Heresy in The Early Church Issue 51 | 1996 Purchase this issue

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[* A condensed excerpt from “The Story of Christianity” by Justo L. Gonazlez (Harper & Row, 1984). Used with permission.]

Long before the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the church had already been dealing with heresy for some time. Early on teachers arose who said they had special access to Jesus’ “real teachings.” So early on, the church had to come up with methods for discerning truth and rejecting error.

In his The Story of Christianity (Harper & Row, 1984), Justo González, a member of the faculty of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, discusses the two most powerful heresies of the earliest church and how it responded.

Gnosticism today. A page from a 1622 Mandean manuscript depicting heavenly angels and demons. The Mandeans began in the first or second century A.D. as a small Christian community living east of the Jordan river. They adopted Gnostic teaching and later became hostile to Jesus Christ. Today the sect survives, with a few thousand adherents living just south of Baghdad.

Of all the differing interpretations of Christianity, none was as dangerous, nor as close to victory, as was Gnosticism. This was a vast and amorphous movement that existed both within and outside the church.

The name Gnosticism derives from the Greek word gnosis, which means “knowledge.” According to the Gnostics, they possessed a special, mystical knowledge reserved for those with true understanding. That knowledge was the secret key to salvation.

Salvation was the main concern of the Gnostics. They concluded that all matter is evil, or at best unreal. A human being is in reality an eternal spirit that somehow has been imprisoned in a body. Since the body is a prison to the spirit, and since ...