Christian Heresies in the East
Lecture given at the Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco, Dec. 17th, 2000.

Not long ago, I stood in the pulpit of my church and opened my mouth to begin what everyone expected to be just another sermon. "I have a confession to make," I began, and suddenly everyone was on the edge of their seats. "I am," I continued, "a hhh--heretic."

At this moment, everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. The mostly elderly, mostly republican congregation were, I'm sure, terrified that I was going to say "I'm a HOMOSEXUAL" but, thank god, I was only a heretic, so that was okay!

Although I grieve that the church I serve is not a place that is openly welcoming of gays and lesbians, I am proud of that fact that they would suffer a sworn heretic to address them from the pulpit a couple of times a month.

Heresy, apparently, is no longer the bad word that it once was, especially in Christian circles. And indeed, why should it be? After all, every religious reformer worth his salt has been branded a heretic sometime in his life. Buddha was a heretic, Jesus was a heretic, Martin Luther was a heretic. Heck, the way I see it, I'm just in good company.

The word heresy, after all, doesn't have such a bad definition, if you consult the dictionary. A heretic is simply "one who questions." Since you are members of the Cultural Integration Fellowship, I would assume that most of you have a critical approach to religion, question things for yourselves, and therefore, perhaps you, too, count yourselves heretics, after a fashion.

For the past two years I have devoted myself to researching and preaching on heresy in the Christian tradition, from the very beginnings of the Christian church to the time of the reformation. In my study I have found not underdogs and losers in the game of religious politics, but instead heroes and saints as yet unsung by the church. Since most of the disputes that caused the heretics of various stripes to be cast out are not only still with us, but widely held by people in the pews as well as the seminaries, it is my hope that we can begin to "welcome home the lost sheep," and to open ourselves to hear, heal, and learn from these fathers and mothers of faith.

This morning I would like to bring you the "Tale of Two Heresies," specifically, the Jewish Christians and the Nestorians. I focus on these two groups not because their heresies are in any way related--they are not--but because these two groups alone made significant missionary efforts in the East, and left a lasting impression on the cultures they touched, long after their numbers and influence had diminished. In their stories, I hope you will find some items of interest, and perhaps even find your own commitment to critical religion encouraged and vivified.

I first met the acquaintance of the Jewish Christians a couple of years ago when I was working on my doctoral dissertation at CIIS. I was researching early Christian communion practices, and was shocked by what I learned about the earliest of the early churches, the great church at Jerusalem. What I discovered threw me in to a spiritual crisis that is still reverberating in my spiritual life. I think one or two of the facts I uncovered may surprise you as well.

If you've ever read the canonical Gospels, it is clear that Jesus' ministry was primarily to the Jewish people, and so, of course, most of his followers were Jews. After Jesus left them they didn't start any new religions. They just kept being Jews. The only thing was, they believed that a new prophet had come to complete and fulfill the Law of Moses. This church was headed over by none other than Jesus' flesh and blood brother, James, and included several other members of Jesus' family. The teachings of these earliest of early Christians are remarkable in light of what we have come to think of as Christianity.

First of all, forget the virgin birth. These people were Jesus' own family, and they knew nothing of this story. Instead, they taught that the Jesus was an ordinary carpenter until the Christ spirit descended upon him at his baptism, where he was adopted as God's son.

Another surprising revelation is that the Jewish Christians did not believe that Jesus died for anybody's sins. Instead, they taught that he was a prophet the equal or even superior to Moses, who came to wrap up Moses' unfinished business. According to some later writings from this community, they taught that God was a compassionate God who doesn't want any creature to suffer, and hated the practice of animal sacrifice. When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, God wanted all sacrifices to end. But Moses pleaded with God, saying, "Hey, this is the only way these people know how to worship. Let's compromise: let them sacrifice, but only to you." God thought this was an acceptable compromise, and in the fullness of time sent the second Moses, Jesus, to complete the deal, to end temple sacrifices altogether. He certainly did not come to be one himself, as God finds the sacrifice of any being abhorrent. For the Jewish Christians, Jesus' death was the inevitable result when someone rocks the boat--and Jesus rocked it big time.
Later Jewish Christians even became vegetarians because of their aversion to killing, another way they honored their departed rabbi.

The first real threat to the Jerusalem church came from a pharisaical purist named Saul of Tarsus, who persecuted the Jewish Christians, as he felt they were--surprise--heretics! But later, as Saul himself reports, he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus, hit his head and had a psychedelic vision which he took to be a revelation of the Christ. He became a zealous convert to the new Jewish sect, and appointed himself to be the missionary to the gentiles.

Unfortunately, Paul, as he was called after his conversion, was a creative theologian, and more of a leader than he was a follower of Jesus the Rabbi, and he invented an elaborate theology based on Jewish and Greek mysticism as much as on the stories of Jesus. He started preaching his new gospel to Jews in the Diaspora and to gentiles in those lands, where he met with great success.

The Jerusalem Church was horrified. Who was this Paul guy, and why was he teaching all these kooky things about their rabbi? The nerve of this guy!

Paul was talking about Jesus' pre-existence before his birth, about the atoning nature of his death, and that the Jewish Law was optional, or at worst, void.

Paul kept trying to raise money to send to the Jerusalem church to get them on his good side, and lend his ministry some legitimacy, but this mostly backfired. It finally came to a head in the year 49 CE, when Jesus' brother James conceded to Paul one point: gentile followers of Jesus would not have to be circumcised, but must at least hold to certain aspects of the Law, most of which were forgotten about.

This was a momentous decision, and in retrospect, a tragic one. For from then on, Paul began to wax and the Jewish Christians began to wane.

The felling blow came in the year 70, when the Romans sacked Jerusalem, and the remnants of the Jewish Christians relocated to Syria.

Like most spiritual communities, the relocated Jewish Christians suffered from factionalism. All they seemed to do was multiply and divide. One community went on to become the Ebionites, who became more and more legalistic until they finally died out in the fourth century.

But much longer lived were the St. Thomas Christians, who after James' death, followed another of Jesus' brothers, Judas Thomas. Also known as "doubting Thomas," Judas Thomas was the author of the canonical epistle of Jude, and was the only one of Jesus' brothers who was also an apostle.

But wait, there's more! Not only was Thomas Jesus' brother, but the writings of the Jewish Christians make it very clear that he was Jesus' TWIN brother! Of course that had to be covered up by the Pauline churches, as one could not have a virgin birth if Jesus was born as a twin--unless of course, Thomas was divine, too!

Like other Jewish Christians, the Thomas school of Christianity attached no importance to Jesus' death, nor entertained any mythology regarding his miraculous birth. Instead, they focused directly on his teaching, believing that embedded in his koan-like proverbs were the secret of eternal life. Indeed, the Gospel of Thomas starts off by saying that whoever finds the secret to the sayings contained within would never die.

For these Christians, Jesus is simply a teacher who had achieved unitive consciousness, and was keenly aware of his union with divinity. Through his teachings he tried to awaken his listeners from their spiritual slumbers and make them likewise aware of their unity with all things. According to them, Jesus did not teach anything about some coming kingdom or imminent apocalypse. Instead, when his disciples asked him when the kingdom would arrive with power, he answered them by saying, "The Kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth, and human beings simply do not see it." He also told them, "Do not listen to those who tell you the kingdom is in the sky, for then the birds of the air will precede you. Likewise do not pay any attention to those who say it is in the sea, for then the fish will get there before you do. Instead, the kingdom is inside you AND it is outside you."

Now this is a great example of Jesus' humor, as no one that I know of ever said that the kingdom of God was in the ocean, but it also reveals his deeply mystical approach to religion. The kingdom is in all of us, and is all around us. We are surrounded by, filled with, bathed in God. Oneness is the primary theme in the Gospel of Thomas, and much like the Buddha, Jesus did not seem to think that it was something that could be taught, but only experienced by the disciple directly. According to Thomas, the goal for the disciple is to also be Jesus' twin; in other words to gain the unitive consciousness that Jesus enjoyed and thereby also become God's son or daughter.

Now, this sounds so much like Buddhism that we have to ask--how did Jesus know this stuff? Contemporary bible scholars contend that he Gospel of Thomas is more reliable than any of the canonical Gospels, so this is not a question we can easily dismiss. Did he, as some contend, actually visit India as a child? Probably not, but we do know that there were Buddhist missionaries in Palestine in Jesus' time, so it is not unlikely that Jesus picked up a little Buddha with his regular diet of Moses, leading to not only his own enlightenment, but an amazing new school of Buddhist thought in Jewish guise.

Now the St. Thomas Christians eventually died out in Syria, but inexplicably, they thrived in India. Probably it is because the Thomas school taught doctrines very similar to what was already known in India, and was more easily inculturated than Pauline forms of Christianity.

The Thomas Christians in India, in fact, believe that Thomas himself brought the good news of the kingdom to their land.

The tale is told that Gundaphorus, king of some province or other of India, wrote to Jesus and asked him to recommend an architect to build his palace.

Now, I wasn't aware--and maybe you weren't either--that Jesus of Nazareth was considered such an expert in exotic architecture that distant kings contacted him for referrals. But that is the tradition, anyway. So Jesus tells his brother to make the journey.

Now this story is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The Mar Thoma Catholic Church in India traces its beginnings all the way back to the very first century, and it is their contention that it was indeed St. Thomas who first brought them the Gospel. Unfortunately not much is known about the early period of this church, since in the twelfth century the Portuguese made the first attempts to colonize India, and coerced the Mar Thoma church into compliance with Roman Catholic belief and practice, which had previously been completely alien to them. All of their ancient prayer books, sacramentaries, and theological writings were burned by the Portuguese, and today we are left with precious little evidence regarding the origins, theologies, and liturgies of the Mar Thoma Christians; a great loss not only for Christianity, but for historians of religion in general.

The Mar Thoma Christians still proudly proclaim Thomas as their founder, even though their distinctive theology has been denied them.

What a story, huh? The Jewish Christians in general, and the Thomas Christians in particular are an important reminder that it is the victor who gets to write history, and sometimes the real pearls get lost among the sands of time.

The second community I'd like to speak to you about comes later in time and further East in space. The Pauline Christians have earned the favor of the emperor by this time, and are expending a great deal of energy rooting out anyone who disagrees with them. The bishop of Constantinople was Nestorius, an opinionated, tactless, rude, belligerent and manipulative guy who REALLY liked to get his way.

Now, as you might expect, Nestorius' pushiness didn't make him any friends. He didn't care much about this when he was in the height of his power in the middle of the fifth century, as he was a merciless heresy hunter. He defeated the Arians, drove out the Novationists, and decimated the Quartodecimans. But Nestorius did not see that his zeal would come back to bite him in the behind. For the heresy hunter would soon become the hunted.

It was easy to identify the gross heretics, you know, those who said Jesus wasn't human, or that he didn't even have a real body or that he had a TWIN, you know stuff like that. But once those guys have been killed or exiled, the heresy hunters had to look closer and closer to home to find heretics. The teachings defined as heretical became pickier and pickier, and it became harder to actually figure out where they deviated from orthodox teaching. In fact, it almost takes a doctorate in theology to understand in what way Nestorius' teachings could actually be conceived of as heresy. Since we don't all have time or the inclination to do a doctoral program just to understand a subtle theological distinction that none of us care about anyway, I will attempt to describe Nestorius' "heresy" in a simplistic and grossly inaccurate way in a sentence or two, for your convenience.

Nestorius, like so many heretics before him, was trying to describe exactly how it is that God was in Jesus. According to Nestorius, Jesus shares God's nature because he is God's Son, in the same way as I share human nature because my parents are human. But my parents and I are distinct beings. Nestorius kind of came to the same conclusion about God. God and Christ share the same nature, but they are distinct beings. Nestorius described their union as being similar to the union of a husband and wife. Two distinct beings, made one through a legal covenant.

So even though Nestorius said Jesus and God shared one nature, and were distinct persons, which none of the his opponents disagreed with, the language he used implied that these two persons were two distinct beings, which his opponents could not tolerate, since, as the creed says, Jesus is "of one being with the father."

Confused yet? Just think of how theologically sophisticated we are today as compared to folks in the fifth century. Few people were educated at all, and if this distinction is difficult for us to fathom today, imagine trying to explain it to the average person in the street in Nestorius' time.

But it may be that none of this would have come down on Nestorius' head if he had not made so many enemies over "the Mary issue." Ever since the third century, it had been common to refer to Mary as "Theotokos," or the Mother of God. Nestorius thought that this was a logical impossibility, for how could a fifteen year old girl give birth to a being older than she is? Nestorius also hated the statues of Mary circulating around, because it smacked to him of idolatry. Especially since it seemed that the statues were virtually identical to the statues of Isis and her baby son Horus, which had been popular for centuries. Folks just baptized their idols in Christian garb and kept right on worshipping them, and Nestorius wasn't going to stand for it.

Well our poor bishop of Constantinople lost that round, and he lost the next one as well, since he was condemned in the year 431. Nestorius was exiled to Egypt where he died in poverty and obscurity twenty years later in 451.

But that is not the end of the story, of course, or we wouldn't be talking about poor disagreeable Nestorius today. Being the bishop of Constantinople is a BIG deal, kind of like being the pope of the East. Nestorius had a LOT of bishops that agreed with his ideas, and when the council that condemned both them and Nestorius was over, though some of the bishops that sided with him recanted and were received back into "God's good graces," the bishops in Persia continued to stay true to Nestorius' formulation.

Now the Christians in Persia lived as a minority religion in a country that was predominately Zoroastrian. Zoroastrianism is often thought of as a dualistic religion that teaches that there are two gods in the universe, a god of goodness and light, and a god of evil and darkness, and that these two gods are in a constant battle over the fate of the earth. The wise men who came to visit the baby Jesus were thought to be Zoroastrian priests, even by the Zoroastrians themselves. For when the Persians conquered the Holy Land in the early seventh century, they destroyed every church and shrine in Israel except for one: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where, not coincidentally, a mosaic of the three wise Zoroastrian sages was set over the door.

The effect that being Christians in a non-Christian country had on the Nestorians is that they were allowed to inculturate their religion to a far greater degree, now that the churches of the Roman empire were minding their own business. They really got the hang of translating their Christian faith into the idioms and traditions of the lands they happened to be living in, and this was a great boon to them in their strenuous missionary efforts in the seventh through ninth century.

Since the West was Orthodox, the Nestorians turned towards the East. A missionary named Alopen was sent to evangelize the Chinese. Amazingly, Alopen was welcomed into the court of the Chinese emperor, who listened to Alopen with great interest. After all, to the Chinese, the West is the spiritual direction, so any spiritual teachers to come from the West, such as Buddha, and now Alopen, were given a good hearing, at least under the emperor Cheng-kuan. The emperor was so impressed with what came to be called "the shining teaching," that he ordered the Christian Sutras, or scriptures, to be translated immediately into Chinese.

And boy, did Alopen translate. Quickly getting the hang of things in the East, the scriptures and other writings that Alopen translated were replete with Taoist and Buddhist imagery. In Alopen's works, Jesus doesn't come to die for our sins, but to bring the great raft to rescue all beings from the suffering sin causes. Alopen had a genius for inculturating the gospel, for making the core teachings of Christianity understandable in the symbols and imagery of the country he was in. So successful was Alopen that soon there were Nestorian churches and monasteries in every province of China.

Unfortunately, not all of the emperors were so magnanimous or tolerant, and in the ninth century, all "foreign" religions, including Buddhism and Christianity, were outlawed. The churches were closed, and over 3000 Nestorian monks were returned to regular life. Most of the monuments were destroyed, but some Nestorian crosses and one very significant artifact, the Nestorian Stone, still survive, along with many of Alopen's Sutras.

The Mongols to the North were among the various Chinese peoples evangelized, and history tells us that even Genghis Khan's mother was a Nestorian Christian, along with many of his officers and soldiers. Christianity survived among the Mongols much longer than in the rest of China, and even as late as the thirteenth century two Mongolian priests set out from the cathedral in Peking with the blessing of Kublai Kahn. They visited Constantinople and Rome and even celebrated communion in the court of Edward the first in England.

Thus it was that this tiny pocket of heretics from Persia became one of the greatest missionary forces the world has ever known, and introduced to all of the East a form of Christianity that fit their culture, made sense to them, and continues to speak even today to those willing to do the research. Though most of the Nestorians were forcibly converted to Islam, there are still Nestorian churches in the East, some of whom have, ironically, kissed and made up with the Orthodox, realizing after fifteen hundred years, that their squabbles were pretty petty to begin with.

History is full of such ironies, but I have yet to tell you about the tastiest irony of all, and a most appropriate one at this holiday time when the image of the Madonna and child can be found even on a postage stamp. It seems that before the Nestorians arrived in China, a minor deity of compassion was widely worshipped. His name was Quan-Yin, and the missionaries would have encountered countless shrines to this deity on their journeys. But human nature is hard to shake, you know, and even though Nestorius hated the little statues of the Virgin Mary, his own monks still clung to them, and carried them with them into China.

Isn't it odd, then, that after only a couple hundred years, Quan-Yin, deity of compassion came to be known as a female deity, rather than male, and amazingly, her later statues showed her cradling a child in her lap, almost identical to Isis and Horus, or Mary and Jesus. Quan-Yin is still a popular figure even today. In fact, rarely a week goes by that I don't see a statue of her right here in the Bay Area.

Funny how these things come around, don't they? So what is it we can learn from the Nestorians? First, perhaps, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If Nestorius had followed that simple scriptural admonition, his end may have been much different indeed. But a much more positive lesson comes to us from his followers, who understood that the good news of the Enlightened One can be translated into any language, any culture. Unlike Western missionaries, who reviled the local cultures and insisted that converts become experts in Western philosophy and theology, the Nestorians showed us the kind of power that good news can have when it is allowed to be spoken in people's native tongues.

Now, although these two communities have largely been lost to obscurity, a little digging can be richly rewarding, for it reveals to us that the form of Christianity which has come down to us is not the only game in town. It is not the oldest form of Christian belief, nor the most scholastically reliable. What the Jewish Christians and the Nestorians reveal to us is that the message of Jesus is one of uniting, not dividing. It is an inclusive message that has the power to reach across cultural divides and enlighten all peoples. It is a universal message of hope that can stand strong alongside the teachings of Buddha or Ramanuja, and indeed, we find that these supposedly disparate teachings are in amazing harmony. This is the gift that the Jewish Christians and the Nestorians have for us this Christmastide: The unity of all things is not the exclusive property of any sectarian teaching, but is the spiritual heritage of all people of faith, now and forever.

I would like to close with a reading from "The Sutra which Aims at Mysterious Rest and Joy," an anonymous Chinese Nestorian document from the 8th century. It presents a parable, supposedly told by Jesus, which I had never heard before. If you would like to close your eyes and get comfortable, imagine yourself on the shore of the sea of Galilee. Strangely, Simon Peter and Jesus are dressed as Chinese Buddhist monks, but don't let that deter you. Jesus turns to Peter and, according to this Sutra, he says:

"The teachings can be compared to the Precious Mountain. Its jade forests and pearl fruits, translucent and shining, sweet tasting and beautifully perfumed, can cure a person of hunger and thirst and heal all ills.

"There was a sick man who heard of this mountain. Day and night he longed to reach this mountain and the thought never left him.

"But, sadly, the way was far and the mountain very high and steep. The sick man was also a hunchback and was too feeble to climb such a mountain. In vain did he try to fulfil his dream. He simply could not undertake it. But he had a near relation who was both wise and sincere. This man set up scaling ladders and had steps cut into the mountain and with others he pushed and pulled the sick man up the mountain until he reached the summit. Immediately, the sick man's illness was cured.

"Know this, Simon Peter, that the people coming to this mountain of true teachings were for a long time confused and in misery because they were burdened by their worldly passions. They had heard of the truth and knew it could lead them to the Way of Rest and Joy-to the Mountain of Rest and Joy. They tried to reach the mountain and to scale it, but in vain, for love and faith had almost died within them.

"Thereupon, the Almighty Lord made himself known. He came as the near relative of the people and taught them with such skill and sincerity that they understood that he was both the scaling ladder and the stone steps by means of which they could understand the True Way and rid themselves of their burdens of confusion for ever."