Who Were the Nicolaitans?

In the book of the Revelation, Jesus Christ commends the church at Ephesus for the fact that they “hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate” (Revelation 2:6). Debate has taken place over the centuries in regard to just who the Nicolaitans were and what it was about them that Christ hated. Given that the word ‘Nicolaitanes’ itself is a compound Greek word meaning “victory (or conquest) over the people,” some have argued that the Nicolaitans represented a high-church type oligarchy that suppressed the laity or common people, yet this interpretation does not fit naturally with the text of Revelation.

Jesus himself seems to elaborate on the matter a bit further in his message to the church at Pergamos in Revelation 2:14-15:

“But I have a few things against you, because you have there some who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of immorality. So you also have some who in the same way hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans.”

Here, Christ equates the teaching of the Nicolaitans with that of Balaam, a renegade Old Testament prophet who led Israel into idolatry and immortality.

The early church father Irenaeus of Lyon may be the best authority we have on the Nicolaitans outside of scripture. Irenaeus was born sometime between AD 120-140 and died around the year 200. He was a disciple of a revered church father named Polycarp, who was a disciple of the apostle John himself. Irenaeus was a prolific early Christian writer and apologist whose works were extremely influential in the early centuries of Christianity. He mentions the Nicolaitans twice in his writings.

In Book I, Chapter 26 of his best-known work Against Heresies, Irenaeus claims that the Nicolaitans were followers of Nicolas, a proselyte (convert to Judaism) from Antioch, who was one of the seven deacons appointed by the church in Acts 6:

 

The Nicolaitans are the followers of that Nicolas who one of the seven first ordained to the diaconate by the apostles. They lead lives of unrestrained indulgence. The character of these men is very plainly pointed out in the Apocalypse of John…as teaching that it is a matter of indifference to practice adultery, and to eat things sacrificed to idols.

In Book Three, Chapter Eleven of Against Heresies, Irenaeus lumps the Nicolaitans in with the Gnostics as “an offset of that ‘knowledge’ falsely so called” (‘Gnostic’ being derived from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge”). The Gnostics effectively layered Christianity over pagan teachings, and promoted a number of heresies related to the nature of God and the person of Jesus Christ. Gnostics denied the resurrection of the body and instead taught a form of spiritual ascension in which the body was cast off and left behind forever. Since the body was to be discarded in this way, Gnostics felt that what a person did in the flesh was unimportant, hence their uninhibited practice of sexual sins such as adultery.

Another church father, Clement of Alexandria, who lived c. AD 150 to 215, denied that Nicolas was the father of the Gnostic doctrine bearing his name, arguing instead that the Gnostics had perverted one of his sayings:

 

Such also are those who say they follow Nicolaus, quoting an adage of the man, which they pervert, “that the flesh must be abused.” But the worthy man showed that it was necessary to check pleasures and lusts, and by such training to waste away the impulses and propensities of the flesh. But they, abandoning themselves to pleasure like goats, as if insulting the body, lead a life of self-indulgence; not knowing that the body is wasted, being by nature subject to dissolution: while their soul is buried in the mire of vice (Stromata, Book Two, Chapter Twenty)

Whatever the truth about Nicolas himself may have been, Irenaeus and Clement clearly agreed that the Nicolaitans taught the sinful indulgence of fleshly desires, particularly where sexuality was concerned. No wonder Christ hated their doctrine and wanted it out of his churches.