“Surely These are Heterodox Teachings”: The Gospel of Mary and Tertullian in Dialogue

The current trend in scholarship on early Christianity is to highlight the diversity and pluriformity of the second- and third-century church(es). There was no orthodoxy, no mainstream church. Heresiologists do not provide an accurate picture of the Christian landscape and twentieth-century discoveries such as the Nag Hammadi codices demonstrate that there was a fluid and varied model of what it meant to be a Christian. To a large extent, this picture of diversity is accurate. The writers we label as ‘orthodox’ or ‘mainstream’, such as Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria, Ignatius and Tertullian, show great variation in their understanding of their faith and its practices: there is no one, single, unified definition of
Christianity in the early period. The texts that we label as ‘heterodox’ may, at points, have more in common with ‘orthodox’ texts than the orthodox do with each other. However, this paper asks what happens when we encounter a self-proclaimed ‘heterodox’ text? And how might this modify our understanding of Christianity in the first three centuries?

Copyright © Francis Watson, Sarah Parkhouse and contributors, 2020

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