Dad jokes aren’t particularly good. Most adults groan when they hear “Knock knock.” Yet young children lean in, giggling as they reply, “Who’s there?” Corny jokes don’t survive because they’re good. They survive because there’s always a new audience.
Similarly, Christian apologetics gets a new audience with every generation, as illustrated by Catherine Nixey’s book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. Nixey, a journalist who studied classics at Cambridge, argued in her 2017 book, The Darkening Age, that Christianity destroyed the classical world. Informed readers will detect echoes of Edward Gibbon’s thesis in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
In her new book, Nixey reminds us of James Frazer’s classic, The Golden Bough, by arguing that Christianity can’t be true because it shares elements with other religions. But she goes beyond that to assert there can’t be anything like Christian orthodoxy because some self-described Christians said different things throughout history.
Nixey’s title is intentionally provocative. She uses the term “heretic” to reflect its earlier etymological meaning: “choice.” The diversity of beliefs under the umbrella of Christianity (understood in its broadest sense) offers us a choice of what to believe. It’s only because of a conspiracy within the church power structure that these variant Christianities were suppressed to consolidate power. Her mission is to uncover these hidden variants to free readers’ minds from the shackles of orthodoxy.
Conspiracy of Orthodoxy
Nixey’s book is designed to dazzle the cultural Christian. She grounds her street cred as a critic of Christianity in her parents’ defection from Roman Catholic religious orders to pursue marriage. Despite their continued faith, her childhood catechesis was far from robust. As she notes, she thought that “God was called Peter because, throughout Mass, [they] seemed to say, at intervals, ‘Thanks Peter God’” (10). Her portrayal of Christianity doesn’t get much thicker from there.
Nixey treats the accounts in Scripture’s canonical books skeptically. She’s careful to quote from the King James Version, which maximizes cultural distance. Meanwhile, she opens the book with an account of Jesus killing one of his playmates, recounted in contemporary language, from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. She takes every skeptical and syncretist text at face value, with the implication that a mid-second-century, universally rejected text like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is more authoritative than Matthew’s Gospel. This pattern is repeated throughout the book.
Nixey implies that Christianity’s truthfulness depends on its existence in a vacuum, free from dissent or error. For example, she recounts her discovery of Celsus’s anti-Christian apologetic as if it’s a secret buried by Christians for centuries that, if it were well known, could cause mass rejections of the Christian faith. She argues that those sources have been hidden due to “sinister causes.” She elaborates, “Many of the stories in this book were buried, in some cases quite literally, when Christianity came to power in the fourth century” (11).
Never mind that we know what Celsus said because Origen, a Christian, responded to his attacks and we’ve preserved those manuscripts—one of many facts that Nixey conveniently ignores. Moreover, Thomas Cahill (of How the Irish Saved Civilization fame) would like a word about Christianity’s role in preserving pagan texts. The conspiracy crumbles when exposed to daylight.
At the same time, we must admit there was plenty of skulduggery in the early church—that’s part of what makes studying church history so entertaining. However, the fact that theologians fought against error doesn’t invalidate the possibility that true Christianity exists. Yet that’s exactly what Nixey implies about Christianity when she writes, “Each sect that was formed was convinced that it alone was the ‘true’ Church, it alone was right” (278).
This is like arguing that the existence of bad Middle-earth fan fiction invalidates J. R. R. Tolkien’s core vision of that imaginative world. Of course, a central and unstated assumption of Nixey’s argument is that Christianity is no more true than Tolkien’s legendarium.
Begs the Question
Much of Nixey’s book is an illustration of begging the question. She assumes Christianity was cobbled together from bits and pieces of contemporary cultural myths. Thus, the existence of myths that have parallels to Christianity proves her point. This is where the overlap with Frazer’s Golden Bough is thickest.
The fact that theologians fought against error doesn’t invalidate the possibility that true Christianity exists.
For example, Nixey makes much of Roman stories like that of Apollonius of Tyana, who was reportedly a contemporary of Jesus. The sole surviving third-century account of his life reports numerous miracles, some of which echo those done by Jesus in the Gospels. Thus, the implication is that these accounts must have borrowed from one another. Yet there’s no evidence of such borrowing. Those who read both the Gospels and Philostratus’s The Life of Apollonius of Tyana will see that the similarities between their lives are much less substantial than the differences.
More significantly, Christianity’s truthfulness isn’t based on denying the existence of supernatural events outside the Bible. Yet Nixey seems to think Christians believe in the exclusive supernaturalism of our faith. She writes, “Contrary to the imaginings of Milton and Gibbon—the ancient world had not been emptied of its gods the moment that Christ arrived on earth” (27).
Such references are baffling because in Acts we have Paul’s clear reference to the pantheon in Athens (17:16–34) and a riot over the worship of Artemis in Ephesus (19:11–41). And, as best I can tell, she invokes John Milton because he wrote a poem about Christ’s supremacy in creation. Nixey’s Christian straw man is both ill-informed and internally conflicted.
Deserves Attention
Though Nixey’s case isn’t well made, it’s attention-worthy because it reflects themes common among Christianity’s critics—both the YouTube and real-life varieties. These arguments are being made and need to be answered. The one-sided account in Heretic will fuel skepticism for those only vaguely familiar with historical Christianity and unwilling to investigate Nixey’s claims.
Moreover, Heretic was glowingly reviewed in several popular media outlets (it was published earlier in 2024 in the U.K. as Heresy). Publisher’s Weekly, which significantly influences the U.S. market, listed the volume as one of their 20 best religious books of 2024. This book is available in my local public library and in airport bookstores. It’s no Da Vinci Code, but we shouldn’t simply ignore it.
There’s nothing new in Nixey’s account beyond her personal experience. Most of her factual critiques of Christianity are addressed in volumes like Josh and Sean McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict or Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. Other apologists, like C. S. Lewis, have already wrestled with the sorts of evidence Nixey (following Frazer) presents. They’ve already demonstrated that the existence of similar myths doesn’t undermine the truthfulness of the Christian story.
Yet popular apologetics books (and their more scholarly kin) are notably absent from Nixey’s bibliography. She never offers anything beyond her selective evidence, much to the detriment of the straw man. It falls to us to replace her straw man with an intellectually rigorous Christianity.
It falls to us to replace Nixey’s straw man with an intellectually rigorous Christianity.
A few years ago, I taught a Sunday school class based on Strobel’s book. I wondered at the time whether going into as much depth on some of the competing myths, like that of Apollonius, was worth the time. Books like Heretic confirm it was.
Nixey recounts her initial wonder at Celsus’s skepticism: “Did you know this? I certainly didn’t, and I had been brought up in a house that was quite religious” (9). Her surprise reminds us not to repeat her parents’ failure of discipleship. Like dad jokes, apologetic arguments must be repeated in every generation because, though there’s no new material, we have a new audience. The arguments in Nixey’s Heretic remind us we’re never done contending for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.