Who are the Nicolaitans?

Question 60104.

The Nicolaitans are one of the small mysteries of the New Testament. They appear twice, both times in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, and nowhere else in Scripture or in any document we can date with confidence to the first century.

That has not stopped people writing confidently about them, and some of what circulates is guesswork presented as fact. So let me set out what the text actually says, what the early church claimed, what can reasonably be inferred, and where honest uncertainty begins.

What the Text Actually Says

In the letter to Ephesus, Jesus commends the church for something specific. Yet this you have, He says: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. The word is works, not doctrines, and the emphasis falls on conduct.

In the letter to Pergamum the emphasis shifts. There Jesus rebukes the church because some hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practise sexual immorality. Then He adds: so also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans.

That juxtaposition is the most solid piece of evidence we have. The Balaam reference and the Nicolaitans are set side by side, and the natural reading is that they amount to much the same thing: a teaching that encouraged participation in idolatrous feasts and the sexual practices that went with them. See Revelation 2:14-15.

The Question of Their Origin

The most common explanation, going back to Irenaeus in the second century, is that they took their name from Nicolaus, the proselyte of Antioch who was one of the seven chosen in Acts 6 to serve tables. Irenaeus states this flatly, and Hippolytus repeats it.

I would hold that identification loosely. Irenaeus was writing over a century later, and no first century source connects the two. Clement of Alexandria, meanwhile, defended Nicolaus, arguing that a saying of his about treating the flesh with contempt had been misunderstood and turned into a licence for indulgence by people who claimed his name without his convictions.

That, if true, is a familiar pattern rather than an exotic one. A teacher says something compressed, somebody else runs with it in a direction he never intended, and the movement keeps the founder’s name. Whether the Nicolaitans had any real connection to the deacon of Acts 6 cannot now be established.

The Name Itself

A popular line of interpretation works from the etymology. The name appears to combine the Greek nikao, to conquer, with laos, people, giving something like conquerors of the people. From this some have argued that the Nicolaitans represent the rise of a clerical class lording it over the congregation.

It is an attractive idea and I am not persuaded by it. Personal names in the ancient world were extremely common and rarely programmatic; Nicolaus was an ordinary Greek name, as ordinary as Andrew or Philip. Building a doctrine of church government on the etymology of a proper noun is shaky ground.

There is also a Hebrew parallel sometimes proposed, linking Nicolaitans to Balaam by way of similar meanings in the two languages. It is ingenious, and it may be right, but the argument in Revelation 2 already sets the two side by side without needing a linguistic bridge.

What the Nicolaitans Appear to Have Taught

Putting the evidence together, the most defensible reconstruction is this. The Nicolaitans taught that Christians could take part in the civic and trade guild feasts of the Roman cities, feasts held in temples, involving meat offered to idols and frequently involving ritual prostitution.

You can see why that teaching would find a hearing. Refusing to attend meant losing your trade connections, your social standing and possibly your livelihood. A teacher who could explain why participation was permissible would be extremely popular in a place like Pergamum, which Revelation calls the place where Satan’s throne is.

The theological argument was probably that since an idol is nothing, the meal means nothing, and since the body is of no ultimate consequence, what is done in it does not touch the spirit. Paul had met a version of the first argument in Corinth and a version of the second too. The Nicolaitans appear to have taken both further than Paul would allow.

Why the Two Churches Responded Differently

Ephesus hated these works. Pergamum tolerated them. That contrast is the reason the Nicolaitans appear in Revelation at all, and it is the point of practical application in the passage.

Ephesus had a strong record on doctrine. The church tested those who claimed to be apostles and found them false, and it would not put up with evil. Its problem lay elsewhere, in the abandonment of its first love, and Jesus deals with that separately and severely.

Pergamum, under real pressure, had let compromise in. Antipas had been killed there for his faith, so this was not a soft congregation. It was a congregation that had held firm under persecution and then given ground on morality, which is a more common sequence than we like to admit.

What This Says to Us

The specific issue has gone. Very few British Christians are invited to a guild banquet in a temple. The mechanism has not gone anywhere at all, and that is why the passage keeps its force.

The Nicolaitan argument, in every age, is that a genuine theological insight can be stretched to license what Scripture forbids. Christian liberty is real. The idol is nothing. Grace does abound. Each of those is true, and each has been used to justify things Jesus says He hates.

The test is not whether an argument sounds sophisticated. The test is where it lands. If a teaching consistently makes it easier to do what Scripture forbids and harder to be distinct from the surrounding culture, its pedigree hardly matters. See battling the world, the flesh and the devil.

Holding Uncertainty Honestly

I want to finish by marking clearly what we do not know, because this is a topic where confident assertion outruns the evidence badly. We do not know who founded the Nicolaitans. We do not know whether they had a developed system or were simply a tendency. We do not know how widely they spread or what became of them.

What we do know is that Jesus names them twice, links them with Balaam, describes their works as something He hates, and commends a church for refusing them. That is enough for the purpose the text has in view.

When somebody tells you with great assurance exactly what the Nicolaitans believed, ask them where the evidence comes from. Learning to distinguish what Scripture says from what tradition has added to it is one of the more useful habits in Bible study, and this is a good place to practise. See Revelation 2:6.

Reading Revelation 2 and 3 Properly

A word about method, since it affects how much weight the Nicolaitans can bear. The letters to the seven churches are addressed to real congregations in real cities in the Roman province of Asia, and they refer to local circumstances their first readers understood immediately.

That is why we struggle. Jesus does not explain who the Nicolaitans were, because the Ephesians and the Pergamenes knew perfectly well. In the same way He mentions the synagogue of Satan, the throne of Satan, the hidden manna and the white stone without a footnote, and each of those has generated its own literature of speculation.

The practical rule is to read what the letters say plainly, take the local references as local, and build doctrine on what is clear rather than on what is obscure. See what is literal interpretation. See Revelation 2:12-13 for how thoroughly local this material is.

Balaam, Jezebel and the Nicolaitans

There is a pattern running through the seven letters worth noticing. Three names are used for compromise: Balaam at Pergamum, Jezebel at Thyatira, and the Nicolaitans at Ephesus and Pergamum. All three involve the same combination of idolatrous participation and sexual immorality.

Balaam, in Numbers, could not curse Israel and so advised Balak to seduce them into the worship of Baal of Peor, which achieved by invitation what could not be achieved by opposition. That is the strategy in view: what persecution cannot accomplish, assimilation can.

Jezebel at Thyatira is described as a self-styled prophetess teaching the same things. So the Nicolaitans are not an isolated oddity; they are one expression of the standing pressure on a small church in a pagan city to make its peace with the surrounding culture. That is why Jesus keeps returning to it.

What Became of Them

We do not know, and that is worth saying rather than filling the gap. Irenaeus and Hippolytus write about them in the second and third centuries, largely repeating and embroidering earlier claims, and after that the trail goes cold. There is no surviving document written by the group and no archaeological trace of them.

Some later writers folded them into the broader gnostic movements of the second century, on which see what about the gnostic gospels, which may be accurate or may be a case of tidying up loose ends by assigning an unknown sect to a known category. Historians of the early church do this, and so do the rest of us.

What survived is the warning rather than the sect. Whatever became of the actual congregation in Pergamum that tolerated this teaching, the letter addressed to them is still in the canon and is still being read, which is a strange sort of afterlife for a group we cannot otherwise identify.

So, now what?

Read the letters to the seven churches in one sitting, with an eye on what Jesus commends and what He condemns in each. The Nicolaitans occupy two verses in a passage of enormous pastoral weight, and reading the whole thing puts them in proportion.

Then ask the question the passage is really pressing. Ephesus was doctrinally sound and had lost its love. Pergamum was brave under persecution and had gone soft on holiness. Most of us are strong somewhere and quietly compromised somewhere else. Which of those two churches does yours look like at the moment, and which do you?

Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Revelation 2:6 (ESV)