“Misinformation" As “Heresy": Attacks on Free Thought and Speech at the Root of Christian Domination

Freedom of thought and speech were anathema to the builders of Christian domination

Oct 18, 2024

Preface

My October 7, 2024, post, “Attacks on Free Speech”, focused on government officials intent on curbing open discussion of ideas and events in the name of “protecting” people from “misinformation”.

In the crescendo of attacks on open discussion during the “Covid lockdown”, government agencies and allied actors fought what they called “misinformation” about “science”.

Though the main battle was waged in the name of “science,” the scientific process of open debate was cancelled.

Scientific “truth” became an article of faith in government bureaucrats and approved “opinion leaders” — “influencers”.

That leads me to today’s post.

The second century in Western history was a period of intense theological wars over the interpretation of the Christian religion and the structure of the church.

The key questions focused on the life and teachings of Jesus: What was the “true gospel”? (The phrase may seem redundant, because “gospel” has come to mean “truth”.)

Most people today know of four and only four accounts of the life and death of Jesus—those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four gospels of the New Testament.

But it is now widely recognized, especially in the world of Bible scholarship, that many other gospels were written during the early centuries of the Christian Church.

Professor Bart D. Ehrman1 writes about these other gospels:

“What happened to all the other books, the ones that told a different version of the story?”

“Most of these alternate gospels were eventually destroyed as heretical—that is, for teaching the ‘wrong ideas’….”

Heresy-hunters—heresiologists—were second century theological “fact-checkers” attacking “spiritual misinformation” and promoting “correct thinking”—“orthodoxy” [lowercase “o”].

One of the earliest and best-known heresiologists was Irenaeus, the bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul (Lyon in modern France).

His five-volume Against the Heresies or Detection and Overthrow of Gnosis Falsely So-Called (~180)named “heretical” groups, discussed their heretical views, and attacked their heretical writings.

Among his targets, Irenaeus attacked a Gospel of Judas.

Until very recently, no one was sure that there was a Gospel of Judas.

But in the 1970s a papyrus book now designated Codex Tchacos was discovered in Middle Egypt. The third text in the Codex is The Gospel of Judas.

In 2006, the National Geographic Society published the first English translation of the Gospel of Judas.

Professor Marvin Meyer,2 in his Introduction to the National Geographic publication, writes:

The very title of the text, the Gospel of Judas—Judas Iscariot—is shocking.
In the New Testament gospels and most of the Christian tradition, Judas Iscariot is portrayed as the quintessential traitor, the betrayer of Jesus who turns his master in to the Roman authorities, and there is little in his character that could connect him with the gospel, or "good news,” of Jesus.

To make sense of why Irenaeus attacked gnostic writings like the Gospel of Judas, we must understand gnostic beliefs.

Gnosticism comes from the Greek gnosis, which means knowledge.

Gnostics are those who are "in the know."
For gnostics, a person is saved not by having faith in Christ or by doing good works.
Rather, a person is saved by knowing the truth—the truth about the world we live in, about who the true God is, and especially about who we ourselves are.
The knowledge of gnostics is self-knowledge and knowledge of the cosmos.

By putting forth these views, The Gospel of Judas stands diametrically opposed to the views that eventually triumphed in the theological wars of the second and third centuries.

Professor Ehrman:

The Gospel of Judas turns the theology of traditional Christianity on its head and reverses everything we ever thought about the nature of true Christianity.

Jesus says to Judas, with reference to the other disciples, "You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
Jesus’ death is not a necessary evil to bring about the forgiveness of sins.
The death of Jesus is the means by which he will be liberated from the flesh in order that he might return to his heavenly home.
By betraying Jesus, Judas will help his friend discard his body and free his inner self, the divine self.

Professor Meyer:

[The Gospel of Judas and other Gnostic] texts …tell a remarkable and revolutionary story.
The creator of the world…is actually a megalomaniacal demiurge, but human beings are exalted above the [world] creator and his powers by virtue of the spark of divinity within them.
If people come to know their true divine selves, they will be able to escape the clutches of the powers of this world and realize the peace of enlightenment.

Prof. Ehrman adds:

The basic thrust [of the Gospel of Judas] is clear: The deities in charge of this world are the Old Testament God, a bloody rebel, and a fool.

Prof. Meyer again:

The creator [of this world] and his lackeys, according to the Gospel of Judas, create this world below with rulers, angels, and powers all around… [and a] bureaucracy of angelic powers….
Parallels [in other gnostic texts] depict the same sort of bureaucracy of rulers of the world….
The bureaucrats of this world are in place in the Gospel ofJudas….

Bishop Irenaeus and his ilk trying to build a centralized church under the “God of this world” were targets of gnosticism!

And then they embarked on a more vicious and widespread ground war against “heresy”

By the end of the fourth century, the church took over functions previously handled by Roman imperial offices. The church’s method to maintain control over the rural outsiders on whose labor the imperial establishment rested was to undertake “conversions,” using coercion to break “heathen” ties to the land and substitute allegiance to the church.
By the turn of the ninth century, Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne initiated steps to create a Christian empire—an imperium christianum—extending into regions far from Rome.
Charlemagne’s invasion of the Saxon peoples (in what is now Germany) became a blueprint for centuries of Christian imperialism.
The measures used against the Saxons aimed to destabilize and dislocate the social texture of life at the most intimate levels of family existence: birth, marriage and death.
By the twelfth century, the church had attained immense institutional and economic resources and was prepared to destroy any opposition to its centralized, hierarchical control.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) began a war against Catharism (also known as the “Albigensian heresy,” for Albi, a city in what is now southern France where Catharism flourished).

Professor Morris Berman describes the papal Inquisition against Catharism in Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (1989):

The losses . . . during the first fifteen years . . . estimated to have been one million dead. . . .
Whole towns, starting with Béziers in 1209 . . . were put to the sword. . . . The military agents of the king and the pope went on a killing orgy . . .
When Arnold Amalric (or Arnaud Aimery), Bishop of Citeaux, was asked by the crusaders what they should do with the Catholic citizens of Béziers, he was reported to have replied: ‘Kill them all, God will recognize his own.’
The new papal legate reported to the Pope that twenty thousand people were put to death—the entire population of the town.

The destruction of the Catharists, like the earlier conquest of the Saxons, proved that church officials understood how to inflict maximum damage on social structures.

A key element was to turn people against each other:

“By 1227 the Church had instituted a primitive police system, in which people were appointed to report on their neighbors. . . .
The goal was to weave a network of secrecy, suspicion, and terror, and in this the Inquisition was very successful. . . .
With the added pressure of torture legalized by Pope Innocent IV in 1252, the kinship and network structures … simply couldn’t hold.”

The fact the Catharist “heresy” focused on “the Great Mother” and the “Earth Goddess” demonstrates the kind of peoples targeted by the church: peoples who affirmed the natural world, the “wild and the primitive.”

United States “Indian Policy” followed the lead of the Christian heresy-hunters

On March 30, 1883, Henry M. Teller, Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior, wrote to Hiram Price, Commissioner of the US Office of Indian Affairs:

SIR: I desire to call your attention to what I regard as a great hindrance to the civilization of the Indians, viz, the continuance of the old heathenish dances, such as the sun-dance, scalp-dance, & c.
These dances, or feasts, as they are sometimes called, ought, in my judgment, to be discontinued, and if the Indians now supported by the Government are not willing to discontinue them, the agents should be instructed to compel such discontinuance.

Hiram Price responded with The Code of Indian Offenses:

The following rules are promulgated for the guidance and direction of the several United States Indian agents, and each agent will see to it that the requirements thereof are strictly enforced, with the view of having the evil practices mentioned by the honorable Secretary ultimately abolished:

The "sun-dance," the "scalp-dance," the "war-dance," and all other so-called feasts assimilating thereto, shall be considered "Indian offenses," and any Indian found guilty of being a participant in any one or more of these "offenses" shall, for the first offense committed, be punished by withholding from the person or persons so found guilty by the court his or their rations for a period not exceeding ten days; and if found guilty of any subsequent offense under this rule, shall be punished by withholding his or their rations for a period not less than fifteen days, nor more than thirty days, or by incarceration in the agency prison for a period not exceeding thirty days.
Any plural marriage hereafter contracted or entered into by any member of an Indian tribe…shall be considered an "Indian offense”…; and upon trial and conviction thereof by said court the offender shall pay a fine of not less than twenty dollars, or work at hard labor for a period of twenty days, or both, at the
discretion of the court…; and so long as the Indian shall continue in this unlawful relation he shall forfeit all right to receive rations from the Government.
The usual practices of so-called "medicine-men" shall be considered "Indian offenses”… and upon conviction of any one or more of these specified practices, or, any other, in the opinion of the court, of an equally anti-progressive nature, [the “medicine-man”] shall be confined in the agency prison for a term not less than ten days, or until such time as he shall produce evidence satisfactory to the court, and approved by the agent, that he will forever abandon all practices styled Indian offenses under this rule.

This long trajectory of Christian theological domination underlies the claims of Christian legal domination over “heathen” peoples and lands

As Carl Schmitt put it in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum [1950]):

The “respublica Christiana [Christian republic] and populus Christianus [Christian people]” had definite orders and orientations. . . .
The soil of non-Christian, heathen peoples . . . could be allocated . . . to a Christian prince for a Christian mission.

Schmitt added:

“So-called ‘modern’ international law—from the 16th to the 20th century—arose from the disintegration of the medieval spatial order supported by empire and papacy.
Without knowledge of the continuing effects of the medieval Christian order, it is impossible to gain a legal-historical understanding of the international law that emerged from it.

The 1823 US Supreme Court decision, Johnson v. McIntosh, stands today as the prime artifact of the US claim of Christian domination over the Original Peoples of the continent and their lands.