THE GREATEST CON IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND

The British Church Newspaper, a lively subscription journal, was recently brave enough to publish a letter in which I declared that the Roman Catholic Church was the greatest con in the history of mankind. In a few paragraphs it was not possible to do more than indicate my reasons for this statement. It is however such a serious charge that it deserves to be explained, even justified.

It all turns on claims made by that Church as to its origins. The world is required to believe that it was first in the field, founded by the number one Apostle St Peter and therefore the mother church of Christianity to which all others owe allegiance.

That is a preposterous claim. In the first place there is no evidence that St Peter was ever in Rome whereas there are strong indications that he was not. The Bible incorporates a history of the very early church in a book called the Acts of the Apostles. St Peter plays a very minor part in that story and disappears quite early. It is evident that the Apostles were travelling by sea from synagogue to synagogue around the Eastern Mediterranean. The only one who went to Rome went as a prisoner for a trial at which he was found guilty and executed. That person was St Paul.

Yet this St Peter according to the Catholic Church, was destined to found God's Church on earth. Is it not likely that the author of the Acts would have been aware of that and would not that have been the story that he told?

To such an apparently august institution one might be inclined to give the benefit of any doubt. The trouble with that is that this same august institution has been guilty of another massive falsification with the Donation of Constantine. This document found or produced centuries after his death purported to show that Emperor Constantine had abdicated in favour of the Church, passing to it his great Basilica with extensive territories and effectively his power in Rome. He did of course leave Rome and build himself a new capital which he called Constantinople. That document was subsequently shown to be a fraud which the Church now admits. That is not all.

An educated young Jew of my acquaintance tells me that for the first two centuries Christianity was considered to be a sect of Judaism and so it was and so the Romans regarded it. Jesus and his disciples were Jews and considered that they were fulfilling prophecies made by Fathers of Judaism. Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman Empire perhaps because Jews, who were everywhere around the Mediterranean rim, were useful in roles from craftsman to merchants, entrepreneurs, even bankers. Christian Jews - what today we call Messianic Jews - accepted that Jesus was the promised Messiah and believed, as Christians generally did, in an imminent second coming. Their spiritual home was the synagogue. They had no need of a church. The ‘Romans', to whom St Paul addressed himself, were Jews resident in Rome.

This however was not the whole story because, thanks to the activities of St Peter and St Paul in Asia Minor and St Mark in Egypt, Christianity had been embraced by non Jewish populations. It spread along the North African coast to Carthage and thence to Gaul (modern France) and the British Isles. The cultural centre of the world at that time was the Greek city of Alexandria situated in the Nile delta and it was there that Christianity developed away from its Jewish roots.

In this guise it came to be anathema to the Roman State and was declared illegal. It was one thing for Jews to follow their own tolerated religion. It was not permissible for non Jews to refuse to sacrifice to the Emperor, to refuse military service, and not to take part in the pagan life of the Roman Empire.

We have a detailed account of the life of a non Jewish Christian living in the pagan society of the Roman Empire thanks to Tertullian writing extensively about 200AD. He was an educated Carthaginian, that is to say he was educated in the philosophy of the Greeks. He was a pagan converted to Christianity so he could see both sides. The fount of his Christianity was Alexandria. Rome was the pagan oppressor. He makes no mention of any ecclesiastical authority there.

He makes it clear that at that date Christians as he knew them had nothing to do with the Jews in that they did not observe their taboos about certain foods, did not practice circumcision or celebrate their Holy days or Festivals. The Christians he knew, like himself, were based on the ten commandments and regarded pagans as idolaters. Christians had the commandment forbidding the worship of idols and graven images.

He argued that Christians could not disrespect the Roman Gods because they had none. What they had was the Emperor who was a man, the eminent long dead, who were mostly men, and idols many of which were made from the same material as their cooking pots. As a former pagan he would know.

Much flows from what I have already shown. If St Peter was never at Rome, as I am convinced is the case according to what evidence there is, then the Pope's claim to sit on the throne of Peter is a nonsense. I would also suggest that it is an insult to Peter to maintain that wherever he was or whatever he was doing he ever thought of sitting on a throne. Such an idea was foreign to any of the immediate followers of Christ or to Christians as described by Tertullian.

It also follows that the claim to apostolic succession falls to the ground and with it the claim to an exclusive relationship with God based upon it.

Now we must turn to history; to what is actually known about these early times.The first Church of any substance was the Coptic (Egyptian) Church founded by St Mark and based in Alexandria. It spread rapidly throughout Egypt and down into Abyssinia. It went along the North African coast to Carthage. The people of Carthage were Phoeniceans who had maintained trade links with the British Isles for tin and other metals from around 600BC. By that route Christianity reached the British Isles. Tertullian remarks that Christianity had conquered parts of the British Isles not yet tamed by the Legions.

We know that Christianity reached Britain in the west. We know that the Romans reached Cardiff in the 70s Ad so the gospel was present in Britain very early. The Glastonbury Monk Gildas writing in the mid 500s AD maintained that it arrived in the reign of Tiberias Caesar who was on the throne at the time of the crucifixion "as we all know". True or false that was what his contemporaries believed..He would have been aware of the Glastonbury records later destroyed in the reign of Henry II.

It cannot be truly said that the Roman Church existed before the Emperor Constantine who, be it noted, was proclaimed Emperor by the Roman Army in York England, a city which had a Christian Bishop as Constantine had a Christian mother.

At his accession the dominant cleric was Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria who had the temerity to defy the new Roman Emperor over the appointment of a Bishop of Carthage, a man whom the Coptic Church regarded as a traitor, who had surrendered sacred texts to Emperor Diocletian during his recent persecutions. Athanasius had his way and although, as a result of later disagreements, Constantine banished him from Alexandria he made no attempt to replace him so that when Constantine died Athanasius returned to complete 30 years as Archbishop.

The supposed history of the Roman Catholic Church before Constantine has to be fiction. Certainly there were Christians in Rome apart from the Messianic Jews. They provided a regular diet for the wild beasts in the arena and featured in ghastly spectacles for the plebs when they were publicly murdered one way or another. There may have been some native Romans amongst them but in the main they would be immigrants from Asia Minor, from North Africa or Gaul. The idea that there could have been an institution purporting to be a church of an illegal religion is far fetched. Diocletian, Constantine's predecessor as Emperor, had spent 12 years ruthlessly and violently seeking to extirpate Christianity. He did not succeed but it was not for lack of will or resources. The claim that St Peter was the first Pope is just silly. The title itself did not exist until the 6th or 7th centuries even had he been there to enjoy it.

It is clear from the writings of Tertullian that violent and untimely death was an ever present threat to Christians, so much so that he is constrained to make a virtue of it saying that whilst martyrdom is not something to be sought, nevertheless if it comes it should be looked upon as a sure pathway to heaven (this sounds familiar).

What Tertullian as a former pagan would make of the Roman Catholic Church today is an interesting speculation. He would perhaps recognise in the communion of saints a continuation of the Roman practice of deifying the eminent dead. He would question the scriptural authority for the elevation of the Virgin Mary to be Queen of Heaven. He would be appalled by the worship of idols, particularly the Virgin Mary, and would question when and on what authority the commandment against the worship of idols was expunged from Scripture. He regarded idolatry as the main distinguishing characteristic of pagans. I suspect that in certain attitudes towards the Pope he would see traces of Emperor worship. He would never have understood the Inquisition merely on the basis of the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill'. I shudder to think what his attitude to the Pope's triple crown would be. He wrote a short treatise condemning the crown in all its forms from the victor's laurel to the gold circlet as a detestable pagan practice. He would have questioned the scriptural authority for the priest's claim to act for God in the forgiving of sins. He would have questioned the scriptural authority for the elevation of the Pope into some sort of infallible being.

To return to the main theme; the development of Christianity into a consistent and coherent system of belief dates from Constantine. Having developed in disparate areas with different traditions there had grown up inconsistencies in practice and even belief. The nature of Christ was a matter of dispute amongst them. Was he man? Was he divine? Was he both simultaneously? Views differed and led to acrimonious exchanges. To promote some sort of order, as Romans were wont to do, Constantine, in conjunction with Athanasius, convened a general church council at Nicaea in AD323.This council was attended by Bishops from all over the Empire, including Britain, but not including Rome (it is said that he was represented). Heavily influenced by Athanasius, if he did not actually write it, this Council produced the Nicene Creed which constituted, and does to this day, a statement of what Christians are supposed to believe.

That the Roman Church was late on the scene is further indicated by the fact that the religious texts later than the old testament are written in Greek, not Latin. At Niceae the Bishops from the Greek world heavily outnumbered those from the west. There was no Latin Bible until the translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew by St Jerome between AD382 and 390. He later translated the four gospels from the Greek.

By the time of the Council of Chalcedon in AD531 Rome was beginning to flex its muscles. At that Council it managed to persuade the delegates to declare the Coptic Church heretical because of its views on the nature of Christ. As a result the Coptic Church was excluded from General Councils and thus Rome removed from the scene its largest most senior and most learned competitor. Rome had taken the lead and from that time we may date the beginning of extravagant claims to authority in Rome.

In AD 800 Pope Leo III was faced with a revolt in Northern Italy. Charlemagne, King of the Franks, who had conquered Europe and Christianised it, somewhat ruthlessly came to his aid. Pope Leo III, who had no authority to do any such thing, crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans in gratitude and the emergence of the Pope as a temporal ruler dates from that time.

The scene was set. The Papacy began. There were Popes who spent more time in the saddle either defending territory or acquiring more than they did at the altar. As the ecclesiastical authority at the head of Christianised Europe and a temporal power in its own right, Rome embarked on a new phase in its progress. It used its ecclesiastical power to demand the obedience of Catholics everywhere, including Princes and Kings. It became a political entity concerned with power and the wealth which gave it power.

That is where it finds itself today - a little circumscribed but still struggling, at the cost of millions of lives and other people's money, to re establish its control in Europe and throughout the world. It claims that its role is divinely given. Its stock in trade is religion and it is all based upon a mendacious claim to have been founded by St Peter.