of days. So you will still exist as a spirit until the end days comes.
00:49:40
Speaker
And so what this does is sort of pave the way for more elaborate apocalyptic ideas later on. So Paul gives us those two contributions.
Heaven and Hell: Spatial Dualism
00:49:53
Speaker
And then we are now reuniting the strands. The ideas of Paul spread and the Jesus movements in general spread throughout the Roman Empire.
00:50:05
Speaker
And now these different conceptions, these different theological ideas about heaven and hell interact with each other some more. And now we're really moving into what today we think of when we think of the doctrines of heaven and hell.
00:50:21
Speaker
So by the time that we get into the second century CE, we start to see ah different kind of dualism, right? It used to be the case that there is this time period now, which is not good.
00:50:36
Speaker
And there will be a good time period later on, when the kingdom of God is here on earth. So that's a temporal dualism. Basically, evil and good are before and after the apocalypse.
00:50:50
Speaker
And now in the second century CE, we're moving towards a spatial dualism, right? Rather than it being time, it's a place. So heaven and hell, right? So if you are evil, you go down. And if you're good, you go up.
00:51:07
Speaker
he Hell and heaven, I guess I should say. And that becomes the more prevalent idea. And you can see this in the Gospel of John. That was written around 100 CE.
00:51:21
Speaker
And you can see here that Jesus is less apocalyptic. It's less about that. And it's more focused on eternal life above. So now we have an up and down rather than before and after kind of idea of heaven and hell.
00:51:38
Speaker
Let's move into where this idea of eternal torture comes from. This is, it shouldn't surprise you, product of the trauma of Roman imperial policy.
00:51:54
Speaker
The Romans, and don't know how to say this in different ways. The Romans were just so unimaginably brutal. It makes your mind real when you learn about them. It is atrocious.
00:52:08
Speaker
Well, during some time periods, the Romans were persecuting Christians, and this led to new visions of divine justice. To be martyred by the Roman Empire was so awful and horrifying that proto-Christians just came up with new views as to what happens after you die.
00:52:35
Speaker
I mean, they would do things like something called Domnatio ad bestias, where they let wild animals devour Christians. Well, if you are a proto-Christian seeing this, how can you explain this?
00:52:51
Speaker
Well, the theological innovation that they eventually landed on is that those that are martyred will be exalted in heaven, a special place in heaven, directly to heaven, first of all, and they'll get a special place there.
00:53:07
Speaker
What does that mean for the tormentors? Well, that would mean that those people get punished, but it's not enough to just annihilate them.
00:53:19
Speaker
That's been the idea this whole time. Now there's this idea that is born that those that persecute Christians will be tormented forever.
00:53:32
Speaker
So this view, sometimes called the conscious eternal torment view, is actually a product. It is almost like a mirror image of Roman cruelty.
00:53:47
Speaker
That's where Christians got the idea from, right? That's bananas, right? And so that's how we eventually get from no afterlife whatsoever in early Jewish writings to the doctrines of heaven and hell as we think of them today.
00:54:06
Speaker
Literally hundreds of years is what it took for these ideas to come into being, not to mention some contact with pagan philosophy and other religions like Zoroastrianism.
Heresies and Doctrinal Control Post-Constantine
00:54:20
Speaker
By the way, the doctrines of heaven and hell kept evolving. The innovations didn't end with this eternal torture view. There was one theologian named Origen who kept thinking about heaven and hell. And here is what he came up with.
00:54:40
Speaker
He said, Origen did, that even the worst sinners and demons and even Satan himself would eventually, after maybe immense suffering, they would all eventually return to God.
00:55:01
Speaker
He believed that this is the only a view that is consistent with God's omniscience and omnipotence. Basically, if God is all good and all knowing and all powerful, this is the only thing that makes sense. Everyone will eventually return to God, even Satan, who turned the furthest away from God.
00:55:24
Speaker
This view is sometimes known as universal reconciliation. Sometimes it's called universalism. Whatever the case might be, everyone eventually returns to God. There is no hell, only creation unified in heaven with God.
00:55:44
Speaker
So that is origin. By the way, that view would eventually be deemed heresy. Maybe it doesn't motivate us enough to do good deeds.
00:55:55
Speaker
Maybe that's a thought. I don't know. In any case, that view was eventually deemed heretical and the church put a stop to any further you know evolution to the doctrines of heaven and hell. And he kind of froze them in place and said, okay, that's it.
00:56:11
Speaker
We're going to keep it like this. And I wanted to tell you this story because I feel like this evolution of these doctrines really shows the diversity of proto-Christian thought in general.
00:57:03
Speaker
Let's fast forward now to the CE. We are still in this morass of various competing and conflicting proto-Christian ideologies.
00:57:16
Speaker
But into this... enters the emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great. In 312-313 CE, Constantine reportedly receives a divine sign before battle,
00:57:35
Speaker
and as a result, Constantine decided to eventually convert to Christianity. He's actually not baptized until his deathbed, but between his death and this conversion event, he becomes intertwined into the history of early Christianity.
00:57:58
Speaker
He is the first Roman emperor to publicly support the faith And this fact that proto-Christianity will now be state-sponsored in a way will dramatically change the direction and tenor of proto-Christianity.
00:58:17
Speaker
In other words, we are now going to the time period where Christianity will go from being a persecuted religion to over time the official religion of the Roman Empire.
00:58:30
Speaker
Now, what happens when Constantine decides to give, oh, you know, a tax breaks and public support to Christian churches?
00:58:42
Speaker
Everyone lines up. In fact, it doesn't seem like Constantine realized just how highly fragmented proto-Christianity was with various sects holding, going to just go ahead and say it, dramatically different beliefs about everything.
00:59:03
Speaker
The nature of Jesus, the afterlife, that what salvation means, what sin is, what divine justice consists of. It is crazy and wild times in Christian history.
00:59:15
Speaker
And so from Constantine's perspective, A, you have to get some order so that you know who to give imperial favors to, right? Everyone says you're a Christian, but you can't give money to all these different groups.
00:59:30
Speaker
Moreover, Constantine's aim during this process is probably political. And I have some quotes from the historian Charles Freeman that shows that, you know, basically Constantine just wanted stability. It was all really for political and social stability.
00:59:50
Speaker
And if that's what your aim is, well, then these theological divisions that can be found in proto-Christianity are obnoxious to say the least, right? You want to get rid of them so there at so that there is uniformity of belief.
01:00:08
Speaker
And so to resolve all these disputes, especially the one about the status of Jesus, right? It looks like Constantine was really bothered by like that.
01:00:19
Speaker
In any case, Constantine convenes bishops from across the empire to his house in Nicaea. And the year is 325 CE. This is now known as the Council of Nicaea.
01:00:37
Speaker
And the goal here was to produce a statement of belief. And that's exactly what they did. It is called the Nicene Creed. And now, in Constantine's eyes at least, we have a unified doctrine under one Orthodox Church. One Church to represent them all, right?
01:00:57
Speaker
One Creed to bring into union all the different Christian sects. The aforementioned historian Charles Freeman argues that this is when a hefty dose of authoritarianism entered the church.
01:01:16
Speaker
Prior to this time period, sure, things were a little chaotic and it wasn't really clear what being a Christian really meant. But once a system of belief is standardized, is forged, and that system of belief is supposed to serve as some kind of backbone for social stability, at that point, if you hold a heretical view, that's not just theological disagreement, right? That is a political threat, right?
01:01:50
Speaker
And it is the case that eventually, especially when Christianity officially becomes the religion of the Roman Empire, the Roman state will suppress heretical groups.
01:02:01
Speaker
In other words, there will be state-sponsored actions taken against heretical groups. And these were to enforce unity and, of course, as always, and imperial order.
01:02:15
Speaker
right That's what the emperors wanted. A harmonious empire.
01:02:23
Speaker
One other thing that I should mention here about this time period is that beginning with Constantine, this wasn't exactly theological debate that settled these disputes time and time again.
01:02:41
Speaker
It was a Roman emperor who would step in and say, you know what, this is the view that I think is right. And when the most powerful man in the world puts his weight behind a particular view, that has an effect on people, right? And so there are several instances of Christian doctrine essentially being decreed Christians Someone that is A, not a Christian because he's not baptized.
01:03:15
Speaker
B, has no background in this. He's not a theologian. C, is not really looking for views that are true, but rather that sort of can forge stability.
01:03:28
Speaker
And D, is extremely scary. In other words, if the emperor of Rome is backing a view and you back some opposite view, how are you going to feel?
01:03:42
Speaker
Will you be as brave? Would you be brazen enough to say, you know what, I disagree with you, Mr. Emperor? Maybe, maybe not. So at this point, Charles Freeman sees that the church begins to become more of a top-down affair.
01:04:04
Speaker
It decides doctrine from the top down and it enforces it from the top down. This is not a we the people kind of thing.
01:04:15
Speaker
We will tell you what to believe. We will tell you how to worship. We are the clergy and we know what's good for you. will tell you how salvation works.
01:04:29
Speaker
Now, part of this, Charles Freeman says, also comes from Plato. so we will get into more of that later on. But of course, one way to interpret Plato is as him being quite elitist.
01:04:44
Speaker
Remember, according to Plato, or I should say, according to one interpretation of Plato, The forms are the ultimate reality on which our physical world is based, but not everyone can come to know the forms.
01:04:59
Speaker
Only the privileged few can do so, and once they do so, they should be given complete power over social affairs.
01:05:10
Speaker
This sort of gets transferred over into Christianity during this time period. The elite few are the ones that choose the doctrines and everyone else just has to fall in line.
01:05:28
Speaker
But now the rest is history, right? to Once we have an Icene Creed, everything is hunky-dory and everyone knows what to... Wait, no, no, not at all. No, 0%.
01:05:39
Speaker
Even though Christianity was becoming institutionalized now by the 4th and fifth centuries, it is still not the case that heresies have come to be under control.
01:05:56
Speaker
The same heresies that were around before the Council of Nicaea were still around after it. It took some effort to stamp them out. And we would get later heresies, newer heresies. In fact, some orders of monks came about specifically to combat heresy several hundred years later.
01:06:20
Speaker
Once we get to someone like Thomas Aquinas, we see that combating heresies is still needed and in fact it's basically a job. Aquinas is a Dominican friar and the Dominicans were specifically brought into existence to combat heresy.
01:06:40
Speaker
It just simply does not end basically. And so let me just tell you about two of them that came about a little bit after the Council of Nicaea.
01:06:52
Speaker
One later heresy has to do with the sacraments. Now, we don't get all the sacraments yet. The full list of seven sacraments took actually a couple of centuries to come about.
01:07:03
Speaker
But we do have some like baptism. And so the question here is, does baptism count if the priest that baptizes you is morally impure?
01:07:14
Speaker
Well, according to Donatism, a priest who has sinned cannot properly administer the sacraments such as baptism. According to the Donatists, the church must be a community of saints, not sinners.
01:07:32
Speaker
right So you need to, if you haven't been baptized by non-sinful priest, you need to go do that because the other one didn't count. This was obviously eventually condemned.
01:07:46
Speaker
One important figure from the early four hundreds Augustine, argued that the holiness of the sacraments does not depend on the priest's morality.
01:07:57
Speaker
And so you would get grace even if the church leaders were flawed, right? So that eventually became a heresy. Donatism did. And Augustine argued against Donatism.
01:08:09
Speaker
There is also Pelagianism. So according to some of the thinking of the time, especially around the time period of Augustine, who we just mentioned, the early four hundred s some people thought that you can only achieve salvation through grace, right? It is up to you to turn towards God. And once you say, hey, God, I need you,
01:08:32
Speaker
God will give you grace and then you will be able to fight sin, right? To be good and and not want to engage in sin. But without grace, you will be naturally sinful. Maybe you've heard of the doctrine of original sin.
01:08:47
Speaker
So that was the mainstream view or the view that eventually became orthodox. But another person, Pelagius, said, well, I think you can achieve salvation without divine grace.
01:09:00
Speaker
Maybe we don't have this thing called original sin. Maybe each of us is born morally neutral, not depraved, not geared towards breaking God's law.
01:09:14
Speaker
And so if you accept this, you don't need grace to be saved. You do have to work hard, that's for sure. But you don't need this special blessing from God to be undisposed towards c sinning. You can do it on your own.
01:09:33
Speaker
Well, this was condemned as well. Once again, Augustine argued that grace is essential for salvation. Humans are just too weak because of original sin to achieve goodness on their own.
01:09:48
Speaker
Now, clearly here, I am prefacing a lesson on Augustine. Augustine is quite a big deal and we will get to him in due time. But before we get there, let's talk about this.
01:10:06
Speaker
Let's bracket the church's battle against heresy. This goes on for a while, as I already mentioned, and it moves into disturbing territory very quickly, right?
01:10:16
Speaker
Some of the most awful things done to Christians during this time period were done to them by other Christians. But let's just say that you were lucky enough to be taught the right version of Christianity.
01:10:29
Speaker
And I do mean luck, by the way. I read some work in experimental philosophy that shows that philosophical arguments don't work.
01:10:40
Speaker
They don't change anyone's minds, which is kind of depressing. So, I mean, if we take that seriously, it seems like arguing against heresy was probably ineffectual.
01:10:52
Speaker
So all that to say, let's just say that you were lucky, all right? You were born in a part of the empire where they were teaching you the views that would eventually line up perfectly with orthodoxy.
01:11:06
Speaker
Okay, lucky you. So now you're living in Christian Rome. It is the year 380, that's when Christianity becomes the official religion of the empire, and that's where you find yourself.
01:11:23
Speaker
If you think about it, really nothing has changed, at least given the focus of this course. The ethical question persists.
01:11:35
Speaker
We turn to that next.