By Tessa Nolan
From Herod as the Messiah to the virginity test for Mary – Christian history, but not as you know it
When it comes to different versions of the Christmas story, it’s hard to top the version from the second-century Gospel of James. It starts quite beautifully with a story of how at the moment of Jesus’ birth, the world suddenly stops rotating: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s hand freezes, and the stars stand still. A woman arrives shortly after, skeptical of whether Mary can truly be a virgin, insisting on sticking her finger into the new mother’s vagina, after which her hand immediately withers. “Woe,” says the woman. Mary’s reaction is not recorded, perhaps because she felt she had made her point.
This is just one of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of alternative versions of Christianity that emerged in the centuries after the life and death of Jesus. Take the Ophites, who believed that Christ appeared on Earth in the form of a snake. They celebrated mass by encouraging a snake to slither across an altar where loaves were placed, sanctifying them in the process. Another first-century sect believed that King Herod, not Jesus, was the Messiah they awaited. Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, Pontius Pilate was viewed as much more than a wavering middle-management Roman official. He is revered there as a saint to this day.
And that’s before we get to the apocrypha, those ancient texts that teeter on the edge of legitimacy and offer a kind of alternative view of the Gospels. Here you will find tales of dragons worshiping a young Jesus and how Mary was able to breathe fire. The tone is usually very sensational. Another version explains how Herod’s daughter was accidentally decapitated by her mother when worms poured out of her father’s mouth. Talking donkeys and a touch of necrophilia provide the final flourish.
The reason we haven’t heard about these untrusted versions of Christian history, Catherine Nixey suggests in this engaging book, is that the early Church fathers moved heaven and earth to ensure they were destroyed at their inception. Whenever they encountered something – a text, a practice, a belief – that they did not sanction, they called it “heresy” and threw the book at it. Flogging, fines, and exile were obvious sanctions. But if you really wanted to send a message, rowing heretics out to sea, weighting them down with a sack of sand tied to their necks and feet, and pushing them overboard was the way to go. The idea was to make sure no body could be retrieved and turned into an object of veneration. Through such repressive measures, only one version of Christianity survived and thrived. This is the Christianity of the Sistine Chapel, the King James Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Bach’s Magnificat.”