Heretic Quotes

“His uncle Constantine, by contrast, lived on and on. By the time Constantine died, he had enjoyed a rule of three decades. What was so very different about Constantine was not, then, that he had a religious vision, nor that he introduced a new god, nor that he plumped for an eccentric Eastern deity – all these things were profoundly unremarkable. What was different about Constantine was that he lived for such a very, very long time. And by doing so he changed the fate of Rome, and of the empire – and therefore of Europe – for ever.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Almost from the first moments of its existence, Christianity became engaged in a ferocious war about whether it was a religion – or whether it was merely magic, with pretensions.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“History, it is often said, is one damn thing after another. In truth, it is not: it is far more often one damn thing before another. Things happen forwards; but history is then written backwards. Historians begin in the present, and trace the roots of the present in the past.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us,’ Symmachus wrote. ‘What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Lucretius explained that he wrote to ‘loose from round the mind / The tightened coils of dread religion.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Whatever each person worships it is reasonable to think of them as one.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Whatever each person worships it is reasonable to think of them as one.’44”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“However, it seems that over the years the countenances of the good monks occasionally clouded a little. For, appended onto angelically idealistic Rules of Pachomius: Part I are the slightly less serene Rules of Pachomius: Part II, and the even crabbier Rules of Pachomius: Part III. These testy codicils testify less to heavenly harmony than to the very earthly irritation that comes from living too close to one’s companions for too long, with nothing but basket-weaving for distraction. Crossness codified, they give vent to years of accumulated irritation, as action after action is outlawed and increasingly furious punishments are instituted. So, while Rules of Pachomius: Part I merely states that talking at dinner is not allowed, Part II confirms this – but adds that looking around at dinner is also not allowed; that putting one’s hands on the table before one’s elders is not allowed; that missing prayers at table is not allowed; and that, if any monk should laugh at table, ‘he shall be judged.’8 Like an oppressive partner, the laws go on, codifying in minute detail what is acceptable and what is unacceptable at all times of the day and night.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Sun gods and gods of light were popular among Roman emperors. When Christianity turned up, classical critics saw it as an unremarkable continuation of this; indeed there was so much sun imagery in early Christianity that one Christian author would feel the need to defend Christians from accusations that they were merely sun worshippers, what with their Sunday (in Latin, dies solis – the ‘day of the sun’) worship and their tendency to pray towards the east.26 Sometimes even Christians themselves seemed a trifle confused. A remarkable third-century mosaic discovered in the Vatican Necropolis shows Jesus represented as the sun god Helios, with that god’s typical rays coming from his head, riding on his chariot.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“As the laws make clear, the world of fourth-century Rome was one of rigid social hierarchies. These legal codes speak of firm class distinctions, of snobbery distilled into subclauses. There are edicts on who may ride horses (former soldiers may; shepherds absolutely may not); on what colours one may wear (never imperial purple or gold); on who can wear jewels (definitely not actresses); on what fabrics one may dress in and on how foreign one is allowed to look (not very).”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“These laws speak of a far more violent world than the one captured by the privileged men of Roman literature. This is a world of cut-throats and infant killings, a place that endures homicides and parricides, rapes and beatings, thefts and robberies. It is a world that frets not over which wine is better to drink under the shade of a tree, but instead muses over how much violence should be involved in ‘the disciplinary correction of slaves’ (in summary: as much as you like, up to and including death, provided that death is ‘accidental’).10 This is not a world of bored poets on riverbanks; it is a harder place, in which parents sell and kill their own children frequently enough for the law to have views on such matters. It is a world of pains and passions and sorrows far beyond the pens of cultured men, and it would, were it not for Rome’s legal fastidiousness, have been all but swept from the pages of history.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Their abbot’s reply became legendary: ‘Kill them all,’ he replied. ‘For the Lord knoweth them that are his.’ And so, the chronicler concludes, ‘Countless numbers in that town were slain.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Eventually, this mingled religion would be utterly wiped out. Its followers would be persecuted, tortured and killed, and its sacred writings destroyed. This happened slowly – very slowly – in some places: it is entirely possible that the last surviving Manichaean in China might have died in the twentieth century. But now it is gone.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“In a text called Jesus Messiah Sutra, buddhas found themselves conscripted into the world of the Christian God: ‘All the buddhas as well as kinnaras and the superintending-devas,’ explained this seventh-century text, ‘can see the Lord of Heaven.’16 It went on to explain that, if there were any people who tried to understand the precepts of Buddha, but did so without fearing ‘the Lord of Heaven’, then these people had failed: ‘they cannot be counted among those who have “received the precepts” in spite of professing that they rely on the teachings of Buddha. They are, in reality, traitors!”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“The historian David Brakke has likened writing about early Christianity to writing about a race whose result is known: it is so hard to pay serious attention to any of the other contenders; they seem so clearly preordained to lose.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“The religion these people followed is called Mandaeism and it is in some ways similar to Christianity – but also profoundly different from it. Dating it is difficult: some say it is as old as Christianity; others that it is later; others that it is far older. Certainly its stories are ancient: Mandaeans believe in Adam and in Noah, and in John the Baptist, and their texts mention Jesus. But in this religion while John the Baptist is revered, Jesus is not. Indeed, far from being considered God on earth, Jesus is instead considered to be a fraud, a sorcerer and worthy of contempt: the ‘false messiah’.5 One Mandaean text refers to him as ‘the wizard Messiah, son of the spirit of Lie who has given himself out to be [a] god.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“As the scene opens, a young royal couple are about to consummate their marriage. The groom, thinking that he is going to meet his wife, ‘raised the curtain of the bridal chamber, that he might bring the bride to himself.’46 He is, to say the least, surprised to find Jesus already in bower with his wife. Jesus, it transpires, has materialized there so that he can give the newly married couple a lecture on celibacy – and then promptly does so. Settling himself down on their marriage bed, Jesus tells the now slightly less happy couple to sit on two nearby couches, then proceeds to explain, at length, why they should not have sex. His reasoning is forceful. Children are without exception awful, Jesus says: they ‘become either lunatics or half-withered or crippled or deaf or dumb or paralytics or idiots’, while their tedious parents become ‘grasping’.47 If you do have children, then there will be no rest for either party, for children inevitably do ‘unprofitable and abominable works. For they will be detected either in adultery or in murder or in theft or in unchastity, and by all these you will be afflicted.’ Therefore refrain, Jesus warns them, ‘from this filthy intercourse.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“(The number and names of the magi varied widely from country to country – which is hardly surprising, since the Bible doesn’t specify either how many there were or what they were called.) So, while Christians in the West know the magi as Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, in a Georgian manuscript they were called Wiscara, Melikona and Walastar, and in Persia they became Amad, Zud-Amad and Drust-Amad.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“The ancient traveller might also have come across an engaging Christian sect known as the Ophites, who were said to believe that Christ had come – but that he was a snake. Thus, as one Christian reported, these people ‘honour the serpent and regard him as Christ, and have an actual snake . . . in a basket of some sort.’19 This group of Christians had developed a complex theology and various proofs for this claim: was not there a snake in the garden of Eden? Had it not shown mankind the route to knowledge? And are our intestines not shaped like a snake? The truth was clear: Christ is a snake.20 During their worship, it was said that these Christians ‘spread loaves around on a table, and call the snake to come; and when the den is opened it comes out. And then the snake – which comes up of its own accord and by its villainy . . . crawls onto the table and coils up on the loaves.’ Once the bread has been ‘consecrated by its coiling’, these Christians ‘offer a hymn to the father on high’ and ‘so conclude their mysteries.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Were a traveller to walk east or south from Alexandria, they would have been hard pressed not to notice the religion changing, again and again. In Ethiopia, for example, Pontius Pilate was looked upon with favour – and is to this day revered as a saint.17 The sacred books were different, too, for Christians there (as they did elsewhere in the ancient world) read a canon that included an extensive list of the wicked things in which angels inducted mankind, including the sinful habit of wearing bracelets and the ‘beautifying of the eyelids’. It went on: ‘Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl [taught] astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“In those days, the unimaginable other was less to be found to the east of the empire than in its north-west, on that damp and dagger-shaped island known as Britain. This was widely considered to be an appalling and uncivilized place, used by the Roman poet Virgil as a byword for the ends of the earth.15 In this ghastly land, as the geographer Strabo observed, ‘the sun is to be seen for only three or four hours round about midday’ and the inhabitants were alarmingly tall – ‘half a foot above the tallest people’ in Rome – and unattractive with it.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Western Christianity, with its paintings of pale-faced saints and honey-haired Jesuses, has an almost unshakeable habit of thinking of Christianity as Western. It was not. As historians have long pointed out, when Christ told his followers to spread the word to the ends of the earth, he was standing on a hill in western Asia and speaking Aramaic as he did so.12 Many of Christianity’s greatest early thinkers were from Egypt and North Africa, not Europe. Yet Western Christianity, which read most of its holy texts first in Greek, then later in Latin, long showed a resolute amnesia to such simple truths. In the nineteenth century, there was a ‘rediscovery of the ancient Eastern Christians’, as the scholar Aziz Atiya put it – but the ‘rediscovery’, it should be noted, was from the point of view of Western scholars: Egyptian Copts had not, on the whole, forgotten that they existed.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.’7 These, so the Bible said, were the words of Jesus to his disciples. The followers of Christ evidently listened, and obeyed, for Christianity spread far and it spread fast. By the third century, it had reached Egypt and Ethiopia and the Iranian plateau; and it kept going, onwards, eastwards, to Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and to China.8 By AD 650, the Church of the East had bishops as far east as Samarkand; envoys from Kyrgyzstan would later appear in Byzantium, much to the surprise of the locals, with crosses tattooed on their foreheads.9 By the year 1000, there were churches in Nineveh, Isfahan and Herat. Eastern Christians were ministered to by priests with such names as Banus the Uigurian and helped by laymen called such things as Kiamata of Kashghar and Tatta the Mongol.10 In the Middle Ages, the Eastern Christian church – not the Western – was the most widespread in the world.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Had Cosmas been able to understand the texts that those Christians used, he might have been a little less satisfied. For almost certainly the Christians whom Cosmas saw in India were Thomas Christians, a group influenced by an ancient text known as the Acts of Thomas. In this text, Jesus sells a man into slavery, is described as having a twin brother and rants, at length, about the ghastliness of children.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Laws, customs and diseases – all were transforming the world in this era. But they were only able to do so because Roman roads and Roman transport and Roman peace were opening the world up in a way never seen before. Globalization was underway. And one of the things that globalized fastest of all in this period was religion. Lighter than spice, more profitable than gold, gods were spreading along the arteries of empire.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“But Alexandria was different. Admittedly, it still had bodies and filth and piss. But, despite its size – perhaps half a million inhabitants – and despite being constructed with its buildings so close together that they seemed to stand almost ‘another on another’, Alexandria didn’t suffer from the stifling, stinking airs that made life in other cities so unbearable. Standing with its face to the Mediterranean and its back to a great lake topped up by the Nile, the air in Alexandria was always fresh, always moving. Sea breezes passed along its broad marble streets all summer long. As the geographer Strabo noted with admiration, ‘the healthiness of the air is also worthy of remark’, and, as a result of it, ‘the Alexandrians pass the summer most pleasantly.’6 Everyone considered the city to be a ‘fount of health’.7 There were smells here, too – but pleasant ones. You could smell the world in this single city since, every day, by camelback and horseback, by boat and by barge, from India and Arabia, Somalia and China, a world of spice and scent was brought into Alexandria, filling its air with perfume.8 Frankincense smouldered, constantly, on a thousand altars, and ‘censers, filled with spices, breathed out a divine smell.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Gathering himself, Porphyry then sets about a more systematic critique of the tale, attacking everything from its geography (there is no sea there, so how was it that ‘all those swine came to be drowned, although it was a lake and not a great sea?’) to the improbability of the story’s agricultural setting (given the Jewish dietary laws on pork, he asks, ‘How could there be so large a swineherd grazing in Judea?’). Porphyry also attacks its morals. What, he wonders, had the poor pigs done to deserve this? Why should Jesus drive the demons from one man, only to send them into helpless swine and, in the process, frighten the poor swineherds? It’s all very well to free one man from demonic possession, but to release one man from invisible bondage only ‘to place similar ties on others’, and then ‘to push fear into other men thereby’ – that ‘is unreasonable.’33 Almost two thousand years later, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his essay ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’, would find almost identical fault with the miracle. ‘You must remember that He was omnipotent,’ said Russell, ‘and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs.’34 Why?”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“We now know of apocryphal texts that tell of how dragons worshipped the young Jesus; texts in which Mary is fed by angels; texts that describe her youth and childhood; and one very engaging text in which Mary is capable of breathing fire. There are texts that explain how Herod’s daughter was accidentally decapitated by her mother while worms poured out of Herod’s mouth. There are texts that contain necrophilia and talking donkeys. There is one supremely pleasing text in which St John banishes bed bugs from a hotel, with full biblical bombast. Having spent half the night being bitten by the creatures, the holy John comes to the end of his tether and suddenly declares, ‘I say unto you, O Bugs, behave yourselves, one and all, and leave your abode for this night and remain quiet in one place, and keep your distance from the servants of God.’21 The bed bugs duly depart. And with them – and with all of these tales – went some of the unquestioned authority of the Bible.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“There is, for example, an odd and now little celebrated moment in the Gospel of Mark when Jesus is hungry; seeing a fig tree, he goes to eat from it – then finds it has no fruit. Jesus – who in this story has hints of the angry infant Jesus – curses the tree. ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’31 Sure enough, when he and the disciples pass by a little later (this takes place after Jesus has, in another less-than-mild moment, walked into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneylenders), the disciples notice that the tree has withered up. They point this out to Jesus. His response is brief, and telling: ‘Have faith in God,’ he replies. It is an act that would later wholly baffle the philosopher Bertrand Russell: ‘This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree.”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

“Jesus, it was argued by some Christians, ‘used to eat and to drink in a special way, without excreting his solids . . . So great was the power of his self-control, that the food in his body was not digested, because all form of corruption was alien to him.’29 For centuries, a long, involved and theologically important debate rumbled over the question of whether or not Jesus had defecated. (The conclusion eventually reached was that he had, and many of those who suggested otherwise were later condemned as heretics.)”
― Catherine Nixey, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God