Don't get me started on Martin Luther, or I'll get moderated.
Are you familiar with a book called, The Trail of Blood, by J. M. Carroll?
Yes, and its an exemplary work of the Landmark Baptist movement. However, historically, it is spectacularly inaccurate. It ignores the existence of the Oriental Orthodox and the Church of the East, the former being excommunicated in the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon for refusing to accept the Tome of Leo due to perceived similarities with Nestorianism, with the OO Patriarch of Alexandria, St. Dioscorus, being deposed, falsely accused of Monophysitism despite having anathematized Eutyches. It also ignores the Church of the East, which actually venerates Nestorius, and is often called by older historians, inaccurately, the Nestorian Church, when really this was the church in the Persian Empire and Asian lands east thereof, and also Yemen and the Yemenese Island of Socotra although adopted a psuedo-Chalcedonian Christology developed by its Patriarch Mar Babai the Great in the early 6th century.
Until the 15th century when the Muslim warlord Tamerlane and his descendants began killing most of them, leaving alive only the Assyrians in the Fertile Crescent and the Nasranis or St. Thomas Christians in India, who were evangelized by the Apostle Thomas, who was martyred in Kerala in 53 AD (because of Alexander the Great, Kerala was the Easternmost city with a large Jewish community, which only in the 20th century migrated en masse to Israel, prominent members including the famed hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, and was thus the end of the road for St. Thomas, who on his way there established churches in Edessa, Nineveh and Seleucia-Cstesiphon, which replaced ancient Babylon after the Euphrates shifted, and was replaced by Baghdad which directly borders the ruins of Babylon when the river shifted again) the Church of the East was the largest in the world geographically, and quite possibly in terms of membership.
We don’t know exactly how many members it had since the genocide of Tamerlane and the later genocides by the Ottomans, for instance, in 1915, and by ISIS in 2014-2018, have sought to erase the church from history, destroying ruins in the Syrian desert, for example, and likewise the Cultural Revolution and Communist regime are not ideal for archaeological research on it, although there is archaeological evidence of the Church of the East in China, Mongolia and Tibet. We do know that before Tamerlane it had 80 dioceses and afterwards, 20, and would lose more still under his barbaric Muslim sons.
Thus the work ignores the actual trail of blood, which also includes the persecution of the Oriental Orthodox by Justinian and successors and the eradication of the Numidian Orthodox Church in what is now The Sudan, and the Albanian Orthodox Church in Caucasian Albania, not to be confused with the Balkan state bordering Northern Macedonia, Greece and Serbia, and nowadays known as Azerbaijan due to the Muslim Azeris which displaced the Armenians and other surviving Christians (Caucasian Albania borders Armenia, and Georgia, also known as Iberia, not to be confused with the peninsula of Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar, formerly the Roman provinces of Baetica, Lusitania and Hispania Terraconensis). And it ignores the wholesale massacre of all Christians in Africa outside of Egypt and modern day Ethiopia and Eritrea by the Visigoths and other Arian tribes which converted to Islam, and from which the Berbers are in part descended.
These churches wreck the whole Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic opporessing the proto-Protestants narrative, which is false.
Having studied the history of heresies such as Gnosticism extensively, and thusngroups like the Bogomils, and having read actual Cathar scriptures, and the Paulican Book of Keys, I can assure you their beliefs are nothing like that of the Waldensians or the subsequent Moravians and Protestants. Rather these were variants of the Gnostics, whose heresy centers around salvation by the possession of secret knowledge, dualism, and rejection of the material world as evil, created by an incompetent demiurge identified with God in the Old Testament. It is conceptually related to Neo-Platonism and Zoroastrianism. There are no surviving historically Gnostic groups that are Christian, the last ethnic Paulicians in Armenia converting to Orthodoxy in the 19th century (presumably Armenian Oriental Orthodoxy), although there is the remotest possibility the ethnic Paulican community in Romania and Bulgaria somehow preserved the faith through the Communist period while appearing to be Eastern Orthodox, but I doubt this.
There are however the Mandaeans of Iraq, who dispersed in 2003, fearing a genocide, however, who are Gnostics who regard St. John the Baptist as the true Messiah, and the Yazidis and Yarsanis of Kurdistan, who the Muslims regard as devil worshippers, but at least in the case of the Yazidis their beliefs appear to be crypto-Christian, and the Yazidis of Sinjar were victims of the ISIS genocide; they are also the largest ethnic minority in Armenia as they helped Armenians survive the Genocide of 1915, and in return were allowed to settle in the Republic of Armenia, and many did, remaining after the Soviets conquered it and presumably closed the border on the rest. Also the Alevis and Bektasis of Turkey, some of whom are nominally Muslim, some of whom are Muslim, and some of whom reject Islam in favor of a concept of pure Alevism called Ishikism, are quite possibly crypto-Christians, or else are related to an ancient grouping of Persian, Anatolian and Kurdish religions including Zoroastrianism and the aforementioned Yazidism and Yarsanism. In researching this I have devoured journals on Kurdish studies, but the subject is obscure.
However, what can be asserted is that the belief systems of these groups is radically dissimilar to that of any Baptist Christians today.
Nor were the Montanists or Donatists proto-Protestant. We have surviving literature from Tertullian, who became a Montanist because he believed the claims of Montanus to be the Paraclete and was attracted to the Montanist rigorist theology, which held one could not be forgiven after Baptism. Donatists were related, possibly, to Waldensians, but only by accident, and only possibly, in that Donatists believed that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on the purity of the priest officiating, but in all other respects were orthodox (likewise, the Novatians had a similar belief but were otherwise identical to the orthodox Nicene Church), and the Waldensians are said to have believed that any righteous Christian male could officiate the sacraments without requiring Episcopal ordination by the Roman church. The problem is of course the lack of pure or righteous Christian males to serve as priests; indeed, unless one accepts the heresy promoted by Pelagius, that we can save ourselves by not sinning, as opposed to requiring the grace of the Holy Spirit to help us have faith in Christ because we are incapable of not sinning or even sinning less without Him and need the forgiveness of God that faith in Christ provides.
Also priestly celibacy was the practice of the Roman church, but only the Roman church, never the Eastern churches (including most Eastern Catholic churches in communion with Rome, like the Ukrainian Greek Catholics), who never even formally prohibited married men from the episcopate, although in practice nearly all bishops have been monks, or in the case of the Church of the East which hasn’t had a monastery since Tamerlane, and with just a million members, 700,000 of them ethnic Assyrians who are the largest surviving group of native speakers of Aramaic, there is a need for reproduction, and attempts at restarting monasticism have failed, the bishops are merely celibate. There have throughout history been small numbers of mostly elderly married bishops in the Eastern churches who by virtue of their age are celibate and likely would need Viagara or a similar in most cases to desist from celibacy, which did not exist until very recently, so before the famous ad with Bob Dole, this would not have existed as a possibility. And there have always been married Chorepiscopi, or Choir Bishops, in the Church of the East and the Nasrani (St. Thomas) Orthodox churches of Kerala, India, as
@Pavel Mosko and
@coorilose can confirm, who have extremely limited powers of ordination but are not required to be celibate, but rather are usually married, in effect being like archpriests but with more power.
Thus, when I mentioned Landmark Baptism in the previous post, the Trail of Tears is what I was specifically referring to.
Also, the work suggests illegitimacy on the part of the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople. This is a problem for two reasons: the Council of Nicaea was convened to debate the teachings of Arius, who had been deposed and excommunicated by the Church of Alexandria under Patriarch St. Alexander, who was tortured but not killed under Dioscorus (his predecessor St. Paul of Alexandria was killed), and the Nicene Creed is the first line of defense of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, especially with the additions made at Constantinople that added to the clause “I believe in the Holy Spirit” the important “the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, and together with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified.”
At Nicaea, Emperor Constantine presided, but aside from ejecting St. Nicholas of Myrha, who was also automatically deposed from his episcopate, when he slapped Arius, but reinstated when he begged the Council for forgiveness, which was granted, on the basis of his reputation and his status as a confessor who like St. Alexander was tortured during the Diocletian persecution (forensic analysis of the relics of St. Nicholas, which were stolen in the Crusades from the Byzantine Empire and moved to Italy, indicates his nose was broken at least three times), it was St. Athanasius, the protodeacon to, and later the successor of, St. Alexander of Alexandria, whose oratory persuaded the council with near unanimity to anathematize the Arian heresy (all dissenting bishops except for Eusebius of Caesarea left before the final vote, and Eusebius of Caesarea assented but whined about it, desiring toleration of Arianism).
A decade later, and another bishop named Eusebius, of Nicomedia, who was a follower of Arius, crept his way into the court of Emperor St. Constantine and baptized him on his death bed, thus gaining dominance in spiritual matters over his son and heir Emperor Constantius, who exiled St. Athanasius, the new Patriarch of Alexandria, eventually sending him to Trier in Germany. He would not be allowed to return until if I recall the reign of Julian the Apostate.
Nevertheless, in his 39th Paschal Encyclical it was St. Athanasius who first mandated the 27 book New Testament canon we all use at present.
It is for good reason that Athanasius is called The Pillar of Orthodoxy, and after his death was lauded by St. Gregory the Theologian, who said the name of Athanasius had become synonymous with virtue, in that if we undermine Athanasius and Nicaea, the two vital extra-Biblical documents which all Christians rely on, the New Testament canon and the Nicene Creed, become invalid, and the whole edifice would come crashing down. At that point one might as well adopt the beliefs of the Paulicans or the Donatists or the Montanists, since without a Creed and a Canon, its pretty much anything goes. And we are blessed to live in a society where people have the freedom to do that, as the existence of Mormonism demonstrates. However, Christianity to be meaningful as a concept requires a definition such as that provided by St. Athanasius.
