There is a way of telling stories about the past that makes it seem as if all that happened was meant to be: that events had purpose and moved towards a destined end. It was most famously popular in the days of English exceptionalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this view, the revolutions of the seventeenth century had all been Divine Providence guiding the people of Britain towards the grand destiny of liberty at home and empire abroad.
It’s a longer-view version of the cognitive bias known as the “just world fallacy”. Psychology shows that human beings have an in-built sense that the world should be a fair place and we slide easily into the belief therefore that it is a fair place and that, all things being equal, people get what they deserve. This assumption makes our lives easier to cope with in general but there is something particularly comforting about this view applied to the history of your own people or tribe when they have been doing well. It implies that all that has happened was meant to be and was for the best. But more than that, it excuses anything that might look like a crime, because it certainly couldn’t, on this view, really be one. That would certainly have been a comforting thought to the advocates of English exceptionalism.
English exceptionalism may (or may not) be dead but certainly Christian exceptionalism is alive and well. The idea is still widespread – and is currently even being rejuvenated – that Christianity in ancient times came as a blessing into a world that knew no kindness or compassion and was ignorant of universal notions of humanity. The suffering people of that time embraced it because it gave them the hope of justice and equality and because it was a rational alternative to the chaotic and fraudulent polytheism under which they had previously laboured. From these roots in due course flowered all the values of the west, a unique and Christianity-dependent harvest. With Christianity from the outset all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
In Heresy Catherine Nixey strips these pretensions away with a complete (but scholarly) lack of mercy. Her focus is on Christianity’s first few centuries and she brings together three facts that are individually well-known within their respective fields of scholarship but are not well known generally, and have rarely been united to make the point she makes.
The first is that the figure of Jesus, far from being unique, was just one of many strikingly similar god-men around at the time of Christianity’s beginnings, some of them so similar to him that the stories of their miracles are identical. Walking on water, turning water into wine, healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding vast crowds with food conjured out of thin air, exorcising demons out of men – these were all the staples of magicians in the Mediterranean world in Roman times. We have many texts now that show this. We also have the images of Jesus holding his magic wand in early Christian art.
The second is that even the Jesus stories that have ended up in the Christian Bible are just one small portion of all the different stories that different early Christians believed. The stories that didn’t make it are diverse, from that of the God whose breast is milked for the Holy Spirit to the infant Jesus who struck his school friends dead when they annoyed him. They failed to end up in the Bible because they were favoured by the Christians who lost the inter-Christian rivalry of the religion’s early days.
The third is that many educated, enlightened, kind and virtuous people in the Roman world were not pleased by the rise of Christianity and found Christianity itself both irrational and immoral, often for reasons that read the same as the critiques made by non-Christians today. We have few sources for this – the works of Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian all appear in this book – not for the reason that such reactions were rare but because they did not survive the age of Christian domination.
What these three facts combine to do is to highlight how incredibly contingent was the emergence of Christianity in general and also of the specific version of Christianity that survived. It was all just another historical event. Even if something like Christianity was bound to have succeeded (not a given by any means), it still could have been the Jesus with a magic wand who became the one Christians worship. Or it could have been one of the other god-men, or none of them.
In a way the strange thing is how novel the premise of the book might seem to its readers. Classicists have always known that the mediterranean world was full of god-men, miracles, and magic so why should it be shocking to read this now? A lot is down to a conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a ‘gentleman’s agreement’) between theologians and classicists or ancient historians is real. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. ‘That’s myth – not history’, was his view. You might as well investigate whether Vespasian rose to the heavens as an eagle. But he never said that in print to my knowledge and certainly not in his lectures. Nixey’s book breaks an important taboo in a well-crafted and eminently readable combination of scholarship and polemic.
An edited version of this review appeared in New Humanist, August 2024