A Christian teenager preached communism and ‘free love’ in 150 A.D.

The religion didn’t like Epiphanes

When I set out to learn more about Christianity, I wondered if it was possible that all the leaders were sex-maddened puritans.

But then I noticed a lurking legend of the religion: a Greek teenager around 150 A.D. who said the teachings of Jesus were communism and ‘free love’. This was a ‘church father’ I had to learn more about.

Epiphanes has mostly been mentioned to dismiss or attack him.

The insults go on and on. He’s called “immoral” or “pagan,” or a “nasty-minded adolescent of somewhat pornographic tendencies.”

If it weren’t for the attacks, however, we wouldn’t know anything about him. His work has been lost by a religion that was good at losing texts it didn’t like.

The only source for his life and work is a horrified discussion by the ‘church father’ named Clement of Alexandria in Stromata, written around 198 A.D.

The story he tells is certainly a colorful one. Clement reports that Epiphanes was the son of a Christian teacher named Carpocrates. Said to be very brilliant, he wrote a book of theology, On Righteousness, an outrage on the sex rules of Christian theology, and died at age 17.

Epiphanes was said to have been buried on the Greek island of Cephallenia, where he was worshipped as a god.

Or was Clement just telling a tall tale?

The “church fathers,” as it turns out, were often writing hit jobs on their enemies. When details can be checked, they’re often false. If a “heretic” was in view, it seems the “fathers” felt most any attack fiction was allowed.

Was Epiphanes really worshipped on an island? I’m reading M. David Litwa’s new study, Carpocrates, Marcellina, and Epiphanes. Early Christians, as he details, often referred to people being worshipped on islands—but when the shrines on the islands were found, the Christian details prove inaccurate.

What we know about Epiphanes seems to be that he lived in Alexandria, in Egypt. A time range between 117 and 166 A.D. seems likely. The Jesus teachings were then very new. They seem to have had the gospel of Matthew, some of Paul’s letters, and Old Testament texts.

They read Christianity very differently.

Carpocrates, in addition to other supposedly “heretical” beliefs, was famous as a believer in reincarnation. Is that non-Christian? One might think so, but it was clearly mulled among Jewish teachers of the biblical period, and also early Christian teachers.

Then Epiphanes, his son, then set out to write about sex. That’s what got drew the notice of Clement of Alexandria. As Litwa writes: “He assumed, with many Christians of his day, that a true Christian was defined in terms of correct sexual practices.”

For Clement, Christians didn’t have any sexual desire. He said Jesus forbade sexual desire (i.e. “lust”) in Matthew 5:28, as Paul forbade sexual desire in Romans 7:7. “Do not desire,” as Clement translated that passage.

Even a traditional Christian would be mystified by this now, since Clement was doing an outrageous mistranslation.

Christianity was reeling under a cultural attack.

The religion had been born into a hell of sexual accusations. For three centuries, a ‘regular’ person hearing about Christians would think they had sex with siblings, loved orgies, and ate babies.

Where this came from is unclear. The rampant talk of Christians loving incest, scholars suggest, might’ve come from the Christian talk of “brotherly love.” Or maybe the ‘holy kiss’.

Clement’s solution seems to have been to crack down on all sex, and hold out the Christian person as having no sexual feeling. Desire was forbidden!

Then he turned to attack any Christian teachers who’d been teaching sexually liberal messages. And so Epiphanes came into his crosshairs.

It isn’t clear that Epiphanes was as wild as Clement said.

Clement quotes from On Righteousness, and layers on his own commentary, but his conclusions don’t reflect the text he quotes. Epiphanes writes that men have sexual desire, so sex is part of God’s creation.

As he’s quoted writing:

“For he implanted vibrant and rather forceful desire in males for the persistence of human families, a desire which no law, custom, or anything else can destroy, for it is a decree of God.”

Clement saw a case for orgies.

He discusses Epiphanes as a figure of total sexual excess—as he reads all Carpocratians as sex monsters. His only proof, however, seems to have been the quotes from On Righteneousness.

As Litwa notes, the quotes “said nothing about group orgies.”

What Epiphanes argued has remained mysterious, with only a few quotes to go on. He’s often discussed as echoing the thinking of Plato, and being ‘platonic’. There are no quotes from Plato or allusions to Plato.

Epiphanes is a Christian and is making an argument from the Bible.

He is thinking about about the concept of ‘righteousness’.

Like many biblical terms, “righteousness” has been unclear. It merges, hazily, with the similar concept of “justice.”

For a Christian, it often means…following the rules? Especially the rules about sex.

For Epiphanes, it seemed to mean living in community with other people. He defines it as “a certain communality joined with equality,” or a “universal sharing.”

He writes:

“For man God made all things to be common property. He brought the female to be with the male in common and in the same way united all the animals. He thus showed righteousness to be a universal sharing along with equality.”

The concept of ‘righteousness’ seems to have led him into thinking about marriage. As Christians may not know, marriage in the biblical period meant one thing: women being owned by men.

Epiphanes writes that marriage causes “what should be common property to be treated as private possession.” The subject here is women being owned by men in the context called ‘marriage’.

Nobody is owned in the Jesus community?

That seems to be his meaning. I don’t see Epiphanes suggesting that people should have orgiastic sex, or that wives—or husbands—should be shared.

Rather, I think that Epiphanes is saying that men and women are equal in the Jesus teachings. He mentions the “no male or female” language we find in Galatians 3:28, which seems to have been the language used for Christian baptisms.

Christians shouldn’t own own each other, he suggests, even in the context of marriage. To own people is not “righteousness.”

He asks if people really need laws.

He references Romans 7:7, where Paul says:

“I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law.”

Most Christian readers would see “law” here as meaning Old Testament law. But Epiphanes sees the reference as all law made by humans.

Any arrangements between people, he suggests, don’t have to be done through legal codes, but with the idea of ‘righteousness’ being the bond between them. He sees Jesus being the source of a new community between humans that achieves justice, but not through rules.

Clement makes it all about sex.

This orgy-loving kid thinks that sex, as Clement writes, “will bring them to the kingdom of God.”

Clement reads Epiphanes as basically not Christian, but a curiosity might be noted. Clement thinks he violates Old Testament adultery laws, but he doesn’t say anything about Paul’s porneia talk.

Scholars tend to read Epiphanes as preaching a kind of sexed-up theology. In a 2018 paper on Epiphanes, Taylor Petrey writes: “This egalitarian vision was a sexual revolution that embraced free love.”

Perhaps that’s a possible reading. But all Epiphanes was saying is that people don’t own each other, and therefore human relationships become voluntary.

All he says about property is that the earth belongs to God, not people, and a new community of sharing is possible. We can learn to live together, he suggests, in keeping with ‘righteousness’.

Isn’t Christian history fun?

You were told about semi-divine Christian “fathers” who were plugged into God. That turns out to be guys who were lying like crazy.

The accusations against the Carpocratians continued. Litwa writes that Christian critics “claimed that Carpocratians engage in ‘every form of man-mounting and lecherous sex with women, using each part of the body…”

Christianity went on to its long history of sexual attacks. What was done to them, ironically, they did to the world.

I’m left thinking about Epiphanes—wondering what might’ve been.🔶