Euchites

The Euchites or Messalians were a Christian sect from Mesopotamia that spread to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and Thrace. The name 'Messalian' comes from the Syriac , ''mṣallyānā'', meaning 'one who prays'. The Greek translation is , ''euchitēs'', meaning the same.

History

They are first mentioned in the 370s by Ephrem the Syrian, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Jerome, and are also mentioned by Archbishop Atticus, Theodotus of Antioch, and Archbishop Sisinnius. They were first condemned as heretical in a synod of 383 AD (Side, Pamphylia), whose acta was referred to in the works of Photius. Their leader was supposedly a man named Peter who claimed to be Christ.Janet Hamilton, Bernard Hamilton, Yuri Stoyanov ''Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, C. 650-c. 1450: Selected Sources'', Manchester University Press, 1998 Before being stoned to death for his blasphemies, he promised his followers that after three days he would rise from his tomb in the shape of a wolf, attracting the title of ''Lycopetrus'' or ''Peter the Wolf''. Christians believed it was not Peter who would come out of the grave, but a devil in disguise.

They continued to exist for several centuries, influencing the Bogomils of Bulgaria (who are called ''Lycopetrians'' in an abjuration formula of 1027) and, thereby, also influencing the Bosnian Church and Catharism.

Michael Psellos, a Byzantine monk, accused Bogomils and Euchites of orgiastic practices, incest, and homosexuality. Furthermore, he argued that children born from these promiscuous activities were brought before a Satanic assembly after eight days, offered up to Satan and then cannibalistically eaten. This cannibalistic act was supposedly a parody of baptism. Euthymios Zigabenos, a later Byzantine monastic writer, would make the same accusations. Such charges have a long history, and historians debate whether they are truthful to any degree: the idea of these unholy acts can be traced back further to alleged practices of certain Gnostic sects; indeed, a similar literary tradition regarding heresies seems to have been brought into existence well before the Christian era, during the reign of the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

Modern scholarship has also questioned whether a coherent heretical movement existed behind these condemnations, and has emphasised instead the friction in the Eastern Church caused by Messalianism's "ascetical practices and imagistic language far more characteristic of Syriac Christianity than of the imperial Church centred on Constantinople".

Teachings

The sect's teaching asserted that:

# The essence (ousia) of the Trinity could be perceived by the carnal senses.
# The Threefold God transformed himself into a single hypostasis (substance) in order to unite with the souls of the perfect.
# God has taken different forms in order to reveal himself to the senses.
# Only such sensible revelations of God confer perfection upon the Christian.
# The state of perfection, freedom from the world and passion, is therefore attained solely by prayer, not through the church, baptism and or any of the sacraments, which have no effect on the passions or the influence of evil on the soul (hence their name, which means "Those who pray").
Messalians taught that once a person experienced the essence of God they were freed from moral obligations or ecclesiastical discipline. They had male and female teachers, the "perfecti", whom they honored more than the clergy. The condemnation of the sect by John Damascene and Timothy of Constantinople, expressed the view that the sect espoused a sort of mystical materialism. Their critics also accused them of incest, cannibalism and "debauchery" (in Armenia, their name came to mean "filthy") but scholars reject these claims.

In Mandaean texts

Gelbert (2013, 2023) suggests that in the Ginza Rabba (Right Ginza 9.1), the Mandaic term ''minunaiia'' ("Mnunaeans" or "Minunaeans") is actually a reference to the Messalians or Euchites.

See also

* Athinganoi
*Bogomilism
* Carpocratians
*Cathars
* Constantine Chrysomalus
* List of Gnostic sects
* Marcianists
* Sergius-Tychicus
*Timothy of Constantinople

Bibliography

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References

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Early Gnostic Christian sects
Gnostic religions and sects