Anybody knows if this is a genuine Hitler quote?: ‘My spirit will rise from the grave and the world will see I was right’.
Categories
Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.
Most of the martyrs’ acts are falsified, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (5 of 7)
Following the above examples, as many Christian heroes could have died as the writer wanted. Let us compare the martyrdom of Mar Jacob in Persia with that of St. Arcadius in North Africa, which is still honoured by the Catholic Church on January 12, and also recorded in the Roman martyrology.
Like St. Jacob, Saint Arcadius is a hero and a Christian from the top of his head to the soles of his feet, that is, literally unbreakable. Confronted finally with the instruments of torment by the rabid consul, he only scoffs: ‘Do you order that I have to undress?’ And he listens to the sentence to cut him slowly one member after another with ‘happy mood’. The text continues: ‘Now the executioners rush on him and cut off the joints of his fingers, arms and shoulders, and crush the toes, feet and legs. The martyr voluntarily offered one member after another, swimming in his blood, praying aloud:
‘Lord, my God! All these members you have given me, I offer them all to you’, etcetera. And all those present swim in tears just as the saint does in blood. Even the executioners curse the day they were born.
Only the wicked Roman consul remains undaunted. When the holy confessor had cut off all the lesser members, he ordered the elders to cut off the larger members with blunt axes, so that only the trunk remained. The holy Arcadius, still alive (!) offered God his scattered limbs and shouted: ‘Happy members!’ after which—as has been said, ‘nothing but the trunk’—it followed an ardent religious sermon to the adepts of the classical world…
The editor of the gigantic Catholic work cited, which in the prologue assures us that he only wishes to ‘offer facts founded on the place (!) of the so-called legends’, and ‘only facts that are true and historically proven’, offers in this work an infinity of horrifying stories.
And starting from such horrible coarseness, still in the 20th century—with multiple authorisations of superiority—the government of the Catholic souls extracts the ‘doctrine’ with the words of none other than St. Arcadius: ‘To die for Him is to live! Suffering for Him is the greatest joy! Support, oh Christ, the hardships and adversities of this life and do not let anything divert you from the service of God. The heaven is a worthy reward for everything’.
For those who do not have enough wonder even with the martyrdom of Mar Jacob—supernatural things happen as well.
To a Christian who owes and wants to kill another Christian, the ‘strength of God’ raises him twice and almost throws him to the ground; three hours is as dead.
Saint Nerses’ head could not be cut off, not even with eighteen swords; only with a knife.
And where these heroes die, since they must die, ‘often at night armies of angels ascend and descend’. And indeed, there is no doubt about the story, as even some ‘pagan’ shepherds saw that ‘three nights the armies of angels were floating above the place of death and praising God’.
Acts of martyrs!
______ 卐 ______
Liked it? Take a second to support this site.
Categories
The Spielbergs of Antiquity
Above, Siemiradzki’s painting showing Dirce, at the behest of Emperor Nero, being put to death by being tied to the horns of a bull and smashed against rocks.
This comment by S. Ranch about some words of Edward Gibbon moves me to say the following: Deschner’s story about Mar Jacob is taken from Acts of the Persian Martyrs (remember that in my abridgment of his Christianity’s Criminal History I omit the hundreds of bibliographical references used by Deschner).
I cannot talk about Gibbon since I did not finish reading his book. But the Christian propaganda about the martyrs was such (the Holocaustianity of the Ancient World!) that even anti-Christians continue to believe many of these stories. Years ago I read in a secular source that the author gave credibility to a story in which the ‘pagan’ executioners torture a Christian woman all night long until they fall exhausted: something implausible.
Many liberal, secular authors and even atheists have not realised how Spielberg et al have deceived us with their films and documentaries about the Jewish holocaust. The 6 million figure, for example, is a complete fabrication: something that Judeo-Christians have been doing to us with their psyops of martyrs since Antiquity.
Unless the historical source comes from non-Christian Romans, we should not give credibility to the accounts of martyrdoms. Otherwise the Judeo-Christians will continue deceiving us even after a millennium and a half of having written their martyrs’ acts. That’s why I liked my words to Arch Stanton: that if he could use a non-biblical source he could continue discussing with us about such a ‘Jesus’. Obviously he can’t: his main source, as well as that of those atheists who still believe they can find some real history in the hagiographies of saints, is the Judeo-Christian source.
It is striking that folks on the Alt-Right, as stagnant as they are in # 5 or in previous numbers of this list—that is, before they wake up from the Matrix—continue to take, as sources, ancient texts that should be as suspicious as a film of Spielberg today.
Level 1:
Nadzees are evil, Democracy is good.
Jews are Holocaust survivors.
Christianity is for idiots.
Level 2:
Nazis were misled by an anti-Semitic demagogue.
The Holocaust may be false.
Christianity is ‘okay’.
Level 3:
Germans were fighting against Zionists.
The Holocaust is false, Zionism is evil.
Christianity is good.
Level 4:
White Nationalism is good.
Jews are evil.
Christianity is a White religion.
Level 5:
National Socialism is good.
America is evil.
Christianity has been corrupted by Jews.
Level 6:
National Socialism is the only solution.
All countries are evil.
Christianity has always been a Jewish Psy-op.
Level 7:
White segregation is the only solution.
Modernity is evil.
Anti-Christian Paganism is good.
Level 8:
There are no political solutions.
Civilization is evil.
Blood and Soil is the only true religion.
Level 9:
Non-white exterminationism is the only solution.
Most Whites are not true Whites.
All Whites are spiritually flawed.
Level 10:
10% of Whites are true humans, and must survive.
90% of Whites are defective humans, of which 50% must die (males).
100% of non-Whites are sub-humans, and all must die.
Personally I’m a level 9, verging on level 10.
I’ve met some level 4, and only a few level 5.
The leap from 5 to 6 is astronomical due to the Xtian malware rejection. Feels lonely sometimes.
Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (4 of 7)
Mar Jacob, the one tear into pieces, after the ten fingers of the hands and three of the feet have been torn off, smiling, makes deep comparisons: ‘Third toe, follow your companions and do not worry. For the same as the wheat that falls to the earth and in the spring makes your companions grow, you too will be reunited in an instant with your companions on the day of the resurrection’. Is not this well said? But after dropping the fifth toe, he cries out for vengeance: ‘Oh God, direct my punishment and make my revenge fall on the ruthless people’.
Often these saints become rude and insult their impious torturers or judges according to all the rules of the religion of love; they augur them ‘gnashing of teeth for eternity’, insult them by calling them ‘impure, dirty, blood lickers’, ‘lewd ravens, who rest on corpses’, ‘a snake of a thirst-eater’, ‘greens’ of hatred ‘like a bad viper’, a lascivious looking for ‘women in the bedroom’, an ‘impure dog’. Saint Aitillah tells his executioner: ‘You really are an irrational animal’. And St. Joseph does not think precisely of loving his enemy, of offering him the other cheek. The writer says: ‘Joseph filled his mouth with saliva and suddenly spit on his face and said: “You, impure and stained, you are not ashamed”.’
After Mar Jacob had been cut one by one all fingers and toes, accompanied each time by a noble or poisonous sentence against the ‘butcher wolves’, he remains firm in the faith and ready for more torture. ‘Why are you lounging?’ he asks impatiently. ‘Don’t forgive your eyes. For my heart rejoices in the Lord and my soul rises up to him, who loves the mortified’.
Thus, after the ten fingers and toes, the executioner’s helpers systematically cut, with grinding teeth, new members and with each of those who fall, the holy man makes comments with a pious sentence. After losing his right foot, he says: ‘Every limb you cut off from me will be a sacrifice to the king of heaven’.
They cut off his left foot and he said: ‘Hear me, O Lord, for You are good and great is Your goodness for all. They call you’. They cut off his right hand and he shouts: ‘The grace of God was great with me; free my soul from the deep realm of the dead’. They cut off his left hand and he said: ‘Look, you did miracles with the dead’. They approached and cut off his right arm and he spoke again: ‘I want to praise the Lord in my life and sing hymns of praise to my God as long as I exist; He likes my praise; I want to rejoice in the Lord’.
The perverse ‘pagans’ cut off his left arm, tear off the right leg of the knee… and finally ‘the glorious’ is reduced to ‘head, thorax and abdomen’. Then he reflects briefly on the situation and ‘opens again the mouth’ to tell God a brief speech. It is already daring to talk in such a reduced state—he has lost everything for Him!:
Lord, God, merciful and compassionate. I beg you, listen to my prayer and listen to my pleas. Here I am without my members. I’m here in half body and I’m silent. I have nothing, Lord, I do not have fingers to implore you; nor have the persecutors left me hands to extend them toward You. They have cut my feet off, my knees have been ripped off, the arms are away, the legs are cut. Here I am before You as a destroyed house, of which only a crown of tiles remains. I beg you. Lord, God…
And at night the Christians stole the corpse, or rather, ‘picked up the twenty-eight dismembered members’ and the rest. And then fire fell from heaven that ‘licked the blood from the straw until the members of the saint blushed and became like a ripe rose’.
Acts of martyrs!
______ 卐 ______
Liked it? Take a second to support this site.
Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (3 of 7)
But precisely the bishops—whose martyrdom was considered ‘something special’ before that of ordinary Christians—very rarely were martyrs. They fled en masse, sometimes from one country to another, to the limits of the Roman Empire, naturally at the behest of God and without forgetting to send from a safe place letters of support to the lesser faithful who were left imprisoned. In the old Church this was so well known that even in numerous spurious accounts of martyrs there are few bishops who figure as martyrs! (The patriarch of Alexandria, Dionysus, was in such a hurry when a local pogrom broke out that he fled on the back of a cavalry devoid of a chair—he rightly bears the nickname ‘the Great’.)
But practically all of the ‘saints’ of the first centuries were later declared martyrs, ‘even if they had died peacefully. Anyone worthy of the veneration of Constantine had to be a martyr ‘(Kötting). Therefore, ‘very few’ of the Acta Martyrum are ‘true or based on real documentary material’ (Syme).
And especially after the 4th century Catholic Christians had records and accounts of martyrs that seemed forged by the ‘heretics’, so they ‘purified’ them by counterfeiting. Although they admitted the miracles of the apostles that the accounts related, they did not want to consider valid the ‘false doctrines’ that accompanied them.
In this way, orthodox counterfeiters such as the so-called Pseudo-Melitus, the Pseudo-Jerome, the Pseudo-Obadiah and others, provided counter-falsifications. Christian ‘martyrs’ acts did not recoil at any exaggeration, no lack of truth, no kitsch. Since the Church made no use of the martyrdom of the woman of the apostle and first pope, St. Peter, a tale transmitted by a Father of the Church, St. Thecla is considered the first martyr, although it is said that she escaped martyrdom by a miracle.
Giovanni Battista: St. Thecla Liberating a City from the Plague, 1759.
But Catholic martyrology is strictly documented with the martyrdom of Polycarp, even knowing the hour of his death, something almost unique in proto-Christian literature. However, the date is unknown. It is unknown either if it was under Marcus Aurelius or Antoninus Pius. In this ocular testimony of the death of a Christian martyr—the oldest text: a throughout falsified text with revisions and interpolations with pre-Eusebian and a post-Eusebian false annexes—, the holy bishop knows in advance the type of his death.
Upon entering the stadium he is encouraged by a voice from the sky: ‘Stand firm, Polycarp!’ Miraculously he is not burned at the stake, to which ‘especially the Jews’ throw firewood. All the flames burn in vain. The executioner must then finish him off, his blood extinguishes the fire and from the saint’s wound a pigeon ascends to the sky… These acts ‘arose little by little and in a fragmentary way’ (Kraft).
However, even in the 20th century, in the Catholic Lexikonfür Theologie und Kirche (Encyclopaedia of Theology and the Church) this story shines as ‘the most valuable testimony for the Catholic worship of saints and relics’. Even today, the brave martyr continues to be venerated, who, as befits a bishop, had previously fled several times and changed his hiding place: the Byzantine and Syrian Churches celebrate it on February 23, the Melkites on the 25th and the Catholics on January 26, and Polycarp continues to act as ‘patron saint against the pain of ears’.
Let us take a look at the Acts of the Persian Martyrs.
The Christians are heading en masse towards their execution ‘singing the psalms of David’. They smile as the executioner lifts the sword. All the teeth are ripped out and all the bones are grounded. New whips are bought on purpose. They are hit until only pulp is left of their bodies. Their joints are broken, they are skinned from head to toe, they are cut slowly from the middle of the neck to the skull, their noses and ears are cut, burning needles are stuck into their eyes, they are stoned, they are cut with a saw, they are left to starve until the skin falls from their bones. Once sixteen elephants step on the heroes…
But whatever it is, the martyrs tolerate almost everything for a surprisingly long time and with good cheer, so to speak, with joy. Being only blood and shredded flesh, they launch the most edifying discourses. They shout with joy: ‘My heart rejoices in the Lord and my soul rejoices in its bliss’. Or they recognise: ‘This suffering is only relief’.
______ 卐 ______
Liked it? Take a second to support this site.
Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (2 of 7)
The tolerance of the Romans in religious matters was generally great. They had it before the Jews, guaranteeing their freedom of worship, and even after the wars fought against the Jews, they were not forced to worship the gods of the state and released from the obligatory offerings to the emperors.
Until the beginning of the 3rd century, the hatred against Christians—who considered themselves exclusive; who, with all humility (!) thought of themselves as special, like the ‘God of Israel’, ‘chosen people’, ‘holy people’ who felt themselves as the ‘golden part’—came mostly from the common peoples. For a long time the emperors imagined themselves too strong before this dark sect to intervene seriously. ‘They avoided whenever possible’ the trials against Christians (Eduard Schwartz).
For two hundred years they were not subjected to any ‘persecution’. Emperor Commodus had a Christian favourite. In Nicomedia, the main Christian church was in front of Diocletian’s residence. Also his preceptor of rhetoric, the Father of the Church Lactantius, remained safe in the vicinity of the sovereign during the toughest persecutions against the Christians. Lactantius never appeared before the courts or went to jail.
Almost everyone knew Christians, but they did not like to get their hands dirty by persecuting them. When it was necessary because the adepts of the Greco-Roman culture were furious, the officials did everything possible to release the imprisoned. The Christians only had to renounce their faith—and they did it massively, it was the general rule—and nobody bothered them again.
During the most intense persecution, that of Diocletian, the state only demanded the fulfilment of the offering of sacrifices that the law imposed on all citizens. Non-compliance was punished, but in no case the practice of the Christian religion. Even during the persecution of Diocletian, the churches were able to dispose of their property.
Even with Emperor Decius, in the year 250, we cannot speak of a general and planned persecution of Christians. At that time the first Roman bishop is killed in a persecution. Fabian died in prison; there was no death sentence on him. But up to that date, the ancient Church already considered as ‘martyrs’ eleven of the seventeen Roman bishops, although none of them had been martyrs! For two hundred years Christianity had lived side by side with the emperors. And in spite of that, on the Catholic side they still lie—with ecclesiastical imprimatur (and dedication: ‘To the beloved mother of God’)—in the mid-20th century: ‘Most of the popes of that time died as martyrs’ (Rüger).
(Cornelius by Master of Meßkirch.) The ‘pope’ Cornelius, who died peacefully in 253 in Civitavecchia, appears as beheaded in the acts of the martyrs. Also falsified are those that make the Roman bishop Stephen I (254-257) victim of the persecutions of Valerian. Pope St. Eutychian (275-283) even buried ‘with his own hands’ 342 martyrs, before following them himself.
The Church tried to cover up the apostasy of several popes at the beginning of the 4th century by falsifying the documents. The Liber Pontificalis, the official list of the papacy, points out that the Roman bishop Marcellinus (296-304), who had made sacrifices to the gods and had delivered the ‘sacred’ books, soon repented and died martyred: a complete forgery.
In the Roman martyrology, one pope after another gain the crown of martyrdom—almost everything is pure deception. (Interestingly, until the end of the 3rd century the cult of the martyrs had not begun in Rome.)
______ 卐 ______
Liked it? Take a second to support this site.
Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (1 of 7)
The Christians first falsified, from the 2nd century, the emperor’s edicts of tolerance: for example that of Antoninus Pius (about 180), or a Marcus Aurelius writing to the Senate a letter in which the emperor testifies about the salvation of the Roman troops from thirst thanks to the Christians.
They also falsified an epistle of the Tiberian proconsul to Trajan with the supposed imperial order to end the bloody persecution.
An edict of Nerva was falsified which revokes the harsh measures of Domitian against the apostle John. Indeed, Domitian himself, informs the historian of the Church Eusebius—relying on the Eastern Christian (((Hegesippus)))[1], the author of the five books of Hypomnemata (Memories)—, after having imprisoned ‘the relatives of the Lord’ as the successors of David, he released them and ordered to ‘cease the persecution of the Church’.
If the Christians began falsifying documents so that the emperor exonerated them, when the persecutions were a thing of the past, they began to persecute the adherents of classical culture. They ended up falsifying documents to accuse the Hellene sovereigns; they falsified, in series, a large number of anti-Christian edicts and letters of the sovereigns and consuls (especially by the end of the 3rd century): supposed records of non-historical martyrdoms, and also an infinity of martyrdoms. The Christians who appear as witnesses to these false biographies are countless.
Already the first of the presumed persecutions under Nero—which, for two millennia, made this emperor a monster without equal for Christians—was not a persecution against Christians but a process for arson. Even historians Tacitus and Suetonius, hostile to Nero, judged the process as just and reasonable. ‘Christianity was not discussed’, writes the evangelical theologian Carl Schneider. Also, the history of Christianity of the Catholic theologian Michel Clévenot establishes ‘that neither Nero, nor the police nor the Romans must have known that they were Christians; they were still moving too far in the dark and their number was still too small for their executions to have been a matter of public interest’.
But since the logic of Catholic theologians is rarely brilliant, Clévenot finishes his chapter on the fire of Rome in July of the year 64, not without having first recorded the ‘surprisingly’ good memory about Emperor Nero among the Romans. Among the Christians, he is still considered a bloodthirsty madman. And according to Clévenot this would be ‘perhaps (!) the best demonstration that Christians were really the victims of the horrible massacre of July 64’.
It is significant that religious motives did not play any role in the process, or at most a very accessory one. Significantly, Nero confined himself to the Christians of Rome. Although the acts were later falsified to locate martyrs elsewhere in Italy and in Gaul, according to the Catholic theologian Ehrhard: ‘All these acts of martyrdom have no historical value’.
_____________
[1] Editor’s note: The triple parentheses are mine. Hegesippus, a chronicler of the early Church, was a Jewish convert. One wonders how many of the Christians that Deschner has been mentioning also had Jewish ancestry.
______ 卐 ______
Liked it? Take a second to support this site.
That the white nationalists and I live in parallel universes can be seen in today’s commentaries on the visit of Witch Theresa May to the African country that is ethnically cleansing whites from its soil. I just saw a few seconds of this Ramzpaul video on the subject but I won’t see everything. A year ago I wrote:
The South African government had six atomic bombs. If the South Africans had nuked Washington, in addition to New York (which would dispatch quite a few non-gentiles) and Hollywood (thus destroying the Jewish virus factories for the Aryan mind), together with Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (which would have emboldened the surrounding Muslims to re-conquer Israel)—with the surplus bomb being retained for London, Paris, or Moscow—South Africa would have been destroyed by the Evil Empire, but at least it would have died with honour.
In addition to Ramzpaul, other white nationalists and people of the Alt-Right are commenting today on the Witch’s visit to South Africa. Well: I would bet that nobody says, not even remotely, what I wrote a year ago and also through the spoken word in one of the podcasts.
Pierce saw it clearly in The Turner Diaries: if a fraction of the atomic weaponry falls into the hands of revolutionaries, it must be used immediately, even if it is a move of enormous risk.
Nobody thinks like Pierce today! They prefer to follow the loving ethics of humanity, so full of flowers, inspired by Christianity. Next month Greg Johnson publishes his book White Nationalist Manifesto and I’m sure he will continue to say that racists should continue to use porcelain guns instead of fighting.
Yesterday I saw part of this video by Jean-François Gariépy (known simply as JFG in YouTube) about whether the future of the white race will be great or will be extinguished. As far as I watched, at no time was armed struggle discussed as the royal path out of the death trap in which the white man has fallen.
I live, as I said, in a universe parallel to that of white nationalists, folks of the Alt-Right or Alt-Lite vloggers (JFG, for example, is a libertarian). For me it is more than obvious that whoever wants to save his race must convert himself into an army: an army of a single soldier!
That’s why I can no longer tolerate more than a few seconds in sites or videos of WN / Alt-Right. Their lack of martial spirit, and lack of desire to annihilate the Enemy even if that leads to their own death, make me sick.
Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.
As the historical-critical exegesis of the Bible teaches us, Jesus—the apocalyptic man who, totally within the tradition of the Jewish prophets, waits for the immediate end: the irruption of the ‘God’s imperial rule’, and thereby makes a complete mistake (one of the most solid results of exegetical investigation)—certainly did not want to found any Church or institute priests, bishops, patriarchs and popes.
As late as the middle of the 2nd century, the Roman Christian community had about thirty thousand members and 155 clerics. None knew anything about the appointment of Peter, nor about his stay and martyrdom in Rome.
The list of fabricated Roman bishops
The oldest list of Roman bishops was provided by the father of the Church, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, in his work Adversus Haereses, roughly between the years 180 and 185. The original Greek text is not preserved; only a complete Latin copy of the 3rd century or 4th, if not the 5th. Literature about it is hardly noticeable, the text is ‘spoiled’ in a manifest way. What remains a mystery is the origin of the list. Ireneus wrote down a little more than the names.
And nowhere is there talk of a primacy of Peter! By the end of the 2nd century Peter was not yet counted in Rome among the bishops. And in the 4th century it is affirmed that he was pope for twenty-five years! Bishop Eusebius, a historian of little confidence, even guilty of falsification of documents, transmitted in his time the succession of Roman bishops.
Eusebius ‘perfected’ also the list of Alexandrian bishops, very similar to that of the Romans. The same with the Antioquian list, associating an Olympiad with each one of the bishops Cornelius, Eros and Theophilus. In the list of bishops of Jerusalem he also worked with artificial computations, not having ‘practically any written news’ of the years in which they were in office. Later, Bishop Epiphanius made an exact dating comparing it with that of the emperors.
Around the year 354, the Catalogus Liberianus (Liberian Catalogue), a relation of popes that goes from Peter to Liberius, indicating dates in days and months, was continued and ‘completed’, as indicated by the Catholic Gelmi, who immediately added: ‘All these data have no historical value’.
The Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes), the official book of the popes, the oldest list of the Roman bishops, contains ‘a great abundance of falsified or legendary material’, which the author ‘completes by new findings’ (Caspar). In short, it carries so many fabrications that until the 6th century it has hardly any historical value, not naming Peter, but a certain Linus, as the first bishop of the city. Thereafter Linus is in second place and Peter in the first.
In the end a ‘position of Peter’ is constructed (Karrer) and becomes ‘papacy’. ‘Like a seed’, writes the Jesuit Hans Grotz in a poetic way, ‘Peter fell on the Roman earth’. And then many others fell, as is still happening today. Little by little all the ‘successors’ of Peter could be counted, as has been said, with the year in which they acceded to the papacy and the date of their death, apparently in an uninterrupted succession. (Editor’s Note: Deschner’s books have no illustrations but see the image that I chose for this post: part of a poster of the purported bishops of Rome from St. Peter to Pope Francis under the heading ‘I Sommi Pontefici Romani’. The poster is so large that, already unfolded, I had to hang it on a wall to photograph it.)
However, over time the list of Roman bishops was modified, perfected, completed in such a way that, in a table compiled by five Byzantine chroniclers, of the first twenty-eight bishops of Rome only in four places do the figures agree in all columns. Indeed, the final editor of the text, perhaps Pope Gregory I, seems to have expanded the list of names to include twelve saints, in parallel with the twelve apostles. In any case, the list of Roman bishops of the first two centuries is as unreliable as that of the list of the Alexandrians or Antiochenes, and ‘in the first decades it is pure arbitrariness’ (Heussi).
Note of the Ed.: Fabricated list of popes. Starting at the left,
St. Peter. Note the noblest faces the artist used for these
non-existent popes to make the faithful believe that the first
popes were not only saints, but also holy men of the white race.
The invention of a series of traditional names and tables, partly constructed, artificially filling the gaps, existed long before the appearance of Christianity and its lists of bishops falsified from the beginning. It is comparable to the Old Testament genealogies, which through a succession of names without empty gaps, guaranteed participation in the divine promises; especially the list of high priests after the exile, as a list of rulers of Israel.
Furthermore, the ancient pastors of Rome were not considered in any way ‘popes’. For a long time they had ‘no other title than that of the other bishops’ (Bihimeyer, Catholic). Whereas in the East, patriarchs, bishops and abbots were long known as ‘popes’ (pappas, papa, father), this designation appears in Rome for the first time on a tombstone from the time of Liberius (papacy 352-366).
At the end of the 5th century, the notion acquired a naturalisation certificate in the West, where the Roman bishops used the word ‘pope’ to call themselves, along with other bishops, although they did not do so regularly until the end of the 8th century. And until the second millennium the word ‘pope’ does not become an exclusive privilege for the bishops of Rome.
The first to refer to Mt, 16, 18, is, of course, the despotic Stephen I (papacy 354-357). With his hierarchical-monarchical conception of the Church, rather than episcopal and collegial, it is to a certain extent the first pope.
Not even Augustine, so fond of Rome but sometimes oscillating delicately among the pope and his African brothers, defends papal primacy. That is why Vatican I, of 1870, even reproached his ‘erroneous opinions’ (pravae sententiae) to the famous father of the Church. Sumus christiani, non petriani, ‘We are Christians, not Petrians’, Augustine had affirmed.
Similarly, like the bishops and fathers of the Church, the ancient councils did not recognise the primacy of law of Rome.
______ 卐 ______
Liked it? Take a second to support this site.