Did the Catholic Church Murder the “True Church”?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to look at a claim made by a group that are sometimes called Baptist secessionists or Landmark Baptists or Landmarkian Baptists. But you’re going to find similar claims to the one I’m going to address made by other groups as well. But it’s going to be this idea that while most of us believe Baptists are a Protestant denomination, while most Baptists would believe Baptists are a Protestant denomination that arises out of the reformation with something called the Radical Reformation, an offshoot of the Reformation in the 16th century. And then more directly that modern day Baptists are descended from the Puritan strain that broke away from the Church of England that broke away from the Catholic church.

The Baptist secessionists say, no, no, no. We’re not an offshoot of an offshoot, we’re, the one true church. And in some form or another, we’ve been around for 2000 years. And the only reason you don’t know about that is the Catholic church has systematically been killing us for centuries, for more than a millennium. And so 50 million allegedly of these Baptists were murdered and nobody knows about this. Now, I should make two things clear at the outset. Number one, this is not the mainstream view, even among Baptists. I don’t want Baptists in the comments saying, Hey, how dare you accuse us as Baptists of holding this view. I’m, not saying, some Baptists hold this view and it’s not scholars, but you will find scholars a hundred years ago who are Baptists who have degrees and are writing books that are actually getting published saying this sort of thing.

And so you will find people today, who’ve read these books or have read, in a lot of cases, books quoting these books and just taken this history as fact. I spoke to someone a couple months ago who suggested all of this was true and cited a book we’re going to look at today, The Trail of Blood. So I want to say on the one hand, no, this is not something that is normative even among Baptists. On the other hand, I don’t want to just laugh it out of the room or dismiss it. I want to take it seriously because I actually think it’s an attempt to solve a problem facing Protestants. Here’s what I mean by that, if I were to put the problem in a nutshell and put it this way, number one, Jesus promised that the gates of hell wouldn’t overcome the church.

He creates a church on earth and says that he will build the church and the gates of hell won’t overcome. If you knew nothing else but church history and you saw that you’d say, okay, Jesus is God He’s building the church, he’s saying the gates of hell won’t overcome, things are looking pretty good. But then the second point, if you’re a Protestant, you have to say that for most of church history we don’t find groups either the institutional church certainly or even any obvious groups of Christians in an unbroken line for 2000 years that are believing anything like what most Protestant denominations believe. And so that creates a problem. What do you do about that? And I want to look at four ways of trying to resolve this problem. There are more I’m sure, but these are four that I’ve seen. One is to redefine what it means to say that the gates of hell won’t prevail.

That this just means in the very end, at the end of time, Christ will eventually win. And now don’t get me wrong, Christ will eventually win. But if that’s all it means, that’s kind of striking that the gates of hell will not prevail just means someday Jesus will win and the church may be basically destroyed for 2000 years, for 1500 years, for however long, it doesn’t square up neatly with the biblical evidence. And I’ve quoted this before, but in judges six, when Israel is under the rule of Midian for seven years, not 1500, for seven years, the Bible describes it as the hand of Midian prevailing over Israel. So it sounds like the gates of hell won’t prevail means the church won’t go out of existence even for a little while, much less, again, if you’re someone who believes the apostles are good, but then you quickly have apostasy and then 1500 years later or 1600 or 2000 years later, then you’ve got the restoration of the true church that doesn’t seem to square neatly with prevailed.

Now if you saw I’ve responded to the LDS Mormon claim on this, I’m not going to go too deeply into that, but that’s one way of trying to resolve the problem of saying, well the gates of hell, won’t prevail doesn’t mean what it seems to mean. A second way is to redefine what the Bible means by church. And I think this is a pretty common one, and I don’t think it’s intentional don’t get me wrong. When I say redefine, I don’t mean that there’s anything malicious here, but that many Protestants have the idea that church in the biblical sense just means saved people wherever they are. That’s not what the word means. Ecclesia or ecclesia is to be gathered. It’s the called out or the calling together, it means something like assembly. And so to have an unassembled assembly seems to be a contradiction in terms, but also, besides the etymology of the word, you have things like Matthew 18 in which we’re told that if our brother sins against us, eventually we can take that issue to the church.

And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a gentile and a tax collector. Well, how do we take him to the church if the church isn’t a visible structured institution that can handle judicial cases, right? There seems to be a pretty clear judicial role the church on Earth is playing here. And then you’ve got earlier in Matthew 13, the kingdom of heaven, which seems here to be the church being compared to a net containing good and bad fish. So it certainly isn’t depicted as the invisible set of all the saved. So a third way is to claim that there is a tiny remnant somewhere, but they didn’t make enough of a difference to be recorded clearly in history. Yeah, this is something thats called the invisible remnant theory. That yes Christ does create a visible church and this visible church, the gates of hell don’t prevail against it.

They stay true to the faith for 2000 years. And they’re going strong for a long time. You just don’t see them anywhere in history. They don’t leave any written records, they don’t leave any recorded information. Well that doesn’t really make a lot of sense for a few reasons. In Matthew chapter five, Jesus describes the church, he says, you are the light of the world. The city set on a hill cannot be hid. And then he says, nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel but on a stand and it gives light to all in the house. So a church that goes into hiding, that doesn’t practice the great commission of preaching to all nations, that’s not a true church, right? A church that doesn’t follow the great commission isn’t actually being faithful to Christ. So the invisible remnant theory that for 1500 years Christians just hid and did nothing, that’s not faithfulness, right?

If the apostles on the day of Pentecost had just gone back into the upper room and locked the door, that wouldn’t have been faithfulness just to try to preserve themselves and their families. No, they’re called to something more. So even by the terms of the New Testament, the idea of the invisible remnant doesn’t really work because you have to assume that even the faithful churches, it’s not very faithful, that it’s not actually being a light of the world, it’s not actually being a city set on a hill because the two qualities of a city on a hill, number one it’s visible, it’s on a hill, number two, it’s structured, it’s a city, it’s a society, all of that looks much more like the Catholic concept of church than it does these attempts to say, oh, well maybe we mean something else by church. Now relatedly, I should have probably mentioned this on the last one, if you say, well, it doesn’t mean the institutional church, fine if you want to say the entire society, not just the government, we actually agree on that.

In the same way, if you say America, you don’t just mean the federal government. Usually you mean the people as well. But the problem is we don’t find 2000 years of Protestant Christians of any stripe, not just the bishops but the ordinary people, the theologians, we don’t find people who look and sound like Protestants for 2000 years. There’s one more issue here, which is that the mustard seed parable that Jesus gives where he describes the church going from the smallest of seeds to the largest wall garden plants seems to suggest that the church on earth is going to be very large, not an invisible remnant we’re not going to be able to find when we go looking for it in history. So those three ways I don’t think work particularly well that leads to a fourth way, which I think is actually really interesting.

They claim there were actually lots of pre reformation Christians just like you if you’re a Baptist, they’re a Baptist, if you’re an Adventist, they were Adventists, but all of these Christians were victims of a mass murder and subsequent coverup, that there was basically an unwritten genocide. And that the only reason you don’t find evidence of this isn’t because they weren’t evangelizing in the third view, the invisible remnant looks like they’re not evangelizing. No, no, no, they’re not in hiding. They’re all dead. And so they don’t leave us a trail of written records. They instead lead us with a trail of blood and you’ll see why I use that language in a minute. So that’s the claim I want to investigate. Now, one thing to notice here is that claim is actually a little harder to argue against because the absence of evidence, they’re going to say, well yeah, that just shows you how good the coverup was.

They were so good at murdering everyone and destroying all of their writings that the fact that we can’t prove it is only proof that it happened. And you think, well how can you possibly respond to that? So I’m going to do my best to try to answer that. So let me lay out the Baptist secessionist view in a nutshell. And this is coming from Daniel H. Williams. Williams is a Baptist himself, but not of the secessionist variety. He is a non secessionist. He believes Baptist well, we’ll just quote him directly, he says, although a predominant number of Baptist historians have taught accurately, that the Puritan context of 17th century England and Holland marks the origination of modern day Baptists. No less influential, having those who claim their lineage should be traced back across the centuries to New Testament times. So you’ve got within the world of Baptists, these two kind of strands, the kind of scholarly academic strand, and then this more popular strand, I don’t mean more popular, more at the level of the people.

According to the latter scenario, Baptists are not a species of Protestantism but predated, being found in every previous age since the apostles. And then he points that in a footnote that you can find similar visions to this in the Plymouth Brethren and Seventh Day Adventists. And so he gives some resources on that. So while I’m focusing on Baptists, I’m really meaning this to directly address anyone who’s of the Baptist or Protestant or Adventist, whatever kind of group you want to talk about, variety that says, no, no, no, my group is actually 2000 years old, not whatever age you would normally assign to it, 17th century or whatever. So I want to look at a few key ideas. First, for the past 2000 years, there have always been Baptists.

And again, if you want to look at variations, just replace Baptist with fill in the blank, although they were sometimes known by other names. So when you hear about the Cathars or the Donatist, these groups throughout history, that was us, that was the Baptists. Number two, these Baptists were never a part of the Catholic church. So they actually deny, fascinatingly, that this is an offshoot or reform movement or rebellion from the Catholic church. And this is important because their whole claim is no, no, the Catholic church isn’t 2000 years old. We are. So they can’t then be a breakaway, right? They can’t be a schism away from the Catholic church because they’re denying they ever went into schism in the first place. And then number three, the only reason we’ve never heard of them, as I said before, is that the Catholic church killed 50 million of them, destroyed their writings.

This is that trail of blood. Now that language is coming from probably the most influential work on this, JM Carroll’s I believe it’s 1931 book, the Trail of Blood, the full title is the Trail of Blood, following Christians down through the centuries, or the history of Baptist Church from the time of Christ, their founder, to the present day. And so that’s the claim, I want to look at what Carol argues and I want to respond to him. Carol’s not the only one, but as I said, I think he’s the most important and influential. So Carol’s claim is pretty simple. He has this period that he calls the Dark Ages and now there’s a whole debate of dark ages is kind of enlightenment, secularist propaganda of criticizing the religious ages before them. But a lot of baptists have picked up on this because the dark ages, so-called, were very Catholic. So they’re going to say they’re dark, not because they didn’t have the light of rationalist enlightenment secularism, but because they didn’t have the light of I guess the reformation, it is not clear what makes this dark versus light.

Nevertheless, he’s going to say during every period of the dark ages there were in existence many Christians in many separate and independent churches, some of them dating back to the time of the apostles, which were never in any way connected with the Catholic church. They always wholly rejected and repudiated the Catholics and their doctrines. This is a fact clearly demonstrated by credible history. That’s his claim, we’re going to see if That’s true. He says, these Christians were the perpetual objects of bitter and relentless persecution. History shows that during the period of the dark ages about 12 centuries, beginning with 8426, there were about 50 millions of these Christians who died martyr deaths.

So he’s claiming from mid 400s to about the mid 1600s, you’ve got the Catholic church killing 50 million people. And history just doesn’t, well, he’s going to say history shows this. This is clear, credible history. These Christians during these dark days of many centuries were called by many different names, all given to them by their enemies. He says these names are sometimes given because of some specially prominent and heroic leader, sometimes from other causes, and sometimes, many times the same people holding the same views were called by different names in different localities. So when you hear about all these different groups, that’s actually maybe all just Baptists by different names, that’s the argument. And he claims that a striking peculiarity of these Christians was that they rejected infant baptism and demanded re baptism and that it has to be done through immersion. So baptism by immersion, and even if you were immersed as a baby, you still had to be reimmersed.

And so he claims that for this reason they were called Anabaptist, but they had other names or nicknames. So they were called the Donatist, Politeans, the Albigensians and the Ancient Waldensians and others. And in the book he actually has a really fascinating kind of historical chart. And in the chart, let me make it bigger, in the chart, he tries to trace church history beginning in the early church showing when Jesus organizes his church and then there are these faithful churches that are going by all different names, the Motanists, the Cathars, the Armenians, well in Armenia, the Politeans. And so he views the Arnoldist Albigensians, Henricians and so on, and only later do they get to be called the Baptist. So all of this is going on as an entirely separate strand from what’s happening in the Roman Catholic Church. And so again, he says that this is not a reform movement, this is not a breakaway because if he says that, then he has to admit the Catholic church is older than the Baptist church and that’s the claim he’s trying to deny.

And so he is going to say that there was hard, cruel and perpetual persecution by the established Catholic church with a war of intended extermination. And so he says a trail of blood is very nearly all that is left anywhere. And then he is going to say, especially throughout England, Wales, Africa, Armenia, Bulgaria, but we’ll get back to why I focus on England because I think it’s going to show one of the problems with this claim. But we’ll get into why. Anywhere else Christians could be found who are trying earnestly to remain strictly loyal to New Testament teaching. So that’s the claim kind of in a nutshell, and I want to look at two questions. The first simply, did the Catholic Church murder 50 million people during this age? And the answer is going to be no, obviously. So Carol even admits that this seems a little hard to believe.

He says if 50 million people died of persecution during the 1200 years of what are called the dark ages as history seems positively to teach, then they died faster than an average of 4 million every 100 years. That seems almost beyond the limit of human conception. Well, right It’s, not just that it’s beyond the limit of human conception. The Catholic church is just committing this massive Holocaust level genocide, but it’s also just mathematically impossible because you don’t have, Europe today has what, three quarters of a billion people, like 750 million people. So you could have a situation where 4 million people died over the course of a century from being murdered, that’s mathematically possible, whether it’s plausible or not.

But he’s going to say 50 million die in the ancient church, again starting with like 426 going up until mid 1600s and that’s not they killed all 50 million of the Baptists. He’s going to say that into the dark ages, so before 400 or before 426, there went a group of many churches which were never in any way identified with the Catholics. Out of the dark ages came a group of many churches which had never been in any way identified with the Catholics. So even after killing 50 million of them, there’s still more, apparently many more. And so my question is this mathematically possible? Because if they’re going to kill 50 million Baptists, then there would seemingly have to be a pretty large number of Catholics and a pretty large number of Baptists, in the upper millions. Because if you’re killing 4 million people every century on average, that’s 400,000 people being murdered every decade or 40,000 people every year, why is that a problem?

Well, when you go back to early history and you actually do the math, you realize that by around the year 500, so this is the early part of that time period, the entire European continent only had 27 and a half million people and then it gets hit by the plague. And so by six 50 you only have about 18 million people living in Europe. So how do you get mass murder on that level? It’s not mathematically, there are not enough people to kill. And Lisa Patel, the historian who looks at early medieval Europe between 400 and 1100 says by 700 or so, neither Rome nor Paris nor any other population center in Western Europe had more than 20,000 people in it. And those numbers were rare. So to put this in context, Carol’s claim is that 40,000 people on average are being killed every year for more than a thousand years, at a time when that would be Rome and Paris put together the two largest cities being wiped out any year and then the next year you wipe out the next two largest cities.

And my point is that literally isn’t possible. You would run out of people. And instead we actually see European history population. It goes down when there are major diseases like the plague, but overall it ends up going up. And so by 1500 you now have 60 million people still too low to be killing that many people and have it not be huge dent in the population. So you have about 60 million people and 1500, 50 years later, you’ve got about 68 million people. And you can trace the population growth. My point is that the population is small but growing, neither of which permits assuming 50 million dead people, there are not 50 million people to kill and still have either Baptist or Catholics left. And that would not make the population go up if you killed 50 million people. And I mentioned England because he claims that this was especially bad in England, that’s the first place that he mentioned it.

It’s not the only place he mentions, but just to put that in context, England is so sparsely populated in 1086, 20 years after the Norman invasion, there’s 1.7 million people in all of England. So you just can’t have mass murder with the kind of numbers that he’s talking about and the population gradually rises till 1348. So you have 4.8 million people, and then you get hit by the plague and the population of England plummets from 4.8 million people to 2.6 million people. The point of all of this is when there are population drops, we know why, because this is actually pretty well documented in the record. Things like bubonic plague. And bubonic plague isn’t some sort of elaborate Catholic coverup, there’s tons of evidence of the plague and its effects all over Europe and Asia and we can trace it literally to the year when it arrives in different places.

So you would see in the numbers 50 million people missing, even if you space that out equally over centuries or over decades or over years, there’s just no way to wipe 50 million people off the map when in many cases Europe didn’t even have that population. So all that’s to say there’s no form of that that mathematically makes any sense, and in most cases it would literally be impossible. You can’t have Catholic murderers, Baptists who survive and 50 million dead people and still make the numbers work out in any sense. And if there were 50 million Baptists, even if they’re nonviolent, how did they, were there medieval concentration camps we didn’t know about it, how are we even making sense of any of this? And all that’s to say it doesn’t work, it doesn’t make a bit of sense. Now some people will say, well what about the Spanish Inquisition?

What about these kind of really bloody moments in church history? Well, there were bloody moments in church history. There were times where when the church and the state especially together were feeling threatened, there were sometimes these violent outlashes and the most notorious of these is the Spanish Inquisition. And some people have heard it kills like a million people or something. Well the historian Henry Camon, in his book The Spanish Inquisition takes a hard look at the number he realizes that the numbered historians in earlier ages had been working with were dramatically overinflated. And one of the reasons was you would find chroniclers that mentioned how many people were killed, but what wasn’t clear at the time is that they were including as well those who were burnt in effigy. So burning at the stake could mean you were burnt or an effigy of you was burnt to symbolically condemn you. That was counted towards the numbers.

When you actually dig into how many people were actually burnt at the stake, how many people were actually executed for heresy, he says the number, is a very much smaller number than historians once thought, a recent carefully considered view is that in these years, the high tide of persecution, the tribunal of Saragosa, hedged some 130 executions in person, that of Valencia possibly some 225, that of Barcelona, some 34. So in the worst years, we’re not looking at numbers in the millions or in the hundreds of thousands or in the tens of thousands, he says that for all of Spain between the beginning of the Inquisition in Spain, which I believe is 1486 until 1520, it is unlikely that more than 2000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition. Now notice, this is the bloodiest period of the Inquisition. This is a time when Europe’s population is much higher than it was in the earlier years, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth century, even the 15th century when it was racked by the plague.

And so 2000, not 50 million, 2000, no, even if you say, well there are other tribunals, there’s other inquisitions, there’s religious wars, you take all of those things into account if you want, and there’s no way to make the numbers work to anything coming even remotely close to 50 million people. And among those who were executed, they weren’t Baptist. So let’s get into that. The second thing, so the first question is did the Catholic church kill 50 million people? Answer no. The second question is, what did these groups actually believe? Was this a case where these were Baptists before the name? Carol says yes, he says they were called by many and varied names. He gives several examples, the Donatists, the Patternings, Cathari, Cathars, Politeans, Anabaptist, Petrobrussians, Arnoldist Henrician, Albigensians, and Waldensians. Now the closest thing He’s got are the Petrobrussians, Arnoldists, and Henrician. These were short-lived medieval movements that did seem to reject infant baptism, but they were also from Catholic clergy who were breakaways.

And this is one of the things he doesn’t want to grant. Remember he’s going to say these groups were never part of the Catholic church. And these were also not groups that lasted 2000 years or even a very long time at all. But I’m going to focus on the other groups that he mentions on there. He’s going to say a few things about it. He says, well don’t imagine that all these persecuted ones were always loyal in all respects to New Testament teaching. But in the main they were. And some of them, considering their surroundings were marvelously so. That’s what he says, it’s an interesting kind of caveat. They’re not perfect, but they’re doing a remarkably good job. And we’ll see whether he gives any evidence for this and the answer’s going to be no. But he says for several centuries these plans and measures, this persecution, were strictly and persistently followed.

That is according to history, the main reason why it’s so difficult to secure accurate history. But all persistent writers and preachers also died martyr deaths. This was a desperately bloody period. Now I want to point out this is a two-edged sword. You can’t say, oh yeah, the reason we don’t have any evidence of these people teaching what we believe is because they were all murdered. But then also say, but I know how many there were and what they believed. Where are you getting, the whole argument is all record of them was wiped out. How do you claim to know what they believed and taught and how faithful they were to the gospel and all these, where are you getting that information? What library do you have that historians don’t have? Where are you getting this if your whole claim is all the evidence was destroyed? It’s kind of like when the guards at the empty tomb say the apostles came while we were asleep.

Well if you were asleep, how do you know the apostles came and took the body? So the argument is kind of self refuting, but nevertheless, he’s going to claim pretty specific knowledge about the doctrines taught by all these groups. He says they rejected the manmade doctrine of infant baptism and demanded rebaptism. We already saw that. And then he’s going to give 10 different teachings that they commonly held. What he calls the fundamental doctrines. I’m going to focus on just two of them. The idea that they had two ordinances. And so instead of having the seven sacraments, they only had baptism and the Lord’s supper and they didn’t think these were salvific at all. They just thought they were typical and memorial meaning they were like types, they were symbols and memorial. And then the final claim that I want to focus on is the idea that all of these groups had officers of just bishops or pastors and deacons.

So in other words, instead of having the threefold clergy of bishop, priests, deacon, like in the Catholic church. He’s claiming that all these groups only have two ranks like Baptists do. We have bishops and deacons or pastors and deacons, elders and deacon, whatever you want to call that first group. And deacon that is a two-tiered church. So I want to see if any of those three claims are true and also ask another question that he doesn’t ask because he just takes it for granted. He says they’re faithful to the New Testament. I want to say, are these groups even people you would recognize as Christians if you actually listen to what they have to say for themselves about what they believe? So let’s turn to that. What did these groups actually believe?

And again, I’m going to focus on a few of the ones that he mentions. The Donatists, the Cathars, the Albigensians, Daniel Williams who I quoted earlier, the Baptist who’s not a secessionist, he points out that once you kind of accept this model of viewing everybody before as Baptist, the number of people who get claimed as Baptist just grows and grows and grows. And so modern theorists will claim some other ones. So I want to add to that also the Bogamills, there are plenty of interesting people who allegedly were Baptist like St Patrick, but we’re going to ignore all of that and just look at some of the big groups that he’s claiming. And remember by the way, Carol is appealing to history here. He regularly says clear history teaches this, et cetera. What do historians actually believe the Donatists taught? Well here the nice thing is we actually have their writings.

And so Battilion who is a Donatist, we have Saint Augustine’s answer to him. Saint Augustine argues against the Donatists, but he quotes Battilion seemingly line by line, takes an entire letter of his and just responds to every line, every paragraph. And Batillion opens the letter by declaring himself a bishop writing his well-beloved brethren, fellow priests and deacons. So notice Batillion has a three-tiered structure of his church. He doesn’t have a Baptist two-tiered model. So That’s simply not true. And if you know anything about Donatism, you can read the Encyclopedia Britanica article, you can read any scholarship on it. It’s incredibly clear where Donatism comes from. The Donatist controversy was based on, in 270 there was a massive persecution of Christians, and in this unfortunately many Catholics collaborated with the government, they didn’t want to be martyred and so they would turn over, they would turn over either holy books, they’d give their Bibles to be burnt or in some cases they would even turn other Christians over.

They were called tradators. Related to the word for traitor, but it also means to turn over. And so the Donatists said sacraments done by priests and bishops who collaborated with the government in any way who were tradators, were invalid. And how do we know this? Both because of a wealth of responses to them on this point, there’s a theological debate being had on this but also from their own writing. So Cotillion goes on, he says, those who have polluted their souls with the guilty lavar under the name of baptism reproached us with baptizing twice. In other words, he says, if you get baptized by one of these tradators, that is an invalid baptism. Not because you were a baby. This is not a question of infant baptism at all. It’s not about how old you are, it’s about how holy the person baptizing you is.

He says, for what we look to is the conscience of the giver to cleanse that of the recipient. For he who receives faith from the faithless receives not faith, but guilt. So notice he doesn’t think baptism is simply a memorial, he doesn’t think it’s simply a type or a sign. He thinks baptism is actually salvific but only if done by a person who has valid faith. And since he rejects the faith of the tradators, he says, therefore if you got your baptism from one of those disloyal priests and bishops it doesn’t count. We don’t need to get into the theology of the sacramental theology Augustine and others are going to put forward that it’s Christ who saves us in baptism, not the priest, not the apostles. Augustine points out Judas went out baptizing people and they didn’t have to get rebaptized. John the baptist gave them simply symbolic baptism and those people did have to get rebaptized.

We see that in acts, those who only received John’s baptism then had to receive Christian baptism. That suggests that the power of the sacrament of baptism isn’t tied to the person administering it, but is tied rather to the rite of baptism itself. That Christian baptism is doing something different, that Christ is present in a sacramental way there. Strikingly, Batillion and Augustine agree baptism is a sacrament, they disagree on the efficacy of it if it’s given by a bad priest. Neither of them has anything remotely like the beliefs of modern Baptist. So it is true in other words that they do rebaptize, but for almost polar opposite reasons from what a Baptist today would re-baptize for. Because a Baptist today would baptize an infant even if you were infant baptized by the holiest person who does infant baptism. It wouldn’t matter. You have to be rebaptized as a sign and in rebaptizing you as a sign it doesn’t matter how holy the person doing it is.

In other words, a Donatist and a Baptist in a room would find very little to agree on even on the question of baptism. They certainly don’t agree on the structure of the church or the other sacraments, they’re a bad fit. They clearly just don’t believe what Carol claims and believes. Okay, so much for the Donatists Let’s, turn now to the Bogamills and Cathars, and I want to preface this by saying There’s some scholarly debate about how closely related some of these groups are. And so if you want to give a lot of credit to Carol and to the Baptist secessionists, they are probably right in seeing there being a connection between the Albigensians, Cathars, and Bogamills. Certainly That’s been the view of a lot of Catholics. If you go back to medieval sources, they would regularly accuse these groups of being connected, and there’s another question about whether they’re related to the Manichean, but we’re going to ignore that because we’ll just look specifically at the medieval groups.

And so just to give you a sense of maybe where the mainstream scholarship is on this, this is Claire Taylor in the journal history in 2013. She explains that over the 20th century the kind of scholarship on Catharism was led by a group of eminent scholars. She actually names them, that they explain why this is a dualist heresy and then she’s going to explain both how we know that and what that means. Dualism, she explains is a belief in two gods or two principle beings, one good and one evil. So the good God was responsible for the creation of human souls, and the evil God for the creation of everything material or visible. But the good God can’t interact with the material world and so he can’t perform miracles. Miracles are tricks of the evil God.

Catharism specifically derived from a sect known as the Bogamills strongest in this period, the 1240s in Bulgaria in the Byzantine Empire, notably at Constantinople. It was initially successful in Germany in the 1140s and then it spread from there into southern France and northern Italy. And so it’s true it does take on different names sometimes like town names, like Albigensians is a regional kind of name. And then Claire Taylor explains that this sect was as real as it was dangerous. Christian order and orthodoxy has more or less been the consensus of heresiologists, that’s people who study heresy since. And why is it dangerous to Christian order and orthodoxy? Well because it considered all physical matter including people and animals as the work of the creator God who is not a good God. He is evil. He’s identified with the devil. And so this is why the argument goes, the material conditions experienced by most people were miserable. They were not the work of a loving God. Like of course the visible world is hard. The God who made the visible world hates you.

Professor Taylor continues where still the human soul was not united with God when the human body died but was reborn over and over into human or even animal bodies. So there’s a belief by the Cathars in reincarnation. The good loving God sent his son Jesus to bring the message of salvation. You might be wondering, well what does that message look like? Well, Jesus in this view came as a non-physical apparition, just a vision to comfort and teach humans that the soul could be released to join the good God if it was carried within one of the sects elect when they died. So if your soul is united to one of these good people when their body dies, then you are free from this cycle of reincarnation. Jesus in this view does not suffer and die incarnate because he is not really incarnate and he does not interact with the physical world.

For example, by performing miracles. Only in a very pure condition could souls escape reincarnation in human or animal form upon the death of the body and leave the earthly realm for heaven. So the dualist then aimed to die in a perfected state, becoming initiated members of the elect through training and preparation and there’s a ritual, the core sacrament isn’t baptism for the Cathars, but what’s called the consolomentum, we’ll get into what that is, and the maintenance of a strict and austere lifestyle after. Now this austere lifestyle went beyond the humble lifestyle advocated by other radical Christian sects. It involved the refusal of meat and dairy products and the enunciation of sexual intercourse even for married couples, and also the refusal to take human and animal life under any circumstances. So you can’t eat meat, you can’t even have dairy because dairy is tied to the sexuality of animals, and sex is evil.

And so you can’t even have sex with your spouse. And so Professor Taylor explains this historical understanding of cathar beliefs was established on the basis of a body of text deriving from the dualists themselves. In other words, this is not just other people saying, oh yeah, those dualists, they really believe crazy things. The dualists themselves say these things and as well as ones who were dualists who then converted to Catholicism, you also have sermons, letters, political and instructional tracks, chronicles and even songs. Great similarities were noted between Bogamillism and Catharsism. Several sources make the explicit claim that eastern and western dualists were connected. Bogamills are in the east, Cathars are in the west, but they’re teaching the same thing. Now the important thing here is this isn’t the unbroken line of authentic Christianity. Obviously. This is not even Christian and how do we know that?

Because the Bible explicitly condemns it in first Timothy four, St. Paul warns, he says, now the spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons. What are these doctrines of demons? Those who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. Now many Protestants without any kind of historical knowledge of Cathorism or any of these doctrines or heretical sects think this is St. Paul warning against clerical celibacy even though Paul is himself a celibate. No, the Catholic church teaches that marriage is a sacrament, a sacrament that’s consummated through the sexual act. We are not against marriage, but there were those who were extremely against the body, who viewed the body just as evil, who viewed matter just as evil, who treat all of this as the flesh, that’s not the Catholic view.

What you see in the Cathars and the Bogamills, the Albigensians they’re teaching the doctrines of demons and we know that by just listening to what they have to say for themselves. So let’s take a deeper dive in the Cathars in their own words. There’s a really helpful book here, it’s older but it’s still helpful. It’s from the 1960s. Remember when Professor Taylor was saying the really influential historians on the Cathars? One of the ones she mentions is Walter Wakefield. What makes the book really good and his book Heresies of the High Middle Ages is he just gathers as many documents as he can, what are called primary sources. So you can just read people in their own words. So you don’t have to take a Catholic’s word for what a Bogamill had to say. You can read a Bogamill. Or in some cases you can read those who converted about what they used to believe.

Now feel free to take it with a grain of salt, maybe they’re lying about what they used to believe. But it’s still helpful to hear where it’s not a historian 500 years later trying to piece the history together. Someone who’s alive at the time. So one of those examples is Bonacorsis. He had been a Cathar and then he becomes a Catholic and he explains, they condemn all the doctors they damn Ambrose, Gregory, Augustine and Jerome, all the others. And he says if anyone should have eaten meat, eggs, or cheese, anything else of an animal nature, they believe he consumed damnation for himself. They think that the Holy Spirit can in no way be received in the baptism of water, nor do they believe that any visible substance can by any means be changed into the body of Christ. Now there are some points on there in which they certainly do agree with Baptists.

They don’t think baptism does anything. They don’t think that the Lord’s supper does anything Eucharist, but that’s because they don’t believe that matter is good. Now, I don’t want to press this further than I should, but how much within Protestantism is indebted to that kind of fear of matter, fear of the body and I’ll just give one example. I think I’ve given it before, many Protestants have a belief that there can be unholy physical things. If you have a Ouija board in your house, that’s obviously an evil thing, you need to find it and destroy it. But they would be very skeptical of the idea of holy physical things.

And so physical things can be neutral or bad. They can’t be good. That is a strangely negative view of the world created by a good God. To give another example, the 19th century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon mocks the idea that the Eucharist could actually be contributing in salvation in any way because he doesn’t think salvation could come from eating. He says, if you eat the Lord, he doesn’t go into your heart. He just goes into your intestines. But he has no problem preaching that Adam and Eve bring damnation into the world by eating the fruit of the tree. So he’s fine with damnation being brought about through a physical object, but he’s very opposed to the idea of salvation could come through a physical object that looks more like the Cathars, Bogamills, et cetera than it looks like Catholicism on that particular point. I’m not saying on any other points.

When you get the full-fledged version of the Cathars, Bogamills, et cetera, you realize the reason they held these things is because they denied the incarnation. They don’t think the world is created by a good and loving God. Baptists think the world is created by a good and loving God but still have some vestiges of this suspicion of matter in the created world. No, not all Baptists, but I hope you take my point there. It is something to at least probe. How much does this theology make sense with a good view of the incarnation? If the word is made flesh and blood among us, we can’t just say flesh is evil. Okay, returning then to Bonacorsis’s text, he says the Cathars believe also that anyone who takes an oath will be damned. They think that no one can be saved except by a certain imposition of hands, which they call baptism and the renewal of the Holy Spirit.

And he says, such is the heresy of the Cathars from which God keep all Catholics. Now I think one thing to note there is they clearly believe something different than Carol is ascribing to them. They have much different beliefs that are much more controversial and involve a different sacramental structure. They don’t just have a symbolic baptism. They have what they call baptism that is a non-physical baptism, it’s a laying on of hands. You don’t have to deal with water or anything physical like that, laying on of hands. It’s supposed to be a spiritual baptism and we actually have the text of that. This is the condolomentum that Taylor mentioned. We have one of the French texts from the late 1200s and the text itself says this Holy baptism with the imposition of hands was instituted by Jesus Christ. Now notice, remember this is not water baptism.

This is a baptism of imposition of hands and give several scriptural citations in which laying on of hands is done to prove that this Cathar sacrament was instituted by Christ, says this holy baptism by which the Holy Spirit is given. So notice it is salvific it’s not just a symbol. The church of God has preserved from the apostles until this time and is passed from good man to good men. The Cathars didn’t call themselves Cathars. They called themselves the good men. And so you notice there their sacramental beliefs are radically different than what Carol is claiming. When we don’t have to take Catholic’s word for it, we can read them in their own words. So whether you take ex Cathar Catholics, whether you take modern historians, whether you take Cathars themselves in their own rituals, you see they don’t believe what the Baptist secessionists claim they do.

They don’t believe anything close to what a Baptist believes. Thanks be to God. If a Baptist believed what Cathars believed, we wouldn’t be able to call them brothers and sisters in Christ because the Cathars were wildly outside of Christianity even while calling themselves Christians. Let’s look next and finally at the Albigensians, the Albigensians are closely related. There’s some question about how much the terms are interchangeable. I’m going to go back to Wakefield and Evan’s book Heresies of Middle Ages or the high Middle Ages, excuse me. And in it they look at a particular Bogamill text called the Secret Supper. It’s sometimes also called the Interrogatorio Johannes or the questions of John because the whole thing is structured as Jesus and John having a Q&A session at the Last Supper and we only have the Latin version of it. We know that it was originally written in either Salvonic or Greek and It’s probably based on earlier apocrypha.

Now this is a point I haven’t even really covered, but the Bogamills and the Cathar and the Albigensians, as you might imagine don’t just accept the New Testament because if they did, they’d have to accept that whole bit about the doctrines of demons. They have other secret writings they consider to be scripture. This is a thing Carol denies, but that we actually see, we have their documents, we have their texts. This is one of them. The Secret Supper purports to be not a modern medieval account, anything like that. No, no, no. It was pretending to be scripture. It was pretending to be an actual conversation. It claims to be written by the apostle John. In it, oh, before we get into, so we know it comes to Italy by the end of the 1100s, we even know who brings it there. We also see it among other heretical groups.

So we know the Albigensians had it and then some other groups that we haven’t gotten into, we don’t need to, but let’s just look at what the text says. I’m going to just take a few passages. When Satan falls from heaven here’s what Jesus allegedly tells John. Falling down from heaven, Satan could find no peace in this firmament, nor could those who are with him and he be sought the father saying, I have sinned, have patience with me and I’ll pay the all. The Lord has moved with pity for him and gave him peace to do what he would until the seventh day. What do you think he does in those seven days? Well, he creates the world. Satan took his seat above the firmament and gave command of the angel who was over the air and the angel who’s over the water. So they raised two thirds of the water high in the air.

Of the remaining third they made the waters. He commanded the earth to bring forth all living things, animals, trees and herbs. And then he pondered on making men to serve him. He took clay of the earth and made men like unto himself, unto Satan, not God the Father, right? This is Satan making, this is Genesis being told, but instead of a loving God, making the world it’s the devil himself making the world. And he baited an angel of the second heaven to enter the body of clay, of this body, he took apart and made another body in the form of a woman and baited an angel of the first heaven to enter into it. There’s kind of a funny sexism there In Genesis, the equality of man and woman is shown by eve coming from Adam’s side. In the Secret supper, a higher angel becomes a man, a lower angel becomes a woman.

But the angels are tricked into becoming humans. We’re told the angels grieve deeply that thus they had immortal form imposed upon them and that they now existed in different forms and Satan bade them to perform the works of the flesh in their bodies of clay, but they did not know how to commit sin. So these are purely spiritual beings. They aren’t familiar with sin and so now they have bodies and they have to die that they also have now been introduced to sin. And so this fake Jesus says, when my father thought to send me to this earth, he sent before me his angels, she who is called Mary, my mother, that she might receive me through the Holy Spirit. And when I descended, I entered and came forth through her ear. You’ll notice their disdain of the body is so thorough, their disdain of sexuality is so thorough that you can’t even have Mary giving birth in a virginal way.

Jesus has to be born in this kind of quasi pagan way. If you know about Athena, Athena springing from the head of Zeus, right? Well, there’s something very similar here. Jesus allegedly comes out of the Virgin Mary’s ear. Now Satan, the prince of this world knew I was come to seek and to save that which was lost. Then he sent his angel, the prophet Elijah who baptized in water and was called John the Baptist. Now that should be striking, right? That Carol is going to claim that you need full immersion water baptism and this is what the Cathars taught. Excuse me, this is what the Albigensians taught, and they actually taught no water baptism is a sacrament of the devil. And Elijah was reincarnated as John the Baptist to try to thwart Jesus. This is not Christianity, right? We can agree on that, I hope.

And then the fake Jesus also says the followers of John marry and are given in marriage, whereas my disciples marry not at all, but remain as the angels of God in the heavenly kingdom. And so you’ll notice once again, the difference between this group and Christians is this group denies marriage, they’re against it completely. Mandatory celibacy for everyone to be a full member of their group. So all of that is to say two things. Number one, there were not 50 million people killed during the so-called Dark Ages. And number two, none of the groups that Carol’s citing to claiming this is your unbroken continuity of Baptists down through the ages are actually Baptists. You occasionally, like I said, you have these periodic brief spring up reform movements where they’ll occasionally agree with the Baptists on particular issues like denying infant baptism. But you don’t have 2000 years of that.

You don’t have an unbroken line of that, you’ve got little pockets of that throughout history and then they spring up and die out, not because of massive murder, just because the movements often just don’t really get legs and take off. They’re often limited to a particular medieval town and then they peter out. So what I hope to do in all of that is to say, this is a really interesting theory, Baptist secessionism, and I think you can do a similar thing. Any group claiming the Bogamills, the Cathars, Albigensians were really their group, just read what they actually had to say for themselves. Don’t read second and third and fourth hand sources of people claiming they taught X, Y, Z.

If you really want to find out what they believe, there are ways of reading their works. They’ve been translated into English and they’re so shockingly unlike anything like Christianity that you can see why Christians were terrified of this arrival of a new evil kind of mockery of Christianity that claims to be Christian, while also saying that the Old Testament God is evil and that John the Baptist is evil and that water baptism is evil.

It is drawing people away from salvation in a major way and that’s why there was so much anxiety, not because the battled Catholic church was afraid of these Baptists that didn’t actually exist. Oh yeah, I’m, sorry, one final, final thought because Baptist secessionism isn’t real because it doesn’t exist and no historian takes it seriously. And in fact, a wealth of documentary evidence contradicts it both from the groups themselves and from the numbers where you can’t just say, well, maybe they destroyed all the evidence and not only destroyed all the evidence, but destroyed all the people riding against them and all of their evidence. You would see it demographically in the numbers and we don’t see that/. There’, no way to sustain it. And so you’re still left with the core problem. How are you going to make sense of the fact that Christ promised that the gates of hell would not prevail over the church if you don’t accept that the church Christ founded isn’t Protestant? For Shameless Popery, I’m, Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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