Standing on Higher Ground; The History of the Papacy

[Trollheart]

So, I hear you all moan, he’s lost it at last. After vampires, serial killers, histories of this country and that country, animation and aviation he’s reduced to the most boring topic of all time: popes.

What? Boring did I hear you say?

Boring?

Let me tell you, nothing could be farther from the truth! The history of the papacy is littered with lies, corruption, sex, racism, misogyny, wars, betrayal, and power hungry men who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted. Boring? It’s like the Roman Empire, only without the sex. Well, okay, with the sex. But without the war. No, wait a minute, it has that too. Well, without the betray - okay, basically the long, two thousand year plus story of the papacy is just like the history of the Roman Empire, but with just the one god.

It’s also incredibly amusing that because one man who may or may not have been the son of God (who himself may or may not exist) gave authority to another over his people, this authority has carried through two millennia and continues to hold sway over the faithful, sending them into paroxysms of ecstasy whenever he even appears before them. But the real question is: how did this institution , which was originally intended to be the idea of a shepherd leading his flock and caring for them, turn into century after century of men setting themselves up as little less than kings and emperors, and lining their own coffers while the ministration to the faithful could go fuck itself? And how, after so many corrupt popes, did the whole thing - on the surface, at least - turn itself back to the business of looking after God’s people?

I feel the history of the Papacy should be a very interesting thing to research - not always; surely there were Popes who did little in their term, just spent their time nodding off and calling for mugs of milky tea, but certainly in the earlier days they all but reigned like kings or emperors, so there should be a lot of meat there. And while of course the “bad Popes” are going to be more interesting to write about, I don’t intend this to be a hatchet job: many of the Popes supported the arts, were patrons of literature and architecture, even helped the poor and contributed to world history in a positive way. So I will be taking the good with the bad, and trying to draw a picture of what the Papacy has looked like over the now two thousand years and counting of its existence. As you probably all know, I am a non-believer, but my intention is not to denigrate or jeer at the institution of the Papacy, and I will give as balanced and fair an account as I can manage.

But it should not and cannot be overlooked that it was the Catholic Church that instigated the Crusades, the Inquisitions and who ordered certain books - and many people - to be burned, the Church which actively held back advances in science because they did not fit in with their teachings and were therefore seen as heretical, and who kept women and minorities down, believing this to be the “will of God.” Popes often sponsored or even commanded armies, wars and land grabs, allowed loveless marriages for the sake of alliance building, and helped to keep Europe in the Dark Ages. On the flip side, as noted, and certainly during the Renaissance, they were the patrons of the arts, builders of cathedrals, hospitals, schools and of course churches, and provided for the poor and the destitute.

Whether true or not we shall see, but the TV series The Borgias implied that Popes were not just elected - at least, at that time in history - but could buy, bribe, threaten or even murder their way into the job. In many ways (and again, how much of this is fantasy, distortion of the truth or pure lies I don’t know at the moment) the Vatican seems to have been, for some considerable time, almost a forerunner of the Mafia, with hired killers, poisonings, suppression of the truth and, of course, twisted sexual practices. I’d like to say that was just a few bad apples, but this is not something I know, so you’ll have to find out as I do, as we descend into the murky forgotten dusty crypts of the Vatican and unearth the stories of the men behind the office down through almost two millennia.

Of course, I say the Vatican, but the independent city-state was only established less than a century ago, in 1929. Prior to that, all popes presided from Rome (though there were a few exceptions as we will see) as this was of course the centre of the Roman Empire, which changed from a pagan worship to a Christian one on the conversion of the Emperor Constantine the Great, allowing the new sect, which had up till then been persecuted by the Romans, its adherents tortured and killed, its priests hunted down, to be practiced in public and in safety.

[Trollheart]

Part I: Foundations (1st to 10th Century)

Chapter I: Upon This Rock: The Founding of Christianity and the Beginning of the Papacy

FIRST CENTURY

Total popes: 5
Oldest:TBA

"And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
(Matthew 16:18)

Papal Name: Saint Peter
Actual Name: Shimon Bar Yonah
Born: c. 1 AD
Year elected: c. 30
Country: Israel (Judea)
Region: Capernaum
Duration of Papacy: approx. 34 years
Roman Emperor(s) in his time:Caligula, Claudius, Nero (talk about a baptism of fire!)
Bulls: n/a
Achievements: Established Christianity
Enemies: Romans, Jews, other religions, almost everyone
Wars Engaged in or Supported: n/a
Died: c. 64-68
Death: By crucifixion (said to be upside-down)
Buried: Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where the Vatican now stands

Even if you, like me, doubt that Jesus Christ was or is the Son of God and that he rose from the dead, there is good historical evidence that a man of that name lived and preached in the area around Judea in what we have come to call AD 30 or so, and that he had followers, of which Simon Peter is said to have been one. As noted in the quote from The Gospel of Matthew above, Jesus is reputed to have told Peter (then called Simon, or Shimon) that he was to lead his church after Jesus’s death, and for this reason he renamed him Peter, or the rock. No, not that one. As a result of this, Peter is seen in Christian belief as being the first ever pope. It might not be the greatest endorsement of him that he denied even knowing his master three times (as Jesus prophesied) but then, we all do things we later wish we hadn’t when we’re scared, and who among us has not lied to protect his own skin, so maybe we can forgive him that little slip.

The Bible (the only semi-historical record we have of events leading up to Jesus’s death) tells us that after his rabbi was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane the Apostles, the followers and disciples of Jesus, legged it and split, all heading in different directions, hiding from the Romans, whom they feared would arrest them too. It’s fair to say that, while Peter had his long dark night of the soul, punctuated with a dreadful full stop by the crow of the cock, none of the other Apostles were exactly rushing to give themselves up either. After all, when it comes right down to it they were just men, and simple men at that: their leader, whom they had hoped and believed would change the world, had just been taken by the military force occupying their country, and to them it must have been something like expecting to hang around while the Nazis took Anne Frank. Well, nothing like that, but certainly you didn’t rush up to the SS and say “Here I am! Arrest me too!”

No. To give its authors credit, there are no wild stories invented about how the Apostles all stuck with Jesus, surrounding him and stopping his arrest, and giving themselves up too. While Peter did literally strike a blow for freedom in Gethsemane, Jesus rebuked him and allowed himself to be taken. The Bible, whether you believe it or not, has no reason to lie about this. The authors could have made out there had been a glorious standoff, a popular uprising that swept Jesus to power. Or that, being the Son of God, he had simply vanished, or his captors had been cowed by his majesty and divinity, and fallen on their knees before him. This is not what we’re told happened. The story given is brutal and honest, without frills or fables, without miracles or daring escapes. Jesus, when it came down to it, was taken without resistance, and the Christian sect lost its leader.

And after Jesus had been crucified (if you wish to believe he appeared to the Apostles, including Peter, three days later, that’s your right, but I don’t) Peter set about carrying out the mammoth task his master had set for him, that of carrying on and spreading the faith, taking the Good News to all nations, scattering the seed Jesus had sown far and wide. He would find this was harder than it seemed.

Christians being Christians, and men being men, almost immediately the new sect (not yet a church) began to disagree on various points of dogma. It should be perhaps noted that there is no record of Jesus, the undeniable (for Christians) head of the new church, ever specifying who could and could not “join up”. In fact, he said that “anyone” who believes in me, shall have eternal life. He did not say “any Jew” or “any Gentile” (non-Jew) or even “anyone but the Romans”. He said everyone, which included everyone; everyone of every faith who was prepared to believe in and follow his teachings could be considered a Christian, and was allowed enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

His followers, however, didn’t quite see it that way.

A row broke out between Peter and James, the brother of Jesus. James believed that Christians (I’m not sure if they were called that yet, but you know what I mean) should adhere, um, religiously to the traditions of Judaism. Paul in particular believed that in order to be accepted into the new sect, which he saw as Jewish (which it pretty much was, then) converts must follow Jewish law, the Law of Moses. This included, inevitably, a popular Jewish operation in the trouser area. But not too many of those who wanted to switch sides had much interest in losing their foreskin, and Paul was of the belief that “no snip, no service, no salvation”, or words to that effect. Peter, on the other hand, pointed out that Jesus - remember him? Our master? Died on the cross, returned from the dead, ascended into Heaven? Oh come on! You must remember him! Nice guy, long hair, beard, wouldn’t hurt a fly? Yeah, yeah, that’s the one, you remember now - had never set these preconditions on being accepted as part of his flock. While travelling Judea preaching, had he ever once asked to see a fore - well, let’s not go there, but basically the point being made was that if Jesus had not ordered it then it was all cool. All friends together, and even Moses might have agreed.

But on such points of disagreement schisms develop, and so it was with the fledgling religion. Only barely born, not even able to talk or do anything for itself, it was already throwing tantrums and demanding this and that. Peter decided to take the dispute to the only one left on Earth who could be said to be related to Jesus (the only male; females of course did not count, despite the inclusion of Mary Magdalene into the Apostles by Jesus), his brother, James, called the Just. He ruled as follows:

[i]“My brothers, you are well aware that from early days God made his choice among you that through my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the heart, bore witness by granting them the Holy Spirit just as he did us. He made no distinction between us and them, for by faith he purified their hearts. Why, then, are you now putting God to the test by placing on the shoulders of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they.”
— Acts 15:7–11

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.”
— Acts 15:19–20[/i]

In other words, basically what I said: if Jesus didn’t demand this of his followers, then what do you think gives you the right to? Chill out man, and let them keep their fucking foreskins. It’s their souls we want, their hearts and minds. What is it with you and genitalia anyway? You some sort of queer or something?

Well, maybe not the last. But the decision was made, and so Gentiles would be allowed to become Christians without having to sacrifice their best friend’s overcoat. Paul, of course, was not going to take this lying down, and thundered in a letter to the Galaxians, sorry Galatians “When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat the Gentiles (sorry, sorry: that’s eat WITH the Gentiles. Ah, the difference one word can make! From potential cannibal to a nice cup of cha). But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. (Sounds like some sort of self-support group). The rest of the Jews joined in this charade and even Barnabas was drawn into the hypocrisy.” (Oh no! Not Barnabas! All right, I’ll stop now).

It seems that Paul was losing support, and the schism between the two leaders began to widen. Theological scholars and experts disagree about a whole lot of things, including the possibility that the Peter mentioned as having a face-off with Paul was not that Peter but another one. There are differing opinions as to how the two men got on in later life - some even postulate that they were both martyred at the same time. None of that really concerns us, as I intend to concentrate on the popes and not Saint Peter, but he has to be covered as he was the first pope. I make no claims as to theological knowledge about the man, and admit that all we know about him comes from the Bible and either his own writings or those of other Apostles, some of whom, like Paul, may have been predisposed towards blackening his name and placing himself in the best light possible. Good luck to them both: I don’t care. I’m just trying to position Peter historically as to what he did to kick off the original GOP that now all but rules the Earth.

Peter is said to have served as Bishop of the ancient Greek city of Antioch, now in modern Turkey, for seven years, then headed over to what would eventually - after a very long time, and long after he was dust himself - become the centre of Christian power, the Italian capital city and stronghold of the Roman Empire, Rome itself. Before even Antioch though, Peter would have a confrontation with a man who would challenge his power, and provide him with his first major challenge since the death of Jesus.

[Trollheart]

Simon Magus

But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, “This man is the great power [Gr. Dynamis Megale] of God.”[17] And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done. Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Ghost: (for as yet he was fallen upon none of them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.) Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost. And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, saying, “Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost.” But Peter said unto him, “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought [Gr. Epinoia][18] of thine heart may be forgiven thee, for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.” Then answered Simon, and said, “Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.”
— (Acts 8:9–24)

Reading the above it can be seen that while Simon Magus, a Samaritan, wished to be an Apostle he coveted the power rather than the desire to convert. He even went so far as to try to pay for the power, which really ticked Peter off, and he kicked him out of the city and denounced him. On arriving in Rome (before Peter) he seems to have set himself up as Jesus, telling everyone that he was the saviour, and performing “miracles” - he is said to have been a magician and a sorcerer (what’s the difference? Dunno) and to have been able to levitate himself off the ground. Unlike (or, perhaps archly, like) the man he was impersonating, he fell in with a bad woman by the name of Helen, and the Romans clapped at his magic and even made him a god.

It’s quite amazing the myths that grew up around this guy. I mean, some writers seem to have believed he actually was God. I mean, literally. The Big Cheese, old Scarypants himself, as Rik Mayall once said, though he was referring to the Devil at the time. Epiphanius (from whom, I wonder, is it possible we get the word epiphany?), Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, wrote that - oh wait just one tension-popping moment! I’ve heard of this guy. Wasn’t he the one who refuted Origen in my journal about the Devil, moaning that he was wrong about his interpretation of God or something? And it seems that he didn’t believe what I’m about to relate, but did in fact refute it in his Panarion (it means bread-basket - why did he title it so?) which is a work basically demolishing all Christian sects whose specific beliefs he did not agree with. Spent a lot of his time refuting, did our Epiphanius; seems to have been pretty much all he did. Nobody could refute like him. A dab hand at the old refuting, this lad.

So then, Epiphanius tells and then refutes (see?) the story that God was sitting around bored one day, long long ago, so long ago that even I don’t remember what I was doing. Long before he had the spiffing idea of creating a universe, even. And a thought popped into his head, known as his First Thought, and for some unfathomable reason given a name and even a sex, female. The thought was called Ennoia (which, I have to be honest, sounds very close to annoy doesn’t it?) and gave him this idea, literally translated from the pages of Panarion:

“Fuck me but I’m bored sitting around here with nothing to do. I am great after all. Why isn’t somebody here praising me? I need to be praised, and constantly too. No point in hiring some dumbos who will drop in twice a week for a quick “Hosanna” and then feck off home, leaving me lonely and bored and un-praised. Nah, I need full-time staff. See to it will you Ennoia?”

(Okay I lied. Back to Ennoia and her great thought):

And so she did. She made herself into an idea, this thought called Annoy ya and this thought was this: where in the name of blue jumping fuck am I going to find professional sycophants for this guy? Congress hasn’t been invented, Trump is trillennia from being born, and this copy of God News is three months old! I know! I’ll make them, I will. What a good idea.”

And so she did. Down to - well, I really don’t know. Down to nowhere really. If this was, as the account suggests, the Beginning, then really nothing should have existed, should it? There should have been nowhere to go. What does it say in that bestseller of fiction? “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and something something was without form something.” I don’t know: I haven’t opened a Bible since I was a kid, and even then I was bored. But religion - especially Christianity - is full of these paradoxes, and they’re never explained, mostly because they can’t be. The old f-word is used so often - no, not that one! Faith I mean - it becomes a catch-all for everything that’s too hard, or even impossible to explain, sort of “a wizard did it” kind of thing.

Anyhoo, this thought went somewhere, and created the angels. Masterstroke. Smashed it. God will be really happy now, thought Ennoia, and headed back up to tell him the Good News. Well, tried to anyway. Seems the angels, for some reason, according to this account, were none too pleased to have been created. Kind of like your annoying teenage son fuming “I didn’t ask to be born!” Well, they didn’t, and they were, on the whole, pretty pissed off about it. They grabbed Enoia - of whom, it is said, they were jealous - and jammed her into a female body.

Now, again, help me out here. Man had not been created, much less woman. The angels were the first living beings to be made by God, or his thought at any rate, so without the actual concept of male and female, how did they manage to…? Look, let’s just leave all this inconvenient logic behind us, yeah? Go crazy otherwise. So they put poor old Ennoia into a female body and proceeded to, um, humiliate her down through the ages, as Man came swaggering onto the scene, much later. The angels, according to this account (which might have been part of the reason poor old Epiphanius spat out his unleavened bread or whatever he was eating and said “Oh no you fucking don’t lads!”) created the world as a prison for Ennoia, gave her the finger, said, “That’ll teach you to create us, you bitch!” and slouched off to Heaven, where God greeted them, not with joy or love, but with a sharp glance at his watch and a frown, asking “where the hell have you guys been? Get to work immediately and don’t expect any fucking lunch break!”

Maybe the angels had a point in not having wanted to be born. I mean, when your entire existence consists of telling one ageing white guy how great he is, you might as well be in Donald Trump’s staff! Anyway at some point God must have thought “Where the hooting heck is that thought of mine?” and the angels shrugging uncomfortably and changing the subject by commenting loudly on how shiny his hair was, and how he only look a quadrillion gazillion years old and they could not believe he was so much older than that, surely not, he decided the only thing he could do was get up off his divine ass and lever himself up off of the couch (with the assistance of an infinite number of angels, all of whom did groan and grunt and sweat most profusely but yea, did refrain from suggesting the old guy sign up for a gym membership or maybe take more walks) and go looking for her.

In perhaps the first ever instance of finding yourself, this account goes on to say he discovered her on Earth, and was mightily pissed. He descended to Earth, possibly making admiring remarks about the architecture, and found his thought Ennoia was in the body of a woman called Helen. He came to her in the shape of (thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you? Thought my mind was wandering again) Simon Magus, speaking thus:

“And on her account,” he says, "did I come down; for this is that which is written in the Gospel ‘the lost sheep’. - Epiphanius, Panarion, 21.3.5

His explanation then seems to have been a little, shall we say, distracted as he went on.

“For as the angels were mismanaging the world, owing to their individual lust for rule, he had come to set things straight, and had descended under a changed form, likening himself to the Principalities and Powers through whom he passed, so that among men he appeared as a man, though he was not a man, and was thought to have suffered in Judaea, though he had not suffered.”

Right. Glad we got that sorted then. But he wasn’t finished, oh no.
“But in each heaven I changed my form,” says he, “in accordance with the form of those who were in each heaven, that I might escape the notice of my angelic powers and come down to the Thought, who is none other than her who is also called Prunikos and Holy Ghost, through whom I created the angels, while the angels created the world and men.”

Oh-kay. Well, it’s no wonder Eipihanius blew a fuse, is it? While it’s a given that trying to figure logic into religion is a waste of time, there are some basic details here that seriously challenge standard Christian dogma.

First: the idea of God’s thoughts, or any part of him, being female. Surely this is not what the Church, an institution which delights in keeping women down and which, through its teachings via the Bible, holds all of womanhood liable for humanity’s unceremonious ejection from the Garden of Eden, wants to preach? God is a man. There is no argument. God is superior. Man is superior. Therefore, God must be a man. QED. How dare anyone suggest any part of him be female? And his thoughts? As we all know, the brain is the seat of the human personality, so what is being suggested here is that the most important part of God - his brain - is (at least in part) female, which is tantamount to saying God is female!

Heresy!

Second: the account claims that this female thought created the angels, not God. Well, I mean, yes, essentially it’s still God, but I can imagine Epiphanius fuming at the idea of “any part of God being female” and that part being given the glory of bringing the angels into being. I doubt he would have been amused.

Heresy!

Third: The angels create Earth and imprison Ennoia (God, basically) there. What happened to “God moved on the waters” or whatever? Everyone knows the big man made the Earth, no damn angels. Angels are good at singing and praising and occasionally fighting for the Lord, doing the odd Annunciation to unsuspecting virgins, but creating the Earth? Do me a favour, son. Next you’ll be asking me to believe there’s more than one God!

Heresy!

Fourth, and finally: God comes down to Earth, not as Jesus, not to take on the sins of men (well, women really, but we’ll give them a pass - for now) and to bring eternal salvation, but to save his whore?

Heres - well, you get the picture.

So Epiphanius roundly condemned and branded Simon Magus as a heretic, as had Hippolytus, another well respected theologian, a century before when he wrote, rather more damningly, “But the liar was enamoured of this wench, whose name was Helen, and had bought her and had her to wife, and it was out of respect for his disciples that he invented this fairy-tale.”

You’ve got to wonder, don’t you, if this “wench Helen” (sometimes called Helena) is linked to or based on or in any way related to she of the Trojan War, that “face that launched a thousand ships” and who is of course blamed by Homer for the war, continuing a longstanding tradition of putting it all on the woman. Women aren’t allowed on ships because they’re bad luck. Women for a long time couldn’t vote, or own property. Women married to kings were blamed if they couldn’t get pregnant, or, if they did, if they lost the child. Women were burned as witches (seldom ever men) and women were stalked by killers like Jack the Ripper. All the way back to poor unfortunate Eve, who after all was just a bit peckish and took the Yelp review of the big tree from that nice snakelike fellow, women have been oppressed, put upon, blamed and punished for almost every evil that has befallen man.

At any rate, Hippolytus goes on to describe how Peter (yes I know, we’re getting there, we’re getting there) took on the heretic: Until he came to Rome also and fell foul of the Apostles. Peter withstood him on many occasions. At last he came … and began to teach sitting under a plane tree. When he was on the point of being shown up, he said, in order to gain time, that if he were buried alive he would rise again on the third day. So he bade that a tomb should be dug by his disciples and that he should be buried in it. Now they did what they were ordered, but he remained there until now: for he was not the Christ.

Oops! I suppose there’s such a thing as believing your own press too much, huh? I can just see the poor old disciples of Simon, standing around, looking at their watches (yes, yes!) and turning to each other after four days, shrugging and slowly dispersing. Backed the wrong horse again.

[Trollheart]

Not surprisingly, there are several accounts of Simon Magus’s death, and many of his encounters both with Saint Peter and Saint Paul, who seem to have put their theological and ideological differences aside at least long enough to team up against the common enemy. One story tells of Magus riding a chariot through the air pulled by demons (uh-huh) which the two saints bring crashing to the ground by the power of prayer, killing Magus or, as it puts it in the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem (346 AD) “their prayers brought him to earth a mangled corpse.” Then there were the Acts of Peter, believed written by Photoshop sorry Photios (c. 810/820 - 893) in which Peter actually challenges Magus to what amounts to I guess a magical smackdown. Magus is performing magic such as levitating himself from a tower (which might be slightly - but only slightly - more believable and explainable than riding through the air in a chariot pulled by demons!) and declaring he is going to Heaven. Peter throws down the gauntlet, praying to God to fix this imposter, and so he does. Magus falls mid-flight and breaks his leg in three places. Reading between the lines, it seems the inefficiency or ineptitude of the local doctors exacerbated the problem, and he died in pain.

The Acts of Peter and Paul, not to be confused with the above, author unknown but sometimes attributed to some head called Marcellus, note that the emperor Nero was a believer in Magus and had Peter and Paul imprisoned for three days, expecting Simon Magus to rise, Jesus-like, after three days. Needless to say, he was ever so slightly disappointed, so much so that he ordered the crucifixion of the two lads.

Though he didn’t cheat death, necessitating the stowing by a crestfallen and angry Nero of the banner WELCOME BACK SIMON MAGUS I ALWAYS BELIEVED IN YOU and his cancellation of the ticker-tape parade, there are many accounts of Simon Magus’s supposed magic. Mind you, it’s important to be careful here. We have about as much evidence for them as we do for the works or miracles of Jesus, and who can say for sure what, if anything, happened, especially given that the accounts are all written by friendly hands, men who would want to place their leader in the best possible light? With that in mind though, here’s what Magus is reputed to have done.

Seizing the chance to take over from him while he was away in Egypt at some magic symposium or other, one of his followers took it into his head to pronounce himself the leader, or as Simon Magus had described himself, the Standing One (I would assume some early Biblical times version of last man standing?) and when Simon came back and challenged him, here’s what apparently happened.

"Dositheus, when he perceived that Simon was depreciating him, fearing lest his reputation among men might be obscured (for he himself was supposed to be the Standing One), moved with rage, when they met as usual at the school, seized a rod, and began to beat Simon; but suddenly the rod seemed to pass through his body, as if it had been smoke. On which Dositheus, being astonished, says to him, ‘Tell me if thou art the Standing One, that I may adore thee.’ And when Simon answered that he was, then Dositheus, perceiving that he himself was not the Standing One, fell down and worshipped him, and gave up his own place as chief to Simon, ordering all the rank of thirty men to obey him; himself taking the inferior place which Simon formerly occupied. Not long after this he died.”

From what I can work out, this account comes from something called Histories and Recognitions, by a guy called Clement, who is believed either not to have existed or to have been someone who just wrote stuff down without any proof. They call this a “romance”, which I guess is as close as it comes to describing it as fiction. He also (Magus, not the possible Clement) did a Dorian Grey by enslaving the soul of a young boy to act as his familiar, keeping it trapped by use of the boy’s image in his room. Right.

When Simon Magus again debates Peter on the nature of Jesus, and how he, Simon, is better placed to know the mind of the Saviour (despite having, he says, only conversed with him in dreams and visions, whereas Peter has spoken to him literally in the flesh - and denied him, though I think he leaves that part out) Peter takes him apart philosophically and theologically thus:

“But can any one be educated for teaching by vision? And if you shall say, “It is possible,” why did the Teacher remain and converse with waking men for a whole year? And how can we believe you even as to the fact that he appeared to you? And how can he have appeared to you seeing that your sentiments are opposed to his teaching? But if you were seen and taught by him for a single hour, and so became an apostle, then preach his words, expound his meaning, love his apostles, fight not with me who had converse with him. For it is against a solid rock, the foundation-stone of the Church, that you have opposed yourself in opposing me. If you were not an adversary, you would not be slandering me and reviling the preaching that is given through me, in order that, as I heard myself in person from the Lord, when I speak I may not be believed, as though forsooth it were I who was condemned and I who was reprobate. Or, if you call me condemned, you are accusing God who revealed the Christ to me, and are inveighing against Him who called me blessed on the ground of the revelation. But if indeed you truly wish to work along with the truth, learn first from us what we learnt from Him, and when you have become a disciple of truth, become our fellow-workman.”

And mic drop.

But we have got a little off the beaten path here, and this is supposed to be about Saint Peter. His battles, both physical and philosophical, with Simon Magus are only a small part of his story, though they do come near its end, as he ends up being crucified a matter of days after Simon’s death. But let’s not forget Simon Magus was in Rome long before Peter, who was hanging out at Antioch for seven years. What did he do in that time, between kicking out Simon Magus and later facing him down in the final confrontation? Well he seems on the face of it to have been quite a pragmatic man. Judaism is notorious for its insistence on adherence to its rites - no Jew can eat pork, all Jewish boys must go through the Bah Mitzvah and so on, but this wasn’t Judaism, or if it was, it was a new offshoot of it, and Peter must have known that, like every new idea, it was going to take some persuading before people would try it.

For one thing, you have to consider the times. Jews had clung desperately to their religion in the face of an occupying force who believed in multiple gods, and while in general the Empire recognised that to try to force all Jews to convert would kick off riots across the entire region, they were still made to feel like they were ignorant, superstitious fools. So, considering how important their religion was to them, is it any wonder they resisted the idea of another new guy on the block, who seemed to take the best of their religion but add some of its own, and asked them to convert? They wouldn’t exactly have been lining up, especially since the new sect was already outlawed and unrecognised by Rome, given that its now-dead leader had been classified and executed as an enemy of the state. Why should they ally themselves with such rebels and bring trouble down on their heads, when the Romans were - grudgingly - allowing them to pursue their own religion?

If he was to get anyone to sign up, Peter must have realised that he had to make it as attractive as possible, and placing restrictions on membership was not going to help. Besides, Jesus had not mentioned any such terms and conditions, had he? So while Jews had to eat “kosher” meat, why should Christians? Was it necessary for Christians to be circumcised? This was a big bone (sorry) of contention between Peter and Paul, the latter of whom thought the snip was definitely in order, but Peter knew most men would not go for this, and would then say “nah you’re all right mate I’ll stay where I am”. Of course then Jews converting were going to be pissed, as they would already have lost their outer shell, as it were, and would probably resent that the new guys hadn’t to go through the same no doubt painful process (so much more for them, one would shudderingly imagine, than for the Jewish lads, who would not even remember the ceremony, having been babies at the time).

So Peter did what he could to make joining up as easy and hassle-free as possible, though of course there were still rules that had to be followed. One god, lads. Just the one. Leave the others behind. No, you fucking can’t have just Mercury too. I don’t give a toss if he’s only a little one, he’s not welcome. Aphro-what? Goddess of love? Do me a favour.

Paul did not agree. Paul was, I guess what we’d call a hardliner, a traditionalist. Not forgetting of course that all the Disciples were Jews originally, Paul believed all Jewish traditions and conditions should be brought forward into the new religion, making it more an offshoot of Judaism than a totally new religion. He therefore reviled the Gentiles (non-Jews) who refused to do the things mentioned above, and more, and decreed they should be shut out of the new religion, not allowed to follow Jesus. But as I say, Paul and Peter obviously reconciled, or at least declared a truce, as they’re depicted as working together for much of the accounts that mention them.

They are, for instance, both said to have founded the Church of Corinth (in ancient Greece) and Rome: “You have thus by such an admonition bound together the planting of Peter and of Paul at Rome and Corinth. For both of them planted and likewise taught us in our Corinth. And they taught together in like manner in Italy, and suffered martyrdom at the same time” - (Dionysius of Corinth, Fragment of a Letter to the Roman Church, Chapter III). However there may be doubt about this, as apparently in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul namechecks his homies in Rome but Peter is conspicuous by his absence. Three to five years later, about AD 60 - 62, again no mention of Peter during Paul’s two-year stay in Rome.

The death of Peter or rather, his acceptance of it - is commemorated in story and in a painting by the fifteenth-century artist Annibale Carrachi, which depicts the legend. Christ is seen carrying his cross towards Rome, while Peter, under sentence of death, is getting out of Dodge. He asks his master “Domine, Quo Vadis?” (Lord, where are you going?) to which Jesus replies “Eo Romam vado iterum crucifigi” (I am going to Rome to be crucified again). On realising that Jesus has to die twice because of his cowardice (what?) Peter decides to return to Rome and face his fate. All highly idealised, as is the idea he was then crucified upside-down, possibly due to the incompetence of Lucius Malefistus Stupidus, an intern on his first day on the job who had held the instructions the wrong way up. Or, according to various Christian dogmas, because he did not believe himself worthy of dying as Christ did, or again to illustrate that the Romans had everything upside-down, arse-about-face, and that he was, even right up to the end, a fucking clever clogs who never knew when to shut his fool mouth.

Whatever the truth, that was the end (at least, the human end - don’t ask me about what happened next, if anything) of Saint Peter, the first Bishop of Rome, and the first Pope of the new Christian Church. Of course, back then the word pope was not even invented and the Church was still a persecuted sect, but later, when things cooled down and it became accepted, legal and then official, and eventually the most literal example of local boy done good as Christianity became the biggest religion in the entire world, there was time to write about Saint Peter and to adopt him as being the very first pope.

As something of a postscript to this, in 1939 fragments of bone were unearthed in what was believed to be a shrine just beneath St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, said to be the grave of the saint himself. Now, it was apparently the current pope at the time, Paul VI, who confirmed the bone fragments were those of Saint Peter. What exact skill a pope has in archeology, forensics or anthropology I don’t know, but he was seen as the central authority and almost thirty years after their excavation the bones were pronounced as being those of the first pope of the Christian Church. More tricky was working out whether this was indeed the place of the saint’s burial or just the site of his execution, and that, well, they’re still working on that. Still, it does seem to prove, if nothing else, that the man actually existed. Of course, technically speaking these bones surely can’t be identified (DNA would be useless, as I doubt the Roman Empire kept a database to check it against) so they could in all likelihood be the bones of anyone. Like almost everything to do with the Church, and religion in general, I guess it’s a matter of faith. You either believe or you don’t.

Following Peter the line of succession is a little blurred, a lot disputed and not very well documented, but in general these are the more or less agreed-upon men who took up the baton, sometimes called the “shadow popes”, which, though it sounds like some sort of cabalistic organisation working dark deeds in the Vatican, merely refers to their doubtful provenance. I suppose as the Christian Church was then a) new and b) under persecution by Rome, the chances of anyone writing down for instance minutes of meetings wherein a new pope was elected were slim, and even if anyone did, they’re lost to history now, so we go with what we have.

[Trollheart]

And next we have this guy.

Papal Name: Linus
Actual Name: Linus
Born: c. AD 10
Year elected: c. AD 67
Country: Italy
Region: Volterra
Duration of Papacy: 9 years
Roman Emperor(s) in his time:Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian (that’s a LOT of arses on the Imperial throne, but then, this was the time of the Four Emperors)
Bulls: None
Achievements: Not really an achievement, but witness to the sacking and burning of Jerusalem
Enemies: Roman Empire, all Peter’s inherited enemies
Wars Engaged in or Supported: None, though he lived and ruled during the Jewish-Roman War
Died: c. AD 76
Death: Probably from natural causes. There are those who claim he was martyred, but this is believed unlikely.
Buried: (possibly) Vatican Hill

Like I say, there’s very little to go on with the first batch of popes, as I guess they spent their time moving around and avoiding the Romans, but what we do know of Linus is that he’s agreed to have been the second pope, ordained by Saint Peter (and later canonised himself, in a move which would become almost a posthumous perk of the office) and (remembering that there are differing views and you really don’t want to get bogged down in these theological arguments and debates) is said to have been with Saint Paul near the time of his death or perhaps even when he died, in Rome. What is almost certainly not in doubt though is that Linus was the first Italian pope, and that virtually every other pope for two thousand years would be from that country, with a very few small - but often important - exceptions.

Can you then, I wonder, describe Linus as the first Roman pope? Italy being the heart of the Roman Empire, I think you could, and this then seriously predates the later conversion of Constantine the Great to Christianity and the wider acceptance of, and indeed imposition of the world’s favourite religion throughout Rome, and later the world. I suppose the idea of travelling to Rome to set up the new Church was to “beard the dragon in its lair”, so to speak, or even walk into the lion’s den, almost literally. Rome was the centre of the empire’s power, so if Christianity was to flourish it would have to take on the control and command centre of the religion which worshipped false gods, and in so doing take on the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. Like they say, go big or go home.

An interesting point about Linus is that, if the dates given are correct (and of course they may be off a year or two here or there, but are generally accepted to be more or less accurate) then he would have been the first pope to see Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish - and later Christian - faith destroyed by General, later to be Emperor Titus in AD 70. Following the Jewish Riots of 66 (get your kicks, huh?) when Jewish forces seized control of Jerusalem, the First Jewish-Roman War was initiated, and when Nero died in 68 there was a mad scramble for power, as the Year of the Four Emperors began the first Roman civil war. As you might expect from the name, 69 was the year that four separate emperors sat on the imperial throne - Galba, Otho, Vitellius and finally Vespasian, who would rule for ten years before being succeeded by his son, Titus.

As a general, Titus distinguished himself in the Jewish-Roman War and it was he who was responsible for sacking the city and burning the temple in 70, and also he who oversaw the completion of the new amphitheatre which was to become known as the Colosseum. He would also live through the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, a matter of a few months after he had taken the throne. Titus, then, though feted both as a Roman general and emperor by history (his rule was said to be one of the wisest and most benign in decades, particularly after the cruelties and insanities perpetrated by Nero and Caligula before him) was a hated figure among Jews, and also the burgeoning new Christian religion, for his destruction of Jerusalem and his sacrilegious burning of the temple.

Linus would have found himself under immense pressure, trying to keep his faith and his people together in the face of such barbarity, and while the Christians were presumably not involved in the Jewish-Roman War, he must have felt for and sympathised with them. I mean, I don’t know how the new sect felt about the war, whether they had any stake in it, but they surely would not have been on the side of Rome, and having been only less than a century ago most likely Jews themselves, it must have hit hard. To some extent, you could perhaps compare Linus to the guy who’s entrusted with the keys to the office for the first time only to have the place turned over. The old adage was true, and all roads did indeed lead to Rome. Rome was the cultural, religious, military and artistic centre of the world, so any new religion wanting to spread its message would have to set up here.

I find it surprising, yet when I think about it now perhaps I should not, that early Christianity jostled and jockeyed for position with other new religions and sects, all of which wanted to attract the attention of the people, and all of which based themselves in Rome. In a way, I get the feeling of a kind of reality show idea - Last Religion Standing!? - where the one that could attract the most converts would be the one to survive, while the others would fade away or at least be less popular and not spread as far.

How very Darwinian, huh?

[Trollheart]

Papal Name: Anacletus
Actual Name: Anacletus
Born: c. AD 25
Year elected: c. AD 79
Country: Greece
Region: Athens
Duration of Papacy: 13 years
Bulls: None
Achievements: Divided Rome up into 25 parishes
Enemies:
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: c. AD 92
Death: Probably natural causes
Buried: St. Peter’s Basilica

Also known as Cletus, and the first one who calls him a slack-jawed yokel will… make me laugh. Yeah, there’s very little written about this third pope other than that he established various parishes in Rome itself. The first Pope to come from Greece. The only one? I guess we’ll find out as we go along. Again, there are claims he was martyred, but no details, and historians in general reckon this is a load of bullpucky.

Papal Name: Clement I
Actual Name: Clement
Born: c. AD 35
Year elected: c. AD 88
Country: Italy
Region: Rome
Duration of Papacy: 12 years
Bulls: None, but he is agreed to have written the first existing example of Christian writing, I Clement.
Achievements: Established the authority of bishops over deacons and other lower officials of the church
Enemies: Rome (remember, Rome was an enemy to Christians, ruled by emperors, and would be for another 250 years or so)
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: c. AD 99
Death: Probably natural causes, though there is a belief he was martyred (see below)
Buried: St. Peter’s Basilica

Clement is known as the first of the “Apostolic Fathers”, a title usually taken to mean that the person knew or met the original Disciples or Apostles of Jesus. Clement is certainly believed to have known Peter, and it is quite possible that, like his forebear under Nero, Clement had to guide his people through the persecution of Roman Emperor Domitian. Clement is the first pope (as it were) that I see whose name would be taken by further popes down the centuries. I don’t know when the tradition began of, when being elevated to the papacy, taking a name usually reflecting the new pope’s admiration for, wish to emulate or devotion to a previous holder of the office, but there were about ten Pope Clements down the ages.

One of Clement’s epistles (letters) to the Corinthians asserts the apostolic authority of bishops or presbyters over the church, thereby establishing, if slightly tenuously, the power of the men who would later be called pope. Legends surround his final days, one in particular relating to a miracle and his supposed martyrdom. Having been banished from Rome by the emperor Trajan, he was sent to a penal colony where he was put to work in a stone quarry. Everyone was dying of thirst so Clement - it is related - prayed for water and when he saw a lamb on a hill went there and dug with his pickaxe, releasing a fresh stream. Due to this miracle, many of the prisoners and some of the inhabitants of the colony were converted to Christianity.

The Romans were not amused, and again according to legend (refuted by most scholars but it gives me something to write about) tied him to an anchor and threw him into the sea. What a bunch of anchors! Sorry. Legend goes on to say (as legends do) that every year that part of the Black Sea where he is supposed to have been drowned ebbs mysteriously to reveal an underwater shrine. Whether it supports the legend, or spawned it, or has nothing to do with it, it’s said that Saint Cyril brought what he believed to be the bones of Clement to Rome, found on dry land in the Crimea and attached to… an anchor.

Papal Name: Evaristus
Actual Name: Evaristus
Born: Unknown
Year elected: c. 99
Country: Israel
Region: Bethlehem
Duration of Papacy: 7 years
Bulls:
Achievements:
Enemies: Roman Empire
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: c. 107
Death: Unknown; said to have been martyred
Buried: St. Peter’s Basilica

Even less is known about Evaristus than is known about Anacletus, not even a birth date. Interesting how he is said to have come from the very city that would become sacred both to Jews and Christians, Bethlehem, where Jesus is supposed to have been born.

[Trollheart]

SECOND CENTURY

Papal Name: Alexander I
Actual Name: Alexander
Popes who have subsequently taken this name: 6 (And one Antipope)
Born: January 10 75
Year elected: 107
Country: Italy
Region: Rome
Duration of Papacy: 7 years
Bulls:
Achievements: Said to have introduced the blessing of holy water; said to have converted Hermes (the Roman governor, not the god) and all his household - approximately 1,500 people - in what is regarded as a miracle.
Enemies: Roman Empire
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: 115
Death: Possibly martyred, though it seems this is confusing him with another Alexander, who was beheaded and canonised.
Buried: Freising, Germany

If for no other reason, Alexander I is notable as it was his papal name which one of the most notorious of the line ever to sit in the Vatican took, this of course being the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. As noted above, this Alexander is said to have invented or at least implemented the idea of using holy water to protect the homes of Christians from evil, and of adding water to sacramental wine, perhaps to weaken its alcoholic strength, perhaps to bring together the two symbols of the transubstantiation, water and wine, one changed into the other during the Mass. Or maybe he was a publican in a previous life. It’s also believed he was the first to use the narrative of the Last Supper in the Mass, something we all remember from our childhood, if we’re Catholic that is. That god-damn bell! Which one do you kneel down at, first or second? Nobody ever seemed to know.

Papal Name: Sixtus
Actual Name: Sixtus or Xystus
Popes who have subsequently taken this name: 4
Born: 42
Year elected: 115
Country: Italy
Region: Rome
Duration of Papacy: 9 years
Bulls:
Achievements:
Enemies: Roman Empire
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: 125
Death: Unknown, though as per usual he’s said to have been martyred, without any details
Buried: St. Peter’s Basilica, possibly

Sixtus instigated a “hands off” policy on sacred vessels for all but priests and “sacred ministers”, decreed that any bishop summoned to the Holy See (Rome) had to present an Apostolic Letter before they could be allowed to resume their position in their diocese. What? Did he think that somewhere along the way these bishops were being replaced by pod people or something, and they had to have a “Guaranteed Roman” certificate signed by the pope to weed out imposters? Or is this, more likely, just some overblown churchy nonsense? There was and is certainly enough of that to go around. Oh, and he ensured priests had to sing some sacred hymn called the Sanctus after the preface of the Mass. A priest’s work is never done, huh?

What the hell do I know about it, but someone who knows a lot more than me (wouldn’t be hard) points out that the emperors ruling Rome around this time - Hadrian and then Antoninus - didn’t really hassle the Christians or the Jews during their reign, so it might seem even more unlikely that Sixtus was martyred. Still, Nicholas Cheetham, in his Keeper of the Keys: A History of Popes from Peter to John Paul II does admit that the odd martyrdom did occur, and the lad who follows was one of those unlucky enough to buck the general trend.

Papal Name: Telesphorus
Actual Name: Telesphorus
Popes who have subsequently taken this name: 0
Born: Unknown
Year elected: 126
Country: Italy
Region: Calabria
Duration of Papacy: 11 years
Bulls:
Achievements: Said to have instigated the practice of the Christmas Midnight Mass, Easter being always on a Sunday, the custom of Lent and the singing of the Gloria. As usual, these are all disputed by some scholars.
Enemies: Roman Empire
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: 137
Death: Martyred
Buried: Unknown

As mentioned above, it is in either the first years of the emperor Antoninus or the last of Hadrian that Telesphorus is believed to have been martyred, although there are no details as to his actual death. If the additions above to the mass are true (and many think or believe there is good reason to doubt them) then he would seem to be the first pope since Peter to really shake up the Church, holding that Easter should always fall on a Sunday, allowing congregations to attend a midnight mass, and introducing the tradition of Lent. As far as his martyrdom goes, and its being something of a conflict with the fact that neither of these two emperors actively persecuted Christians, it should probably be borne in mind that Telesphorus was pope at the time of the Second Jewish War, and he may have come under fire as a result of that, even though he would not have been considered a Jew. Perhaps the emperor (either one) was just striking out to try to assert his authority over all “pagans”.

Papal Name: Hyginus
Actual Name: Hyginus
Popes who have subsequently taken this name: 0
Born: Unknown
Year elected: 136
Country: Greece
Region: Athens
Duration of Papacy: 6 years
Bulls:
Achievements:
Enemies: Valentinus
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: 142
Death: Said to have been martyred
Buried: St. Peter’s Basilica

Not the only Greek pope, then. Hyginus is said to have introduced the idea of godparents, who would be present at baptisms and stand for the child, agreeing to take charge of it should the parents die or be otherwise incapacitated. He’s also credited with the organisation of the clergy into a hierarchical structure, and with decreeing that all churches should be consecrated (blessed). Another said to have been martyred, and another without any evidence or details of this. Seems like it went with the territory. He had run-ins with the Gnostics, a kind of spinoff sect or cult who had very different ideas about Jesus and the Heavens, in fact believing God was and is female, and their leader Valentinus made life difficult for him. Especially every February 14. Sorry.

Papal Name: Pius I
Actual Name: Pius
Popes who have subsequently taken this name: 10
Born: late first century
Year elected: 140
Country: Italy
Region: Aquilaeia
Duration of Papacy: 14 years
Bulls:
Achievements: Excommunicated the heretic Marcion of Sinope, built Santa Pudenziana, oldest Church in Rome
Enemies: Valentinians, Gnostics
Wars Engaged in or Supported:
Died: 154
Death: Unknown; rumours of martyrdom but not supported
Buried: Unknown

With a name like Pius, it’s perhaps not that surprising that later popes would take his name, as the tradition grew not to use your own name. I don’t know why this is done, but I expect it’s something to do with leaving your old life behind and dedicating your new one to God and the papacy? Pius appears to be the first pope who may have been a slave, though that has not been proven, and whose family also figure in his biography - such as it is. His brother, Hermas was a literary man, who wrote a tract on redemption and salvation called The Shepherd. He is the second pope I read of who took on “heretics”, ie those who thought about the Bible and God differently than mainstream Christianity did, as opposed to actual pagans who did not believe in God at all.

The Gnostics were the nemesis of the accepted face of the Church, always banging on about nonsense like how Jesus was married, God was a woman, and Black Sabbath’s best album was Sabotage. Idiots. Anyway a bunch of their heretic leaders rocked up to Rome during his papacy, among them Valentinus (who is, I presume, not to be confused with St. Valentine?), Cerdo and Marcion. He sent them on their bikes, excommunicating Marcion for good measure. WHAM! POW! KA-BLAM! You’re OUT, son!

[Trollheart]

Tell you what, before we go any further, let’s check these dudes out.

Chapter II: The Other Side of the Mirror: Catechism, Schism and Seeing Things Through a Different Prism

Not my Christianity! Gnostics, Iconoclasts and Other Heretics

Heretics of the First Millennium

Heresy! It’s a hate-filled, panic-stricken, trembling-with-indignation accusation hurled at anyone who does not believe - usually implicitly - in a powerful religion. Islam doesn’t necessarily use the word, calling unbelievers infidels, but it’s the same thing. Protestants and Lutherans believe Catholics to be heretics, and vice versa. And if there is one thing any Church cannot stand, it’s the h-word. It was the reason the Spanish, Italian and other Inquisitions were set up by the Catholic Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Essentially a medieval version of the McCarthy trials, during which the panel of Inquisitors would ask the leading question “Are you now, or have you ever been?” But unlike McCarthy’s witch-hunt of communists in the 1950s, these were actual witch-hunts, which usually ended as witch-hunts do, in fire and pain.

Religion, you see, seems to be unable to grasp the idea of “live and let live”, and if you don’t believe in their specific god or gods, then you’re only good for the fire. The Romans were the same, though through amassing, via their conquests, a smorgasbord of peoples with differing beliefs, the various emperors usually chose - wisely - to allow their new subjects to practice their preferred religion, as long as they paid passing obeisance to their gods and didn’t get into trouble. Some, of course, did not take that path, leading to the persecution of the Jews by various emperors, and later the Christians, though as ever throughout history, this was often a mere smokescreen to divert attention away from their own blunders and poor governance.

But it must be said, nobody did heresy like the Catholic Church. Michael Palin was completely wrong. Everyone expected the Spanish Inquisition; everyone feared it. Like the later Gestapo, its eyes and ears were everywhere, and you just had to say the wrong thing to land in the Inquisition’s tender clutches. Sometimes you didn’t have to say anything at all; an accusation was enough, and let’s be honest here, torture will get a man or woman to confess anything. The hypocrisy of the Inquisitions of course is that they purported to be saving the souls of heretics, when most of the men giving the order were as corrupt as could be, and deserved more to be in the dungeons having various bodily parts extracted and violated than did their unfortunate and often innocent victims.

It seems that the first thing a new religion does is to splinter. There’s always someone who disagrees with some part of the doctrine, and they go off and form their own version of the religion. Almost before Jesus had finished saying “I will be with you always” squabbles broke out among his followers, as we have seen above with the feud between Peter and Paul over circumcision. As the news of Christianity spread across the Middle East and into Europe, the message began to get warped and twisted, edited and amended, changed until often what was called Christianity bore little or no resemblance to the instructions Jesus apparently left for his Apostles in the manual for Christianity V1.0. Here, then, are some of the major diversions from that manual, all of whom are or were characterised as heretical by the orthodox Church.

Gnostics

The best-known of these - especially following the sensationalist publication and then filming of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code - and ten-times winners of the Christian, and later Catholic Church’s Most Hated Heretic Award are the Gnostics, whose main difference with the “proper” Church teachings seems to be a big one, leaving little or no room for compromise. Gnostics believe not in one God, but in two, and further believe that one of these Gods, the one who created the Earth, is imperfect, and even evil. They call this God the demiurge, and believe that the true God in Heaven will one day destroy the Earth and release all humans from their material shells, revealing them to be the divine beings they are inside.

Sin and repentance, two of the cornerstones of Christianity, or at least orthodox Christianity, seem to have little or no value or relevance to Gnosticism, which is concerned more with the search for enlightenment. Interestingly, from what I can see, Gnostics were considered heretics not just by Christians but by Jews as well, and even Romans, at least, those involved in Hellenic philosophy. Prejudiced against all others, eh? Or at least, hated by all others. Indeed, Gnosticism is believed to have even predated Christianity, beginning back in the time before Christ himself, though nobody can truly trace its origins. Gnostics do appear to have had the dubious honour of being the first Christian sect to be declared as heretics.

Instead of one God who created the universe, Gnosticism believes in seven archons, each assigned to one planet - The Moon (yeah), Mercury, Venus, The Sun (uh-huh), Venus, Jupiter and Saturn - who prevent humans from leaving their physical shells and seeking enlightenment beyond. The planets of the ancient world were laid out as the only seven celestial objects visible in the night sky to the naked eye, one reason why both the Moon and Sun - which we obviously know not to be planets at all - are included, and Earth is not. Together, the Archons are known as the Hebdomad, and make up the Prince of Darkness. They’re not nice people, as you might have guessed, being said to have impregnated Eve and brought to mankind knowledge of idolatry, sacrifice and bloodshed, all in the service of keeping humans ignorant and in their imperfect mortal form.

Gnostics believe Jesus to be an angel, also called an aeon and the Holy Spirit to be his consort, female. They hold that the angel Jesus, most high and powerful and first created of the archangels, was sent down to Earth by God, but was not his son. They say he was sent not to redeem mankind from sin but from ignorance, to allow them to see the truth so that they could find their way to the bright shining realm in which God resides. To some extent, and to this guy ignorant of theology, this sounds a little like what the Christian Jesus says: “I am the way and the light; anyone who believes in me, even though he die, shall have eternal life.” Also, if ignorance is seen as a sin, then in a symbolic though not literal way Jesus could be said to be coming down to save mankind. Take it a step further: maybe he did not die on the cross, but the Gnostics are looking to the old Norse sagas and legends, where Odin, All-Father of the Gods, hangs on the tree Yggdrasil to obtain knowledge.

Babylonian, Iranian, Alexandrian and Jewish origins have all been proposed for Gnosticism, though as usual there’s no real consensus. One Israeli philosopher and historian called Gnosticism “metaphysical anti-Semitism”, while another author labelled it “Anti-Judaism”. The idea of Heaven in Gnosticism seems to be more ethereal than real. Christians believe they will literally go through the Pearly Gates and meet God when they die, whereas Gnostics appear to be more of the almost “attaining Nirvana” style of thinking. As Lenny once said in The Simpsons: “Maybe it’s a metaphor; maybe the cabin is in each one of us. Aw, they said there’d be sandwiches!”

So far as I can understand it, Gnostic tradition has no place for the Virgin Mary, or indeed a Virgin birth, Christ being an angel (or aeon) and all that, but their version of the mother of, well, everything, Sophia, is believed to have birthed the demiurge spoken of above, and that demiurge, lonely and feeling isolated, perhaps like a child wanting company, created the archons and some shower that wander around on the face of one of the planets it created and think they’re the cat’s pyjamas. This demiurge is generally opposed to the God, the real god which they call I think the Godhead, and is identified with various versions of Satan. A big difference here though is, as already mentioned, the demiurge (Satan) creates the universe, and men, rather than God. This therefore makes him seem much more powerful than the fallen angel of Abrahamic belief, almost on a par with God himself.

Hell, there are even separate schools of thought within Gnosticism that declare that Jesus was not divine, merely a human who attained enlightenment, and one that accuses him of perverting the teachings of John the Baptist and being a false messiah. Who knew? As you might expect, a major schism of Christianity like Gnosticism has many offshoots, a total of more than forty in the first millennium, with more to come in the second - nearly another thirty - but I’ll listen to every album Lily Allen ever made before I’ll list them all, much less write about them. My original intention had been to explore three of them, but after reading about only one my head hurts and I have no clue what the hell they’re talking about. Thank God I’m an atheist, is all I can say! Instead, I’m going to check out the three men who figure in the most prominent Gnostic sects.

Valentinus (c. 100 - c. 160)

If any “heretic” ever opposed the early Church with as much success and fame, it was Valentinus, who is said to have been born in Egypt and studied in Alexandria, one of the largest centres of Christian learning at that time. He became a follower of Theudra, who himself had known and followed Saint Paul, and learned from him of what he called the “secret knowledge” Paul possessed. The initial idea of Valentinus’s striking out on his own seems to have been something of a case of sour grapes. He was in line for the bishopric at Rome but was passed over, took his ball home and did a Bender on it: “Ah who needs ya! I’m gonna create my own religion! With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the religion!” He didn’t though. Forget the religion that is, and formed his own sect of followers which he called, with typical self-effacement, Valentinians.

“Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able man both in genius and eloquence. Being indignant, however, that another obtained the dignity by reason of a claim which confessorship had given him, he broke with the church of the true faith. Just like those (restless) spirits which, when roused by ambition, are usually inflamed with the desire of revenge, he applied himself with all his might to exterminate the truth; and finding the clue of a certain old opinion, he marked out a path for himself with the subtlety of a serpent”

Mind you, this was written in a book specifically called Adversus Valentinianos (Against the Valentinians), so it’s hardly unbiased. Our buddy Epiphanius reckons he lost it after being shipwrecked. Neither reason sound a good one to start your own sect, but there you go.

Marcion of Sinope (c. 85 - c. 160)

The son of a bishop, Marcion was said to have been a mariner and tried to buy his way into the Church (a tactic that would sometimes later be adopted by higher-ranking clergy) but when he began going around saying God was not the father of Jesus, the Church told him to take his money back and go to Hell, excommunicating him as a heretic. He hung around with Valentinus too, which would not have helped, as that guy was on Rome’s hit list as well, and it seems that his major beef was kind of understandable. He couldn’t reconcile the God of the Old Testament, who amused himself with a spot of city burning, flooding and inciting his people to war, with the one in the New Testament, all peace and love, man, and forgiveness. Bollocks to that, he thought, and wrote: this guy ain’t no father to Jesus. This then led him to the Gnostic idea of there being two Gods - a lower and a higher - something the orthodox Church was not having, not on its watch.

He got on the Jews’ wick as well, asserting that Judaism was incompatible with Christianity, and asking some fairly understandable questions, such as, if God is all-knowing, how was it he’s said to have had to ask for directions to find Adam in the Garden of Eden? It’s a fair point, if a somewhat pedantic one. So Marcion decided the God of the Jews (Yahweh) was the demiurge of Gnostic belief and that the Christian God was the Big Cheese. He also believed Jesus never took material form, though he did disagree with his buddy Valentinus about the parentage of the Saviour. Of course, this far from made him any friends with the Church, as, since he said Jesus had no physical body, he could not die on the cross, and therefore could not rise from the dead. And that’s kind of the central tenet of Christianity, so not surprisingly the pope was miffed about that.

Still, this Marcion guy must have had some skill with weapons, as it says he invented the first Christian cannon. Oh no wait: that’s canon, with one “n”. My bad. Hah. Canon then, being a set of books, in his case an abridged and edited Gospel of St. Luke, leaving out all that tiresome nonsense about Jesus’s virginal birth and tedious death of course, and a bunch of epistles from his boy, Saint Paul, whom he believed was the only real Apostle. “I’m the real Apostle, all you other Apostles are just imitaters, so would the real Apostle please stand up, please stand up?”

[Trollheart]

Adoptionists

Sounds like someone who might take a child into care, doesn’t it? Not so. Adoptionists, apparently, unlike our friend Marcion, believed that Jesus did have a human body, but not that he had been divine prior to this. The whole idea of adoptionism (religious arguments send Homer to sleep) seems to hinge on the idea that God chose a human to carry out his will on Earth and then after that human (Jesus) had died, having fulfilled his will, adopted him as his son and thereby raised him to the status of divinity. This theme is in accordance with the Gospel of Mark, in which there is no mention of Jesus’s immaculate conception and birth, nor any appearance by Jesus after he dies.

Paul doesn’t have any reference to the virgin birth either in any of his epistles, nor did our friend Hermas in The Shepherd, who simply calls Jesus a “virtuous man filled with the Holy Spirit and adopted as the Son”. There must also have been links with Gnosticism, as Theodotus of Byzantium, a prominent Valentinian, believed that while Jesus had been born of a virgin, and that “the Christ” had come down to him when he had been baptised by John the Baptist, he only “became” God after his death. More support for this idea came from the Ebionites, an early Jewish Christian sect, who held that although Jesus was the Messiah, he had not been born of a virgin and he was not in fact divine, just a holy man. They didn’t much care for Paul either, these Ebionites, calling him an apostate. That’s someone who turns against his own religion, basically, though it’s more complicated than that.

Even the hyper-Catholic Spanish were at it, though admittedly they came late to the party. In the 8th century Bishop Elephant Panda, sorry Elipandus of Toledo preached that Jesus was only the adopted son of God, and another bishop, Felix Unger, sorry Felix of Ungel, agreed. The Church, unsurprisingly, did not, and both men were excommunicated.

Apollonarists

This one didn’t last long. Came into being near the end of the fourth century and was gone by the time the fifth began. Apollonarists believed that Jesus was a game of two halves, having a human body and soul but a divine mind.

Arabici

These didn’t last long either. A small sect, they believed the soul died with the body, but would be resurrected on Judgement Day. By 250 though they had seen the error of their ways and were welcomed back into the Church with open arms.

Arianists

Although this sect was called Arianism, and despite the temptation to, it’s not linked or connected in any way with the Aryan ideal espoused by Hitler and other racial thinkers. Arians did not believe in the Holy Trinity, holding that Jesus was subordinate to his father and came into being later, and so could not be seen to be eternal and divine, as he would then have a beginning, which God did not. Abilene Christian University’s Everett Ferguson noted “The great majority of Christians had no clear views about the nature of the Trinity and they did not understand what was at stake in the issues that surrounded it.” No shit. I never did understand it, and I never will. Three beings who are one but yet separate? And still one can separate off and head down to Earth to live as a man without diminishing the whole left behind? Get away from me with that shamrock! What’s that supposed to prove?

This sect did markedly better than the others, numbering bishops, priests, even kings and emperors among its adherents. Constantine the Great, the man responsible for the legitimisation and acceptance of Christianity from the fourth century onwards, wasn’t having it. “In addition”,he wrote in 325, “if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offence, he shall be submitted for capital punishment. …”

Despite this stark warning, Arianism spread after Constantine’s death, extending to Spain, where it persisted till the late sixth century, and even into North Africa. Arius himself tried to lay out his case in a letter to Eusebius of Nicodemia, who had actually baptised the emperor Constantine: “Some of them say that the Son is an eructation, others that he is a production, others that he is also unbegotten. These are impieties to which we cannot listen, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But we say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect as God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted because we say that the Son has a beginning but that God is without beginning.”

A subtext you can read here in modern parlance is a spreading of the hands and “Come on guys! It’s fucking obvious isn’t it? Why fight against it?” It’s also amusing - though not in any way surprising - that Arian, seen as a heretic by the Church, describes its followers as heretics. All in the eye, or belief, of the beholder, I guess. Much of the reason for the lenient stance later taken by the Church towards Arianists was due to the ascension of Constantine’s son, Constantius II, who reversed his father’s edict and welcomed Arianists into the Church. The new emperor even went so far as to dismiss the Pope and install what is known to history as an Anti-Pope, Felix the Cat, sorry Felix II. The Cat. No, seriously. Nobody would make a cat a pope. Well, maybe Caligula…

His efforts culminated in the Seventh Arian Confession (later called the Sirmium Blasphemy) at the Third Council of Sirmium in 357, which stated that “since many persons are disturbed by questions concerning what is called in Latin substantia, but in Greek ousia, that is, to make it understood more exactly, as to ‘coessential,’ or what is called, ‘like-in-essence,’ there ought to be no mention of any of these at all, nor exposition of them in the Church, for this reason and for this consideration, that in divine Scripture nothing is written about them, and that they are above men’s knowledge and above men’s understanding”.

So that was that, then. Well of course not. Once Constantinus II kicked it, the next emperor was no fan of Chrisianity. “Fuck all these differences you mad dudes have,” he is reported most definitely not to have said, “I’m off back to our own gods. At least you know where you are with Jupiter. Offend him - thunderbolts! BAM! No wishy-washy is-he-isn’t-he-divine shite. Enjoy your false god, Christian dudes. You’re not illegal, but you’re not the official game in town any more. Now where’s my chariot? I could have sworn I parked it - hey! You! Come back with that!”

So now Christians, demoted to a tolerated but not dominant religion, were left to thrash it out for themselves. Rome no longer cared. “Let them belt seven shades of shite out of each other,” unreliable sources quote Emperor Julian as saying. “Why aren’t these grapes peeled? Off to the crucifixions with you! Can’t get the staff these days.” Valen, sorry Valens succeeded Julian, and went back to favouring the One God, and indeed the Arian idea of One God, until he was killed by the Goths (probably because he said Robert Smith couldn’t sing or something) and replaced by the nineteen-year-old Gratians, but he was too young and had to co-rule with Theodosius, and together they put paid to Arianism forever.

At least, it did among the Romans. But the Goths didn’t give a fetid pair of dingo’s kidneys what the Romans worshipped or believed in. For them, it was Arianism or nothing. Jesus was subordinate to God, had been for centuries of their faith, and that was just how they liked it. However it did begin to lose ground around the fifth century, most notably under Clovis I, the legendary first King of the Franks, and by the eighth it was gone altogether.

Collyridians

This one is good. A sect made up entirely of women, the very existence of which is disputed by some scholars. They worshipped the Virgin Mary as a goddess (the sect, not the scholars) and offered her tributes. They seem to have been confined - if they existed at all - to Arabia. They did not, however, unlike some later adherents to Islam, believe Mary to be part of the Divine Trinity. To quote the great theologian and philosopher, Montius Pythonus, that would just have been silly.

Docetists

They believed that the human form of Jesus was an illusion. Well, if it was, how come he couldn’t disappear off the cross when they - sorry, sorry. I’ll let Wiki explain this one: Two varieties were widely known. In one version, as in Marcionism, Christ was so divine that he could not have been human, since God lacked a material body, which therefore could not physically suffer. Jesus only appeared to be a flesh-and-blood man; his body was a phantasm. Other groups who were accused of docetism held that Jesus was a man in the flesh, but Christ was a separate entity who entered Jesus’ body in the form of a dove at his baptism, empowered him to perform miracles, and abandoned him upon his death on the cross.

This meant that Docetists did not take Communion, as thundered by Ignateus of Antioch in his letter to the Smurfs sorry Smyrnaeans: “They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.”

Luciferans

Imagine a man with a name like Lucifer going into the Church! Not only that, Lucifer of Caligari became a bishop and then, probably not surprisingly, though likely his name had little if anything to do with it, was declared a heretic. It seems he had the bad fortune to live and work in the reign of Constantius II, son of Constantine the Great, who was a big supporter of Arianism. Lucifer was not, and argued against it, leading to the wonderful quote “Constantius confined Lucifer for three days in the imperial palace”. Unable to get him to recant, the emperor exiled him not once, not twice, but thrice! First to Germanica (Turkey), then Palestine and finally Egypt. In letters surely not seen to be helping his case, Lucifer declared he was ready to be martyred for his beliefs. He didn’t get his wish though.

After Constantius died and was replaced by Jerome the Apostate, the empire no longer cared who believed what, and it was left to the bishops to fight it out among themselves. Lucifer fought against the readmittance of bishops who followed the Arian teachings (all friends now, all forgotten, and let’s have no more talk about the war) and, though allowed back from exile himself, his intransigence may have had him excommunicated. Either way, he fucked off back to his homeland and died there in 370.

Macedonians

Also known as the Pneumatomachi, which means “combators of the spirit”, and not that they were obssessed with bicycle tyres, they denied that the Holy Ghost was part of God. Another buddy of good old Constantius, Macedonius was a bishop of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) who had close links with the Arians, and was no friend of the Christians or their friends the Novatians. In fact, he was a little more hands-on that most of the heretics we’ve read about to date. He was said to have forced baptism on unwiling women and children, thrown his enemies in jail, used torture and coercion in a way which would not be seen for another thousand years under the Inquisition, and knocked down any churches he didn’t like. Nice.

Finally the Novatians had had enough, and rebelled. His legions were defeated and slaughtered, and when he dug up the body of Constantinus’s father, the emperor Constantine (not sure why; maybe it just sounded like a good idea at the time) he was judged to have gone too far, and dismissed from his post. What? Oh yeah: murder innocent people, force them to be baptised, wreck their churches and torture them, and you’re all good. Emperor will look the other way. But dig up daddy and now you’re just asking for trouble. Macedonius died around 364. His sect did not survive him long.

Melchisedechians

Also known as the A Thing Annoy, sorry Athinganoi, they were another of the school of thought that believed Jesus was adopted, and human. They believed he was the biological son of Joseph and Mary, and that God adopted him after his baptism by John the Baptist. These guys went further though, holding that Jesus married Mary Magdalene (helloooooo Dan Brown!) and that they had a son, Eybas, whom St. Paul had, for some reason, blinded. Although they accepted that Jesus had risen from the dead, they did not believe he ascended into Heaven, but instead hung out with Mary seeing the sights of the world. They semed to have some sort of aversion to touching, as explained in a letter written by Timotheus, Presbyter of Constantinople around 600: They will not touch any man. If food is offered to them, they ask for it to be placed on the ground; then they come and take it. They give to others with the same precautions"

Monarchianists

They didn’t believe in the Holy Trinity, believing God was all one, indivisible, and not three separate-but-joined individuals. Frankly, I don’t blame them: the Trinity is a bitch to understand and I don’t think that many holy men even get it. Nevertheless, going against Church dogma - even if the Church can’t adequately explain or justify it - makes you a heretic. Monarchianism didn’t last beyond the fourth century.

Monophysitists

Rather than a single sect, this seems to have been a kind of catch-all description for those who didn’t believe in the two natures of Christ - human and divine - and includes some of the sects we have already covered, such as the Docetists and the Apollonarians.

Monothelitists

And these guys believed that Christ only had one will. Probably pissed that he didn’t leave them anything in that will. Honestly, the in-fighting and sniping and accusations, condemnations and often close to bloody wars fought over issues of the smallest difference makes me wonder how the Christian Church ever survived to grow to the bloated, unopposed monster it is today. Shower of fucks.

Nestorianites

Getting a little bogged down here. This appears to be another umbrella term to describe any cult or sect which held that Christ had two natures, human and divine, and that each were separate from the other.

Patripassianists/Sabellianites

An interesting idea which holds that God is not separate from Jesus, so he suffered himself when Jesus died on the cross. It’s considered heretical because "it simply cannot make sense of the New Testament’s teaching on the interpersonal relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit.” Well who the fuck can? Still, if that’s the case why did he cry “Father forgive them”? Oh he didn’t? The Bible is a work of what? Well then: off to the dungeons with you, my fine fellow!

Psilanthropists

Basically yet another catchall for those who deny the virgin birth of Jesus. Our friends the Ebionites are one of these sects.

Trithesits

Those who believe that God is three separate beings and which denies the unity of the Trinity.

Right, I’ve had enough of all these bloody heresies, which mostly seem to be differences of opinion about something on which no human can claim to be the definitive authority. Like arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or how Jacob’s get the figs into the fig rolls. Jesus, probably, wept. Back to the world of popes we go.