Resistance to Christianity

A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century

Raoul Vaneigem, Bill Brown

• Publisher: ERIS
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781912475605
• eBook ISBN: 9781912475452
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century reveals the hidden story behind the modern-day edifice of Christianity. Raoul Vaneigem's landmark study provides a compelling account of the falsifications and political agendas that shaped what we now know as the canonical Bible and such pillars of Christian doctrine as the Resurrection and the Holy Trinity. It also traces alternative pathways that have been opened up the many individuals and groups that have departed from the Church's teachings: from the remarkably modern first-century thinker Simon the Magus, to the libertarian mystics of the Middle Ages, to the Jansenists of the seventeenth century. This is, in short, an exceptionally wide-ranging history of the forms of thought and belief that orthodox religion has mischaracterized and suppressed over the course of the centuries.

Resistance to Christianity is far more, however, than a study of religious movements and ideas; indeed, Vaneigem is bracingly unapologetic in his ambition "to examine the resistance that the inclination to natural liberty has, for nearly twenty centuries, opposed to . . . Christian oppression". The story of how men and women have again and again resisted the authoritarian implications of religious orthodoxy is, above all, a crucial strand of the history of human freedom.

Bill Brown's translation makes available in English a major text by one of the preeminent thinkers of our time. A brilliant work of historical scholarship that deserves to be widely read, Resistance to Christianity represents radical thought at its most exciting, incisive, and persuasive.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Introduction
• Author’s Foreword
• 1 A Nation Sacrificed to History
• 2 Diaspora and Anti-Semitism
• 3 The Judean Sects
• 4 The Men of the Community, or the Essenes
• 5 The Baptist Movement of the Samaritan Messiah Dusis/Dositheos
• 6 Simon of Samaria and Gnostic Radicalism
• 7 The Phallic and Symbiotic Cults
• 8 Three Esseno-Christian Christs
• 9 The Messianic Sects of Joshua/Jesus
• 10 Quarrels about Prophets and Apostles
• 11 Marcion and the Hellenization of Christianity
• 12 The Inventors of a Christian Theology
• 13 Marcus and the Hellenization of Jewish Hermeticism
• 14 Carpocrates, Epiphanius, and the Tradition of Simon of Samaria
• 15 The New Prophecy and the Development of Popular Christianity
• 16 Tatian and the Fabrication of the New Testament
• 17 Three Local Christianities
• 18 Novatian, the Apostate Clergy, and the Anti-Montanist Reaction
• 19 Arianism and the Church of Rome
• 20 Donatus and the Circumcellions
• 21 The Spirituals, Also Called Messalians or Euchites
• 22 Monophysites and Dyophysites
• 23 Pelagius and Augustine
• 24 Priscillian of Ávila
• 25 Paulicians and Bogomils
• 26 Christs and Reformers
• 27 The Communalist Prophets
• 28 Philosophy Against the Church
• 29 The Cathars
• 30 The Waldensians and the Adepts of Voluntary Poverty
• 31 The Movement of the Free Spirit
• 32 Beghards and Beguines
• 33 The Millenarians
• 34 The Flagellants
• 35 The Fraticelles
• 36 The Eastern Reformers
• 37 The Men of Intelligence and the Picards of Bohemia
• 38 The Victory of the Reformers and the Birth of the Protestant Churches
• 39 The Dissidents from Lutheranism and Calvinism
• 40 The Alumbrados of Spain
• 41 The Spiritual Libertines
• 42 The Anabaptists
• 43 The Individualist Messiahs
• 44 Ironists and Skeptics
• 45 Levelers, Diggers, and Ranters
• 46 The Jansenists
• 47 Pietists, Visionaries, and Quietists
• 48 The End of the Divine Right
• Afterword to the English Edition
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Authors’ bios