God’s Bestseller
Brian Moynahan
Number of quotes: 15
Book ID: 98 Page: x
Section: 3A2A
But in 1199 Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) issued the decretal Vergentis in senium, which constituted a major step in the formalization of the prosecution of heretics. Besides repeating much of Ad abolendam, Innocent’s decretal for the first time identified heresy with the doctrine of treason as found in Roman law.
Quote ID: 2503
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: 34
Section: 2E6
The word ‘purgatory’ appeared nowhere in it; it was a twelfth-century invention.
Quote ID: 2511
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: 39
Section: 3A2A,3A2B
Early in December 1514, the body of a rich London tailor named Richard Hunne had been found hanging by the neck in a cell of the Lollards’ tower, the ecclesiastical prison maintained by the bishop of London in the west churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three years before, Hunne’s son Stephen had died at the age of five weeks. The infant’s body was taken to St Mary’s Church in Whitechapel for burial, where Thomas Dryfield, the priest at St Mary’s, demanded a ‘mortuary’ for performing the service. By tradition, a priest could demand to be given a piece of property belonging to the deceased.
Quote ID: 2512
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: xi
Section: 3A2A
The Church could not itself carry out a burning. To do so would defy the principle that Ecclesia non novit sanguinem, the Church does not shed blood. Pope Lucius III had bypassed this inconvenience in 1184 by decreeing that unrepentant heretics should be handed over to the secular authorities for sentence and execution.
Quote ID: 2504
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: xx
Section: 5D
Hostility to Wycliffe’s followers escalated. The term ‘Lollard’ was applied to them, a derivation from the Dutch lollen, to mumble, and used in English to describe religious eccentrics and vagabonds.
Quote ID: 2508
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 98 Page: xx/xxi
Section: 2A6
The ‘Bible-men’ denied all rituals that were non-biblical. They ate meat on fast days. They did not keep Sunday as a special day. They did not confess. They failed to gaze up when the Host was elevated at mass. Some held that the sacramental bread had not even a symbolic significance. Eleanor Higges of Burford was arraigned for putting the sacrament in her oven and eating it.. . . .
Lollards maintained that only God could beatify; the pope was powerless to make a saint. The sacraments were described as ‘dead signs of no value . . . a mouthful of bread with no life’.
Quote ID: 2509
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 98 Page: 104/105
Section: 2D1
Tyndale wrote, as we have seen, of ‘the congregation’, rather than the Church, ‘which is the body of Christ’. The Greek word is a word of particular importance to the papacy. It appears only three times in the gospels, each time in Matthew. The only biblical justification for papal power over the Church lies in a claim made in a single verse in Matthew 16 and nowhere else. Popes claim to be the successors of St Peter. Tyndale translated Jesus in verse eighteen as saying: ‘And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter: and upon this rock I will build my congregation. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ To use ‘congregation’ in place of ‘Church’ was to strip the papacy of its claim to have inherited the leadership of the Church from St Peter.
Quote ID: 2513
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: 105
Section: 5D
More flayed him for this, and for the two other supposed mistranslation. Tyndale, he said, ‘chaunged comenly this worde chyrche in to this worde congregacyon, and this worde preste, into this worde senyour, and cheryte in to loue love . . . and penaunce in to repentaunce’; in this, ‘Tyndale dyd euyll evil in translatynge the scrypture in to our tonge’.
Quote ID: 2514
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 98 Page: 105
Section: 2D1
This was not hair-splitting. When King James’s divines came to the Authorised Version, they made two changes to Tyndale’s verse eighteen. One was to replace Tyndale’s ‘gates of hell’ with the weaker ‘gates of Hades’. The other was to substitute ‘church’ – ‘upon this rock I will build my church’ – for ‘congregation’, since the Protestant Church of England was itself now established, powerful and hierarchical enough to claim the same authority over its worshippers that Rome had enjoyed.
Quote ID: 2515
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: 238
Section: 5D
The war over the use of the word ‘congregation’ ground on. ‘Wheresoever I may say a congregation,’ Tyndale wrote, ‘there may I say a church also; as the church of the devil, the church of Satan, the church of wretches, the church of wicked men, the church of liars, and a church of Turks thereto. For M. More must grant (if he will have ecclesia translated throughout all the new Testament by this word church) that church is as common as ecclesia. Now is ecclesia a Greek word, and was in use before the time of the apostles, and taken for a congregation among the heathen, where was no congregation of God or of Christ. And also Lucas Luke himself useth ecclesia for a church, or congregation, of heathen people thrice in one chapter . . .’
Quote ID: 2516
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 98 Page: 289
Section: 2E6
On 20 June, Frith appeared in front of Stokesley, Gardiner and Longland in St Paul’s Cathedral. He again refused to abjure. ‘The cause why I die is this,’ he said, ‘for I cannot agree . . . that we should believe under pain of damnation, the substance of the bread and wine to be changed into the body and blood of our Saviour.’
Quote ID: 2517
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: xvi
Section: 2A6,2A3
He held that auricular confession, heard by a priest, was superfluous; the only effective confession was that made silently by the sinner to God. He ridiculed pilgrimages, prayers to saints, the sale of pardons and indulgences, and the veneration of relics – all parts of the fabric of medieval faith, and cash cows for the Church – as non-scriptural and inefficacious.
Quote ID: 2507
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 98 Page: xxi
Section: 1A
The Church was ‘nothing but a synagogue of Satan’; none should be baptized by priests, and purgatory was an invention.3H
Quote ID: 2510
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 98 Page: xiii
Section: 1A
Religion had come to mean the Church itself, and its traditions.Wycliffe stood this on its head.
Quote ID: 2505
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 98 Page: xiii
Section: 3A1
Wycliffe noted that the Bible did not mention the pope. ‘What good doeth hys gabblyng that ye pope wolde be caled moost holy father?’ he demanded. The dignities and privileges that Rome bestowed were ‘not worthe a fly’s foote’, and men should ‘shake awey al ye lawe that ye pope hath maad’, and return to the laws of God.
Quote ID: 2506
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes