Quid faciat hereticum et quid sit hereticus

The picture of heresy that we receive from texts is a construction of orthodox commentators, rather than a straightforward description. This has been a given since the introduction and entrenchment of the text-critical methods that revealed the different filters at work and the distortions that result from them, particularly in those texts produced in the context of a tribunal. Heresy is of course, by definition, always relative, but what recent work has shown is that its representation in text is a major part of how that otherness is created and maintained, even if the precise meaning or significance of that representation – from what is it built and to what end – is debated. Once layers of distortion are identified in a text, however, there is a tendency to peel them away in an eagerness to see what lies beneath, and there is a danger that, in doing so, the significance of the layers themselves is disregarded; and, perhaps, the assumption that they are so easily removable is itself questionable. The purpose in looking at a broad cross section of texts is to understand, rather, what those layers are and how they work: how the constructions relate to each other, how they are combined and whether something can be said about the ideas and preoccupations of the writers as visible in texts.

The themes that we will look at are themselves in many ways interconnected, but for the sake of clarity the general construction of heresy has been divided here into three main areas. At the end of the chapter we will consider the most basic level of the construct, the meanings of the terms ‘heresy’ and ‘heretic’. Before that, there will be an examination of the role played by ideas of number in the representation of heresy.