A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

One has always to remember that throughout the New Testament we are hearing one side of an argument. When the writer to Timothy insists with irritating fussiness that ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’, we can be sure that there were women doing precisely the opposite, who were probably not slow in asserting their own point of view.31

From such questions and answers, there could follow a train of thought perceptible in various forms in many gnostic documents. First, if the God of the Jews who created the material world said that he was the true and only God, he was either a fool or a liar. At best he can be described in Plato’s term as a ‘demiurge’

and beyond him there must

The gnostics included people of sophistication and learning – the complexity and frequent obscurity of their literature impressively demonstrated that – and arguably they had a more intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil in the world than the mainstream Christian Church has ever been able to provide. Evil simply exists; life is a battle between good and evil, in a material world wholly beyond the concern of the true God.

He saw the Creator God of the Jews as a God of judgement, rather than the God of love whom he saw perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. Christ had died to satisfy the Creator God.

Christians have never since abandoned their rhetoric of unity, despite their general inability to sustain it at any stage in the reality of history.

Some Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean regarded the Book of Revelation with suspicion as late as the fifth century.

Ultimately the mobile ministry disappeared from the mainstream Church, leaving the local ministry as the only accepted form.

Father, Son and Spirit – creator, redeemer and strengthener.

One, ‘Adoptionist Monarchianism’, explained the nature of Christ by saying that he had been adopted by God as Son, although he was a man; he was only God in the sense that the Father’s power rested in his human form.

Modalist Monarchianism is often known as ‘Sabellianism’, commemorating an otherwise obscure late-second-century exponent of the idea, and a term of abuse which has been flung around at various periods in Church circles with about as much discrimination as Senator Joe McCarthy once used the word ‘Communist’.