This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

David Mills, "Getting Jesus Right"

David Mills writes:

Protected by 2,000 years of Christian thinking, we moderns tend to think of the ancient heresies as if their advocates were like the shabbily dressed men in public parks who hold up badly hand-lettered signs and scream out warnings about alien invasions, and to wonder how so many people could have been taken in by ideas that were so obviously wrong. Most of us do not feel the danger of heresy, because we do not realize how attractive the great heresies were--which means that we do not realize how attractive they are.

You will not understand the early Christians, nor the need to keep to their doctrine today, until you understand how seductive were the imitation Jesuses they offered, and how easy it was to meet a fake Jesus and think he was the real one. The heretic was usually a rather charismatic man whose teachings were much more like the urban legends that even normally skeptical people believe because they seem so obviously true. He was almost always on to something that Christians had neglected or forgotten, and his faith therefore seemed deeper and wiser than theirs.

But only the Christians presented in their doctrines the real Jesus, and only the real Jesus could save you from hell and bring you to heaven. That in itself was obviously reason enough to drive out the people who were introducing their victims to a fake Jesus. The more believable was the picture, the more important it was to expose it as a fraud. . . .

This begins to explain, I hope, why the early Christians cared so much to get the doctrine right. It explains why they labeled certain ideas heretical, and expelled from the Church those who insisted on teaching them. They wanted everyone to know who Jesus is, and did not want them to be fooled by the frauds and fakes, some of whom were extraordinarily good frauds and fakes. If Jesus is the only way that we come to the Father and find eternal happiness, if he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we need to know exactly who he is. What we say about Jesus has vast and everlasting effects on human happiness.

[The rest of the article can be found at the link above.]