'When a Persian painter turns up claiming to be the Paraclete and promulgating a hotch-potch belief system, you’ve got problems.'

Matthew Graham continues his look at heretics throughout history with those connected to the letters M, N and O  

The Holy Spirit is supposed to be the intangible agent of divine providence, subtly shepherding human history toward its culmination.

So when a Persian painter turns up claiming to be the Paraclete and promulgating a hotch-potch belief system, you’ve got problems.

Drawing on Judaeo-Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Babylonic folklore, Mani (216 – 276) created a dogma of universal truths.

Styling himself, amongst other things, the “Apostle of Jesus Christ”, Mani proselytised his message of an urgent struggle between light and darkness (which was winning) to great effect across the ancient world.

Only by practicing vegetarianism – the most devout survived on fruit juice alone – and sexual abstinence could one prepare for the coming apocalypse and ensure personal salvation.

Executed

Mani was executed in 276 (either beheaded or flayed and stuffed) by the Sassanid emperor Bahram I who could not tolerate that he himself was not a prophet.

In the following millennium, Manichaeism would stretch from southern Spain to China and meet with frequent suppression.

Although its connection to subsequent dualist heresies (such as Bogomilism and Catharism) is debatable, it had a very direct impact on one of the most significant figures in Christian history, St Augustine of Hippo.

For a decade in his youth, he was a Manichaen. It seems likely that his ideas on the nature of good and evil, hell, and sexuality drew on his early experiences as a “follower of Light”.

Many of the Christian communities that would follow Manichaeism were earlier adherents of another dualist heresy.

Marcion (c. 100 – 160) was a wealthy shipowner from Asia Minor who believed that the wrathful God of the Old Testament (the rigourously just Demiurge) was not the loving God of the New Testament.

Canon

Apparently only St Paul fully appreciated this and Marcion compiled ten of his letters and a modified version of the Gospel of St Luke (described as interpreting scripture with a pen knife) into the first canon of Scripture in the Christian Church.

Marcion also held that Jesus was not human at all but fully divine and had suddenly appeared preaching and teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.

In 140 Marcion journeyed to Rome to convince the rest of the Christian Church that he was right. Despite a sweetener of 200,000 sesterces (the annual salary for a legionary was about 1000 at the time), the first Roman church council on record chose to excommunicate him (and returned his donation).

Marcion returned to Asia Minor and proved fantastically successful in forming his own faith community. His brand of Christianity rivalled Catholicism for over three centuries and for many years comprised the greatest number of persons claiming to be Christian.

Small wonder, then, that the Apostolic Father Polycarp described Marcion as being the first-born of Satan.

The second and third centuries were clearly rife with competing theologies and it was men like Origen (c. 185 – 254) who steered the early church through those difficult waters.

Castrated

In spite of his rigid ascetism (he is alleged to have castrated himself following Matthew 19:12 too literally) and providing the first philosophical exposition of Christian doctrine, even he eventually fell foul of the authorities.

His arguments that Christ was subordinate to God, that even the Devil would eventually be saved and that souls experienced some form of metempsychosis proved too much. He was persecuted in his final years and died as a result.

Finally we’ll end with Nestorius (c. 386 – 451) who taught that the divine and human natures of Christ were distinct.

The emergent schismatic Nestorian church spread eastwards and formed the dominant Christian presence in China and India for over a millennium.

With hindsight, the history of the church seems incredibly fragile and the eventual success of Catholicism quite amazing.

It’s interesting to ask whether this is the result of natural selection, happenstance or the influence of the true Paraclete.

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