Was watching the box last night (a show in German) and learned some history which was new to me. Perhaps the teacher never mentioned it, simply because there wasn’t time. Perhaps there was a reluctance to mention scandals associated with the church. Perhaps I slept through the instruction. However, last night I learned that one of the Roman Catholic Church’s main claims to authority is based on a forgery.
This document is known as the Donation of Constantine.
The Donation of Constantine was a document in which the Roman Emperor Constantine supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. Composed probably in the 8th century, it was used, especially in the 13th century, in support of claims of political authority by the papacy.
Turns out it was a complete fraud.
For more, jump through the curly orange time portal.
Who was Constantine?
The Constantine in question is one of the Roman emperors. He’s also known as Constantine I, or Constantine the Great, and he ruled for 31 years, from 306 CE to 337 CE. He’s particularly important in Christianity because he was the first emperor who was also a Christian, a change from being a pagan. His conversion to Christianity stopped Christians from being persecuted. Constantine did not authorize persecution of pagans, however; the Arch of Constantine has depictions of Diana and other gods and he was also a great admirer of the sun god.
Why did the Donation of Constantine matter?
If you read the Gospels, you can see that Jesus’ main focus is on loving your neighbor. It is not about setting up such an organized authority on earth. Of course, some verses have been interpreted that way, However, many of the kings in the 700s through the 1400s were not keen to yield any power or authority to another, even if it was the Pope. So the church forged this document to help authenticate its claim to authority.
How did they figure out it was a fake?
From Wikipedia:
It was not until the mid-15th century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual criticism, that humanists, and eventually the bureaucracy of the Church, began to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa declared it to be a forgery and spoke of it as an apocryphal work. Later, the Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla, in De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, proved the forgery with certainty. This was the first instance of modern, scientific diplomatics. Independently of both Cusa and Valla, Reginald Pecocke, Bishop of Chichester (1450–57), reached a similar conclusion. Among the indications that the Donation must be a fake are its language and the fact that, while certain imperial-era formulas are used in the text, some of the Latin in the document could not have been written in the 4th century; anachronistic terms such as "fief" were used. Also, the purported date of the document is inconsistent with the content of the document itself, as it refers both to the fourth consulate of Constantine (315) as well as the consulate of Gallicanus (317).
Pope Pius II wrote a tract in 1453, five years before becoming Pope, to show that, though the Donation was a forgery, the Church owed its lands to Charlemagne and its powers of the keys to Peter; he did not publish it, however.
Although the bulls of Nicholas V and his successors made no further mention of the Donation, even when partitioning the New World, Valla's treatise was placed on the list of banned books in the mid-16th century. The Donation continued to be tacitly accepted as authentic until Caesar Baronius in his "Annales Ecclesiastici" (published 1588–1607) admitted that it was a forgery.
This isn’t new news. This is old news. Unfortunately, it is so old that many people do not know about it.
It is important because this document is what the Roman Catholic Church used in order to establish its authority for centuries. When the absurdities and contradictions within the document were pointed out by three different men, the Roman Catholic Church – with power already firmly established – stopped referring to that document but did not admit it was a fake for another hundred years.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Power based on lies. Promulgated for centuries. A few individuals who value truth noticing, making their cases but having their work banned or even worse.
Power based on lies. Lies are still being told, about abortion, about finance, about climate change. And more.
That’s why I spend so much time here. There are certainly some who come with ill will, bent on misleading or even defrauding us, but sometimes we lurch towards the truth.
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Tired of politics? Need to escape? Try one of my Greek-mythology based novels, either the story of Jocasta: The Mother-Wife of Oedipus or a trilogy about Niobe, or one of the first examples of civil disobedience, Antigone and Creon. Or, if you like mysteries and/or Jane Austen, treat yourself to
The Highbury Murders: A Mystery Set in the Village of Jane Austen’s Emma very positively reviewed at the Daily Kos Monday Murder Mystery blog.