Asia Minor, today’s Turkey, was the busiest workshop of early Christianity, and it was also the stage of its fiercest arguments. The seven best-known early church heresies tied to this land are Marcionism, Montanism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, Iconoclasm and Paulicianism. Not all of them were born here, since some began in Alexandria or Constantinople. However, each of them was argued out in Anatolian cities, from Sinope and Nicaea to Ephesus.
A Word About the Word Heresy
The word heresy sounds harsh today. It comes from the Greek hairesis, which first meant simply a choice, or a school of thought. In Book of Acts the same word is used for the sect of the Sadducees and the sect of the Pharisees (Acts 5:17 and 15:5). Only with time did it come to mean a teaching that the wider church judged to be wrong.
So this article is not a list of villains. It describes seven movements that the historic church, through its councils and its writers, judged to be in error. Some of them were sincere efforts at reform, and some were bolder departures. All of them forced the church to say more clearly what it believed, and much of that work was done in Asia Minor.
I am a tour guide, not a theologian, so my descriptions are deliberately simple. Still, the geography is something every Christian visitor of Turkey can enjoy knowing. All seven ecumenical councils met in what is Turkey today, and most of them were called to answer one of the movements on this list. The list runs from the second century to the ninth, so the last two belong to Byzantine times.
Not every heresy here was born in Anatolia, and I want to be honest about that. Montanism and Paulicianism grew from Anatolian soil, Marcion was a son of Sinope, and Iconoclasm found some of its first champions among Anatolian bishops. Arianism began in Alexandria, Nestorianism in Antioch and Constantinople, and Monophysitism in Constantinople and Alexandria, but all three were fought out at Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon.
By the way, the story of heresy in this land starts in the Bible itself. In the Book of Revelation, the churches of Ephesus and Pergamum are warned about a group called the Nicolaitans (Revelation 2:6 and 2:15). I wrote about them in my article on the Nicolaitans and Nicolaitanism. Let’s have a look at the seven bigger movements that came after them.
1. Marcionism and Marcion of Sinope
Marcion was born at end of the first century in Sinope, today’s Sinop, a port city on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. Ancient writers say he was the son of a bishop and a wealthy ship owner. Around 140 AD he moved to Rome, joined the church there and gave it a large gift of 200,000 sesterces.
His central idea was a radical one. Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament, the creator and lawgiver, was a diffrent and lower being than the loving Father revealed by Jesus. So he rejected the Old Testament completely. His Bible had only eleven books: a shorter version of the Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Apostle Paul.
The church of Rome excommunicated him around 144 AD and gave his money back. Marcion then founded his own church, which spread across the Roman world and also lasted for centuries too. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all wrote against him. Tertullian alone needed five books, Against Marcion, written around 208 AD.
There is also a famous meeting with a saint from our region. Irenaeus tells that Marcion once met Saint Polycarp of Smyrna and asked him, “Do you know me?” Polycarp answered, “I do know you, the first-born of Satan.” Polycarp was the bishop of today’s İzmir, and in his youth he had known Saint John.
Marcion’s biggest legacy is the Bible itself. To answer him, the church said clearly that the Old and New Testaments speak of the same God, and it began to define which books belong in the New Testament. Sinop today is a beautiful little harbor town, there is nothing left of him there. Still, perhaps the most influential Christian thinker of the second century outside the mainstream church was born there.
2. Montanism in Phrygia
In the middle of the second century (ancient writers give dates from about 156 to 172 AD), a recent convert named Montanus began to prophesy in a village called Ardabau, on the border of Mysia and Phrygia. He said the Holy Spirit spoke through him. Two prophetesses, Priscilla (not the friend of Apostle Paul) and Maximilla, joined him. Their followers called the movement the New Prophecy.
They taught a strict Christianity: more fasting, no second marriage after a husband or wife died, and a strong feeling that the end of the world was near. Montanus named two small towns in Phrygia, Pepuza and Tymion, as place where the heavenly Jerusalem would come down. Women held a leading role, and later Montanists even accepted women as presbyters and bishops.
The bishops of Asia Minor were alarmed from the ecstatic prophecies and the claim of a new revelation. Their churches met again and again to examine the prophecies, and they excommunicated the followers of the movement. Around 177 AD, Apolinarius, the bishop of Hierapolis, led a synod that condemned the New Prophecy. Yes, this is the same Hierapolis we visit above the white terraces of Pamukkale.
Apollonius is another name you meet when you read about the early church heresies. He was a church writer, probably from Asia Minor, and about forty years after Montanus began to prophesy he wrote a whole book against the New Prophecy. The book is lost, but parts of it survive in later church writings.
Apollonius was not gentle. He wrote that Montanus made laws for fasting, appointed collectors of money and paid salaries to his preachers. He also wrote that the two prophetesses left their husbands. His attack hit hard enough that Tertullian later added a whole book against him.
Today he is often called Apollonius of Ephesus, because one later text, the Praedestinatus, calls him a bishop of the church of Ephesus. This is doubtful, since no earlier writer says so. Please don’t mix him up with Apolinarius of Hierapolis, their names are very close.
In North Africa, the great Latin writer Tertullian was drawn to the New Prophecy around 207 AD, although most scholars today think he never really left the mainstream church. The movement survived in Phrygia for almost four hundred years. In 550, on Emperor Justinian’s orders, John of Ephesus went to Pepuza and destroyed the Montanist shrine where its founders were laying in their tombs.
For centuries nobody knew where Pepuza was. Since 2001, Peter Lampe of the University of Heidelberg and William Tabbernee have explored the area, and they identified Pepuza near the village of Karayakuplu in the Karahallı district of Uşak. A rock-cut Monastery from Byzantine times belonged to the town. It is one of the least known Christian sites of Turkey.
3. Arianism and the Council of Nicaea
Arianism was not born in Asia Minor. Around 318 AD, Arius, a priest in Alexandria in Egypt, began to teach that the Son of God was not eternal. In his view the Father brought the Son into being before everything else, so Christ was the highest of all creatures, but not God in the same sense as the Father. The council of 325 condemned those who said, “There was when he was not.”
However, Asia Minor quickly became the main battlefield. Arius found his strongest supporter in Eusebius, the bishop of Nicomedia, today’s İzmit, where the imperial court lived. In 325 AD Emperor Constantine called the bishops to Nicaea, today’s İznik. Council condemned Arius and wrote the first Nicene Creed. It did not meet in the Hagia Sophia of İznik, but in a great hall of the imperial palace.
The council did not end the fight. Eusebius of Nicomedia came back into favor, and in 337 he baptized Constantine on his deathbed. Two later emperors, Constantius II and Valens, supported the Arian side, and Nicene bishops were sent into exile again and again. Eusebius also ordained Ulfilas, the missionary who carried the Arian faith to the Goths.
The answer came from Cappadocia. Basil the Great of Caesarea (Kayseri), his brother Gregory of Nyssa and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, known together as the Cappadocian Fathers, shaped the words the church still uses for the Trinity. The First Council of Constantinople in 381, more than fifty years after Nicaea, finally settled the question for the empire.
4. Nestorianism and the Council of Ephesus
Nestorius was born around 386 in Germanicia, today’s Kahramanmaraş in southern Turkey, and trained in Antioch, today’s Antakya. In 428 he became the archbishop of Constantinople. He objected to calling Virgin Mary Theotokos, the God-bearer, and preferred Christotokos, the Christ-bearer, because he wanted to keep the divine and the human natures of Christ clearly apart.
Cyril of Alexandria attacked him strongly, and Emperor Theodosius II called a council to Ephesus in 431. Cyril opened it on 22 June, before John of Antioch and the eastern bishops arrived, and the council deposed Nestorius. When the eastern bishops came, they held their own council and deposed Cyril. I am telling the whole dramatic story in my article on the Council of Ephesus of 431.
In the end, Cyril’s side won and Mary was confirmed as Theotokos. In 435 Nestorius was exiled to Upper Egypt, where he died around 451. Today some scholars argue that his own ideas were closer to the later teaching of Chalcedon than his enemies said. You can read about his great opponent in my article on Cyril of Alexandria.
The Church of the East, whose home was in the Persian Empire, never accepted his condemnation. It was long called the “Nestorian Church,” but the church itself rejects that name, and scholars have called it “a lamentable misnomer.” Its heirs, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, still exist. In 1994 the Assyrian Church and the Catholic Church signed a common declaration about Christ.
The council met in the Church of Mary, nearby the harbor end of Ephesus Ancient City, a short walk from the Lower Gate. Most groups enter from the Upper Gate and walk down through the city, so it is worth keeping some time for this church in the end of the visit. Here the bishops declared Mary the Mother of God.
5. Monophysitism and the Council of Chalcedon
This debate went the opposite way. Eutyches, an elderly archimandrite, the head of a monastery in Constantinople, taught that after the incarnation Christ had only one nature, his humanity swallowed up by his divinity. A later image compares it to a drop of vinegar lost in the ocean. In 448 the bishop who brought charges against him was Eusebius of Dorylaeum, an ancient city nearby today’s Eskişehir.
A council at Ephesus in 449, led by Dioscorus of Alexandria, cleared Eutyches and deposed Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople. Pope Leo I called it the “Robber Council.” Two years later, in 451, the bishops met at Chalcedon, today’s Kadıköy on the Asian shore of Istanbul. The council defined Christ as one person in two natures, divine and human, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”
Here we must be fair. Several ancient churches did not accept Chalcedon: the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara (Indian) Orthodox churches, known today as the Oriental Orthodox family. Others called them “Monophysites,” but they reject that label and they condemn Eutyches too. They call themselves Miaphysite, after Cyril of Alexandria’s formula, “one incarnate nature of God the Word.”
For them, Christ is fully God and fully man in one united nature, without mixture and without change. Modern dialogue has shown that the gap was widened by language and politics as much as by faith. In 1984, for example, the Syriac Orthodox patriarch and Pope John Paul II declared together that the old divisions do not touch the substance of their faith.
The Syriac Orthodox Church still has its spiritual heartland in Turkey, in the Tur Abdin hills of Mardin province. Tur Abdin was mostly Syriac Orthodox until the early twentieth century. Today only a few thousand Christians live there, and a few families have come back from Europe. Mor Gabriel Monastery near Midyat, founded in 397 AD, is one of the oldest Christian monasteries still active in the world.
6. Iconoclasm and the Second Council of Nicaea
Iconoclasm, the “breaking of images,” was a Byzantine movement against the veneration of icons. Among its first champions were Anatolian bishops, such as Constantine of Nakoleia, today’s Seyitgazi in Eskişehir province. According to the traditional account, sometime between 726 and 730 Emperor Leo III removed an image of Christ from the Chalke Gate of the Great Palace in Constantinople, and in 730 he forbade the veneration of icons.
The reasons were mixed: the biblical commandment against graven images, a fear of idolatry and perhaps the shock of a huge volcanic eruption in the Aegean in 726, which many read as God’s anger. In 754 Leo’s son Constantine V gathered 338 bishops in the palace of Hieria, today’s Fenerbahçe on the Asian shore of Istanbul, and they condemned icons.
Icons were removed from churches, and many monks who defended them suffered. In Hagia Irene in Istanbul you can still see a rare work of these years: a large plain cross in apse mosaic, outlined in black on a gold ground. It was put up during Constantine V’s repairs after the earthquake of 740.
The tide turned under Empress Irene. Her first council, in Constantinople in 786, was broken up by soldiers, so in 787 she moved it to Nicaea. The Second Council of Nicaea opened on 24 September 787 in the Hagia Sophia of İznik and restored the veneration of icons. A second wave of iconoclasm followed in the early ninth century.
On 11 March 843, the first Sunday of Lent, Empress Theodora and Patriarch Methodios led a procession that brought the icons back into Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Orthodox churches still celebrate that day every year as the Sunday of Orthodoxy. Every icon you see in an Orthodox church today owes something to the bishops who met in İznik in 787.
7. Paulicianism in Eastern Anatolia
Paulicianism was a movement of the eastern borderlands. Its founder is said to be an Armenian called Constantine, from a Syrian community near Samosata, whose old town now lies under the Atatürk Dam lake in Adıyaman province. Around 660 he took the name Silvanus, after a companion of Apostle Paul, and founded his first congregation at Kibossa. His followers called themselves simply “Good Christians.”
Almost everything we know about them is coming from their enemies. Byzantine writers described them as dualists, believing in a good God and an evil creator, and said they rejected the Old Testament. Some modern scholars think they were closer to an old Armenian form of adoptionism, or even to a conventional reform movement. The truth is hard to know.
Persecuted by Byzantium, they built a small state of their own around 850, with its capital at Tephrike, today’s Divriği in Sivas province, under Arab protection. Their leader Chrysocheir raided deep into Asia Minor, as far as Nicaea, Nicomedia and Ephesus. In Ephesus, the chroniclers say, he stabled his horses in the Basilica of Saint John, the church built over the tomb of Saint John.
Emperor Basil I’s armies broke the Paulician state in the 870s. Chrysocheir was killed in battle and Tephrike fell. Many Paulicians were later moved to Thrace in the Balkans, and the movement may have influenced the later Bogomils and Cathars. In Divriği today, the famous monument is the Great Mosque and Hospital, built in 1228 and 1229 by the Mengujekid dynasty, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.
Early Church Heresies Timeline
Here is the whole story in order of time, with the place in Turkey connected with each heresy:
- About 144 AD, Marcionism: Marcion of Sinope (Sinop) is excommunicated in Rome.
- About 156 to 172 AD, Montanism: the New Prophecy begins on the edge of Phrygia, and Pepuza near Uşak becomes its center.
- 318 to 381 AD, Arianism: condemned at Nicaea (İznik) in 325 and again at Constantinople (Istanbul) in 381.
- 431 AD, Nestorianism: Nestorius is condemned at the Council of Ephesus.
- 448 to 451 AD, Monophysitism: Eutyches is cleared at Ephesus in 449 and condemned at Chalcedon (Kadıköy) in 451.
- About 660 to the 870s, Paulicianism: from Samosata (Adıyaman) to Tephrike (Divriği).
- About 726 to 843, Iconoclasm: icons are banned, restored at Nicaea (İznik) in 787, banned again and finally restored in 843.
Why the Heresies Still Matter
The heresies in the early church were answered by councils and by books, and in the last case by armies. Each one also left a permanent mark on the way the church explains its faith. Without Marcion, the church might not have defined its Bible so early. Without Arius, there would be no Nicene Creed. Without Nestorius, there would be no Theotokos at Ephesus, and without Eutyches, no Chalcedon.
Without the iconoclasts, there would be no Orthodox theology of icons, and the Paulicians help us understand the medieval dualist movements of Europe. Much of this happened on the land I guide in. To understand what the church believes, it helps to know what it rejected, and why. You can read the believers’ side of the earlier centuries in my article on the persecution of early Christians in Asia Minor.
Frequently Asked Questions
What were the main early church heresies?
A list of early Christian heresies usually includes Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism, Arianism, Nestorianism and Monophysitism, and later Iconoclasm and Paulicianism. Most of them are tied to Asia Minor, today’s Turkey, where all seven ecumenical councils met. Gnosticism and Docetism are not covered here because they are not tied so closely to one Anatolian place.
Which early church heresy denied the divinity of Jesus?
Arianism. Arius of Alexandria taught that the Son of God was created by the Father and was not eternal, so Christ was not God in the same full sense as the Father. The First Council of Nicaea condemned this in 325 in today’s İznik, and the Nicene Creed was written against it.
What does heresy mean in the Bible?
The Greek word hairesis means a choice or a school of thought. In Acts it is used for the sects of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and even for the early Christians, “the sect of the Nazarenes” (Acts 24:5). Paul uses it for divisions in the church (1 Corinthians 11:19, Galatians 5:20), and 2 Peter 2:1 warns of “damnable heresies.”
Are the Oriental Orthodox churches Monophysite?
They reject the label. The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara Orthodox churches did not accept the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but they also condemn Eutyches, whose teaching the word “Monophysite” usually means. They call their faith Miaphysite: Christ is fully God and fully man in one united nature, without mixture.
Hire Biblical Tour Guide in Turkey
I’m a nationally licensed Turkish tour guide based in Kuşadası, nearby Ephesus. My day guiding is in Ephesus, İzmir and Pamukkale, so the Church of Mary, the Basilica of Saint John, Polycarp’s Smyrna and the Hierapolis of Apolinarius are all close to home. My license is valid all over Turkey, so for İznik, Cappadocia, Sinop or Tur Abdin I can join you as your personal guide on a longer journey.
You can see my guiding rates and guiding areas, read my guide to Christian Turkey for first-time visitors or write to me through my contact page.
The heresies are an unusual but wonderful way into the Christian history of my country. Following them, we travel not just from the Black Sea to the Aegean, also from Phrygia to the hills of Tur Abdin. I hope we will walk some of these places together. You can always write to me with your questions about the councils and the early church in Turkey. See you soon, Hasan Gülday.
