First-century Christian sect mentioned in Revelation 2:6, 14-15. In the letter to the church at Ephesus, Christ commends the Ephesians: thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate (Revelation 2:6). In the letter to the church at Pergamum, Christ rebukes the Pergamenes: thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication. So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate (Revelation 2:14-15). The juxtaposition with the doctrine of Balaam (which involved Israel's idolatry and sexual immorality at Baal-peor, Numbers 25:1-9; 31:16) suggests that the Nicolaitan heresy involved similar compromise with pagan idolatry and sexual immorality. Patristic tradition (Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.26.3; Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies) identified the sect's founder as Nicolas of Antioch, one of the seven men chosen by the Jerusalem church in Acts 6:5 to administer the daily distribution to widows; later patristic writers debated whether the sect represented a genuine departure of Nicolas himself from apostolic doctrine or whether the Nicolaitans had falsely claimed Nicolas as authority for their compromise. The substantive content of Nicolaitism, drawing on the Revelation 2 passages and patristic tradition, appears to have involved (1) eating food sacrificed to idols (a problem also addressed in 1 Corinthians 8-10 and the Jerusalem Council's apostolic decree in Acts 15:20, 29); (2) sexual immorality, particularly in compromising contexts with pagan culture; (3) some form of Christian-syncretist accommodation to Greco-Roman pagan culture. The patriarchal-Reformed reader engages Nicolaitism as a substantive NT-era heresy that Christ Himself explicitly hates, and as the perennial pattern of Christian-cultural accommodation that recurs throughout church history.