The Invention of Heresy

For there also have to be factions among you, so that those who are approved may become evident among you. 1 Corinthians 11:19  NASB

Factions – Paul uses the Greek term haíresis a few times in his letters.  Today we think he’s writing about false doctrines.  We transliterate the Greek as heresy, by which we mean something opposed to truth.  But the word didn’t always mean that.

“The Greek term haíresis earlier meant just a ‘choice,’ that is an affinity group joined by common ideas, theories, and practices, without any pejorative overtones at all.  Le Boulluec found that Justin Martyr, a ‘pagan’ convert who lived in Asia Minor and Rome through the first two thirds or so of the second century, was a crucial figure (if not the crucial figure) in the Christian shift from understanding haíresis to be a ‘group of people, a part or sect marked by common ideas and aims’ to being ‘a party or sect that stands outside established or recognized tradition, a heretical group that propounds false doctrine in the form of heresy.’”[1]

Boyarin’s insight is crucial.  By the time we get to the development of Christian “doctrine,” haíresis becomes the description of anything other than approved teaching.  You can see the hint of this in Paul’s verse.  Schlier makes this shift abundantly clear: “Yet there is from the outset a suspicion of the haíresis within Christianity itself, not through the development of orthodoxy, but through the basic incompatibility of ekklēsía and haíresis (cf. Gal. 5:20; 1 Cor. 11:18–19). In 1 Cor. 1: 10ff. haíresis has a sifting purpose. In 2 Pet. 2:1 it affects the church’s very basis; a haíresis creates a new society alongside the ekklēsía and thus makes the ekklēsía itself a haíresis and not the comprehensive people of God. This is unacceptable.”^[2]  Boyarin makes a startling discovery: heresy was invented in order to establish a borderline between what the religious authorities found acceptable and what they rejected.  In other words, before the Church established itself as God’s authority on earth, haíresis was just another way of following God.  After the Church established itself as God’s authority, haíresis was forbidden evil.[3]

Boyarin also shows that rabbinic development followed a similar path, eventually establishing its own borderline based on a similar claim of authority.  But none of this happened at the time of Yeshua.  In fact, it took several hundred years for the borderlines to become theological fences.

What does this mean for us?  It means that during the time of the Messiah, and for many generations following, orthodoxy didn’t exist.  What existed were various groups of spiritual followers of YHVH, each community with its own practices and texts, all accepted as the greater kingdom of God.  What existed was a wide tolerance of spiritual worship, practice, and thought because there was no established religious authority demanding strict obedience to one way of being.  That’s why Paul encountered traditional Jews, proselytes, Messianic Jews, and Messianic Gentiles in the same assembly.

But not now.  Two thousand years later, after both Judaism and Christianity have established their borderlines by inventing what each supposes is heresy, we find ourselves in the middle of the bridge.  We don’t belong in the world of Jewish orthodoxy and we don’t belong in the confines of the Christian Church.  Two thousand years ago, we would have been just one more spiritual community following YHVH in our own way accepted as part of the great kingdom of God.  But not now.  Thanks to the penchant of Man to want control over others, we are haíresis from both sides.  God might not think so, but men certainly do.

“Christianity, in its constitution as a religion, therefore needed religious difference, needed Judaism to be its other—the religion that is false.”[4]

A long time ago I wrote, “Don’t call me a heretic until I am one.”  Now you must realize that I have never been, and never will be, a heretic because I have always been, and always will be, haíresis.  I would fit quite comfortably in the greater community of the first century.  I don’t fit at all after the fifth century.  I’m just too young for my age.

Topical Index:  haíresis, Boyarin, orthodoxy, 1 Corinthians 11:19

[1] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp, 3-4.

^[2] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 28). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.

[3] You can see this influence on a web page about heresy: https://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/library/verses/id/426/heresy-verses.htm

[4] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 11.