Early Christian authors posited that corrupt false teaching and practice spoiled pristine orthodoxy. For almost two centuries scholars have contested that notion. The present consensus is that what early Christians called heresy is a second-century ideological and social construction that sought to champion one set of teachings over another by strategies of marginalization. Alain Le Boulluec (La Notion d'hérésie dans la Littérature Grecque IIe—IIIe Siècles, Tome I, De Justin à Irénée, 2 vols. [Paris: Ètudes Augustiniennes, 1985]) traces the origins of that construction to Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 CE). In a synthetic study, Royalty argues that we should look much earlier for the origins of anti-heretical discourse. Justin may have been a catalyst in marginalizing one set of beliefs as heresy, but its elements can be found in ideas and communities represented by the authors and communities of the New Testament as well as their Jewish and non-canonical contemporaries. Succinctly stated, “there was such a thing as ‘heresy’ in ancient Jewish and Christian discourse before it was called ‘heresy’” (4). Justin is not the start but rather the end of process inaugurated long before him (172). Royalty describes his account as “a history of discourse,” that is he intends to furnish is a Foucauldian genealogy of the “the idea of heresy” (3). He roots that idea in “the rhetoric of difference and disagreement” in early Christian and Second Temple Jewish texts. He returns us to these texts as an “unexploited source to connect first- and early second-century Christianity by means of a history of heresiology” (17). Genealogy he means in Foucault's sense of the plural past that has in various and not always systematic ways given rise to both to early Christian notions of orthodoxy and, implicitly, modern ones.

To support his thesis Royalty charts a history of discursive formations. His project, again following Foucault, finds him outlining not a linear history of ideas but rather the ways in which the texts he takes up organize power and knowledge in a variety of ways to marginalize and even manufacture dissent by way of aspersion and consensus through the creation of “common sense.” He marshals his argument in two parts, which he calls “Genealogy of a Discourse” (1–116) and “The Politics of Heresy” (117–171). The first part deals with how different texts create an idea of difference; the second how they protect those ideas by creating a kind of “common sense” (119) and especially by making them conform to values championed in Roman imperial political discourses.

After an introductory chapter that outlines the thesis described above, part one (chapters 1–5), “Geneaology of a Discourse,” offers a kind of vademecum to ideas of difference found in New Testament, extra-canonical, and Second Temple Jewish texts. Here Royalty seeks to outline how texts negotiate difference by creating ideas of heresy, even if the term does not appear in the writings surveyed or, where it does, is not used in the technical sense it came to mean in the second century. Beginning with notions of difference in the Hebrew Bible, where he discovers apocalyptic exclusion of outsiders as an especially potent idea in the creation of theories of difference, Royalty takes up in dedicated chapters the creation and disqualification of difference in Qumran, the movements associated with John the Baptist and Jesus, uncontested Paul, Gospel narratives as represented by Q, Thomas and especially the Gospel of Matthew, as well as the Didache. Here Royalty is necessarily brief and skirts myriad difficulties of redaction, reconstructions of historical settings, competing scholarly theorizations, Sitze im Leben, and so forth, all of which are surprisingly sparsely footnoted. (The reconstruction of the historical Jesus receives nine pages [54–62], most of them dedicated to his relationship to the apocalyptic preaching of John the Baptist). A glaring omission is discussion dedicated to the Gospel of John, which deploys sharp dualisms in order to marginalize and to create a rhetoric of difference. A history of discursive formations of the kind Royalty intends does not so readily wed itself to the brief accounts he sketches. Although his accounts read as a whirlwind tour of writing, themes and scholarly debates over sources Royalty here successfully puts forward evidence for an inchoate notion of “heresy” as he charts the rhetoric of difference each set of texts represents.

In part two (chapters 6 and 7), “The Politics of Heresy,” Royalty turns first to what he describes as “policing of boundaries” (119) as Christianity continued to emerge as a diverse religious phenomenon in the second half of the first century and beyond. Then he considers the ways in which the discourse of difference found a welcome home in the Roman Empire and how the Empire found a welcome ally with what he calls Christianity's “politics of exclusion” (147). In the first chapter Royalty elegantly and forcefully shows that however much Justin Martyr enunciated a theory of heresy, the later writings of the New Testament (the contested and pseudonymous Paulines, the Johannine epistles, the letters of Ignatius and Polycarp) anticipated his rhetorical moves by decades. Notions of apostolicity, scripture, patriarchal authority, authoritative offices, dogma, and the demonization of difference as strategies in policing difference show to what degree these ideas antedate Justin Martyr's theorization and response to heresy. All of this was welcome in an empire that celebrated homogeneity, promoted political harmony and concord as imperial ideals, and punished dissent. Royalty argues, “Positioning early orthodox Christianity with Rome also meant positioning themselves [early Christians] against other Christians” (147). Here Royalty deftly takes up Romans 13, the Haustafel topoi in the disputed letters and 1 Peter, as well as Revelation and Luke-Acts to show how each of these texts in its own way fosters imperial ideals either through a kind of colonial mimicry or analogous imperial strategies of marking sameness and difference. In the case of Luke-Acts, eschatology has been replaced with a theory of history that functions as apology both before the state and before the church, erasing threats of difference toward outsiders and writing out of history traces of dissent from within.

In a brief conclusion (172–176) Royalty sums up the outline for a rhetoric of heresiology that emerges from the array of documents his discussion surveys and analyses. Salvation dependent on belief or ideas, dualistic eschatology, ideological condemnation of opposing points of view, emphasis on tradition, and the creation of a theory of opposition by linking it to history show how indebted Justin Martyr was to prior ideas in his formulation of heresy. If there is a criticism to be made, for this reader it is that Royalty's history of discursive formation is too docetic. His goal is to reconstruct a genealogy of the “idea” of heresy. Yet ideas are always wedded with practices in material worlds. Royalty himself refers in an evocatively Foucauldian way the to “technology of control” in the formulation of orthodoxy and heresy (e.g. 4, 44, 51, 110). The merit of Foucault's account of “technology” is that it shows how ideas, behaviors, and institutions go together in the formulation of self and other. A genealogy of discursive formation of heresy could only be enhanced by closer attention both to practices as well as the social constructions of space, an attentiveness that also makes Foucault's historical study of discursive formation so engaging and persuasive. Royalty opens the door toward a consideration of practices of travel, letter writing, the giving and withholding of hospitality, ascetical practices, worship, the giving of material support, and acts of confession as both creating and inscribing power/knowledge on bodies and communities. By the same token, a social geographical consideration of space, created with the help of imagined worlds—even Foucault's notion of heterotopia as the place occupied by the other—will also contribute to the spade work Royalty undertakes in his expansive study. All of this is to say that Royalty persuasively makes his case and invites further work in the archaeological site he has begun to dig in this study. Any further discussion of the origins of the concept in early Christian discourse, especially amongst those who continue to champion Justin Martyr as its originator, will need to take into consideration these important arguments.