Christian Legacies

General Category => Christian Legacies Main Forum => Topic started by: Phidippides on December 04, 2023, 12:11:02 AM

Title: Early Church Heresies
Post by: Phidippides on December 04, 2023, 12:11:02 AM

Can you name any heresies in the first few centuries of Christianity and what they believed (in a nutshell)?

A few are:

• Marcianism: believed that God in the New Testament was different from God in the Old Testament because their behavior was not reconcilable.
• Gnosticism: believed in esoteric knowledge held by the few "true believers" and that the Bible's text was to be interpreted symbolically for hidden meaning

Title: Re: Early Church Heresies
Post by: Donald Baker on December 07, 2023, 08:00:24 PM

How about Arianism:

Title: Re: Early Church Heresies
Post by: Phidippides on December 24, 2023, 07:53:35 PM

Good one.

Another is "donatism", which held that Christ was not actually man.  Apparently there was a gospel that was rejected from the canon (I believe it was the Gospel of Peter) because of potentially donatist content.  For example, there was a line in it that described Christ as behaving like He was in no pain while on the cross.  If Christ were in no pain, though, it would mean that He was not a man.