Did Heresy Creep into the Church?

Protestants, Mormons, Muslims, and secularists may not agree on much, but they do frequently agree that the Catholic Church corrupted the “original teachings” of Jesus . . . even if they can’t agree on what those alleged “original teachings” were.

Anyone making such a claim should be able to show three things: first, what Jesus originally taught; second, when and how the false Catholic teaching was introduced; and third, how that false teaching supplanted the true one. 
 
Broadly speaking, there are two ways of approaching this challenge. One way is by articulating a specific historical claim. Take, for instance, Dan Brown’s popular novel The Da Vinci Code (which sold more than 80 million copies). Although a work of fiction, The Da Vinci Code was widely assumed to be set against the backdrop of real history. The marketers of the book were only too happy to promote this view, printing “read the book and be enlightened” (taken from the Washington Post’s review) on the back of the paperback. In the novel, Sir Leigh Teabing claims that Jesus was originally viewed simply as “a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless,” until the First Council of Nicaea, at Constantine’s urging, voted to declare Jesus Son of God instead. Teabing concludes that Constantine thus “turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable.”
 
The advantage to the specific approach is that there’s a clear theory presented. In this case, Brown is making clear his belief that prior to the reign of the emperor Constantine (306-337), Christians didn’t believe that Jesus was divine. But the flip side is that it’s easy to demonstrate the falsity of such an explicit claim. Besides the biblical evidence (e.g., St. Thomas calling Jesus “My Lord and my God!” in John 20:28, or John describing Jesus as both “the Word” and “God” in John 1:1), there’s an abundance of evidence that Christians before Constantine considered Jesus divine and worshipped him. 
 
The other approach is vague historical hand-waving. Instead of specifically claiming that a particular heretic introduced a heresy, just say that heresy crept in (as if ideas created themselves!). And instead of saying this happened in a particular year, or even a particular century, just say it happened over time. A clear example of this can be found in the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States, in an 1820 letter from then-former president Thomas Jefferson to his predecessor, John Adams. Jefferson held to the belief that God, the human soul, and angels are all made of matter. Explaining his theory to Adams, he said that “to talk of immaterial existences, is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. . . . At what age of the Christian Church this heresy of immaterialism, or masked atheism, crept in, I do not exactly know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it.”
 
The advantage to the vague approach (from the perspective of the person arguing it) is that it’s harder to debunk. Even if you showed him early Christians who believed that God was immaterial, Jefferson could always respond, “I said I do not exactly know when it crept in . . . it must have been before this!” But the only reason it’s hard to debunk is that there’s not really much of a theory there. It fails to articulate the who, what, when, where, why, or how explaining the creep of this creeping heresy. It’s the difference between saying, “Professor Plum killed Mr. Boddy in the drawing room with the revolver” and “Mr. Boddy died.” If it can’t be easily fact-checked, it’s only because it offers so few factual claims. A person can always say, “Christians don’t really believe Jesus’ teachings,” so long as he doesn’t bother to explain which teachings. 
 
We’ll take a closer look at how the Church worshipped, what it believed about baptism, what the structure of the Church looked like, and which books it considered Gospels. In each case, we’ll see that the Catholic teaching was the teaching believed and practiced by the earliest Christians. My goal is not to comprehensively cover every doctrinal question related to the Catholic Church. It’s rather to show something of the pattern I am describing here: Protestants (and others) arguing against the historicity of the Church’s teaching do so with either inaccurate history or no history at all. 
 
But anyone arguing against Catholic teaching, whether relying on specific historical claims or vaguer creeping heresy theorizing, eventually must grapple with two realities: the conservative theological character of the early Church and the short span of time involved.