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False Teachers
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There has always been some diversity of understanding in the Church. Although we like to think of the church of Acts as completely unified in what they believed and practiced, a closer look reveals that there were different groups in the early church with different approaches to things. On one end of the spectrum were “Judaizers,” who thought Gentiles needed to convert fully to Judaism to be saved. On the other end of the spectrum were individuals in the church who seemed to flaunt the Law, sometimes called “antinomians” or people against law.
Were these individuals really Christians? God is ultimately the one to decide. Certainly, Paul considered some of the Judaizers to be “false brothers” (Gal. 2:4). Similarly, Jesus has some very strong words for some “antinomians” at Pergamum and Thyatira (Rev. 2:14-23).
In the middle were also groups who did not see eye to eye on everything. The Jerusalem Church strongly believed that meat sacrificed to an idol should be strongly avoided (Acts 15:20). By contrast, Paul considered this issue to be a matter of personal conviction (e.g., Rom. 14:14).
At some point, however, a certain teaching or practice goes outside the lines. Sometimes it is not clear at first whether such teachings and practices are just acceptable disagreements or genuinely unacceptable and harmful to the church. “Heresy” is not always clearly known to be heresy at first. Sometimes, heresy is only fully recognized after a process of discussion, debate, and discernment has taken place.
When we look back, it is easy in hindsight to be harsh toward those who promulgated heresies in the church. But if we could go back in time, we might realize that these issues were not nearly as clear then as they are to us now. Many individuals we now recognize as heretics at the time were genuinely wrestling with the Scriptures and processing questions that had not yet been fully answered.
One of the first groups to be clearly outside the bounds of appropriate belief is one we might call “Gnostics.” The first real evidence we have of them is at Ephesus at the end of the first century. 1 John and the Gospel of John both give evidence of this group. The key characteristic of the group is that they viewed the material world as intrinsically evil such that they could not believe that Jesus had really taken on a body.
1 John 2:19 indicates that this group had actually left the church and separated themselves. They did not believe that Jesus had really come to earth in the flesh (1 John 4:2-3). They thus did not accept that Jesus had died on the cross for their sins (1 John 1:8-2:1). John 1:14 and other passages in the Gospel of John may implicitly be countering their thinking (e.g., John 6:53-56).
They would become a significant movement in the second century, especially in Egypt. A whole set of Gnostic Gospels would be written there, with elaborate conceptions of angel hierarchies and levels of heaven. In the late second century, the church father Irenaeus would write a book called Against Heresies in which he wrote a good deal about false teachings like those of the Gnostics.
Around the year 150, a Gnostic by the name of Marcion argued that the Creator God of the Old Testament was actually a different God than God the Father in the New Testament. Because he believed that matter was evil, he could not bring himself to believe that the Father of Jesus could have engaged in this way with matter. He also was one of the first to put forward a sense of which books should be in a “New” Testament. But his list was quite limited, including some books of Paul and a mangled version of Luke. Some think that his list was so bad that it inspired more mainstream Christians to work on the right list.
At the same time, God may have used Marcion to help inspire Christians to begin to think about which books really did belong in a New Testament. By the end of the second century (100s), there seemed to be broad agreement on the four Gospels, Paul’s writings, and Acts as Scripture (covered further in Lesson 2: Development of the Canon).
The Gnostics also helped the Church refine its understanding of creation. Prior to the Gnostics, neither Jews nor Christians had really clarified where matter came from. Probably the default assumption was simply that it had always been here. By the end of the 100s, Christians and Jews had largely come to the understanding that God had not simply formed creation but had actually created the material of creation out of nothing, which is called ex nihilo creation (“out of nothing”).
There were also some Jewish individuals who did not believe that Jesus was God or was born of a virgin. The Ebionites believed that Jesus was a prophet but not that he was God. They did not believe that Jesus was born of a virgin either. The Ebionites were adoptionists, meaning that they believed that God “adopted” Jesus as his Son at his baptism. There were other adoptionist groups and individuals in the 100s and 200s.
Another false teaching that arose in the 200s was called “Sabellianism,” after a man named Sabellius. In his view, God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit were all the same person changing his “mode” of being. God the Father comes to earth as God the Son and then transforms into the Holy Spirit, One person, one God, three modes. This idea is thus known as modalism. We find versions of it in the church today, such as in the “Jesus only” movement or groups like the United Pentecostal Church.
How did the Church sort out and eventually condemn these false teachings? Before Christianity became a legal religion, it was harder to address. Church leaders would write treatises like Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, but Gnosticism flourished in parts of Egypt. It is hard enough to control popular opinion, let alone the opinions of some little group in some location. Often, the church needed to rely on the Holy Spirit and the powers of persuasion.
A canon of Scripture was developing, a sense of what books were authoritative Scripture, a “New Testament.” But it’s precise contents would not really become settled until the 400s when Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. At that point, the church had the power to make such things official and enforce them.
In the meantime, Christians developed something called the rule of faith. This was an informal sense of what Christians commonly believed, what would soon be known as orthodoxy or “right belief.” These beliefs would eventually be put into creeds. One of the earliest creeds was the Apostles’ Creed or the Old Roman Creed at first. We know it today as perhaps the most basic of all expressions of Christian belief.
The Apostles’ Creed
I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
And in Jesus Christ his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day, he rose again from the dead and is seated on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there, he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
In 313, the Roman emperor Constantine would make Christianity a legal Roman religion. This was a huge turning point. Some see this as a horrible moment in church history. But there are also misconceptions. Christianity was not yet the official religion of the empire. It was still just one among many. It thus did not have the power to persecute anyone.
But at least now Christians themselves did not have to worry about being persecuted. Now they could focus on questions like what right belief really was. What exactly is the relationship between Jesus and God the Father? They could begin to standardize the text of Scripture they used in worship and which books were the New Testament.