Catherine Nixey, Heresy – Jesus Christ and Other Sons of God (Picador, 2024) 365 pp.

British journalist Catherine Nixey’s first foray into popular history, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017) received enthusiastic praise by many non-specialist reviewers and an even more rapturous reception by certain polemicists, who relished its fundamentally anti-Christian thesis. It was far less well-regarded by historians who are expert in the periods and topics it covers, who condemned it as biased, polemical and distorted. In her new book, Nixey seems to have learned some lessons regarding how to present history in more nuanced and accurate manner, though it makes for a book that tells a story which probably has a popular audience, even though it has been told before, and better, by other writers.

The general theme of Nixey’s new book is that Christianity burgeoned into a great variety of forms and beliefs in its first few centuries, but then this variety was pruned back by orthodoxy into those theological ideas that are more familiar today. This fairly simple and – to anyone who has studied early Christianity even a little – less-than-remarkable premise forms a general loose framework, allowing Nixey to range over various centuries, peppering her narrative with entertaining historical anecdotes and episodes. Examples of the pre-Christian “Sons of God” of her subtitle are presented in lively prose, highlighting the idea that Jesus was one of many such figures. Miracle stories that parallel those in the gospels to greater or lesser degrees are related. The variety of stories and texts about Jesus alongside those found in the canonical texts are sampled. And the bewildering range of disputed and debated theological variants on early Christianity are presented. All this makes up most of the book and is presented entertainingly enough, though with an overall tone of “I bet you didn’t realise this!”

The book certainly seems to be aimed not just at the general reader, but one who has probably read almost nothing on the history of Christianity or its cultural and historical contexts. Indeed, Nixey goes so far as to claim in her Introduction that she is doing something unusual:

This book will do some things that are, in the world of history, if not heretical then mildly frowned upon. For one thing, it will unapologetically consider Christianity alongside other classical religions. To do this is relatively unusual (though much less so than it once was). (Nixey p. 14)

This is a remarkable claim and one that would cause any historian of these subjects to raise a quizzical eyebrow. If Nixey had been writing in, say, 1889 perhaps this supposedly radical approach would indeed be “heretical” or at least “mildly frowned upon”. But in 2024, or actually any time after the publication of, say, Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890), it is more “mundane” or even “completely normal and expected”. This is so much the case that Nixey’s prospective general reader would have to have been almost completely sheltered from pretty much any popular books or documentaries on these subjects to find this approach in any way “unusual”, let alone “heretical”.

I am sure such readers exist, and Nixey’s publishers are probably banking on the hope there are actually many of them. But to pretend her approach on this is some kind of departure is a distinctly odd beginning. The idea that there were other cults like the early Jesus sect that worshipped saviour deities or venerated exalted teachers is so well-known it is almost a cliche. And there have been plenty of popular works, of varying quality, which have explored these parallel sects and their possible relationships with early Christianity. Selina O’Grady’s And Man Created God: Kings, Cults and Conquests at the Time of Jesus (Atlantic, 2012) is one of the better and more recent examples of book-length popular treatment of this theme.

Similarly, most people with even a passing interest in the history of Christianity would be well aware of the various non-canonical gospels and the examples of them that Nixey presents as so startling are actually commonplace in popular writing. Again, it would be a very naive reader who was not at least somewhat aware of the material that scholars like Elaine Pagels have been writing widely-read, popular books about for decades. Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, 1979) was a best-seller a whole 45 years ago and has been found on the shelves of most larger bookshops in the English-speaking world ever since, alongside a plethora of other such works. Periodic media flurries over these texts, such as was triggered by the publication of the Gospel of Judas in 2006 or the silly pseudo historical claims of the schlock airport novel The Da Vinci Code, have made these alternative gospels and their variant Jesus stories very well-known.

And the variety of early forms of Christianity are, as a result, also well-known, at least in principle. Bart Ehrman has formed a whole parallel career as a popular writer on this and related subjects, with books like Lost Christanities: The Battles of Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford, 2003) also found on the best-seller lists. Of course, there will always be people who have never encountered these subjects before and perhaps Nixey’s book will be where they first find them – we all first read about them somewhere, naturally. But both her Introduction and her presentation of these topics makes it seem as though she is revealing something hidden or at least highly obscure.

If these topics are not as startling or original as Nixey’s retelling seems to assume, at least the retelling is competent, entertaining and (generally) free from major errors. The problems with the book are more ones based on emphasis than outright mistatement or misrepresentation. The chapters on the variant Jesus stories stress their great variety and the bizarre elements in some of them. But nowhere do we find a discussion of why the four canonical gospels won out over these alternatives. So Nixey’s seeming intended audience of very general readers would be forgiven for thinking that choice was fairly arbitary. Indeed, Nixey gives the very strong impression that it was purely luck, with the help of later orthodoxy-driven politics, that meant these four made the cut and the others did not.

Actually, the four canonical gospels held favoured status very early on – from the mid second century, at least – by merit of the fact they were the most established and widely-read due to being … the very earliest gospels. This was the view of the early Christian writers and it has been fully confirmed by modern critical scholars. But the closest Nixey comes to almost making this rather important point is here:

To modern eyes such confusion can seem baffling: it is ‘naturally’ clear to modern readers that the ‘true’ stories about Jesus are those which are contained in the New Testament. …. [But] the four gospels in modern Bibles were written down between AD 70 and AD 110, long after the death of Jesus.

(Nixey, p. 95)

This is all true, but Nixey does not make the obvious point that, while these texts were written “long after the death of Jesus”, they were written long before the alternative stories she details with such relish. She bothers to note that writing down any stories of Jesus came later, while failing to note that these familiar ones are, by far, the earliest of these stories. So, of course, she does not make it clear that while critical scholars today do not take them at face value by any means, they do regard them as the only ones that can reliably tell us anything about the historical Jesus.

The historical Jesus is a figure who is remarkable by his near total absence from Nixey’s account. In her Introduction she assures her readers that she will be writing a work of history, not theology. Yet what relationship, if any, the historical figure of Jesus had to the plethora of Christs that proliferated after his time does not seem to interest Nixey at all. A kindly interpretation of this could be that the book is about the figure of “Jesus Christ”, not the historical man. A slightly less kind reading would be that if a line of tradition was drawn from the Jesus of history through the later traditions about him it would become very clear that the orthodoxy-advocates of the second half of her book actually had some very solid reasons to base their theology on the canonical gospels and not the efflorescence of later variants and their attendant sects. That would be accurate and grounded in historical scholarship, if a lot less fun than the story Nixey tells. Nixey seems to be writing mostly for the fun stuff.

And she certainly has a lot of fun, with all the (usual) weird variant Jesuses and whacky variant Christianities being described in detail. So we get the story of the playmate-killing murder child Jesus of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the virginity-doubting midwife Salome in the Protevangelium of James getting her hand burned in an impertinent gynecological examination of Mary. But, again, we get no differentiation between the sources of these odd and often amusing stories. The Protevangelium was widely read and much circulated. And it is the source, as Nixey correctly notes, of non-canonical elements in the Christmas story that are so well-known to this day that many people just assume they are in the Bible – such as Jesus being born in a cave attended by an ox and an ass. But other variants that Nixey has such fun with would have been obscure or even all but unknown even in their own time. It is not very accurate to pretend these stories or ideas found on a few scraps of papyrus are equivalent to those in wide circulation in any respect other than their non-canonical status.

The same can be said for the wild variation in forms of Christianity that proliferated in the early centuries of the faith. Some – such as Marcionism and some forms of Gnosticism – were widespread. Others are known to us only because they are mentioned by the champions of orthodoxy as examples of “heresy”. And even then, what they say indicates that even they were not very clear on who or even when these heretical groups were, with a strong chance that at least some of them did not exist at all.

Nixey shows some sign of awareness of a need for caution when using heresiological writings. When detailing some of the odd sexual theologies of these variant forms of the faith she notes:

Such stories, entertaining though they are, should be read with a certain amount of suspicion: [the heresiologist] Epiphanius is a witnes to treat with caution at the best of times and sexual immorality was a staple criticism that was levelled at so-called heretics. But then, given the vast losses of texts that occured, the historian is forced to use such sources: there is little else left. (Nixey, p. 136)

Sure. And it is good that she includes the caution. But it is not hard to get the impression that the entertainment value of this and other such material that makes up much of the book is the main point for Nixey.

Nixey gives caveats and cautions like this one at several points and this is to her credit. It is particularly good to see her provide them on topics where she had been rather less judicious in her previous book, The Darkening Age. Her clumsily unuanced argument there and her tendency not to temper her points by noting other relevant information or perspectives were among the things that her critics – myself included – noted as deep flaws in that earlier work.

In The Darkening Age, for example, Nixey went to some lengths to contrast the expansive and wise religious tolerance of the pagan Romans with the stern and often (at least, according to her narrative) violent and destructive intolerance of the Christians. Like much of that book, this was a cartoonish caricature of a far more complex state of affairs. As I noted in my critical review (see “Review – Catherine Nixey ‘The Darkening Age'”), Roman “tolerance” had definite parameters and they could be murderously intolerant of those who fell outside these limits. I noted the persecution of the Bacchanalian sect in a moral panic in 186 BC as one of several examples of how very intolerant the Romans could be. I also noted that the parameters of what was tolerated changed over time and the later Roman Empire became far more controlling and far less open when it came to religious diversity, as both Christians and Manicheans discovered in the reign of Diocletian.

So it is interesting that in her new book Nixey pauses at one point to make similar points and, perhaps not coincidentally, to note the Bacchanalian sect and the Christians and Manicheans as her examples. I know that Nixey was made aware of my reivew at the time, so it could be this point hit home. But she still emphasises the relative intolerance and exclusivity of Christians and still fails to see this as a continuation by Christians of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries of the shift to greater restriction and control by their pagan predecessors of the third century.

Similarly, in The Darkening Age she spends a great deal of time depicting Christians as rejecting, ignoring, neglecting and even actively destroying Classical learning, using selective evidence and often highly dubious arguments to do so. One thing she ignores completely is the fact there was a vigorous debate within early Christianity about the worth of “pagan” learning and it was the Christian leaders who argued for its preservation and use that won that argument. A reader of Nixey’s book who did not know of Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr or Augustine’s arguments on this would have no idea they existed and so not realise this is why basically all of the Classical works we have today were preserved – by Christian scribes and scholars.

In Heresy she at least gives a faint nod to some of these writers, noting how they “openly blended Christianity with Platonism and used a range of works, including pagan and Jewish texts, to inform their understanding of the world.” (Nixey, p. 139). Unfortunately this is about as far as she goes and she highlights this Alexandrian school largely by way of supposed contrast and states, wrongly, that the “attitudes of the academic Christians were, eventually, suppressed”. This is nonsense. They became the norm for all of the Christian intellectual tradition.

Nixey consistently emphasises that Christians in this period restricted, suppressed, banned and burned alternative views. But peeking from behind some of her arguments are glimpses of evidence that this was not as comprehensive as she makes out. In a highly perceptive reivew, Oxford’s Markus Bockmuehl notes how she relishes the wit and verve of Christianity’s pagan critics, like Porphyry and Celsus. But he notes:

She almost never stops to hear the responses offered by their Christian interlocutors – whose habit of quoting extensively from their opponents shows them conspicuously more engaged with rival ways of looking at the evidence than is the case in most of Nixey’s own account. 

Similarly, the heresiologists who she relies on (with minor caveats) for a lot of her accounts of the wild variety of alternative Christianities are also vigorously engaged in analysis and debate with their rivals. They do not simply hurl abuse at them, though they do indulge in a bit of that too.

Nixey gives another caution about the nature of our evidence in a long section on what the laws of the Christian Roman emperors can tell us about the increasing intolerance of alternatives that began in the fourth century. She, rightly, notes that laws in this period were more rhetorical statements of policy rather than strict legal prescripts that were rigidly and consistently enforced (Nixey, p. 174), and cautions that they should mainly be used to understand attitudes. That said, she goes on to talk about various forms of oppression and violence being enforced against heretics and other dissenters, without being able to furnish many actual examples of these legal remedies resulting in much genuine persecution. Death penalties are flourished in the laws and Nixey refers to them, but we get virtually no actual evidence of them being carried out against heretics.

As Markus Bockmuehl pinpoints in his review, there is a certain contradiction at the heart of Nixey’s book that means its argument, for all its anecdotes and quotes, never quite coheres. Nixey’s overarching argument is that Christianity had a great variety of forms in its early centuries, but most of this was suppressed or even wiped out by its more intolerant, orthodox strain. But much or even most of this variety died out well before that intolerant orthodoxy got the capacity to actively suppress anything. That did not happen until the fourth century, but most of these variant Christianities were minor things or even vague memories or literary ghosts by then. Nixey admits that at least some of these variants were so weird they were of limited appeal and it is actually likely that many of the rest were never large or influential. So was it intolerance that suppressed them or simply that they lost out in competition with more appealling, more intellectual and less esoteric forms of the faith? Given that, as I have noted above, Nixey never bothers to examine if the canonical gospels had greater appeal and influence because they were the earliest manifestations of the Jesus stories, she cannot explore how much impact this too had on what strands survived and which failed.

Even after the fourth century, the “oppressive orthodoxy” explanation that she stresses has elements in it that do not quite fit. She admits that the laws of the Christian emperors cannot be taken as evidence of actual oppression on the ground, and this is why she does not furnish us with much evidence of real persecution. She also admits that the various fulminating anathemas of the champions of orthodoxy in both writings and from the pulpits were largely “to no avail”. So why did this orthodoxy win out? It is clear that intolerance is certainly part of the story, but it is equally clear it is not all of it by a very long chalk. But that is the story Nixey chooses to tell.

The story of the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century and the massacre of the population of the town of Béziers in July 1209 gets two lurid pages (pp. 157-159), with the implication that this was the culmination of the earlier intolerance of difference she details in the second half of Heresy. This ignores the fact that the persecution of heresy in the later Middle Ages was not a continuation of a centuries long tradition, but a radical and very new break with the earlier approach, that consisted largely of words and voluminous writing, not swords (see “The Great Myths 14: ‘The Inquisition’ – Myths and History” on how Medieval legalistic heresy hunting evolved after centuries of no executions at all).

Nixey devotes several pages to the flat earth cosmology of Cosmas Indicopleustes and also to the quite different debates about whether the other side of the (round) earth was inhabited, and manages to conflate these two sufficiently to give the impression many Christian thinkers argued the world was flat – a hoary nineteenth century myth. She is aware enough that this is a myth to note that not all Christians were flat earthers and to say “it might be possible to argue that Cosmas …. was an aberrration” (p. 245). Except this is not merely something it “might be possible to argue”, it is simply a fact. He was. The majority of early Christian thinkers fully accepted that the earth was round, with a handful of exceptions. This is in contrast to their pagan predecessors, where whole substantial schools of philosophy, such as the Epicurians, clung to a flat earth cosmology for centuries after Aristotle. So, once again, Nixey hedges her examples around with caveats and notes of caution, but is careful to put the emphasis – often wrongly – where it suits her general line of argument.

The result of all this is a slightly odd and oddly slight book. The material it covers has been covered many times before and it is not clear that pulling it together into a new book was greatly needed. As I have noted, perhaps it will find an audience for whom this is all new. If it does, then at least this new book is not as slanted, distorted and misrepresentitive of history as The Darkening Age. Nixey appears to have learned some lessons there and been rather more careful in her choice of topics and her lines of argument. But there are still distortions here and they are still driven by several misunderstandings of the relevant historical periods that Nixey does not seem able to shake out of her head. As a result, any of her intended audience who go on to read deeper on these subjects will have to unlearn some impressions this book is likely to have given them. And that is never a good thing to say about any history book.