There is and can be no absolute guide. You can tell which was the true religion by who won. Obviously God wouldn't let the wrong guys win, everyone said (and says). Alternately, however, the Bible talks about "when two or three are gathered in my name...." so maybe the tiny minority is right and the self-styled winners are wrong and going to hell. Guess we'll find out!
Heretics are specifically people who should know the true religion but have gone seriously astray. So different versions of Christianity can (and often do) label each other as heresy. Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy excommunicated each other in 1054 and have only recently started getting back together. (Protestants and Catholics have also decided that the other side isn't really a bunch of heretics. Or not too heretical.) So Christianity considers Islam not a heresy but a different religion, and Muslims aren't heretics but infidels. Pagans, those who believe in multiple gods, are also not technically heretics. This has never stopped the word "heretic" being tossed around a lot for anyone someone disagrees with.
Early Christianity had a lot of heresies. Some of the most serious were so-called Christological heresies, arguments over the nature of Christ. Was he just an inspired human? Was he God in disguise? Did he really die on the Cross or, if he was God the whole time, was it just a big charade? If he was an inspired human who did rise again from death, should we pray to him rather than directly to God or is that a big mistake? Are God and Jesus both gods, separate ones--and what about the Holy Spirit? The efforts of the Council of Nicaea (325) to define the Trinity, one God in three persons, Jesus both fully human and fully divine, tried to settle the matter and just led to a lot of new heresies. Most only ended with the rise of Islam in the seventh century, when a lot of territories that had been Christian under the Roman empire instead had Islam as their dominant religion, making a lot of the arguing irrelevant.
Other early Christian heresies included pelagianism, the idea that you could save yourself by being as good as you possibly could without needing grace (via the sacraments), and donatism, the belief that sacraments (which you needed) could only be validly administered by a pure priest, so if the priest had secretly sinned they didn't count. These were also more or less wiped out once Islam gave people more things to think about than theological niceties. Pelagianism had been especially strong in Roman Britain, until the arrival of the pagan Angles and Saxons ended that issue.
Another serious heresy was manichaeism, the idea that the universe was locked in a battle between absolute good and absolute evil, which neither would ever win, and that the spiritual world was good and the physical world evil. There is a fair amount of dualism (the idea of two equal powers fighting it out) in orthodox Christianity, but this is heresy.
A lot of early Christian doctrine was worked out in response to heresy. Someone would announce a new insight into religious issues no one had really thought about much, a church council would meet, discuss, decide it was wrong, and settle on an official doctrine of the opposite. (This is how for example it was decided that the Christian Bible would include the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, even though Christians felt they had "moved beyond" a lot of it.) Thus heresy (and the reaction to it) helped define orthodoxy.
A version of Manichaeism took root in southern France in the twelfth century, among people who thought they were good Christians and that God's true message had finally been revealed to them. This version is often called Catharism (from catharsis, a freeing or purging of oneself from troublesome things), and the Albigensian Crusade was launched against it in 1209 (on which see more here).
My husband and I have written a novel, Count Scar, set in a fictional version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade--except with magic. We've moved the geography around some, and all the people are fictional; the single biggest change we made was not getting into northern France's invasion of southern France in this crusade. (The book is available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.)
We're finishing a sequel, Heretic Wind, for anyone who enjoys the first one. Coming soon!
© C. Dale Brittain 2019
For more on real medieval heresy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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