Hello and welcome to Z3 News.
I'm James Bailey and today is Tuesday, May 19, 2020.
And today I'd like to pick up where I left off yesterday.
And yesterday's program I presented evidence proving, in my opinion,
that the Roman Empire never converted to Christianity.
That claim is based on the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
But there are many problems with his testimony, which I showed in yesterday's
program, including the fact that late in his life he was still building monuments
to pagan gods.
And then I pointed out also that the emperors who followed after Constantine's
reign continued persecuting Christians just as much, just as severely,
as the emperors who had ruled prior to Constantine.
And so there is this problem with their testimony.
There's no evidence, they're lacking evidence of a genuine conversion.
Yet in the year 380, they did declare through the Edict of Thessalonica by
Emperor Theodosius I that Christianity became the official state religion of
Rome.
That was a very big deal, but as I shared in the previous program, they were forced
to make changes because of the growing influence of Christians at every level of
their society.
And after many failed attempts to kill all the Christians, they were in a worse
position because the Christian influence had only multiplied.
And so they had no other choice but to effectively join the church and put
themselves in charge of it as a means of trying to take control over it.
Now I had hoped for today's program to get all the way up to this major event,
this major shift in history that occurred in the early 19th century, right around
1814-1815.
But then I realized that jumping forward that far on the timeline would just leave
too many gaps.
There's too many important events that need to be covered.
And so today I want to cover some of these major events that happened between 380 and
the time of Martin Luther in 1517.
That's about 1137 years to try to cover in today's program.
We covered about a thousand years in yesterday's program, so it's not like
we're getting bogged down here.
We're covering about a thousand years in less than an hour.
So I think it's a worthwhile use of our time, especially after today I saw a quote
on Wikipedia.
And I'm not bashing Wikipedia.
I really appreciate Wikipedia.
I use their site every day.
But I also use it cautiously because it's a joint effort of a large number of
people, so all different perspectives, and you just have to be on guard because
it's not always going to be accurate information.
But anyway, I'm looking at this article on Wikipedia today, and the page was devoted
to the persecution of Christians during the Roman Empire.
And I couldn't believe what I read, because it literally said that persecution
happened over a period of two centuries.
Bam, that's it.
From 64 AD, the time of Nero, to 313 AD.
Done.
That's just not true.
I mean, I showed that yesterday very clearly, that even after the time of
Constantine, that persecution was running rampant all throughout the Roman Empire.
And so this is the distorted view of history that's promoted, that we are
bombarded with it constantly, that creates this impression that Rome made great
progress from being a pagan empire to being a Christian empire.
And the truth is, the exact opposite happened, because it's one thing to be a
pagan and to be in the dark in your relationship with God, but it's another
thing to then step forward and claim to take His name and start teaching His
people, as if you are a genuine Christian, when in fact, you're only doing it for the
advancement of your own power.
That's a direct assault on God, and that's a lot worse than just being in
the dark and being a pagan.
And, so, Rome took this step in the wrong direction.
They took a step away from the light of God and into greater darkness and
deception.
And that just gets back to the old principle of sowing and reaping,
because they started sowing a lot of bad seed, seeds of deception, deceit
throughout all their actions, putting on the garbs of righteousness without any
conversion to righteousness in their heart, continuing to practice their own
pagan ways.
Those are bad seeds, and those seeds come back and multiply upon them, causing them
to enter into greater darkness and deception to the point where they become
thoroughly deceived themselves.
And it's like that scripture that says that God will eventually give people over
to powerful delusions if they insist on going their own way and turning away from
the light.
And, so, by taking on this appearance of righteousness with this edict of
Thessalonica, they became far more evil than anything that Rome had ever been
before.
And since we're looking at such a large time span, I just attempted to try to boil
it all down and summarize the main gist of it, the general direction, because there's
so many events.
Several years ago I started my own timeline.
I use an Excel spreadsheet, and I've just continued to add to it and add to it and
add to it over the years.
And I just like to be able to see.
I started all the way back at the time of Adam and Eve, and went as far as I could
in the scriptures, because the scriptures tell you the years, the age of the fathers
when the child was born, and it just goes on and on.
So you can go a long way like that, building a timeline from the scriptures.
And then I have added to that with all kinds of different historical sources.
So I have this detailed timeline, and today I was just scanning through all
of the events of this time period.
And I have this one column in the Excel spreadsheet that I call the persecution
column.
And if there was severe persecution, the cell is colored blood red.
If there's mild persecution, it's colored pink.
And if there's no persecution, it's just white.
But for this time span, there's a whole lot of red, blood red.
And I have accumulated from different sources.
Fox's Book of the Martyrs, for one, has great testimonies of Christian
persecution throughout the years of the early church, including all of these years
that we're covering today.
And I have other sources, including Wikipedia, but there's a lot of other
sources that have kept track of the persecution of the Jewish people.
And it's really kind of a heavy, heavy topic to cover.
It's hard to read that whole thing and have it not affect you.
Because, you know, I mean, just consider for a minute, these are real people.
These were Christians.
These were Jewish people, whatever.
But the things that were done to them were so horrible.
And my point was that my spreadsheet for these 1,100 years, I mean, that's why when
I read that quote on Wikipedia, I'm like, are you kidding me?
I'm so tired.
I'm so tired of this false narrative.
The facts of history are screaming loud that we're being fed a bunch of lies.
And I'm just tired of it.
That's one of the reasons I didn't want to skip over this today.
Because to me, the crimes that were committed against our fathers and our
mothers, our Christian in the spirit realm, fathers and mothers, committed
consistently by the Romans, or you call it the Roman Empire, or the Roman Catholic
Church, whatever, the Roman Kingdom.
It's the Romans.
It's always been the Romans all the way through.
And so what happened during this time span is Rome kept facing the same problem that
Constantine faced.
They kept facing this problem of what do I do with all these Christians?
These Christians are threatening my power.
These Christians are going to divide my kingdom.
How do I control these Christians?
That was his challenge.
That was his whole basis for his so-called conversion.
And that is the same problem that Rome has faced repeatedly.
And at every turn, they made a wrong turn.
Every time that they clamped down tighter to try to control the Christians,
they put themselves into greater darkness and they get far more wicked, far more
evil.
And so that's what's been happening all of these centuries.
And so I just tried to summarize the main points and I see this general direction
where they became increasingly militant in their efforts.
They became harder and harder.
You know, that's the formation of that iron, just so hard.
But they became militant, calling people to arms, calling people to fight for their
cause.
And they just caused so much turmoil throughout the world, especially
throughout Europe and the Middle East, as they stirred up multitudes to march,
leave their homelands and march to the Middle East and to try to take Jerusalem
for the Pope.
And that was one of the main objectives that they set for the Crusades.
But they had others and it was basically just the elimination of all heretics.
And they define a heretic as someone, anyone who's not submitted to their rule
and authority.
So it doesn't matter if you're a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu or whatever.
If you're submitted to the authority of the Pope, if you're willing to pledge your
allegiance to the Pope, well, then they're going to allow you to operate.
And on the other hand, you could be a devout Roman Catholic, but you're at odds
with the Pope, well, then they're going to have problems with you.
It's an issue of control.
It's not even an issue of faith or religion.
They want control.
And they have proven that repeatedly throughout history by killing multitudes
of Christians, even though they claim to be Christians, and even killing multitudes
of Catholics if they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or happen to
be taking issues with the Pope.
And so during this time period, these centuries that we're looking at
today, I noticed patterns where they would use different tactics to try to control
people.
And one was that they would threaten to call them a heretic.
And due to the influence that the church had over these nations, that terrified
people because they were scared to death that they were going to lose their
employment or their land or their possessions or whatever if they were
judged and ruled as a heretic of the church.
And they would also threaten to excommunicate them from the church,
which also terrified people because it went beyond just this life.
They're thinking, these people don't know any better, so they're thinking,
oh my gosh, I'm going to be facing eternity in hell if these people
excommunicate me.
They had this belief that the Pope had that kind of power, that if he could say
that, then you're doomed for eternity.
And it's just a horrible, horrible way to manipulate people.
But that's the way Rome has operated.
And to make matters worse, they actually officially embraced torture as a means of
extracting confessions from these people who were suspected of heresy, which is a
crime that usually there's no evidence of whatsoever.
Maybe there was some rumor circulating, maybe somebody didn't like you in your
town or your family, and they reported you.
So you didn't even have to have done anything in particular.
You could just be ruined overnight by some rumor or some accusation that comes out of
left field.
And so these kinds of activities by the Roman Catholic Church just created terror
in the lands that they ruled and a climate of fear.
It's just so pervasive that everyone is scared to death to say the wrong thing for
fear that someone will overhear them and turn them in to their priest or their
bishop and accuse them of being a heretic.
And so they would set up these inquisition centers and bring people in for
questioning.
And by that time, if they were suspected of heresy, there was almost nothing they
could say to defend themselves.
In fact, the inquisitors weren't very interested in giving them a chance to
defend themselves.
What they were interested in was extracting that confession through means
of torture.
And that included the most barbaric forms of torture that were routinely used in
these inquisition centers.
And I'm going to read you just a few examples just because I just want us to
hear it.
I mean, it happened and it's so horrible.
And it's been swept under the rug.
And that's the part that really bothers me.
So I don't like sweeping it under the rug.
I like shining a big old spotlight on it and call the whole world's attention and
say, hey, hey, hey, everybody look what you did and give us an answer.
And what have you done to fix this problem so that it never happens again?
No, I don't really like it when it's just like it didn't happen.
We just all go through life and we don't hear a peep about it.
It happened repeatedly for centuries.
So these people, I believe, need to be held accountable for their crimes.
Otherwise, they're guaranteed to just keep doing what they've always done.
And that's what they're doing.
Matter of fact, this Office of the Inquisition never has gone away.
It continued operating all through these centuries.
And it wasn't until 1908 that they changed the name of it but kept it in place.
And then in 1965, they changed the name of it again, but it's still the same office.
It never went away.
It still exists today.
It's incredible defiance.
And so, anyway, they had some horrible things that they would do to extract these
confessions from people that included scalding them with hot water or oil,
making them sit down on these iron chairs that were covered with hundreds of metal
spikes.
And then in the center of the seat was a hole, and underneath the seat was a fire,
a coal fire.
And they would strap them to the chair.
And so they would just suffer great pain because of these metal spikes that they're
sitting on and this intense heat coming from under the chair.
And so, how long would you be willing to sit there before you begin to confess that
you're a heretic, even though you're not?
And so another device that they used was these racks where they would stretch
people from one end to the other until their limbs, their arms and legs,
are literally being pulled out of joint.
And so the pain would just be so intense that they would just be like out of their
mind, wanting relief.
And, you know, that was the purpose.
It was designed to be hideous, to get them to confess.
And another thing that they did, they would use red-hot iron forceps to
tear out the person's teeth or pull out their fingernails or their toenails.
And if you still won't confess, they have more.
They have the iron presses.
They make you put your thumb in there or your foot or your leg or even your head
and begin to tighten the press until they eventually crush your thumb or your foot
or your leg or even your head.
And they had whips that they would scourge people with.
And they had red-hot irons that they would burn their flesh.
And all these things were approved by the Pope.
There was a papal bull, which is a papal order that was released in the year 1252
that specifically authorized the use of torture in inquisitions and included these
torture methods.
And this papal bull specifically said that as heretics are murderers of souls as well
as robbers of God's sacraments and of the Christian faith, they are to be coerced as
are thieves and bandits into confessing their errors.
And so these horrible events were not isolated events, but they were condoned
from the very top, from the Pope.
But the Inquisition was really a smaller part in the overall scheme of things
because the larger numbers of persecutions came through the Crusades.
Because it was during the Crusades that they targeted larger cities and actually
destroyed entire populations of different cities all in one event.
And so the Crusades were taking care of big problems, entire cities, whereas the
Inquisition was focused on hunting down individual heretics.
And they would send out Dominican priests two by two to go into these areas and to
investigate.
And they would also employ the local priests and the local bishops and get them
to actively participate in reporting any potential suspects.
And so all the priests and bishops in the local areas were part of a surveillance
effort to constantly report back on what people in their areas were doing and
saying.
And another interesting thing that was happening during all these centuries was
the spread of monasteries where monks and nuns would live.
But the purpose for the monasteries was primarily surveillance of those areas to
report back what was happening and what people were thinking and saying in those
areas so that the Pope would have information for making his decisions
because information moved so much slower back then.
And so they had to have boots on the ground everywhere, and that was the true
purpose for the monasteries.
And of course today they don't need that so much because we all have a little
monastery in our pocket which is called a cell phone.
And it's a great device for surveillance because we're connected to the internet
all the time.
And so the NSA, the fusion centers, they can listen in on our conversations,
they can capture our emails and our text messages, and they know what we're saying,
who we're talking to, our network of friends and family.
They have all the information they want.
But back in those days they didn't have all that.
And so they relied on these other means.
And so all of those things took time for the Roman Catholic Church to build out the
infrastructure so that they had the facilities in place and the people in
place all throughout these lands.
And of course, you know, that took centuries to build all that out.
But during that time they grew in power.
They grew in influence.
And they grew in wealth.
Because while all those things were happening, they were extracting money from
the lands where they went.
And one of the ways they did that was by selling indulgences.
And what that means is they would sometimes sell prayers where they would
agree to pray for them or for their family members or even for their deceased family
members because they taught that they could pray and get their deceased family
members released from this place they called purgatory, which does not exist
anywhere in the Scriptures.
It's very unscriptural, but it's a very convenient way to raise money if you can
get people to believe that there is such a place and that by praying for the dead
that they can actually get them released from there.
And they would actually sell salvation as well.
They would sell eternal salvation for a sizable donation and give the person a
receipt.
This is your receipt, so hold on to it because this receipt is your ticket to
heaven.
Back in those days, it was easy for the church to take advantage of people because
the people did not have the knowledge of the Word of God.
They did not have access to the Scriptures the way we have today.
In fact, the only Scriptures around were handwritten.
There were no printing presses back in these days.
We're talking before the invention of the printing press.
It was just shortly before the time of Martin Luther that the printing press was
invented in the late 15th century.
So for all these years, these people had no real knowledge of the Scriptures and
roamed it all they could to prevent people from getting that access, even in the
monasteries.
The monasteries, there was only one Bible and it was chained to the pulpit so that
nobody could take it with them anywhere else and try to read it.
And it was written in Latin and that's a testimony of Martin Luther who,
for some time, served as a monk in a monastery because he didn't know any
better when he was younger.
He thought that was the way to devote his life to God.
But he wanted to learn the Scriptures and he was surprised by what he saw in the
people there and the fact that there were no Scriptures except this one that he said
was chained to the pulpit.
But he would go there and he would study and learn.
But for the most part, it was very difficult for people to ever get a good
Bible teaching unless they happened to know Latin or unless they happened to have
the Scriptures that had been translated into their language.
And thank God there were communities where the Word of God did take root and
Christianity was growing strong in some areas.
And wherever that happened, it presented a big problem for the Pope because he had no
control over people once they were truly in a relationship with Jesus Christ.
And so that's what the Crusades were all about.
It was about crushing heresy as they defined it.
And this is another great example of how the truth of history is completely the
opposite of what we've always heard our whole life.
You know, I always heard that the Crusades were all about the Christians going and
fighting against the Muslims in the Holy Land.
But that is a severely distorted, twisted view of history because it leaves
out the true facts that what happened was the Roman Catholic Church went throughout
Europe and identified cities where there were Christians and massacred all of them.
So how could the Crusades be defined as the Christians against the Muslims when it
was the Christians who were being massacred by the Roman Catholic Church?
The whole Crusades was led by the Pope.
It was a call to arms by the Pope.
It was back in 1095 when Pope Urban II issued a call to arms at the Council of
Clermont.
And after he made that call, there was a huge uprising.
There were actually millions of people that joined in the cause and left their
home and their nations behind and went to the Middle East and fought for the sake of
the Pope to take Jerusalem away from the Muslims.
But those were not Christians.
In fact, those mobs murdered many Christians along the way.
And the Middle East was just part of the Crusades because they turned their sights
on cities of Europe that had Christian populations and annihilated them.
And the Pope was behind the whole thing.
So how can we portray the Crusades as the Christians against the Muslims?
It wasn't.
It was the Catholics against the heretics who were not submitted to the Pope.
For example, in the year 1209, a city in southern France along the coast
called Béziers was targeted for destruction in the Crusades because the
population was largely Christians and also some Jews living there.
And the population at that time was estimated to be about 15,000 people.
But because of the threat that they sensed from the Crusades, all the people in the
surrounding areas abandoned their homes and came inside the city.
So it was estimated that the total population in the city at that time was
about four times the normal level, about 60,000 people.
And this city was horrified to see a large army gathering around their city to invade
it.
And this army was made up of mercenary soldiers who were under contract to fight
in behalf of the Pope for 40 days.
And in exchange, he would give them eternal life.
And as an added bonus, he would let them share in taking the possessions of the
people that they were going to kill in this city.
And so these Christians in this city, they were not prepared to fight like that.
They didn't have a chance to withstand this attack.
And I'm going to read this one paragraph that describes what happened.
It says, The multitude, when they saw that the city was taken, they fled to the
churches and began to toll the bells by way of supplication.
This only the sooner drew upon themselves the swords of the assassins.
The wretched citizens were slaughtered in a trice.
Their dead bodies covered the floor of the church.
They were piled in heaps around the altar.
Their blood flowed in torrents at the door.
Seven thousand dead bodies were counted in the Magdalene alone.
And when the crusaders had massacred the last living creature in Béziers and had
pillaged the houses of all that they thought worth carrying off, they set fire
to the city in every part at once and reduced it to a vast funeral pile.
Not a house remained standing, not one human being alive.
And that was written in 1878 by James Wiley in a book called The History of
Protestantism.
It's an awesome book if you get a chance to read it.
But the attack on Béziers was not an isolated incident.
The same year, the crusaders turned their sights on another city in southern France,
called Carcassonne, and they attacked Carcassonne the same way.
The people of Carcassonne put up a much better fight, however, and many of them
were able to escape, but many had remained in the city and all of them were put to
death for the crime of being Christians who were not Roman Catholics in submission
to the Pope.
Now, there were many other examples of the Pope raising up armies to attack and
annihilate Christians throughout Europe, including the Hussites in Bohemia,
the Albigensians, the Waldensians, and many others.
And so, the Crusades were not about Christians fighting Muslims, it was about
Christians being slaughtered by the Roman Catholic Church as they had all of Europe
in turmoil and many innocent people murdered.
So, it was correctly called the Dark Ages as this Roman kingdom was so filled with
spiritual darkness that they led the rest of the world into deep darkness.
But while the rest of the world suffered terribly, Rome advanced their kingdom and
gained great power and wealth and influence throughout the world.
So, by all outward appearances, it looked like their strategy was working,
but yet they were in for a surprise as God had raised up a man, Martin Luther,
who was willing to stand up to them.
And we're going to discuss that turn of events in our next program.
So, I'm going to stop there for today.
I appreciate you listening.
I know this is not a pleasant topic to cover, but this is a kingdom that I
believe it is vitally important for us to understand the nature of it, because we
are today continuing to live under its power and influence.
And as we can begin to understand these patterns of history, we can see them
repeating right before our eyes today.
And that's why I think it's worth this time to go back and review what they've
done for many centuries.
So, thanks for joining me today, and I hope to be back again soon with
another program.
Until then, so long.