I went to the 'heretic' kingdom Nicaea tried to erase

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]If I asked you to picture heretics in antiquity, you probably picture a small group of people kind of ravel rousers in a church somewhere. You probably don't picture this. This is an Aryan church.

[00:00:14]Aryan named after the church father Aras who led a so-called heresy that had a slightly different formulation of the trinity. You will find this amazing building in Ravena in Italy and I had the chance to go there and to check it out. And there's also this a famous Aryan baptistry and it shows a younger Jesus, a slightly different iconographical Jesus that reflects the beliefs of the Aryan movement. And not far away, you will find the Basilica desantare no, forgive my Italian. And here you can see more of these Aryan mosaics, except here they've kind of been adapted in places to fit with some more Orthodox iconography in them. In this video, I want to talk to you about what orthodoxy and heresy actually are.

[00:00:58]I want to show you one of the most classic texts in biblical studies that almost everybody should read, but not everybody has. And I want to show you why heresy is actually always constructed backwards. And it actually always consists of erasing serious serious movements of Christians. So much so that in some regions, the dominant forms of Christianity would later be dismissed as heresy, just like here in Revena. We're going to get to all of that and more in this video. But before we start, my name is CJ Kornweight. I talk about where Christianity came from and how it works. And if you haven't subscribe to this channel yet, you know what to do. Take a second and consider subscribing.

[00:01:36]Here we go.

[00:01:42]So, I was in Italy. I was staying in this little town called Fori. And I had a day to kill. And I knew that not far away was Ravena. And at Ravena, I knew there was something I desperately wanted to see. So, I got up early and I caught the train on my way to Revena. And while I was going, I was thinking about probably one of the most important books in biblical studies that I don't think most people have read. If you were to ask, what is the most important book in biblical studies? One that would probably make the short list is this book by Walter Bower. Bower's book was first published in German in 1934, but it was translated as Orthodoxy and Heresy in early Christianity decades later and published in English in 1971 for the first time. Basically, Bower realized that we have a story that we tell that was given to us by orthodoxy and the story always goes something like this. Basically, there was a true faith.

[00:02:35]There was this like true movement that kind of came down from Jesus and the apostles and it was guarded and preserved in a kind of linear fashion and somewhere along the line heretics came along and like maybe they sprung up from inside or from outside but like they tried to deviate and the protoodox church kept stamping out those heresies and preserving the truth. This is the story of orthodoxy and heresy. But this is actually completely artificial. This is actually nonsense. And when we actually look at how history is constructed, what we need to understand is that orthodoxy is almost always constructed in reverse. Orthodoxy is always constructed after the fact. And Bower's book went even further than this. Bower actually showed how there were completely different forms of Christianity in different places. So in a place called Adessa in Alexandria, he showed how there was such various forms of Christianity that were just later completely stamped out and erased by the Orthodox movement as they consolidated power and consolidated theology and yes, consolidated scriptures as well. All of this was a process. Heretics weren't just people who deviated from like this one line of truth that had been passed down. Heretics were serious followers of Jesus. Heretics were serious Christians who were often later seen to have the wrong doctrines and completely erased.

[00:03:52]And this is a powerful force. It's a powerful pattern when you see it and you look at the early Christian movement.

[00:03:58]And once you see it, you start to see it everywhere.

[00:04:05]In the past year, I've done more than a couple videos on the famous figure of Marcian of Cenote, who is often described by later church leaders as a heretic. And it's fascinating when you look at who Marcen actually is and what he actually did. His role in the foundation of Christianity as we know it is actually completely um completely vital. Like we wouldn't recognize Christianity if Marcian hadn't been in it. He was the first person to create a New Testament that consisted of a gospel and Paul's letters. Yet what happened in the case of Marcian is Marcian was later considered a heretic and retroactively basically erased from church history.

[00:04:45]And what happens when the church decides to do this is it's really good at creating stories and erasing people and erasing movements and trying to pretend that those movements were never actually Christian to begin with. There's a famous story of an encounter between Marcian and the church father Polycarp.

[00:05:01]And Marcian says basically to Polycarp, do you know who I am? And Polycarp says, "Yes, I know who you are, you firstborn son of Satan." Now, this is almost certainly not a historical moment. But you have to understand what is happening here. Christianity explodes outwards. It takes all sorts of different forms. It's varied. It's it's so different all over the place. Even if you look at like Paul's letters, look at the Corinthians and you have different teachers teaching different things. Like this is pretty undisputable. Even in Paul's letters in our New Testament, any one like place, anyone at Clacia could have multiple teachers vying for control with completely different doctrines about really important things like circumcision or eating food sacrificed to idols. This is the diversity in Christianity. And you don't get to a story about one like linear movement that just had a couple heretics challenging it very easily. In fact, the only way you can do that is by erasing people. And that's exactly what happened with Marcian. When you take Bower's thesis seriously, you see that he's right. You see that heretics are almost always created after the fact. Heretics are retroactively projected onto history and stories are told to disqualify and demonize them. And why is this? Well, here's one really big thing. Marcianite Christianity was huge. One of the case studies that Walter Bower talks about in that book that I mentioned at the beginning, Heresy and Orthodoxy, is the story of Christianity in Adessa. And some of the scholarship has changed on this since Bower wrote. But one of the things that still kind of remains clear is that Marcenite Christianity was big in Adessa. Marcianite Christianity was actually arguably a lot more popular than Orthodox Christianity. So what do you do when you want to challenge a powerful rival movement? You make up stories about it and its founder. And that's exactly what happened. Heresy always works in reverse. The story of Marcian shows us that individual people later considered heretics could be retroactively erased. But it's actually much much bigger than this. Because the thing that we learn from Bower as well is that entire kingdoms and entire movements and entire peoples later considered to be heretics could have either their own stories or else their own individual flavors of Christianity retroactively erased and pushed under that label of heresy. And as I stood here at this cathedral in Ravena, I was reminded that Aryanism wasn't just a couple of outliers following this one outlier of Aras. This was an Aryan kingdom.

[00:07:35]King Theodoric the Great was an Ostrogoth king who ruled in this northern section of Italy, the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy between 493 and 526. And King Theodoric was a Christian, but he was a specific type of Christian. He was an Aryan Christian. So maybe you know the Council of Nika.

[00:07:53]Maybe you have said the Nyen creed before. The council of Nika met in 325.

[00:07:58]And one of the main oppositions that kind of works its way actually into the Nyian creed if you've ever said it is the objection against Aryanism. The objection against this teacher named Aras who taught that Jesus was actually the firstborn of creation, the first created being. And this is very specifically what the Nyine creed is responding to. If you know the Nying creed where it says God from God, light from light and importantly begotten and not made is the important line that gets worked into the Nying creed. This is responding to Aryan Christianity. And King Theodoric was an Aryan Christian, not of some weird little breakoff sect, but of a mighty people that stretched across northern Europe. And remember, these Goths are the same Christian Goths, Aryan Christian Goths, who conquered Rome in the fifth century. In 410, the Visigoths under All Alaric sacked Rome, the first time the city had fallen in 800 years. Augustine wrote, "City of God," trying to make sense of it. In 455, the Vandals under Geyser sacked Rome again. 2 weeks of systematic looting, far worse than the first time.

[00:09:04]In 476, a Germanic king named Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor.

[00:09:11]All of them were Aryan Christians. The people who broke the Western Roman Empire weren't pagan barbarians at the gates. They were a different kind of Christian than the one that won the theological war. For about half a century after the fall of Rome, most of Western Europe was ruled by Aryan kings.

[00:09:30]So the next time you hear a triumphalistic story about the Council of Nika stamping out heretics, remember that this is actually empires colliding and kingdoms colliding with different beliefs. And here when we walk through Revena all these centuries later, we can see the remains of an entire kingdom that was founded on this theology and an incredible visual iconography that goes with it. It's not just a couple breakoff bishops.

[00:09:56]So let's come back to Bower's thesis.

[00:09:58]Orthodoxy isn't just one kind of stream of tradition flowing from, you know, the apostles or whoever to us. And if people try to tell you that, they are fundamentally working with a false understanding of history. It's just not the way it works. It doesn't make any sense. That's a theological reading of history. It can work backwards. If you try to do this and try to like piece together your, you know, peacemal evidence backwards, it doesn't work when you actually read history like a historian. Orthodoxy is about who gets power to tell this story. And if you want to see this in action in Ravena, it's just a short walk away in San Vitali. For most of Theodoric's reign, Aryan and Orthodox Christians actually shared this city. Theodoric ruled from Ravena as an Aryan king. But he kept the Orthodox church running and kept the Orthodox bishop in his office. He even let an Orthodox bishop named Ecclesius start building a new church, San Vitali, in the middle of this Aryan capital. For three decades, the two communities lived side by side, each with their own cathedral. And you can see here the Neonian Baptistry built decades before the Aryan Baptistry. And the two baptistries existed side by side, testaments to two different theologies coexisting. But eventually the Aryan mosaics were covered up. And Justinian's portrait was stuck here on the walls of San Vitali as a testament to the power of orthodoxy. You need to read against the grain. We need to do this in biblical studies. And when you look at movements that were dismissed as heretics, you have to realize that for all of these people, they had their own internal logic. For all of these people, their beliefs made sense for, you know, a lot of different reasons. They weren't just guided by Satan or out to destroy orthodoxy or whatever. But that's the story that got told about them later. It sounds like a Da Vinci Code level conspiracy theory like Dan Brown book.

[00:11:46]It's not quite that extreme. But it is true that there's a power structure at work here. It is true that there was a power struggle for history. And it doesn't just happen in the second century or the 4th century. It happens in the 20th century. When I talk to Christian apologists, a lot of them are doing this exact same thing. They're telling these kind of exact stories about history, about how the winners deserve to win because they were the people who carried on divine truth and the people who lost were the heretics led by Satan or whatever. Orthodoxy and heresy are theological positions. They are not historical positions. And studying Christian origins demands that we take this seriously and don't just accept the story that we've been told.

[00:12:25]Heretics aren't born. They are always created. They are often created long after the fact. And if you don't believe me and you ever do have a chance to go, you should go check out these mosaics in Ravena because they are a 1500year-old monument to a, you know, tiny little French heresy apparently that actually founded a kingdom and would also topple Rome. If you love these discussions, I run an awesome community where we talk about this kind of stuff all the time.

[00:12:49]And we also have Bible scholars drop in and hang out with us. It's a lot of fun.

[00:12:52]And you can watch the interviews I do live for Footnote Famous as well. If that's of interest to you, I will leave a link in the comments down below. Let me know in the comments down below what you think of this video. Always appreciate people taking the time to react. Let me know your thoughts. Have you ever been to Revena? Also a cool uh a cool place. I'd love to know if people have been there, what they thought of it. Thank you again for taking the time to be here and to listen. I'll see you next time.