Those Pesky Nicolaitans 1: It Matters

“Papa had permitted my nurse to glue St. Yitrudis’s pages together; the poor lady could not rest easy in our house until it was done. I never did get a look at the heretic. If I held the page up to the light I could just discern the shapes of both saints, blended together into one terrible monster saint.”

Rachel Hartman, Seraphina (2012)

The title of the intended series of posts of which this is the first is taken from a note I made in my bullet journal on the twenty-ninth of April this year.¹ Next to a list of the day’s planned activities and tasks, I wrote: ‘Still trying to figure out those pesky Nicolaitans’. And then I drew a box round it, just to reinforce the point.

 

You can bullet journal using a dotted notebook, but I prefer a squared one. And yes, I’m entirely aware that this doesn’t make a particularly relevant cover picture for the post as a whole, but I challenge you to think of something stock-photo-ish that does.

Indeed, the process of trying to figure out those pesky Nicolaitans has been taking up a frustratingly large proportion of my mental activity in recent weeks and months. The pesky Nicolaitans in question are a group mentioned twice in scripture; both instances are in Revelation, specifically the section of it that consists of letters, dictated by the Lord Jesus himself, to each of seven Christian communities in the Roman province of Asia Minor, that is, modern Turkey. To the church in Ephesus, he says: “Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” To the church in Pergamum, he says: “But I have a few things against you: you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practise sexual immorality. So also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth.”²

Right. So. The Nicolaitans are bad. Like, really bad. Jesus says he hates them; he commends those who do likewise, and he warns those who tolerate them to repent. Sit up and take notice, folks: it really matters that we determinedly reject the works and the teaching of the Nicolaitans. The really obvious question that needs answering off the back of that, though, is, well, what exactly was it that the Nicolaitans did and taught? Scripture says nothing more about them than what’s contained in the quotations above.

When I asked the associate minister of the church I belong to what he thought the doctrine of the Nicolaitans was, he – having smiled in an amused, ‘gosh-what-a-question’ sort of way – responded by checking my assent to the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture. The idea was: since we can trust that God has revealed to us in scripture everything we need to know in order to live lives that glorify him, then we can trust that he has revealed to us in scripture everything we need to know about the Nicolaitans in order to live lives that glorify him. And the implication of that was: if scripture doesn’t give us any explicit details about the works and teaching of the Nicolaitans, that’s because it doesn’t matter that we know any.

You’ll probably have twigged, based on what I’ve already said in this post, that I wasn’t too satisfied with that as a response. Why would scripture even bother to mention them, let alone in such forcefully condemnatory terms, if it isn’t important for us to know about them? For whom are these verses intended, if not us? One is forced to conclude that the members of the relevant churches must have known who the Nicolaitans were when they received their letters, but that that knowledge mysteriously vanished from existence within decades of the book of Revelation beginning to circulate. Evidently, nobody thought it was knowledge worth retaining, even though they had been so vehemently warned against tolerating this jazz; and evidently, the Nicolaitan heresy was a very short-lived one indeed. The problem must have been dealt with so comprehensively right at the birth of the Church that it leaves not even a smudge in the historical record.

I say this because the earliest Christian writings we have extant don’t seem to have any real idea who the Nicolaitans were either. Oh, they talk as if they know who they were, but it’s a right mess, and not very convincing. Here’s a summary:

According to Irenaeus (c. 125-202CE³), in Against Heresies I.26.3, the Nicolaitans were followers of Nicolaus, one of the seven men appointed as deacons in Acts 6:1-5. (It’s true that Nicolaus and Nicolaitans are both derived from the same Greek words – so if a guy called Nicolaus did accrue a few disciples for himself, ‘Nicolaitans’ would have been an appropriate term for them – but Nicolaus is only mentioned that one time, so there are no other clues in scripture that the two might be related.) Irenaeus claims that the Nicolaitans lived lives of unrestrained indulgence. He also conflates their heresy with Balaam’s, as mentioned just beforehand in the letter to Pergamum, in terms of eating food offered to idols and sexual immorality. Elsewhere in the same work (III.11), Irenaeus states that the Nicolaitans’ heresy was the same as that of Cerinthus, who had some strange views about the nature of the Triune God, like that the Father is not the same as the Creator, and the Son is Jesus but not the Christ. In other words, Irenaeus isn’t even consistent with himself about what the Nicolaitans believed.

Tertullian (c. 150-225CE) weighs in on the subject too. Prescription Against Heretics 33 again conflates the Nicolaitan heresy with the teaching of Balaam, and adds that there is now another kind of Nicolaitans who subscribe to something called the Gaian heresy. What that is, is unclear (probably not helped by the fact that almost everybody and his dad was called Gaius in Roman times). In a similar vein, Against Marcion 29 says that the Nicolaitans commit sexual immorality. On Modesty 19 then indulges in even more conflation by stating that the Jezebel mentioned in Revelation’s letter to the church at Thyatira learned her error – again identified as sexual immorality and eating food sacrificed to idols – from the Nicolaitans.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215CE), in Stromata III.4, agrees that the Nicolaitans committed sexual immorality, but tries to dissociate Nicolaus the deacon from this behaviour. Nicolaus, he says, was a fine, upstanding sort of chap, but his followers distorted what he said. This account of the matter is referred to by Eusebius (c. 275-339CE) in Church History (III.29); aside from pointing the reader to Clement, all he does is remark that the sect was short-lived.

According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, other references in Epiphanius (c. 315-403CE), Theodoret (c. 393-458CE), and so forth, are taken straight out of Irenaeus, and so not worth looking at separately.⁴

So what have we got? Well, it strikes me that these guys are making exactly the kinds of claims about the Nicolaitans that they could be expected to make if they had no more information on the matter than we do. If you were trying to squeeze an explanation of what the Nicolaitans did and taught out of scripture, what might you do? Well, you might realise that Nicolaus the deacon had a cognate name, and try to pin the blame on him. Then again, you might not want to do that, because all we actually know about Nicolaus was that he was chosen for the ministry of sorting out the daily distribution for widows, on the grounds that he was a man of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom – so you might infer that his followers must have corrupted his teachings. And as for the substance of what the Nicolaitans taught and did, you might easily decide that, given the lack of further explicit information, it must have been the same as Balaam’s error, as mentioned just beforehand.⁵ That’s an easy fix, right? (And you might as well chuck Jezebel in while you’re at it.) The trouble is that the text simply doesn’t allow for it. Even aside from the fact that there’d be no point in mentioning the thing by two different names, there’s a very clear also between Balaam and the Nicolaitans. You have some who hold the teaching of Balaam, and you also have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans – two separate problems.

 

Balaam, of course, had a talking donkey long before Shrek made them cool.

So we can infer that the church fathers had no more concrete information about the Nicolaitans and their error than we do. (These peripheral mentions of Cerinthus and Gaius are both unique to one author who also affirms the same-as-Balaam’s-error theory, so they’re not worth giving any weight to.) No wonder Eusebius concluded that the sect was short-lived; it must have been, if there was no discernible remnant or record of it left less than a century after it had been busy causing trouble for at least two major churches (assuming that Revelation was written towards the end of the first century CE).

And yet Jesus bothered to say that he hates it. Twice. He didn’t see fit to mention any of the dozens of heresies that the Church would have to actively contend against over the next few centuries: denial of his humanity, denial of his divinity, and everything in between.⁶ He didn’t see fit to mention any of the dozens of heresies that the aforementioned church fathers dedicated time and treatises to dismantling. Yet, for some reason, this mysterious little sect that apparently disappeared without trace almost as soon as it emerged made the cut.

Unless the Nicolaitan heresy is actually something else altogether.

I do believe that we can trust that God has revealed to us in scripture everything we need to know in order to live lives that glorify him. It’s because I believe as much that I don’t buy that God would include in scripture such a strong warning against a heresy that apparently stopped being a problem, to the extent that nobody could remember what it even was, within mere decades after that warning was written down. Frankly, I think God has better things to put in his book than that. And if all scripture is useful for training in righteousness, so must this part of it be.

At this point, I feel I should confess that I have written this post sort of backwards. I didn’t stumble across the Nicolaitans during my personal Bible reading and determinedly set about trying to work out what they did and taught. On the contrary, I was introduced to a compelling explanation of what they did and taught that troubled me to the extent that I determinedly set about trying to work out whether I agreed with it. As you’ll gather, I have concluded that I do.

The explanation in question is as follows. Scripture does tell us what the Nicolaitans did and taught: the information is contained within the word. The Greek Νικολαΐτης (Nikolaïtēs), which is the word that comes out as ‘Nicolaitan’ in English translation, is derived from two other words: νικάω (nikáō), which means ‘conquer’, and λαός (laós), which means ‘people’, as in a collective people-group or nation. So the Nicolaitan heresy pertains to the conquering of a people. How so, given that, when Revelation was written, the Church was hardly going around defeating nations in war? How can the idea of conquering a people apply to an error of practice and doctrine going on within the body of Christ itself? Who is this people? Well, one sense in which the word λαός is used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) is the people at large, as opposed to the priests (and sometimes the Levites too) – check out, for instance, Exodus 19:24, Hosea 4:9, Zechariah 7:5, 2 Chronicles 35:8, and Ezra 7:13 – the laity as opposed to the clergy, in other words, and indeed, λαός is precisely where we get the English term ‘laity’ from. The practice of the Nicolaitans is to conquer the laity – to set up an ecclesiastical elite, to grant some members of the body of Christ authority over the rest. The doctrine of the Nicolaitans is to claim divine approval for the same.

And Jesus hates it. And he calls those guilty of it to repent.

If it’s not apparent from this post why I was so troubled by all this, then I hope it will become so in the coming weeks as I unpack what I think the Bible says about how the Church should be run in more detail. At any rate, I hasten to assure you that I haven’t discarded an entire robust ecclesiology as a result of the above analysis of this one particular Greek word (as the associate minister seemed to think when I explained it to him – not altogether unreasonably, given the manner in which I’d launched the conversation). On the contrary, I was a good deal of the way to my current position on church governance well before I’d given any thought to what a Nicolaitan was; what the issue of the Nicolaitans did was convince me that it matters. It matters how the Church is run and it matters that I conduct myself in a manner that reflects how it ought to be run. It matters, adelphoi, that we hate the works and the teaching of the Nicolaitans, as our Lord does. This is our King and our Captain and our great High Priest talking; this is the one who willingly laid down his life in order that we might be reborn to a life of increasing love and knowledge of him, and increasing reflection of his likeness. He is the one who hates the works of the Nicolaitans, commends those who do likewise, and warns those who tolerate their doctrine to repent. Sit up and take notice, folks: this matters.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, I keep a bullet journal. I’m not going to say it’s revolutionised my life or anything, but I do think it’s a really good system, because it basically lets you build your own diary system, rather than relying on the stationery manufacturers to anticipate your needs. Some tips on getting started: http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/.

² Check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+2&version=ESVUK.

³ All dates in this section are as according to Theopedia, https://www.theopedia.com/, except Theodoret, who wasn’t on it, so I turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica for him.

⁴ I consulted all these sources via the Catholic Encyclopaedia, so big thanks to those guys: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/index.html. Any misrepresentation of the information on my part is, of course, completely my fault.

⁵ Do check out the story of Balaam as recorded in Numbers if you’re unfamiliar with it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+22&version=ESVUK. Also, fun fact, there’s an inscription from Deir Alla that refers to a seer called Balaam son of Beor (coincidence? I think not), which is super interesting: http://www.livius.org/sources/content/deir-alla-inscription/.

⁶ Can we have a moment of appreciation for the fact that the Wikipedia page entitled ‘List of Christian heresies’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_heresies, is topped with the following statement: This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it. Don’t encourage them, Wikipedia! There are enough heresies as it is!