II. The Parameters of the Problem

Any new strategy had to meet several requirements. I had learned from the earlier failures what would not work.

Direct persecution — tried it. Nero, Domitian, Decius, Diocletian. The empire threw everything at them for three centuries. The church grew faster during persecution than during peace. The spectacle of Christians dying without recanting, forgiving their executioners from the arena floor, singing in the flames — it was, professionally speaking, counterproductive. Every martyrdom was an advertisement. I eventually advised my agents to stop.

Internal doctrinal corruption — I had higher hopes for this one. Gnosticism was promising. It kept the name of Jesus, elevated Him into a cosmic figure, removed the embarrassing specificity of the Incarnation (a real body, real death, real resurrection — so particular, so material, so difficult to allegorize away), and offered a version of Christianity that appealed to the educated. But the church's response — especially the Johannine epistles, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian — identified the corruption with precision I found frustrating.

"By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses Jesus as the Christ who has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God — and this is the spirit of the antichrist." — 1 John 4:2–3 (NET)

They drew the line exactly where I needed them not to draw it.

Political cooptation — I had some success here. After Constantine, there were possibilities. An established church can be made comfortable, institutional, interested in its own perpetuation rather than in the transformation of souls. I have worked that angle for seventeen centuries in various forms and continue to find it productive. But it affects the institutional expression of Christianity without touching the core claim. The Spirit who moved in the 1st century moves in the 21st wherever the core claim is taken seriously, regardless of what the institutional church is doing. I needed to address the core claim.

What I needed was something that would operate at the level of the founding documents — the level of the claim itself. Not a persecution of Christians but a replacement of the thing being claimed. And it needed to be a replacement that most people could not distinguish from the original.

Historical note: The Adversary's analysis of early church history is consistent with the actual historical record — see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History; Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1 (HarperOne, 1984); Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity (HarperOne, 2008).