The Catacombs

 In the   first  400 years or so following the ressurection of Jesus Christ there  existed a community of  believers in the city of Rome that lived and died  under  unique circumstances.  Roman society and culture was a culture where every aspect of life was given over to a pantheon of false gods.  If you were a Christian living in Rome at these times,  at every turn you were faced with  the choice of  giving some sort of  acknowledgment to these  man-made deities or face ridicule,  scorn and persecution.  Whether it was the  public prayers  offered up at virtually every public event, or the  oaths to  gods   compelled  during  military service, or the paganism of your neighbors, a subtle oppression existed everywhere.  To abstain or speak up might cost you  your job, or your social standing.  To proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ  might mean the  severing of family ties or physical hardship.

  On  top of that, they endured  the occasional  period of state persecution in which various emperors would pledge to wipe them out. Emperor worship and overall state worship was very  much a  part of Roman life , and the early Christian  community made it clear that they would  pray for the king, but not to the king. Christians were  declared enemies of the state and their practices were said to be injurious to the homogeneity of Roman society. Christianity was proclaimed "strange and unlawful" in AD 35 by the Senate.  It was called "deadly" and "detestable"  by Tacitus, "wicked and unbridled" by Plinius, "new and harmful" by Svetonius ,  and "mysterious and opposed to light" by Octavius.  Diocletian even erected a column  proclaiming his  victory over the Christians in his realm. The properties of followers would be  seized, and their houses burned to the ground with full governmental approval. They were set on fire,  or fed to lions for public sport. To stand up for Jesus in  Rome  meant at least discomfort, and possibly martyrdom before a  cheering crowd of bloodthirsty pagans. The  gospel of Jesus Christ  thrived under these conditions, and  one of the greatest monuments to the persecuted church exists in  the form of a series of winding underground  caves, tunnels,  and rooms beneath the city.   These catacombs were referred to by Charles Maitland as “..a vast necropolis, rich in the bones of saints and martyrs; a stupendous  testimony to the truth of Christian history, and  consequently, of Christianity itself; a faithful record of the trials of the persecuted Church….”   Author Selina Bundy  referred to  the catacombs as the "infant church in it's underground cradle".  For  over 400 years, the  Christians of Rome, met, worshiped, and were buried out of  the sight of their oppressors in this underground city.

  There is some speculation as to how this  underground city even came to be. In early Rome, the bodies of prominent people were burned on elaborate funeral pyres, and one theory is that the early Christians began burying their  dead underground to separate themselves from this practice.

 Other researchers say that the tunnels weren’t dug by the Christians, just occupied by them after the rock and sand were removed to build  houses.   The  sandy volcanic  material  known as tufa was mined from the  Roman countryside and used in cement.  It has been suggested by some  chroniclers that  Roman soldiers who who were known converts to Christianity were made to labor in the excavation of this  building material.  This provided the empire with cheap labor and also  put the soldiers in the position of digging out the  future resting place of other Christians. Either way, the  tunnels and chambers and graves stretch out under the  ancient city in all directions for  roughly 15 miles.  Some join up to the family crypts of believers, and  some have entrances that existed under people's houses.  

 In some places, the  tunnels go down several levels, hand carved through rock , with the graves themselves being chiseled out of hard rock and then  sealed up with plaster.

   When one of their own was killed, the Christians would recover the body and take it beneath the city for burial. But it wasn't just a  graveyard, it was place to flee the  sporadic persecutions of the Roman government. Found inside the catacombs are chapels carved from the rock, altars,  benches, chairs and  fountains that supplied water to those hiding there. This was such a well-known fact that   several pagan Roman emperors ( Vallerian, Gallenius, Maximus) forbid entry into the underground city, and would arrest those found at the entrances.   Despite their best efforts though, the Roman state was never able to plug all the holes or block all the entrances, and the  underground community grew and grew, with a  population of approximately 40,000 dead, although an exact number is impossible  due to  vandalism and grave-robbing.

 

  The graves themselves offer remarkable insight in to  this community.  The mourners would  write epitaphs for their departed on the cave walls, or in the wet plaster, and we often see a very human side of these dear saints. We read of their families, of their faith, and of their murders.

translated 'The Tomb of Philemon'

 

 

Sometimes persecutions were so severe, and    internment so hasty, that what results is a sort of mass grave.

 

 

  Equally compelling is the artwork that adorns  the walls of the catacombs.  Hand-painted and personal, it not only gives us  a picture into the  heart of the church, but it also  documents a shift in the  mindset of believers from the period immediately after the Resurrection to the  slow rise of what would eventually become the Roman Catholic Church.  In these paintings you can see a slwo  drift away from  Biblical Christianity to paganism and then the very beginnings of Catholicism.The early artwork  highlights the biblical focus of the church, with  Old Testament Biblical scenes being represented, such as Noah's ark as well as New Testament themes such as the Good Shepherd.

Noah's Ark

Jonah and the Whale

The Three Hebrews from the Book of Daniel

The Good Shepherd

   Unfortunately as time went on , apostasy began to creep in, and the catacombs become adorned with  vague 'Christian' symbology. Decorating  graves with symbols as opposed to words was a well known pagan custom.

The 'Christian' fish

 

 

  

 By the time the  catacombs fell into disuse by the close of the  4th century,  the Catholic elevation of Mary had already begun, and her steady rise in the minds of  believers   shows itself in  the  catacomb paintings.  Admiration of martyrs in the  first century became, sadly, worship of martyrs  by the 4th century.

'Mary'

   Due to a multitude of factors, including the  fall of Rome and  it's invasion by foreign armies, the catacombs were  lost to history for almost a thousand years.  The faithful in Jesus slept  beneath the city while  on the surface upheavals and invasions were happening.  The catacombs were rediscovered in the 1500's and were  excavated  off and on for the  next  several hundred years.

 Unfortunately, at the time of their rediscovery the  Roman Catholic church was at a  peak of great power, and  claimed the catacombs for themselves. What remains today is still under Vatican control. They rewrote the history, claiming the catacombs as 'proof' that the Church of Rome was the   one great true church.  They used the catacombs to establish a legitimacy that they could trace back to the  time of Christ, although a careful student of history will note the difference between the church of the catacombs and the  Vatican  monstrosity.

  Vatican thugs plundered the  catacombs.Graves were opened, and  the bones removed to be treated as relics and worshiped. Artifacts were stolen, and sold to the highest bidder.   Complete fabrications  and histories were drummed up by  Vatican propagandists.  Parishes  paid large sums to  acquire a  finger bone or leg bone from the catacombs. They would then proceed to charge  money for pilgrims  to see it or  kiss it. 

a plundered tomb

  But it didn't stop there.  For the right price, you could do much better than  just a finger bone; you could get yourself a mummified believer or even a whole corpse, grotesquely arrayed for veneration and  trotted across the countryside.   Special indulgences and  privileges were extended to those who would show the remains 'proper respect'. They were set on thrones and  bedecked with jewels.  Parishes across Europe clamored to  either get their hands on such a relic or arrange for one to tour through their district.

 The movement of a dead saint from place to place would draw a crowd, and   drawing a crowd was good for business. Small parishes couldn't always afford the real relics and so a  huge  underground black market developed for forgeries. This led to further pillaging of the graves and grave robbing to feed the demand.  It wasn't that hard to  visit your local graveyard and claim the bones you dug up belonged to  John the Baptist or some other famous name in  Christianity.  This led to by some estimates, hundreds of parts of the same saint existing simultaneously all over Europe, a confusion that continues to this day.

  What also continues to this day is that  Rome  claims the exclusive right to interpret the history of the catacombs in Rome, and the handful of similar structures that have been discovered in other parts of Europe.  The entrances  to the catacombs are dominated by popish structures, and adorned with all manner of relics, such as  the rock at San Sebastiano which purports to contain the footprints of Jesus Christ. With their well-established morbidity, and flair for the  absurd,what should be a celebration of being steadfast and faithful unto death, has become a pageantry of death and   whitewashed history.
Most of this plundered grave material  lingers on in our  modern world in the Gallery of the Vatican.

 

 But before we  get too busy lamenting that this  crucial piece of church history has stayed for so long in  the hands of the  church's greatest enemy, consider the words of Selinda Bundy who wrote "In Rome, destined to act so great, so awful a part in that church's future history, a cradle for those whom the Lord out of the world was provided, even beneath the  ground over which their opponents trod in pride an power; and a receptacle afforded for the ashes of the martyrs who had been faithful unto death, and who, with others more peacefully fallen asleep in Jesus left their tombs as a testimony to ages and ages yet to come, of the truth of that religion for which they  suffered, bled and died"

 

 

Church History: The Heretics-Part 1- The Gnostics

  Even  before the close of the New Testament, heresies began to  crop up in the young church.  Both Paul and  John wrote of the growth of these harmful philosophies and the threat they posed to Biblical  Christianity. Here we will cover, one by one, 5 major heresies that showed up in the first 400 years of Christianity, and how some of these ideas  are still around today.

Gnosticism 

Gnosticism is as old as the Garden of Eden. At its heart is the idea that man learns about life, death, salvation, etc not  from the word of God, but from his own experiences and  education. In Gnosticism, the Bible isn’t the final authority, it’s just one of many sources of information by which a man  learns about reality.  This is of course contrary  to the word of God which points to God himself, and his words as the source of all knowledge, and wisdom and light.

  Gnostic schools, which had their  heyday in the  early Roman Empire, had a structure by which a  student was brought into higher and  higher levels of knowledge.  “Truth” could  only be taught  by a  Gnostic of a higher level who would guide his pupil “into the light”. 
This sort of  thing still shows up in Freemasonry teaching.

  Having rejected God’s light, the Gnostics came up with some  amazingly foolish ideas on their own.

 

“In the Gnostic view, there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created universes and who never created anything …..”-www.gnosis.org 

“One of the … beings who bears the name Sophia (“Wisdom”)… came to emanate from her own being a flawed consciousness, a being who became the creator of the material and psychic cosmos, all of which he created in the image of his own flaw. This being, unaware of his origins, imagined himself to be the ultimate and absolute God..“-www.gnosis.org

  Gnostics teach that most  of mankind lives, unaware of their dual nature ( physical and spiritual), and that enlightened people (like themselves) have to teach man so that man can  ascend.  Some Gnostics taught that by denying the physical ( scourging, fasting, etc)  you could make yourself more aware of the spiritual and free yourself. This philosophy survives in Hinduism, and most reincarnation religions as well as in certain parts of Roman Catholicism

“Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other), but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance -- whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities -- is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.”-www.gnosis.org

According to Gnosticism, the  real mission of Jesus wasn’t the salvation of men’s souls, but the freeing of men’s minds. The Gnostics claim in “The Gospel of Judas” that the other Gospel writers  were confused on this, and only Judas understood what Jesus’s real mission was.

  Gnostics also  cite a book called “The Secret Book of James” to prove that there was a split in the early church. In Gnostic mythology, the good guys ( like Judas) tried to lead man towards light and freedom while the bad guys ( like Paul)  tried to tie people to  religious bondage with rules and regulations.

 Gnosticism got a foothold in the hearts of some in the early church because they wanted to sound smart to the intellectuals in the Greek and Roman world. This still happens when Christians abandon their Bibles and "the faith once delivered to the saints" so that they can run to  vain philosophies like evolution or multiculturalism in order to  be considered 'smart'. They forget that God chooses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.  They forget that friendship with the world is enmity with God.  They forget that the fear of man brings a snare.
  If you are saved, and you waste your life apologizing for the word of God while  trying to  appear 'relevant' or 'intellectual' to a bunch of unregenerant flops, you will always wind up looking like a chump in the end. They will never think you're cool, they will never think you're smart. They will understand in their heart of hearts that  you are a compromiser, and as a redeemed  child of God you will stand shoulder to shoulder with his enemies before it's all over with if you're not careful.
   Men, according to scripture, do not reject the Bible because it is  unbelievable or because it is a burden that cannot be  borne. They reject the Bible because they love light rather than darkness, and Gnosticism, just like the other beliefs that will be examined, are nothing but an empty philosophical pillow case in which a sinner can  hide his head on his way to the lake of fire.

 

The Real Saint Patrick

(Note: While writing an as yet-unfinished book on the history of publick ministry, I came across some  discrepancies in the accounts of  Patrick of Ireland.   What I eventually discovered is almost  everything that everybody thinks they know about Patrick is wrong, and is the result of  marketing and propaganda on behalf of the Church of Rome.  I also  found this person who is pretty upset about something.  This short dash of prose is taken from the manuscript of that book, with sources cited.  And in case you were curious, this is how we celebrate St. Patrick's day)

   Turning our attention to the Emerald Isle, we find ourselves  vexed with one of the most complicated histories of one of the most famous men in church history; Patrick of Ireland. Often  confused even by historians with Palladius (whom he predated by almost two hundred years), most of what the average person knows about Patrick is legends and fanciful tales that have been embellished over the centuries by various interested parties. Rome has a cottage industry of painting Patrick as one of her own, and crediting him with introducing Rome’s flavor of Christianity to the natives.  However, not only is there a Christian presence in Ireland that predates Patrick, but Patrick was hardly a ‘good little Catholic’.

  In fact, the writings of antiquity documented quite plainly  that not only was there a thriving evangelistic work  in Ireland  less than 100 years after Christ’s birth, but that  this work consisted of publick ministry as a means of propagation. For example, Eusebius writes in his church history that the apostles crossed over the sea to visit the British Isles.  Gildas, a British historian writing in the  6^th century, records that  Christianity was  introduced to Ireland prior to A.D. 61, while Cardinal Baronius  records that the Gospel was first preached in Britain in the year A.D. 35.  H.J. Mason in his work, Religion of the Ancient Irish Saints claims that the Bible was available in Ireland in the common tongue as early as 400 and that Christianity was introduced to  Ireland  by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in France. Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John, which plainly places a Christian presence in Ireland within less than 2 generations of the completion of the New Testament.  In addition, Tertullian wrote in  200 A.D.,  “Those parts of the British Isles, which were unapproached by the Romans, were yet subject to Christ.”, and  Chrystom, the Greek historian  wrote in 388 A.D. “Although thou shouldest go to the ocean, and those British Isles, thou shouldst  hear all men everywhere discoursing matters out of Scripture with another voice indeed, but not another faith.”

Patrick was the son of a Roman magistrate living in Briton, and his family despite their social standing, fared poorly in one of the raids conducted against north Briton (then called Cedona) by King Colmac Ulfada.  During this raid in 240 A.D., many of Patrick’s family were killed, and he, as a sixteen year old boy, was carried off as a slave to the shores of broad Killala Bay in County Mayo, in the bleak northwest of Ireland. There he was put to work tending sheep—far from home, alone in an utterly alien land. Then, as he tells us:

    After I came to Ireland—every day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed—the love of God and His fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many in the night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountain, and I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me—as I now see, because the spirit within me was then fervent.

  Six years later he escaped, and, going through Scotland, eventually made his way back to Briton.  He was  discipled under the work of Greek missionaries  and after a few years with his family, was ordained in Gaul and announced that it was God’s will that he return to Ireland to preach, which he did in approximately 252.₁

When he  announced his intention of going to Ireland to preach the Christian religion, he was first met with all sorts of tears, entreaties and expostulations  and offers of wealth and place..and when these failed..he himself was abused and upbraided…and…finally..placed in confinement

  Despite Roman historians best efforts to superimpose Patrick’s ministry over the papist Palladius it is noteworthy in Patrick’s writings that there are no mention of Romish ways. Nowhere do you see references to mass, purgatory, Mary worship, or even of any allegiance to the See. Instead his writings abound with Scriptural references and explanations of  justification entirely by faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. His Confession abounds with statements such as₂

I was as a stone which lies in the deep mire; and he who is mighty came, and took me out of it in his mercy; and he indeed raised me up and placed me on the top of the wall

  Another element of the ‘St. Patrick ‘ myth is his purported supremacy over all other ministers  in Ireland. As we have shown, Patrick did not introduce the Gospel to the island, and so in addition to his writings, we have  the record of his contemporaries regarding his ministry.  Secundinus , a disciple of Patrick  and possibly his nephew writes “he was a true and eminent cultivator of the evangelical field whose seeds appear to be the Gospel of Christ.”   Jocelyn, writing in the twelfth century, says “he read and interpreted the four Gospels at certain seasons, for three days and three nights continually among the people.”

  Patrick died in approximately 310 A.D. , after  60 years of ministry , and by the  ninth century, over sixty-six biographies of him were in existence which, according to the historian Gibbon “ must contained as many thousand lies”.  Incursions and occupations by the Norwegians and the Danes later on destroyed many of the original records and by the twelfth century, the Catholic Church had enjoyed almost 4 centuries of supremacy over Ireland, with plenty of time to rewrite history and obscure so much of the truth about this  soldier of the cross and publick preacher.

Sources :

1  1.        St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland in the Third Century by R. Steele Nicholson

1   2. Religion of the Ancient Irish Saints  Before  A.D. 600  by H.J. Mason
3
     3. Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon