Do Protestants really believe this?

**Sétanta** · February 28, 2006, 08:23 PM

I recently attended a History of Christianity lecture given by a Benedictine Monk at my Church. He started off at the beginning. Like the very beginning, Genesis type beginning. And although I don't exactly believe the bible is literal in that book it was very interesting. For a while he went through the epochs of Christianity, old testament and new. Moses, Jesus, Julian the Apostate. It got kinda boring from 1AD through 1000AD when the Crusades started again.

However, the part that struck me the oddest was when he was talking about the Reformation. He talked about the good, the bad and the ugly of it and all related things. Then he mentioned that many Protestants today claim a seperate lineage from the Catholic Church. Many Protestants don't think that they were a group literally protesting the Roman Catholics but rather were founded back after the early Christian Councils.

So my question is, do Protestants today really believe that they have a lineage completely seperate from the Catholic Church? That they were founded a thousand years ago instead of the 16th Century?

**Honeohvovohaestse** · February 28, 2006, 08:26 PM

Yes sir, many upon many do here in my area. I'm not so sure they believe it in the strictest sense. But as a denial, to seperate them from what they feel are increasingly liberal Catholics, they also will claim Catholicism is NOT and never was part of Christianity.

I'll expand more and give you some quotes from Protestants I know maybe.

**Sétanta** · February 28, 2006, 08:29 PM

So its inferiority complex

Like a rebellious teen claiming he was adopted...

**mike^_^** · February 28, 2006, 08:32 PM

i would strongly suggest you read the book "The Two Babylons" by Alexander Hislop.

http://www.biblebelievers.com/babylon/index.htm

**ThiudareiksGunthigg** · February 28, 2006, 08:56 PM

Originally Posted by mike^_^

i would strongly suggest you read the book "The Two Babylons" by Alexander Hislop. this is the definitive book for understanding the difference between christianity (reformation) and slavishly serving the roman caesar (roman catholicism)

http://www.biblebelievers.com/babylon/index.htm

I'd strongly suggest you only read Hislop's nonsense for a laugh at how prejudice and pseudo scholarship can be combined to create a work of absolutely zero credibility.

Hislop was a rabid anti-Catholic bigot whose work has long since been discredited as bogus, riddled with unsubstantiated assertions and historical impossibilities. He claims (with no evidence whatsoever) that the letters 'IHS' on Catholic communion wafers stand for the Egyptian gods 'Isis, Horus and Seb'. He doesn't explain, however, how Egyptians could have been using Latin letters before the Latin alphabet had even come into existence. The letters actually stand for 'I(e)S(u)S' (ie 'Jesus'). He says the mitre worn by Catholic bishops was a survival of a Babylonian hat symbolising a fish god. But he fails to explain how this 'survival' could have come about considering that the modern style of mitre didn't develop until the Tenth Century AD.

Hislop wrote back in 1858, but his book has remained popular with a certain type of Protestant reader ever since, despite it's laughable errors. It is a major source of the notorious Jack T. Chick, the crackpot publisher of hilarious cartoon tracts which explain such remarkable things as how the Papacy created Nazism, how playing Dungeons and Dragons will make you possessed by demons and how Jesus will burn you in hell unless you subscribe to Jack T. Chick's whacko version of Christianity.

One modern Protestant who took Hislop's pseudo history seriously was Ralph Woodrow, who wrote a similar book called Babylon Mystery Religion inspired by Hislop's 'scholarship'. Woodrow was, however, far more intellectually honest than Hislop. When challenged by a history teacher over some of the many errors in Hislop's book, Woodrow set out to check Hislop's assertions and conclusions. He quickly found that Hislop's book was garbage:

Because Hislop wrote in the mid-1800’s the books he refers to or quotes are now quite old. I made considerable effort to find these old books and to check Hislop’s references; books such as Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains, Kitto’s Cyclopeidia of Biblical Literature, Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, as well as old editions of Pausanias, Pliny, Tacitus, Herodotus and many more. When I checked his footnote references, in numerous cases I discovered they do not support his claims.

As I did this [research], it became clear-Hislop's "history" was often only mythology... an arbitrary piecing together of ancient myths can not provide a sound basis for history. Take enough tribes, enough tales, enough time, jump from one time to another, from one country to another, pick and choose similarities-why anything could be "proved"!

Hislop's book might be useful in a study of Nineteenth Century bigotry or amateurish psedu scholarship, but as a source of reliable information it is less than worthless.

**QuackyNC** · February 28, 2006, 08:59 PM

No offense, but sorry just doesn't cut it....I'm sorry that we made the world suffer for 1500 hundred years, though you don't hear any protestants apologize for their crimes.

I dont see why people apologize for things in history. I wasnt among the protestants who murdered people during the reformation and I doubt that there are any catholics alive who murdered protesants or persecuted other people. So why apologize? We should just use those examples to prevent future religous crimes.

**QuackyNC** · February 28, 2006, 08:30 PM

Well the protestants who are educated about history(like myself) know about the reforamtion and martin luther. I also know of several prsybeterian churches who celebrate reformation day. But there are those, like at my baptist church who probally have no ideal about the history of their church, or even have a clue that there was another martin luther who wasnt black.

The worst thing about my church is that everyone believes the King James Version of the bible was written by god himself and sent down on a ray of light or something. THey always preach against new version and always say that the king james version was copied from the "original manuscripts." They dont realize it was a political instrument.

**therussian** · February 28, 2006, 08:33 PM

I wonder where Orthodoxy fits into all of this. I know that Catholics used to look down at Orthodox christians and thought them only better than the "Infidel", but what about modern day? Is this the same with Protestants?

**Blaven** · February 28, 2006, 08:50 PM

Originally Posted by therussian

I wonder where Orthodoxy fits into all of this. I know that Catholics used to look down at Orthodox christians and thought them only better than the "Infidel"

Got anything to back that up?

And generally speaking, Catholics views on Protestants are a lot more benign than vice versa.

**therussian** · February 28, 2006, 09:03 PM

Originally Posted by Blaven

Got anything to back that up?

Just in case you didn't understand my comment, I was talking about a long time ago, like Medieval and Rennaissance History.

**Kino** · February 28, 2006, 08:50 PM

Deleted by user.

**QuackyNC** · February 28, 2006, 08:55 PM

Originally Posted by Dzoavits

Most Catholics are sorry about the Crusades, the schism, and the fall of Byzantium. In Catechism we talked about the history of the church. That we let down the Eastern Christians and that the schism was really unfortunate. That we should look at the Eastern Orthodox churches as our other half.

We also talked about that the protestants intentions were good and caused a reformation that was good for the Catholic church but people like Luther are looked down upon for actually splitting the church rather than trying to heal it.

I hope one day we can unite the church again. At least East and West, which I think might be more likely.

Well luther didnt originally intend to split the church his original plan was to reform it. The chruch just refused to allow him to do so. I dont see why catholics look down on him for those reasons.

**Hells Bells** · February 28, 2006, 09:03 PM

i was taught the schism happened because the eastern emperor wanted to be pope

**Dromikaites** · March 17, 2006, 08:43 AM

Originally Posted by Xu Xiang Long

i was taught the schism happened because the eastern emperor wanted to be pope

Humm, you can look at it that way too. Actually the Roman emperors also held the title of Pontifex Maximus (=Highest Priest). In theory that was valid for each and every legal religion within the empire though in practice the Jews probably didn't consider the emperors as their highest ranked priests.

When the Roman empire was split between the Eastern Roman Empire (ERE) and Western Roman Empire (WRE) the Byzantine emperor (the emperor of the ERE) kept being the head of the church in the East in a way. That means he was not considered a priest himself but he could appoint or sack the patriarch of Constantinople or any other bishops in his empire. The emperor of the WRE held in theory the same powers in the West but in practice the WRE didn't really lasted that much to see the western emperors sacking popes. After the fall of WRE (475 AD) the Byzantine emperor became the Pontifex Maximus (though the title wasn't used anymore, being associated with the pagan religions) for both the East and the West (because he was the only "descendent" of the Roman emperors). However in practice he didn't have much control over what was going on in the West. The Byzantine emperor Justinian conquered in the 6th century parts of what used to be the WRE but the emperors who followed after him were unable to hold those territories. That situation resulted in the pope (who was initially just the bishop of Rome) growing more and more independent over the centuries.

In 800 AD on Christmas day the king of the Franks and Lombards, Charlemagne, was crowned as Imperator Augustus by the pope Leon III. That was a sort of revolutionary event at the time because technically Charlemagne had no legitimate right to be called "emperor". He was a "barbarian" king, in no way related to the Western Roman Empire and even less with the Eastern Roman Empire. Charlemagne himself hesitated before accepting the title precisely because of the legitimacy issue. Several things made possible his coronation as emperor:
1) At that time on the throne of the Byzantine empire sat an empress (empress Irina), not an emperor.
2) The pope wanted to be officially recognized as an emperor-maker (that is, above each and every Christian sovereign).
3) Being a woman, empress Irina could not be head of the church (only men could be priests therefore only men could be heads of the church

).

So Leon III made a deal with Charlemagne: Charlemagne would become emperor even though he had no real legitimacy while in return the pope would become the head of the church (at least of the Church in the West). It was supposed to look like the only existing emperor (the other sovereign being an empress, not an emperor

) made the pope head of the church, voluntarily giving up the right of the emperors to lead the church. Of course the Byzantine emperors and the eastern clergy in general never accepted this deal. A conflict was bound to happen at any time. It so happened that it took another 250 years for the "bomb" to explode dividing the Christians into Catholics (West) and Orthodox (East).

So, to answer your post: in a sense yes, the first schism happened because the Byzantine emperors considerd themselves the only legitimate leaders of the church and they didn't accept to share that leadership with anybody else.

**Honeohvovohaestse** · February 28, 2006, 08:53 PM

No offense, but sorry just doesn't cut it....I'm sorry that we made the world suffer for 1500 hundred years, though you don't hear any protestants apologize for their crimes.

Eastern Orthodoxy comes in earlier than Protestantism and is most likely the result of the great or western schism I believe dating to 1054.

**Kino** · February 28, 2006, 08:58 PM

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**Honeohvovohaestse** · February 28, 2006, 09:08 PM

Originally Posted by Dzoavits

It's not the same religion as it was 500 years ago. It has changed a lot. It's like condeming Germany 100 years from now for the holocaust. Or Japan for attacking Pearl harbor.

I have to say that's a false analogy, it's more like condemning the Ku Klux Klan, sure it doesn't kill people anymore, but that's only because the law stops it, in fact organized Christians in India and Serbia have done exactly that. If the Ku Klux Klan say it's a charity organization tomorrow I will say, TOTAL BS.

Note this, if you are a Christian I will say this to you, you seem to be a nice and reasonable person. On an individual level I can get along with and enjoy the company of Christians. You may not hate groups or individuals, but there are still large numbers of Christians that do, I don't know if you're familar with protestant America, but they're plenty of hate groups, hell in my state the Klan is extremely anti-Catholic.

**Kino** · February 28, 2006, 09:13 PM

Deleted by user.

**hellheaven1987** · February 28, 2006, 09:15 PM

Originally Posted by Dzoavits

The Ku Klux Klan message is still one of hate. The Catholic church doesn't want to burn witches or heretics anymore. If you like you can call the church 500 years ago the old Catholic church. If the KKK reformed it would be the new KKK. Though it's easier to just start a new group with a different name than something like a religion. Is why I compared it to a nation.

Well, religion is produced by man... so as long as it was built up by man, why we can't change it?