Fate: Repeatedly persecuted by the Byzantine Empire — Empress Theodora’s campaign (~844–872 AD) reportedly killed 100,000 Paulicians. A Paulician military state at Tephrike survived until 872 AD. The Byzantines forcibly transplanted Paulician communities to the Balkans (~970 AD) — a policy that backfired by spreading their ideas into Bulgaria, directly spawning Bogomilism.

The Paulicians (named for their reverence for Paul, or possibly for Paul of Samosata) held a dualist theology: the material world was created by an evil demiurge, the spiritual world by the good God of the New Testament. They rejected the Old Testament, the veneration of Mary and the saints, the cross (a symbol of torture, not veneration), church hierarchy, and the sacraments. They held a docetic Christology — Christ only appeared to have a physical body. Their preferred texts were Paul’s letters and Luke. They organized themselves as a network of communities headed by teachers rather than a hierarchical church. The Paulician movement is the clearest link in a chain running from Manichaeism through the Byzantine heretical tradition to Bogomilism and Catharism — a persistent dualist undercurrent in Christian history that orthodoxy never fully extinguished.

What happens when a group is declared heretical: The process is rarely sudden. It typically begins with episcopal letters condemning a teaching, escalates to synodal condemnation at a regional council, and — after Constantine — can be ratified by an ecumenical council backed by imperial authority. Once condemned: (1) Leaders are excommunicated, exiled, or — in later centuries — handed to secular authorities for execution. (2) Writings are ordered burned; possession becomes a criminal offense. Eusebius records that after Nicaea, Constantine ordered Arian books destroyed under penalty of death. The same logic applied to Gnostic texts — which is why the Nag Hammadi library was buried in a sealed jar around 367 AD, the same year Athanasius’s Easter letter listed the NT canon and ordered non-canonical books removed from churches. (3) Communities are dissolved by force where state power reaches; in regions beyond imperial reach they survive for centuries. (4) Memory is controlled — the only surviving accounts of most heresies are hostile summaries by their opponents (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius’s Panarion), meaning we are largely reading prosecution briefs, not the groups’ own self-understanding.