The Valensians

[JesusA (imported)]

The early years of what eventually became Christianity was characterized by a myriad of competing interpretations of what constituted the new faith. Doctrinal battles were hard-fought and frequently bloody. Members of some sects were converted to the emerging orthodoxy; others were exterminated.

For anyone interested in reading about the early battles, Bart D. Ehrman, chair of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, has written two exceptionally readable books. Highly recommended are his Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew and his Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. Both were published in 2003 by Oxford University Press and they have been selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club, among others.

Among the many early variants of Christianity was a group known as the Valensians. Little is known of them beyond the brief note written by St. Epiphany in his catalogue of “heresies”. St. Epiphany was on the line that eventually led to the modern orthodoxy, though not without some fascinating side excursions. His major work, the Panarion or “Medicine Chest” (of antidotes to the poisons of sects other than his own) was composed during the years 374 – 376. It discusses 80 Christian sects of which he had knowledge.

Here is St. Epiphany’s treatise on a sect that believed in castration for all male members….

Valesians

We have often heard of the Valesians, but have not learned who Valens was, where he came from, or what he said, what admonition he gave or statements he uttered. The name, being Arabic, gives us to suspect that he and his sect continue to find support among certain people living in Bacatha in the region of Philadelphia beyond the Jordan; this is just a suspicion I have, and cannot say for certain?, as I stated. The local people call them Gnostics, but they are not of the Gnostics, for their ideas are different. But the reports we have about them are as follows.

Most of them used to attend church until the time when their insane ideas came out into the open and they were expelled from the church. All of them are castrated except for a few, and they share the opinions of <the Archontics and Sethians?> and others concerning the principalities and authorities.

When they take someone as a disciple, as long as he has not yet been castrated he does not partake of animal flesh. But one they have persuaded or forced him to be castrated, then he partakes of everything whatever, as though he had already retired from the contest and were no longer in danger or being roused by the foods to the enjoyment of passion.

It is not just their own people that they treat like this, but often they do the same to strangers who pass through and stay with them as guests, as is frequently reported. They snatch them inside, tie them to the furniture behind them, and force upon them the operation of castration.

Such is the report we have of them. Knowing in what place they dwell and how widespread then name is in those parts, and seeing as we have learned no other name for the sect, we think that they are that sect.

Now they are quite insane. For if they wish to fulfill the gospel passage: “If one of your members scandalizes you, cut it off, for it behooves you to enter the kingdom of heaven lame, deaf, or crippled,” then how can someone castrated be in the kingdom?

“And there are,” he says, “eunuchs who have made themselves such for the kingdom of heaven.” Who then are these if not the noble apostles and the virgins and monks who come after? John and James, Zebedee’s sons, remained virgins and neither cut off their members with their own hands nor married…. Elijah in the Old Testament did the same….

from The Panarion of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis. Translated by Philip R. Amidon, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 202-203