rlogan

This was a more substantive evaluation of Acharya S. as a resource to me.

I love Wheeless because he is just such a riot to read. Not because he is a good source for facts. Bombastic. Sneering contempt for Christian hypocrisy. Lots of fun.

Acharya S. got caught with her pants down on that quote from the play, and it was one I had familiarity with before I read her saying it. I took that one quote to be a fairly strong signal about her work, and wondered if she would correct it.

I am not sure what people expect her to be, exactly. Holy mackerel if people took my posts here as some kind of demonstration for the work I can do when I am serious about something - yikes. I have plenty of peer-reviewed literature on my vita, but nothing in religious studies. This is just recreation to me.

I'd have to put Doherty above insofar as academic rigor, yea - that is not a hard call. But is that what we are expecting out of her?

I have to comment on Malachi151. Sheesh. Using him to critique Acharya S.?! I tried to interact with him when he was pretending to be some kind of economic commentator without actually reading anything in economics.

I kept trying to get him to quote some source... ANY source... for some of the claims he was making and recieved nothing but childish rubbish in return. Difficult for me to believe anyone would use him as some kind of "authority".

Errancy

Where does the idea that this quote is from a play come from? It isn't. Bale's book is polemical history, listing the Popes and their iniquities in an attempt to demonstrate that Rome is the spouse of Satan. It's a great read, by the way.

I played a role in tracking this down: I'm the one who located a copy of The Pageant of Popes and acquired and sent Holding copies of the relevant passages. I just discovered that he's published a book containing a chapter on this; I wonder whether he'd comp me a copy so that I can see what he's done with my research.

Incidentally, Christ Church College Oxford has a copy of Jovius' De Vita Leonis X, which is slightly earlier than The Pageant of Popes and has also been suggested as a source for the quote. If anyone reads Latin and can get access to it, I'd encourage them to do so.

ApostateAbe

Errancy, welcome to the forum. Good to have someone here who does his homework.

Roger Pearse

The Latin text of Jovius is online here. I no longer remember why I scanned it, tho. A search for "Christi" tells us that "of Christ" is not present in the text.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Errancy

Excellent! I'm glad someone got around to following up that line of enquiry.

The biggest problem with the use of this quote by Christ mythers isn't that it's from a questionable source, it's that it doesn't say that Christ is a mythical figure. In Bale's version of events, Leo X describes a specific passage in a gospel as a profitable fable (there's no indication of which passage, but something like Mark 12:41-44, the widow's mite, would fit very nicely). It's a long way from the idea that one event recorded in the gospel is a fable to the idea that there was no historical Jesus, yet Acharya S wheels out the quote to show that:

Even if the quote is genuine, it certainly doesn't disclose that.

Roger Pearse

Is Bale's book online, in some more or less complete form?

The 'quote' is a standard piece of anti-Christian polemic. Perhaps the reason it appears here is that it was borrowed, without regard to the detail that it was irrelevant?

The opinion of a corrupt churchman wouldn't be evidence of the falsity of Christianity anyway, any more than the actions of corrupt politicians demonstrate that democracy doesn't work.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Errancy

Not that I know of. If it is, then I'd love to know where.

Yes, of course, that's another problem with the way that the quote is sometimes used.

Roger Pearse

I probably ought to say, tho, that Leo X may have been more of a politician than a Pope. But rather more important to us today is that he was the founder of the Vatican library, one of the world's great repositories of manuscripts. He was also responsible for rescuing the Tacitus manuscript of Annals 1-6 from the black-market, after it had been stolen from the abbey of Corvey where it had spent the middle ages.