Apostolic, Latin Apostolicus, plural Apostolici, member of any of the various Christian sects that sought to reestablish the life and discipline of the primitive church by a literal observance of the precepts of continence and poverty.
The earliest Apostolics (known also as Apotactici, meaning “abstinents”) appeared in Anatolia about the 3rd century. They were extremely austere and renounced property and marriage. In the 12th century certain groups of heretical itinerant preachers called Apostolics were found in various centres of France, Flanders, and the Rhineland. This movement seems to have developed from a dualistic heretical current that entered Italy and France from the East during the 11th century. The wealth and worldliness of the Western church at that time encouraged the movement’s growth. These groups condemned marriage, the eating of meat, and infant baptism; and they harshly criticized the church and denied priestly power.
About 1260 a religious sect known as the Apostolic Brethren was founded at Parma, Italy, by Gerard Segarelli, an uncultured workman, to restore what he considered the apostolic way of life. His emphasis on repentance and poverty reflected ideas propagated by Joachim of Fiore, a 12th-century mystic. In 1286 Pope Honorius IV ordered the eccentric sect to conform to an approved rule of life, and in 1290 Pope Nicholas IV issued a bull of condemnation; but the sect continued to spread. In 1294 four of the Apostolics were burned at the stake, and Segarelli met a similar fate in 1300. Thereafter, under the leadership of Fra Dolcino, the sect became openly heterodox and anticlerical. Its power was finally broken when Dolcino was burned as a heretic in 1307.
During the Protestant Reformation many of the doctrines of the various Apostolics were espoused by the Anabaptists.