A Catholic response to “The Trail of Blood”

by Matthew A. C. Newsome ©2003

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INTRODUCTION

     If you have Baptist family, friends, or neighbors, you may have been handed a copy of the little booklet entitled, “The Trail of Blood.”  If you are a Baptist yourself, you may have read it, or been influenced by it through various sermons, lessons, or other material that repeats its errors.  Though originally published in 1931, it is still being circulated today, with almost 2 million copies in print.
     The book is a supposed history of Christianity that establishes the present day Baptist denomination as the authentic Church of Christ.  The author claims his denomination is merely the most recent inheritor of “New Testament” Christianity that began with John the Baptist and continued through the centuries.  This trail is established by identifying the Baptists with nearly every heretical and schismatic group that existed during the early and medieval periods.  This “trail of blood” has left some 50 million martyrs (according to the author), largely at the hands of Catholics.
 In this little booklet, Catholic doctrine is grossly misrepresented and historical accounts are falsified to such an extent that any serious scholar would waste no time with its claims.  However, the text is not aimed at serious scholars, and therein lies the problem.
 Dialog between Catholics and Baptists has often been strained at best.  I’m not talking about high level ecumenical meetings between appointed ambassadors, but rather between common adherents in the work place, in families, and in neighborhoods.  Many Baptists won’t even recognize Catholics as Christian, and Catholics just don’t understand why Baptists exert so much effort in attempts to “evangelize” them.
     After reading “The Trail of Blood” I think I have gained a better understanding as to why.  If I believed many of the lies and errors repeated in this text, I would hate the Catholic Church – her history, her doctrine, and her hierarchy would be absolutely contemptible if they truly were as described.
 But they are not.  And here is a partial solution to the great problem many of us find in trying to share our faith with these separated brethren of ours.  One does not have to agree with Catholic doctrine to understand that it is not as portrayed in “The Trail of Blood.”  One does not have to be a graduate level historian to understand that many of the facts as presented in this “history” are just plain wrong.  One does not have to be a theologian to see that the various heretical groups that have plagued Christendom from almost the beginning are anything but proto-Baptists.
     Catholic or Protestant, we all share a common Church history.  When one refuses to accept revisionist accounts of our past, when one recognizes crack historians with an agenda for what they are, and when the true history of our faith can be learned and discussed and seen for what it is, warts and all – then, my brothers and sisters in Christ, we can begin a most wonderful conversation.

Matt Newsome

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    Henry Cardinal Newman, a former Anglican who became one of the greatest Catholic minds of the modern era, once said, “to know history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  Indeed, most rank-and-file Protestant Christians who fill the pews on Sunday morning don’t give that much thought to history.  They worship and love a Christ that walked this earth some 2000 years ago, but for the most part don’t consider the intervening centuries between that time and now.
    This is the reason many converts to Catholicism (myself included) first become attracted to the Catholic Church.  We don’t want to worship in a church disconnected from the historic Jesus.  We want to know that the church we belong to is indeed the church that He founded and not the creation of a man re-interpreting the “true Church of Christ” centuries after Pentecost.
    Most Protestants that I encounter are very happy to tell you the origin of their denomination.  Presbyterians proudly point to John Knox as the founder of the Church of Scotland, based on Calvinist principles.  Episcopalians (Anglicans) know full well that their church grew out of a split between King Henry VIII of England and the Pope in Rome who refused to grant him permission to divorce and remarry.  The Methodists have the Wesley brothers.  Lutherans have Martin Luther – and in fact have taken their very name from this Reformer.
    The term “Protestant” itself tells us volumes about the origin of this particular group of churches.  They originated in protest, which means something had to pre-exist for them to protest against.  That something is, of course, the Catholic Church.  The most succinct definition of Protestant is simply “anti-Catholic.”
    The fact that these origins leave gaps of time 1500 years or longer between the founding of the church and the crucifixion of Christ doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
    Then we have the Baptists.  According to the Handbook of Denominations in the United States, 10th edition, by Frank S. Mead and Samuel S. Hill, the Baptist denomination is, “a third generation Reformation development that appeared in England about 1610” that “wanted to take Protestantism ‘to its logical conclusion.’”

Convinced that Puritanism needed still further reform, Baptists began to teach that only self-professed believers were eligible for membership in the church and thus that the church is properly made up of only regenerated people. . . . This is now the largest Protestant family in the U.S.  Twenty-seven Baptist denominations reported an approximate membership of 32 million in 1994; there are about 100,000 local Baptist churches, each independent of the others. (pg. 49).

Most Baptists I know (and growing up in North Carolina, I have known plenty) gladly own the Protestant label.  In fact, they are proud of it, pointing to John Smyth as their founder.  According to the Handbook of Denominations Smyth formed most of his ideas after being influenced by Mennonites in Amsterdam, who were teaching Anabaptist principles.  Anabaptist is the name given to a left wing fringe of the Reformation that held to a literal interpretation of the Bible in social matters, a complete separation of church and state, and rejected infant baptism as unscriptural, requiring a “believer’s baptism” of all adults for membership in their churches.  Since they required members of their sect that were baptized as children to be baptized again, they were called “Ana-baptists,” meaning re-baptizers.
    Within 32 years after John Smyth’s death in 1612, the Baptist movement had already split into three distinct denominations; General, Particular, and Immersion.  The Baptist churches in America stem from the Particular Baptists, who accepted Calvin’s ideas about predestination.
    This origin is generally accepted by all respected religious and secular historians.  But there are Baptists who deny that they are Protestants at all.  No, the Baptist church did not grow out of the Reformation, they say.  It was always there, lurking underground, suffering persecution, and only surfaced in the safer religious climate of post-Reformation Europe.  But it has its origins much earlier, indeed with Christ Himself.
    Or so reads the history according to Dr. J. M. Carroll, author of the little booklet, “The Trail of Blood.”  Though rejected by historians, many in the Baptist community today understand this anti-Catholic and largely fabricated historical account to be the story of how Christ established the Baptist church (beginning with John the Baptist) and how it remained the one true church loyal to Christ for the past 2000 years.
    Of course the desire to create such a history is understandable. The honest Christian inevitably desires to learn the actual teachings of Christ as handed on by the Apostles, and if that Apostolic Church still exists, to join in communion with it.  For the Reformation churches, this claim simply cannot be made.  Those that make it must disassociate themselves from the Reformation and seek out the “missing history” of their church that would tie it back to Christ.  This is what “The Trail of Blood” claims to do for the Baptists.
    I have in my possession a copy of the 66th edition of this booklet, copyright 1931, republished in 1993 with 1,930,000 copies said to be in circulation.  Dr. Carroll, a leading figure among early twentieth century Southern Baptists, died just prior to its publication.
 

HALLMARKS OF THE CHURCH

    “The Trail of Blood” is in essence a series of lectures given by Dr. Carroll, in which he lays out the history of the Baptist church, as he sees it, from Christ to the present time. In his first lecture, he sets forth some basic fundamentals of the early church that are to be hallmarks of the true church throughout the ages.  These hallmarks do not come from records left us by the first Christians, but from a Baptist interpretation of the New Testament.  We will look at a few of these hallmarks and see how they stand up to Scripture and what we know from Church history – the New Testament, after all, is nothing if not an account of the beginning of the Church.
    The first hallmark that we will examine is that Christ established His Church with “no earthly head or temporal authority” (pg. 7).  Examining the writings of the early Church Fathers can easily refute this, but in this case we will meet Carroll on the field of Sacred Scripture.
In Matthew’s Gospel we read of the dialog between Christ and Simon, during which Simon makes his famous confession of faith.  Afterwards, Christ tells him, “I tell you, you are Rock [Peter], and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:18).  From this point on, Simon bar Jonah was known as Peter or Cephas – the Rock.
    This verse is a pivotal one in the Gospel, and one that Carroll himself cites numerous times in an abbreviated form.  He quotes Christ as saying, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” without ever mentioning what (or who) it is that Christ said He would build His Church upon.  Yet in this omission lies ample proof against both of his claims – that the true Church has no earthly head or temporal authority.
The language that Christ here uses in speaking with Peter mirrors that used in Isaiah 22:20-22, where Eliakim, a servant, is given the authority of the Davidic kings, making him, in effect, the Prime Minister of the Davidic Kingdom.

On that day I shall summon my servant Eliakim, son of Hilkiah; I will clothe him with your robe, and gird him with your sash, and give over to him your authority.  He shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah.  I will place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open.

The similarity in language between this passage and that in Matthew is no coincidence.  Nothing Christ said can be taken lightly.  Jesus was calling to mind this passage from Isaiah where a servant is granted the authority of the master to illustrate how He, the Master, was granting His authority to His servant Peter.  This is the symbolism and significance of the keys.  And notice the power granted to loose and bind is effective on earth as well as in heaven.
     In effect, Jesus is naming Peter as His Prime Minister, to oversee His Church in His absence.  Since Christ is to rule vicariously through Peter, we call the successor of Peter the Vicar of Christ.  The Church described by the Scriptures most definitely has an earthly head, one with temporal and spiritual authority.
     The New Testament Church, according to Carroll, has other marks that he calls “infallible” (pg. 8).  (Strange that he would deny the charism of infallibility to the successor of St. Peter but assume it for himself when identifying these hallmarks of the church).  One of these is that the church has only two officers – the pastor (bishop) and deacon.  The Scriptures themselves, however, clearly show an early church in operation with three levels of ministry; the episcopoi or bishops (sometimes called “evangelists,” see 1 Tim. 5:19–22; 2 Tim. 4:5; Titus 1:5), the presbuteroi or priests (sometimes called “elders,” see 1 Tim. 5:17; Jas. 5:14–15), and the diakonoi or deacons (see Acts 6:1-6).  Although the exact roles of these three ministers and the application of their titles seems to have been somewhat fluid among the first Christians, by the end of the century they were understood the same way they are in the Catholic Church today (this according to the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch, whom we will meet with later).
     Another of Carroll’s “infallible marks” is that individual churches were completely independent of each other.  Again, Scripture shows us another example, with the coming together of the leaders of the early Christian churches at the first Church council in Jerusalem, described in Acts 15.  Here, a decision is made, for all the churches, that Gentile converts need not undergo the Old Testament rite of circumcision.  This shows the churches working together as a unified body.  A proclamation was made for all.  Individual, independent churches did not vote on the matter.  No one could opt not to obey the council.
     In fact, the notion of independent churches “doing their own thing” was harshly condemned by St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians.

For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarrelling among you, my brethren.  What I mean is that each one of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apolos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.”  Is Christ divided?  Was Paul crucified for you?  Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? (1 Cor. 1:11-13)

No, Christ cannot be divided.  Christ taught that there should be one fold and one shepherd (Jn. 10:16).  In fact it was His prayer to the Father that, “they may be one, as we are one” (Jn. 17:17-23).  The situation Paul condemns in his letter to the Corinthians sounds very much like the situation in this age where independent Baptist congregations split into increasingly more independent congregations over a charismatic preacher or a subtle difference in scriptural interpretation.  This is not the Church as founded by Christ.
     But Dr. Carroll is adamant on this point.  “The word church in the singular was never used when referring to more than one of these organizations.  Nor even when referring to them all” (pg. 9).  But what about the words of Christ when He spoke of the ecclesia, the Greek word for “church”?  Christ used this term twice in the Gospels, each time in the singular.  One was in Matthew 16:18 when He spoke of building His Church, and the other was in Matthew 18:17 when He said, “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the Church; and if he refuses to listen to the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  “The Trail of Blood” is full of accounts of people who refused to listen to the Church, as we shall see later.
     Dr. Carroll no doubt was a very patriotic American.  One can easily see his love for American values in his description of these “independent churches.”  “And their government to be congregational, democratic.  A government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (pg. 8).  But when was the phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people” ever uttered in first century Palestine?  This notion of individualism works just fine in a democratic system of government.  But this is not what the Church is.  One does not strive to get to heaven so that he might be a perfected individual.  One strives to get to heaven so that he may be united with God.  And we begin to form that union here on earth by being united with God’s Church.  It is of, by, and for Him, not us, collectively or individually.
     Another “infallible mark” that Carroll describes is that the Church has but two ordinances (not sacraments) and these are the Lord’s Supper and Baptism.  Again, we turn to Scripture.  While the evidence for Christ establishing the sacraments (as Catholics know them) of Baptism and the Eucharist abounds, we also read of others.
     The Sacrament of Confession (sometimes Reconciliation) is one that Protestants have long left by the wayside, but the Biblical evidence for it is strong.  We begin in John’s Gospel, where we read of Christ telling the Apostles that, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven” (Jn. 20:23).  Paul speaks of this in his second letter to the Corinthians when he mentions Christ giving them the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:17-20).  James tells us explicitly that the prayer of priests forgives sins.  “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (Jas. 5:13-16).
     Other sacraments have equal Biblical basis.  Confirmation is brought out in Acts when Paul laid hands upon already baptized Christians, as they received the Holy Spirit (Acts 19:5-6, also 8:14-17).  Extreme Unction (also known as Anointing of the Sick, or “Last Rites”) can be seen in Mark 6:12-13, and James 5:14.  Matrimony is blessed by Christ in Mark 10:7-12 when He proclaims, “What God joined together, let no man put asunder.”  The ordination of priests with Holy Orders is evidenced throughout the book of Acts and the epistles (Acts 6:6, 13:3, 14:22, 1 Tim. 4:14, 2 Tim. 1:6, Tit. 1:5, etc.).  Without going into further detail on all seven sacraments traditionally practiced by Christians, it is clear that Scripture mentions more than just Baptism and “the Lord’s Supper.”
     Dr. Carroll makes another error when he identifies as a hallmark of the Church that “the New Testament and that only, [is] to be the rule and guide of faith and life . . .” (pg. 9).  One assumes that the justification for this is 2 Tim. 3:15-17 (indeed, this is cited as such in the introduction (pg. 5)).  If this is the case, Dr. Carroll needs to examine the history of the scriptures more carefully.  Let’s back up a verse and read exactly what Paul wrote to Timothy.

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.  All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work (2 Tim. 3:14-17).

Notice here that Paul nowhere states that scripture alone is to be the rule of Christian faith.  This is the mistake made by many proponents of Sola Scriptura.  But leaving that aside, what does this verse tell us about Dr. Carroll’s assertion regarding the New Testament?
    Paul mentions the scriptures that Timothy knew from his childhood.  We know that the various books comprising the New Testament were written between 40 and 100 AD (or later, taking into account some disagreement among scholars), and not compiled into a single, official canon until the late fourth century.  Therefore the only scriptures Timothy could have known in his childhood would have been the Jewish Scriptures, and more specifically, the Septuagint version that was in use by the Greek speaking Jews of Palestine (that included the seven duetero-canonical books that Protestants label the “Apocrypha”).  Paul is talking about the Old Testament!
    This “New-Testament-only-ism” that Carroll expresses and that is so common among Baptists is completely unsupported by the Bible, and leads to such grave errors as the virtual belief that Jesus didn’t so much come to establish a church as to write a book.  Thus you have the person in the Christian book store, confounded by all the translations and editions of the Bible currently available, asking the sales clerk to help her find “the King James Bible that Jesus used.”
    The fact of the matter is that the original Christians could not have based their faith solely upon the New Testament because for them the “New Testament” as such did not even exist.  Its books were still being written, and its compilation was centuries off.
    The last of Carroll’s “infallible marks” that we will deal with (he has ten of them, but we needn’t examine them all) is that neither Christ nor the Apostles ever gave a particular name to their faithful, with the exception of “the Baptist,” which was applied to John.  He condemns what he calls denominational names such as Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and so forth.  He is right in that Christ never established any denominational names, but he is wrong in assuming that because John was called “the Baptist” that was to be the name used by Christ’s followers.  When were any of the Apostles or other disciples ever called Baptists in the rest of the New Testament?  When was any group of Christians ever called Baptist prior to the seventeenth century (the British sect by that name taking it from the Anabaptists of the century prior)?
    Christ did have a word for the collected body of His faithful – Ecclesia, the Church.  And this is just what it has been called historically, and still is today.  While modern Protestant denominational names refer to some characteristic of that denomination – their founder, a peculiarity of belief or practice – Catholic is not a denominational name.  It is an adjective used when describing the Church, which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic (according to the Nicene Creed).
    The first person on record to mention the “Catholic Church” was not some medieval theologian, but a student of the apostle John, the second bishop of Antioch after Peter, a man named St. Ignatius.  Ignatius died a martyr’s death in Rome in 107 AD.  Before he died he wrote a series of letters to other Christian churches. These writings provide for us the most complete and accurate account of the first century Church that we have, so we will be referring to them often. In them, we find the first recorded example of the Church being called Catholic, which means “universal.”  He wrote in his letter to the Smyrnaeans, “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the assembly also be – just as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” (qtd. in The Mass of the Early Christians by Mike Aquilina, pg. 74).
    Carroll asserts that the true Church of Christ does not have a proper name because one of the main components of his “history” is that the Baptist church has always existed, but under the names of various heretical sects.  He would have us believe that names such as Albigensian, Waldensian, and Donatist are merely derogatory nicknames given to the Baptists of past generations.  He claims that all of these groups were also known as “Ana-baptists,” and that this name dates back to the third century, making it the oldest denominational name, older than “Catholic” (pg. 55).  Even if we accept this dating at face value, it still comes 200 years after Ignatius wrote of the Catholic Church.
 

THE FIRST FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

     Like all manufactured histories of the Church, Dr. Carroll admits that the Church began on solid enough footing, under the leadership of the Apostles, but soon after that began to go astray.  He claims the first error began even before the end of the second century, with bishops assuming authority over pastors of smaller independent churches – something Carroll sees as being contrary to the New Testament (pg. 12).
     He quotes from the Lutheran historian Mosheim, asserting that “a bishop had charge of a single church, which might ordinarily be contained in a private house” (pg. 14).  While this is certainly true of the first Christian congregations, small as they were, no one would expect this to continue to be the case once Christianity began to grow.  A bishop who found himself shepherd of a flock of thousands, or tens of thousands, could not possibly expect to minister to them all.  And so we have the class of priest, subservient to his bishop, to serve as pastor to smaller local congregations in that bishop’s jurisdiction.
     Rather than being a later invention, this was established almost immediately in the new Church – even before Christianity was legalized and the faithful could safely move out of their “house churches” and into permanent and public Cathedrals.  Again, we see this clearly in the writings of St. Ignatius. In his letter to the Philadelphians, he writes:

For all those who belong to God and to Jesus Christ are with the bishop. . . . If anyone follows a man who makes a schism in the Church, he shall not inherit the Kingdom of God. . . . For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to show forth the unity of His blood; one altar, as there is one bishop, along with the priests and deacons, my fellow servants (qtd. in Aquilina, pg. 75).

Ignatius, himself bishop of Antioch, instilled there by Peter, clearly speaks of one bishop having authority in an area, with priests and deacons to assist him.  Indeed, he gives a dire warning to any who would make schism – that is, to any who would set up their own “independent church” apart from the legitimate authority of the bishop.
     An even clearer account of the authority of the bishops in the early Church comes from another Father, St. Cyprian, who wrote in the first half of the third century.  After quoting Matthew 16:16-18, he writes:

Thence, through the changes of times and successions, the ordering of bishops and the plan of the Church flows onwards; so that the Church is founded upon the bishops, and every act of the Church is controlled by these same rulers.  Since this, then, is founded on the divine law, I marvel that some, with daring temerity, have chosen to write to me as if they wrote in the name of the Church; when the Church is established in the bishops and the clergy, and all who stand fast in the faith (Letter No. 33 qtd. in The Teachings of the Church Fathers, by John R. Willis, S.J.).

    

The next grave error that Dr. Carroll believes arose is that of infant baptism.  As a Baptist, he denies the effects of a regenerative, sacramental baptism.  This, too, he sees as a departure from the original Christian teaching.  He holds to a “believer’s baptism” that is performed only on confessing adults, and then by full immersion only.
     A theological discussion of the different Catholic and Baptist teachings on this sacrament could fill a book.  That is not the purpose of this present work.  Suffice it to say that Dr. Carroll admits too much when he says that the “error” of the Catholic view came about because, “The Bible has much to say concerning baptism.  Much stress is laid upon the ordinance and one’s duty concerning it.  Surely it must have something to do with one’s salvation” (pg. 12).  Surely it does, and this is how the Catholic Church has always viewed it.
     But we can deal very quickly and easily with some of the erroneous claims made about the origin of infant baptism.  Infant baptism is something that makes an extreme amount of sense if one holds to the Catholic view of baptism as the primary sacrament of initiation.   It makes absolutely no sense at all if one holds the Baptist view of baptism.  Therefore it is always something that Baptists have denied was ever performed in the early church.  In fact, Dr. Carroll writes that “there is not one [account] of the baptism of a child till the year 370” (pg. 13).
     Theology aside, this is simply a matter of historic accuracy.  Whether you are a Baptist or a Catholic, you simply cannot ignore the evidence supporting the baptism of infants by the first Christians.  Origin (c. 244) wrote, “The Church received from the Apostles the tradition of giving baptism also to infants” (Commentary on Romans 5, 9).  St. Augustine said of infant baptism, “This the Church always had, always held.”
     Baptism has always been seen as parallel to the Jewish rite of circumcision (see Col. 2:11-12), which was performed on the eighth day after birth.  For this reason, many early Christians assumed that parents should wait eight days to baptize their newborns.  In the third century, a debate arose as to whether or not this delay was necessary.  In 253 a council was called at Corinth where it was decided that there was no reason to wait any length of time before having a baby baptized.  St. Cyprian was there, and that same year wrote a letter to one named Fidus.

You [Fidus] said that they ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after their birth, that the old law of circumcision must be taken into consideration, and that you did not think that one should be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day after his birth. In our council it seemed to us far otherwise. No one agreed to the course which you thought should be taken. Rather, we all judge that the mercy and grace of God ought to be denied to no man born" (Letters 64:2).

In 215 AD, St. Hippolytus of Rome wrote, “Baptize first the children; and if they can speak for themselves let them do so, otherwise let their parents or other relatives speak for them” (The Apostolic Tradition 21:16).  This is exactly the same rule of thumb used by the Catholic Church today.
     For earlier records, we have the accounts in the book of Acts of entire households and families being baptized together (Acts 16:15, 33), which likely included children and infants.  We have the letter of Paul to the Colossians (cited above), where he talks of baptism as replacing the rite of circumcision, which was of course practiced primarily on infants.  While it is true that the New Testament never explicitly says, “Baptize infants as well as adults,” it also never forbids it, and implicitly accepts it.  Forbidding it would seem to be “un-scriptural.”  Regardless of opinion, however, one would have to ignore a mountain of evidence to suggest, as Dr. Carroll has, that there is no record of infant baptism prior to 370 AD.
    But the major event in the first few centuries of the Church that Dr. Carroll laments above all others is what he calls the “unholy union” of the Church with the Roman Empire, under the Emperor Constantine the Great.  While Church historians usually praise Constantine’s legalization of Christianity as a liberation from state-sanctioned persecution, Carroll sees it as the beginning of the end (Baptists advocate a strict separation of church and state).
     He claims that this “marriage” between church and state was brought about when Constantine called a church council in 313 AD.  At this council the Catholic hierarchy was formed, and Constantine was “enthroned . . . as head of the church” (pg. 16).
     Unfortunately for Dr. Carroll, one will find no record of a Church council in 313.  What did happen that year, however, was the issuing by Constantine of the Edict of Milan, that granted religious tolerance for both Christian and pagan, abolished all laws against Christianity, restored confiscated property that had been taken from the Church, and made Sunday a day of rest.  It made Christianity legal, but not the “state religion.”  Could this edict be what Dr. Carroll is referring to?  It’s hard to imagine that he would confuse a council of the Church with an edict issued by the emperor.  But that’s what happened in 313.
     Of course, Dr. Carroll could have his date wrong.  Maybe he is referring to a council that Constantine did call (with the consent of Pope Sylvester) in 325, the Council of Nicaea. But if this is the council he has in mind, he is greatly misinformed regarding its purpose and proceedings.  The Council of Nicaea was called to address a heresy that was dividing the Church (and potentially the Empire), called Arianism.
     This heresy is named after an apostate priest, Arius of Libya, who in 318 began to teach that Jesus Christ was not divine.  Christ was the highest of all of God’s created beings, but He was created.  He was not God and was not the second person of the Holy Trinity.  Of course the Church condemned this heresy, but it persisted and lingered and was the cause of much strife in the fourth century.
     To finally put an end to all doubt as to the Church’s teaching on the divinity of Christ, the Council of Nicaea formulated what we today know as the Nicene Creed, which reaffirms Catholic teaching that Christ is true God and true Man.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father . . . by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became Man.

This council did also address matters of the Church hierarchy, but it was a hierarchy already in place well before this time.  As much is evident in such early writings as the Didache (a first century work also called The Teachings of the Apostles), in the writings of St. Ignatius, and St. Clement of Rome, the fourth Pope, who was ordained by St. Peter himself.  Space does not permit us to quote from all of their works, but all mention the clerical hierarchy as being established by Christ through the Apostles.
    Simply put, the council did not form a hierarchy.  And it most definitely did not establish Constantine as its head.  Pope Sylvester would likely have had a thing or two to say about that, as the rightful successor of St. Peter.  Constantine did not even preside over the council.  That was done by a papal legate, Sylvester being ill and too frail to attend himself.
     In any case, Dr. Carroll assures us that true Christians (Baptists) “did not respond” to Constantine’s call for this council.  They never, “at that time or later, entered the hierarchy of the Catholic denomination” (pg. 16).
     Which leads one to wonder . . . If the Baptists existed at this early date, and if they refused to participate in this Catholic hierarchy, or take part in the Council of Nicaea, then that means they would have had nothing to do with the subsequent councils of the Catholic Church.  Therefore, in addition to not sharing the Nicene Creed in common with other Christians, they also would not share in common the fruit of later councils.  I’m referring to the Bible itself.
     Various Christian writings abounded in the first few centuries of the Church.  It was not long before church leaders realized that many of these writings were inspired, like the Jewish Scriptures.  They began to be read from at mass as a part of the liturgy, as well as for instruction and devotion.  But what new scriptures were read differed from church to church.  It was not until prompted by the Council of Rome in 382 that the Pope compiled a list of approved books for the Christian canon.  And it was at two later councils, at Hippo in 393, and at Carthage in 397, that this canon was discussed and agreed upon.  And finally it was the Catholic Pope, Innocent I, who formally defined the canon of scripture in 405.
    All of which is to say, if these “early Baptists” had no part in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church or in her councils – if they split apart from her sometime prior to 313 AD -- from what source do they get their Bible?  Why do we not have independent Baptist churches today reading from the Gospel of Thomas, or from the infancy Gospels?  Why don’t some of them exclude certain books that were not universally accepted by early Christians, like John’s Revelation?  If these churches are truly independent, if they really did exist in these early centuries, and if they truly had nothing to do with any of the Catholic councils, you’d expect this to be the case.
    But it isn’t.  Baptists use the same Bible as every other Protestant denomination – an abridged form of the Catholic Bible (the duetero-canonical books of the Old Testament being removed by the Reformers).  And they profess belief in the Nicene Creed, along side Catholics and other Protestants today.
 

THE “DARK AGES”

     Dr. Carroll ends this section of his book by introducing us to the “Dark Ages.”  Every true student of medieval history cringes to hear this phrase.  The Middle Ages is better called the “Age of Faith” for it saw a great integration of the Church and civilization, with religion saturating everything from the politics of kings to the daily tasks of the peasantry.  It was a time of great achievement in art, literature, architecture, music, government, philosophy, and theology during which Western culture flourished.  Dr. Carroll shows his prejudice, dismissing the era by saying, “What a period!  How awfully black and bloody!” (pg. 19).
     If we are to judge an age by the amount of blood spilled, then how awfully dark is our own.  The myth of the “Dark Ages” is largely a creation of the Enlightenment, and the beginning of modernism.  Catholicism had united reason with religion.  The Reformation rendered them asunder, proclaiming religion king.  And the Enlightenment reacted by exalting reason and condemning religion as superstition.  These rationalists saw themselves as the inheritors of the great classical age of Greece and Rome, and they called the centuries of time between that period and their own – the centuries during which Christianity built Western civilization up to greatness out of the smoking ruin of the Roman Empire – the “Dark Ages.”
     During this period Dr. Carroll attempts to identify as Baptist all manner of heretical sects (which he calls “loyal New Testament churches”) that were “hunted and hounded to the utmost limit of [Catholic] power” (pg. 20).
    His second lecture deals with the seven hundred year period between 600 and 1300 AD (pp.20-29).  Nine pages could not contain less information about the Middle Ages.  What we have instead is a general tirade against the Catholic Church (this section is entirely devoted to the actions of Catholics and never once gives any positive information about Baptists) with little substance.  The meat of this section is a listing of Church councils and the “new doctrines” that were invented by them.
     This is the way these councils operated, according to Carroll’s view.  They were called by the Roman Emperor, and never the Pope (pg. 20).  They were attended by bishops, who were simply “pastors of individual churches” (pg. 21).  These pastors met and discussed what new laws to enact and what new doctrines to introduce, all contrary to the New Testament.  To keep their power, they did everything they could to keep the Bible away from regular people, and persecuted with horrific violence any “Bible Christian” that would not accept their new doctrines.
     As might be expected, Dr. Carroll’s view is less than accurate.  It will be beneficial here to go into some detail as to what these Church councils actually were and what sorts of things they can and cannot do.  The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us, “Councils are legally convened assemblies of ecclesiastical dignitaries and theological experts for the purpose of discussing and regulating matters of church doctrine and discipline.”  The first thing to notice is the requirement that such councils be legally convened.  There have been councils that were called illegally, and subsequently have no authority.  These we call “robber councils” and Carroll makes no distinction in his book between these and legitimate councils of the Catholic Church.
     The Catholic Encyclopedia defines seven types of councils, depending on their area of jurisdiction, from a single diocese to the entire universal Church.  These latter are called Ecumenical Councils, and are given the most attention in “The Trail of Blood.”  For an Ecumenical Council to have jurisdiction over all the faithful its decrees must be confirmed by the Pope.  Otherwise it is not binding.  The Pope, or his papal legate, has presided over every Ecumenical Council in the history of the Church.  Sometimes the council may have been called at the request of the Emperor, as we saw was the case with the Council of Nicaea, but always with the consent and support of the Pope.
     These councils are normally called, not to invent new doctrine, but to more specifically define it.  That is to say, they are usually called in response to a particular heresy or question that has become divisive to the Church, to settle once and for all what the orthodox teaching is on a particular subject.  We saw this at work at the Council of Nicaea.  This council was called to address the particular heresy of Arianism.  This heresy denied the divinity of Christ, and the Council made it clear in its proclamations that the teaching of the Apostles is that Christ is divine, both fully God and fully man, and is in fact the second person of the Trinity.
     Which brings up the subject of Apostolic Tradition and the Deposit of Faith.  Apostolic Tradition, or Sacred Tradition, is the teaching of the Apostles, learned either from Christ or from the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Some, but not all, of it is written down in the New Testament (see John 21:25).  The Apostles did not leave us a complete catechism that would tell us everything we would ever need to know about the Christian faith.  They gave us the basic data, the information that was divinely revealed to them.  This is the Deposit of Faith.  The implications and applications of that data, the increasing and deepening of our understanding of it, would take centuries to work out, and indeed continues each day in the life of the Church.
     Church Councils are called to protect and to preserve this original Deposit of Faith, and interpret it when needed for the benefit of the faithful.  New doctrine can develop as a logical and natural growth from the old.  But doctrines are never “invented” as described in “The Trail of Blood.”
     We must make one other distinction before examining some of Dr. Carroll’s specific claims, and that is the difference between doctrine and discipline.  This is the difference between a belief and a practice.  For example, both Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox believe that the Eucharistic bread becomes the Body of Christ upon consecration.  But they take Holy Communion according to different practices, Catholics from the hands of the priest, and Orthodox with a special spoon.
     Disciplines can be great aids to our devotional life and can teach us much about the faith.  But they are created by men in the Church and can be altered by men in the Church with proper authority.  Doctrines, on the other hand, are definitions of what we believe to be true as Christians, and as part of the Apostolic Tradition cannot be changed by anyone – not a council, not the Pope, and not by Protestant Reformers.  Dr. Carroll makes no distinction between doctrine and discipline when discussing these church councils, but it is an important one to be made.  Some councils are not doctrinal councils – they deal specifically with disciplinary matters.
     We will look at a few claims made by Carroll in this section, beginning with the Council of Chalcedon, in 451 (Carroll does not explain why he includes discussion of this council under the heading “600-1300”).  At this Ecumenical Council, he says, “another entirely new doctrine was added to the rapidly growing list – the doctrine called ‘Mariolatry,’ or the worship of Mary, the Mother of Jesus” (pg. 22).  I’m afraid one could read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church cover to cover and not find a single doctrine mentioned called “Mariolatry.”  The fact of the matter is that Catholics do not worship Mary, and never have.  No pope, no council, no bishop has ever proclaimed as doctrine that Mary is to be worshiped as a goddess, or in any way is on equal footing to her Son, Jesus.  Indeed, all of the praise, love, and devotion that Catholics rightfully give to Mary is done because of her intimate association with the Incarnate God, who alone is worthy of worship.
     This is not the place for a full defense of the Catholic devotion to Mary.  There are other good books dealing with this topic (see the recommended reading list).  But I will take the time to point out a very important distinction in the Greek terms that are used to describe adoration and devotion to Mary, the saints, and God.  In Greek, we speak of dulia, hyper-dulia, and latria. Latria is worship.  It is only ever given to the divine, that is, the persons of the Holy Trinity.  Never will you see it applied to any other in Catholic writing.  Dulia is devotion, but not worship.  It is devotion out of honor and respect, the type that you may have for your parents, a mentor, or great leaders of church and state. Hyper-dulia is the greatest devotion it is possible to have for a created being, but it is not worship.  We believe that Mary is the greatest of all of God’s created beings because she alone was deemed worthy to carry the Word of God in her womb.  She had the most intimate and loving relationship with Christ during His Incarnation.  She alone is called “full of grace” in the New Testament (Lk. 1:28) and the scriptures say all generations will call her blessed (Lk. 1:48).  So she is worthy of hyper-dulia but not worship.
     Knowing this distinction will hopefully make it easier to understand Catholic devotion to Mary and to see how ridiculous the notion is that a Catholic council ever introduced a “doctrine of Mary worship.”
     So what did happen at Chalcedon?  That council was called to condemn the Monophysite heresy, which claimed that Christ had but one nature that was both human and divine, therefore making Him out to be a half-god, half-man.  The Church here reaffirmed the teaching of the Nicene council, that Christ is one person with two natures, divine and human, and so is fully God and fully man.  This fact is not even mentioned by Carroll.
     He is eager to move on to other “inventions,” such as the invention of the “new doctrine . . . called ‘Image Worship’” by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 (pg. 22).  Again, this is a doctrine found in no catechism.  This particular council was called in response to the rather nasty heresy called Iconoclasm, particularly prominent in the Eastern churches.  This heresy, perhaps influenced by the Muslim religion (itself really a grossly distorted ancient Christian heresy) taught that all sacred images were evil and idolatrous, not to be possessed or created.  Those found in churches and private homes, some centuries old, were violently vandalized and destroyed, in a rather Taliban like manner.  This heresy is treated fully and well in the book Triumph by H. W. Crocker III (see the bibliography).  I would suggest the interested reader find a copy of that reference for more information.
    Dr. Carroll never even mentions this heresy by name in his text, but because the Catholic Church defended sacred art, he claims this council advocated the worship of images, as forbidden in Exodus 20:3. Nothing could be a more perverted misreading of actual events.  And it should be pointed out that, had the Iconoclastic view prevailed, no Baptist today would be allowed to own a picture of Jesus, or put a manger scene on their lawn at Christmas.
     Moving on to another “new doctrine,” Carroll tells us of the introduction of indulgences and “the Sale of Indulgences” (pg. 24).  He doesn’t tell us what council he thinks invented this doctrine, but we are left to assume it occurred sometime between the years given in the section heading.  He paints for us a picture where men are saved by their good works, which the Catholic Church deposits in a heavenly “bank account.”  Any good works that are performed above and beyond that needed for an individual’s salvation are stored, and the Church can make “withdrawals” for other people.  These are called indulgences.  But, of course, the Church demands a fee for this service.  So you could buy these “good work credits” from the Church, for yourself or a friend or family member.  Dr. Carroll says, “this was sometimes carried to a desperated extreme, as admitted by Catholics themselves” (pg. 25).
     Such a collection of misinformation about indulgences reminds one of the laughable Jack Chick comics.  Laughable, that is, if so many did not take them seriously.  Needless to say, this is not what the Catholic Church now or at any time in her history has taught about indulgences.
     So what are indulgences?  Well, they are not “good work credits.”  The Catholic Church does not teach that we are saved by our good works.  That would be condemned as a heresy just as strongly as when Martin Luther taught that we are saved by our faith alone (see Jas. 2:24). The sixteenth century Council of Trent, called largely in reaction to the Protestant Reformation, restated the Catholic position.  “If anyone says that man can be justified before God by his own works, whether done by his own natural powers or through the teaching of the law, without divine grace through Jesus Christ, let him be anathema” (Council of Trent, Session 6, Cannon 1).  The Church teaches that we are saved by grace alone, but that we will be judged according to our faith and works.  This much is clearly demonstrated in scripture (Gal. 5:6, 1 Cor. 13:2, John 14:15, Matt. 19:16-17, and the entire Epistle of James).
    An indulgence is defined as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain defined conditions through the Church’s help when, as a minister of redemption, she dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions won by Christ and the saints" (Indulgentarium Doctrina 1).
    Now what does that mean? To understand indulgences one must have a basic grasp of sin, forgiveness, accountability and penance. Catholics understand that God will both forgive us our sins and hold us accountable for them. In other words, God expects us to be responsible for our own actions. Here is an example of what I mean. Let's say I stop at a traffic light, and you come along behind me and hit my car. It was your fault for not stopping in time, but I'm a nice guy, so I forgive you. If you are really sorry, though, you should offer to pay to fix my dented bumper. That is accountability.
    In the same way God forgives us our sins (if we ask Him to) but still holds us accountable for our deeds. This is why, after making a confession, the priest assigns us a penance -- as satisfaction for our sin. It's not enough for us to say, "I'm sorry," and not follow it up with action. That would be insincere and ineffectual. In the days of the early church, and in the Middle Ages, penances for sins used to be much more severe than they are now. Sometimes a particular penance could last for years. The indulgence represented time taken away from earthly penance. That is it.
    An indulgence never was a “coupon” to commit a sin for free.  It is a remission of temporal punishment for a sin that is already forgiven.  You can’t “stock up” on indulgences.  Nor is it a withdrawal of good work credit from some heavenly bank account.  God doesn’t keep track of it that way.  Dr. Carroll’s description here betrays an almost juvenile understanding of our judgment, with God keeping a list of all the good things and bad things we do, and if the good list is longer than the bad, we get into heaven.  This is not what Catholics believe, and Dr. Carroll should know better.
    Another misconception that he helps spread in this section is that indulgences could be bought and sold.  This was never the case.  So how did one obtain an indulgence?  (Or I should ask, how does one obtain an indulgence, since this is a doctrine still held by the Catholic Church).  An indulgence was gained by all manner of pious actions, such as going on a pilgrimage (a favorite in the Middle Ages), reading the scriptures, spending time in prayer, or by charitable giving, such as giving alms to the poor.
    It was in these charitable donations that the abuse of the sale of indulgences came about.  As is often the case whenever money changes hands, greedy people saw an opportunity for personal gain.  Yes, it is a sad fact of history that some renegade Catholic priests did sell indulgences to misguided people.  But this was never a legal practice.  And to put an end to it once and for all, in 1567 Pope Pius V canceled all grants of indulgences involving financial transactions.  The important thing to remember is that the sale of indulgences was never a Catholic doctrine, but a horrible abuse of Catholic doctrine.
    Another doctrine supposedly “invented” in this period is transubstantiation.  Dr. Carroll tells us this was invented at the Fourth Lateran Council held in 1215.  Indeed, the dogma of transubstantiation was decreed by this council, as a definition of the nature of the Real Presence in the Eucharist.  Transubstantiation clarifies the Catholic belief that the bread and wine, upon consecration, become the actual Body and Blood of Christ, while retaining the accidentals (that is, the appearance and properties) of bread and wine.
    But Carroll here is not talking about the introduction of a new word to describe what Catholics believe happens at the mass.  No, he is talking about belief itself that “the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper [turns] into the actual and real body and blood of Christ” (pg. 28).  This, he says, was invented at this thirteenth century council.  But perhaps no doctrine of the Catholic faith is more easily proven to be held by the first Christians than the Real Presence in the Eucharist.  I’ll let the Church Fathers speak for themselves.
    First, we will return to our friend and teacher, St. Ignatius.  Writing of a heretical group called the Docetics (whom Dr. Carroll would no doubt identify as Baptists) he says:

[They] abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead.  And so denying the gift of God, these men perish in their disputations (Letter to the Smyrnaeans).

In the middle of the second century, St. Justin Martyr writes:

And this food is called among us the Eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true . . . that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh (First Apology Chap. 65, 66).

From St. Cyril of Jerusalem we read:

Having learnt these things, and been fully assured that the seeming bread is not bread, though sensible to taste, but the Body of Christ; and the seeming wine is not wine, though the taste will have it so, but the Blood of Christ. . . (Catechesis 22:9).

The witness of the early Fathers is universal.  Not one denied the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  For many it was the central thesis of their writing.  Ignatius, especially, showed a great and deep love for the Eucharist in his letters, which is to be expected from a student of the apostle John.  It is in John’s Gospel that we have perhaps the most beautiful Eucharistic text in the Bible, the bread of life discourse in chapter six.
     If Dr. Carroll believes that the idea of the Real Presence was not introduced until a thirteenth century council defined the term “transubstantiation” then he is remarkably unfamiliar with the writings of the early fathers of the Church.  From someone writing a church history, even one as inadequate and flawed as “The Trail of Blood,” one would expect at least a passing familiarity with the writings of these men.
     Another introduction that Carroll claims was made at this same council was that of auricular confession.  The idea that this practice was first introduced in the thirteenth century is again easily put to rest by referring to the Fathers.  In this case we have St. Cyprian writing around 250 AD.  He writes a letter, instructing the recipients on what to do if they should fall ill before his return.

. . . if they should be seized with any misfortune and peril of sickness, [they] should, without waiting for my presence, before any presbyter who might be present, or if a presbyter should not be found and death begins to be imminent, before even a deacon, be able to make confession of their sin, that, with the imposition of hands upon them for repentance, they should come to the Lord with the peace which the martyrs have desired, by their letters to us, to be granted to them (Letters 18:1).

Such writing would be strange, if indeed it was written a thousand years before auricular confession was “invented.”
     Carroll briefly mentions many more councils in this section, but the last of them that we shall examine is the Council of Toulouse, held in 1229, at which, Carroll tells us, “it was decreed,[sic] the Bible, God’s book, should be denied to all laymen, all members of Catholic churches other than priests or higher officials” (pg. 29).  This was all a part of the Catholic Church’s larger campaign to suppress the Bible during the Middle Ages.  “During all the period of the ‘Dark Ages,’ and the period of the persecution, strenuous efforts were made to destroy even what Scripture manuscripts the persecuted did possess” (pg. 23).
     Carroll calls it, “how strange a law in the face of the plain teaching of the Word,” speaking of John 5:39.  How strange indeed.  It is even stranger when one really examines how the Catholic Church set about to “destroy” the scriptures during this period.
     In this period before the invention of the printing press, the Catholic Church did all it could to suppress scriptures by employing its monks and scholars to meticulously copy out by hand all of the books of the Bible, and even to illustrate many of the pages with colorful illuminations, creating works of art still marveled at today.
     These hand-written copies were expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars in today’s currency.  Most people could not afford them, so the Catholic Church ensured that every local church had a copy of the Bible, where it was chained down – not to keep it from the people, but to ensure that it was not stolen, and would always be there, available when needed.
     Since most educated people could not read ancient Greek or Hebrew, the Church employed translators, like St. Jerome, to render the text faithfully into a language that all educated people could read, Latin.  Latin was the lingua franca of Europe, and could be understood in all nations.
     For those countries where it was deemed necessary, the Bible, or parts of it, was translated into the vernacular.  The Slavs of Eastern Europe had a vernacular Bible as early as the ninth century.  Parts of the Bible were translated into English as early as the eighth.
     Since most people could not read, however, the Church read the Bible aloud to them at mass, and decorated churches and cathedrals with stained glass and frescoes depicting Bible stories.  And the Church founded the first and only universities in the Middle Ages, so that people could learn to read and understand the Bible.  Scripture was always among the subjects studied in these early centers of Academia.
     When the printing press was finally invented in the fifteenth century, the very first thing the Catholic Church did was to print the Bible!  I’m afraid Dr. Carroll may be right.  Perhaps the Catholic Church really doesn’t have a clue, if this is how it goes about “destroying” the Bible and keeping it hidden from the people.
     Of course, I am being ridiculously sarcastic.  But this is only because no claim is quite as ridiculously made than this one.  It is only because of the Catholic Church that the Bible survived centuries before printing, or indeed was known at all.  Even most Protestant scholars acknowledge this.  Henry Graham, in his book, Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church, defends this position by quoting almost exclusively from Protestant Biblical scholars.
     So, we return to the Council of Toulouse.  What happened there?  Here is another example of Dr. Carroll’s poor scholarship.  As stated earlier, he does not make any distinction between the different levels of councils.  Toulouse was not an Ecumenical council – that is, it did not involve the whole Church.  Toulouse was a local council, called to address a very specific problem in southern France caused by a group of heretics called Albigensians.
     Elsewhere, Dr. Carroll seeks to identify the Baptists with these Albigensians (pg. 28).  This heresy was influenced heavily by Manichaeism (see later under “Paulicians”).  They taught that the God of the Old Testament was different from the God of the New.  The Old Testament God was evil, and created all matter.  He also created sin.  Therefore all matter, including the flesh, was evil.  The good New Testament God created the spirit world and only the spirit was good.  The good God created human souls and the bad God tricked them into inhabiting evil bodies.  Earth was a punishment, and it was the only hell.  All souls were divine and would enter heaven when the physical body died.
     The ramifications of this heresy were great.  Suicide was allowed, and even praised, because it freed the good spirit from the evil body.  Marriage was not allowed, because it celebrated the union between two evil bodies of flesh.  Having children only trapped more souls in evil bodies.  Sex itself was technically not allowed, but fornication was preferable to marriage, because fornication was a one-time sin, done in private, and no permanent commitment was made.  Marriage, on the other hand, was public and permanent, and therefore a greater sin in the eyes of the Albigensians.  The Incarnation never happened, because the Redeemer could never have inhabited an evil body.  Therefore Christ was only spirit.  They denied the Resurrection of the Body.  They forbade the taking of oaths – any kind of oaths.  This undermined the very fabric of feudal society, which was structured around personal allegiances marked by the swearing of oaths.
    Dr. Carroll claims these people were merely persecuted “New Testament” Christians.  Some scholars, on the other hand, don’t see the Albigensians as a Christian heresy so much as a separate religion.
     The parts of France where the Albigensians held sway were plagued with chaos and turmoil.  The Council of Toulouse was one of many local councils called to try and rein in this terrible heresy.  One of the ways the Albigensians were spreading their error was with erroneous and inaccurate versions of Sacred Scripture.  They were backing up their heretical claims with a heretical Bible.
     This is exactly why that council made the law that it did.  Until this heresy could be put down, use of the Bible was restricted to the clergy only, to make sure that laymen were not led astray by erroneous and harmful versions.  This was not a law that affected the entire Church.  It was only ever in effect in a particular region of France and then only temporarily.  After the Albigensian heresy was taken care of, the restriction was lifted.
     It is a shame that Dr. Carroll could not be bothered by such facts.
 

THE REFORMATION

     We come now to that period of great turmoil in Christendom, the Reformation.  Here is where the reader expects to find the meat of Dr. Carroll’s argument.  And here is where the reader is perhaps the most disappointed, for Dr. Carroll has very little to say about the actual Reformation.
     Peppered throughout this section, as in the rest of this booklet, one finds ample anti-Catholic rhetoric with little substance.  Such is hardly worth refuting.  To give you a sample of the type of language he uses, he writes that the Catholic Church, by “its many strange and cruel laws, and its desperately low state of morals, and its hands and clothes reeking with the blood of millions of martyrs, has become obnoxious and plainly repulsive to many of its adherents” (pp. 29-30).  But nowhere in his text does he give justification for such a claim.  Cite these strange and cruel laws!  Give examples of the low state of morals!  Show us these millions of Baptist martyrs!  But he never does.
     He surprises us by asserting, in bold print even, that “at this time there was probably not one solitary unmarred doctrine of the New Testament retained in its original purity” (pg. 30).  But what about the Baptists?  If it is his contention (and it is) that the Baptist church has existed in some form or another, unmarred since the time of Christ, then where were they during this period?  Did Christ forget about his promise in Matthew 16:18?  Did the gates of hell prevail against the Church?  Is this what Carroll really thinks?  Apparently not, for later in the same section he writes, “One of the most outstanding miracles in the whole world’s history . . . is the nearness with which God’s people have thought and believed together on the main and vital points of Christianity” (pg. 36).  Inconsistency should not surprise the reader by this point, however, for the various heretical groups Dr. Carroll claims carried the Baptist torch through the Middle Ages were nothing if not diverse and varied in their doctrines, disagreeing on just about every “vital point” of Christianity.
     The main body of this section is a listing of Reformers and proto-Reformers.  He mentions Wycliff, Huss, Savonarola, Zwingli (whom he spells “Zwingle”), Luther, and Calvin.  Carroll gives their name, the approximate dates of their lives, a bit of praise for their bravery, and a condemnation of the Catholic Church for “persecuting” them.  But not once does he mention a single doctrinal teaching of these individuals.  Not once does he say where or on what grounds did these people differ with the Catholic Church.  He merely says they wanted “reform.”  But reform of what, and in what manner?
     He is content to leave this question unanswered, and indeed unasked, perhaps because he realizes that these Protestant Reformers disagreed greatly among themselves as well.  Luther and Zwingli, for instance, differed in their teaching on the Eucharist.  Luther was closer to the Catholic view.  He believed in the Real Presence, but he thought the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was wrong.  He believed rather in consubstantiation, that is that the bread and wine remain true bread and wine, but the Body and Blood of Christ co-exist along with them.  Zwingli, on the other hand, denied the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist at all.  To him, it was nothing more than a symbolic meal.  This difference prompted Luther’s famous quote, “I’d rather drink blood with the papists [Catholics] than wine with the Zwinglians.”
     Carroll never attempts to identify the Baptists with any of these Reformation groups.  Remember, it is his position that the Baptist denomination is not a product of the Reformation, but the original Christian church.  He does, however, claim that the Reformers were aided by many of these Baptist groups.

Hoping for some relief from their own bitter lot, they came out of their hiding places and fought bravely with the reformers, but they were doomed to fearful disappointment.  They were from now on to have two additional persecuting enemies.  Both the Lutheran and Presbyterian Churches brought out of their Catholic Mother many of her evils, among them her idea of a State Church (pp. 32-33).

Carroll is correct in that the Protestant churches soon turned into established state churches.  What many people assume to be true about the Reformation – that it was a grass-roots ground swell where the common man revolted against the powerful Catholic hierarchy and won its religious independence – is patently false.  For the most part, proponents of the Reformation were kings, princes, and nobility.  These men saw the advantage of discarding Rome’s authority.  They wanted no authority but their own to hold sway in their lands, over their people.  And if the Church could have its lands confiscated (remember, this was a time when land was the primary source of wealth), who would gain control of them?  It would not be the peasant farmers. The nobility clearly saw opportunity for gain.
     So Lutheranism soon became the Church of Germany.  Presbyterianism became the Church of Scotland.  Switzerland, England, and other European nations had their established state churches as well.
     But Carroll is wrong when he calls this a characteristic inherited from Catholicism.  Catholicism is not a state religion, but a universal one, above all notions of borders and boundaries.  It was not a religion established by kings and governments, but one to which kings and governments were just as subject as everyone else.  This difference comes out clearly when one reads a good history of the Reformation.
     Carroll hits the nail right on the head, though, when he says this about England’s split with the Church.  “While a reformation within the Catholic Church and under papal authority . . . was impossible, it became possible after the division.  Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley and others led in some marked changes” (pg. 34).  If by “reformation” he means change of doctrine, then he is one hundred percent correct.  Change in doctrine is in fact impossible in the Catholic Church, under the authority of the Pope.  This is her greatest claim for doctrinal purity, and even her enemies can see that.  As discussed earlier, it is the Church’s mission to preserve and pass on the authentic teaching of the Apostles.  The fact that so much “reform” (change) of doctrine can be found even within the first generation of the Reformation speaks volumes.
 

THE STORY THUS FAR

     A brief recap before we continue.  It is Dr. Carroll’s contention that Baptists, or Anabaptists, represent the true teachings of Christ and the New Testament, and have existed since Apostolic times.  Indeed, they have remained, throughout the “horrible Dark Ages” the only loyal and authentic Christians.  They stayed hidden for the most part (where he does not say), and were called such names as Albigensians, Waldenses, Donatists – more or less every pre-Reformation heresy was really an Anabaptist alias.
     During this time, the Catholic Church was busy doing its best to destroy the Bible and persecute these Baptists.  Dr. Carroll claims numerous times that at least 50 million Baptists died martyr deaths (he never provides a source for this impressive number).  When the Reformation came, Baptists became hopeful, but soon discovered that Protestants would be just as vigorous an enemy.  “Many more thousands, including both women and children were constantly perishing every day in the yet unending persecutions” (pg. 34).
     This history is notably lacking any real information about these proposed Baptist congregations, what they believed, or how they practiced their faith.  But Dr. Carroll does attempt in several places to expound upon Catholic doctrine, his information invariably filtered through Southern Baptist lenses.
    For instance, he informs us that Catholics do not accept the Bible as their sole rule of faith, although they do believe it is unerring (infallible).  This is true enough.  But then he tells us that Catholics have three sources of authority for their faith – the Bible, the “Writings of the Fathers,” and the decrees of the Church (pg. 35).  This is wrong.  First of all, the writings of the Church Fathers, though informative and profound, are not on par with Sacred Scripture.  They can tell us volumes about what the early Church believed and how they practiced their faith, but they are not inspired writings.  Dr. Carroll is confusing this with Sacred Tradition.  This is the unwritten part of the Deposit of Faith, left to us by the Apostles, that has been preserved through Apostolic Succession in the teaching Magisterium of the Catholic Church.  Much of what the Church teaches regarding Sacred Tradition can be found in the writings of the Fathers, but those writings are not its source.  Likewise, much of this Tradition can be found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  While the Catechism is a useful tool, it is not Sacred Scripture.
     The Catholic Church has but two authoritative sources for its rule of faith, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.  These represent the written and unwritten data of the Deposit of Faith.  The proceedings of Church councils and the declarations of infallible popes define, clarify, and preserve this teaching, but they are not the source of it.
     Dr. Carroll is partly right in his summation of Catholicism’s rejection of Sola Scriptura (an idea unheard of before Martin Luther), but his error would lead people to believe that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is on equal footing to the Bible, rather than the humble servants of the Word of God (in the Scriptures and in the person of Christ) that they are.
 

SEVENTEENTH THROUGH NINETEENTH CENTURIES

     This section in “The Trail of Blood” is primarily a catalog of new denominations founded after the Reformation.  Dr. Carroll chronicles the beginnings of Methodism, the softening of Episcopalianism, and the founding of what he calls “an entirely new denomination” – Congregationalism, better known as the Puritans (pg. 37).
    Though he praises these new denominations, mostly for not being Catholic, he continues to condemn them for allowing such things as infant baptism, or  “preacher-church government” (a structure where a pastor has control over a congregation or parish, not the other way around).  But in the Puritan movement, which he expressly calls a new denomination, he sees many commonalities with modern Baptists.  He praises them for adhering to Sola Scriptura, for being completely removed from the world, and for each congregation being completely independent of all others, governed in a democratic fashion.
     He makes brief mention of the publishing of the King James Bible in 1611, but no mention of the Douay-Rhiems Bible, the English translation provided by the Catholic Church.  The New Testament of this translation was published in 1582 and the Old Testament in 1609.
     Dr. Carroll again takes great pains to point out the severe persecution of Baptists by nearly all other organized Christian bodies.  To this end he backtracks a bit to once more remind us of the primitive origin of his church.

It is a significant fact well established in credible history that even as far back as the fourth century those refusing to go into the Hierarchy, and refusing to accept the baptism or those baptized in infancy, and refusing to accept the doctrine of “Baptismal Regeneration” and demanding rebaptism for all those who came to them from the Hierarchy, were called “Ana-Baptists.” . . . Near the beginning of the sixteenth century, the “Ana” was dropped, and the name shortened to simply “Baptist” . . .It snugly fits.  It was the distinguished name of the forerunner of Christ, the first to teach the doctrine to which the Baptists now hold (pg. 39).

Needless to say, Dr. Carroll would be hard pressed to prove that John the Baptist taught anything remotely resembling modern Baptist theology.
     Of the seventeenth century “Baptists” in Switzerland and Germany, Dr. Carroll asks the question, “Where did these Baptists come from?  They did not come out of the Catholics during the Reformation.  They had large churches prior to the Reformation” (pg. 40).  But where were these large pre-Reformation churches?  Where is the evidence for them, written, archaeological, or otherwise?  Dr. Carroll is adamant in asserting that they were not a product of the Reformation.  But telling us where they did not come from doesn’t answer the question.
     For that, we have to go to other sources.  Who Carroll here identifies as Swiss and German Baptists are really Anabaptists, a different sect with a similar name.  Carroll has referred to this group numerous times in his discourse as being virtually synonymous with “Baptist.”  It’s time we find out exactly who they were.  The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that the Anabaptists were, “A violent and extremely radical body of ecclesiastico-civil reformers which first made its appearance in 1521 at Zwickau, in the present kingdom of Saxony.”
     The name “Anabaptist,” it says, was restricted to a prominent sect during the Reformation that denied the validity of infant baptism, and though many medieval heresies had certain views that resembled theirs in some respects, there is “little if any historical connection between the Anabaptists and those earlier sects.”
     The distinctive principles of the Anabaptists were restoring what they claimed to be primitive Christianity, which involved a church with no teaching authority; the Bible alone as their sole rule of faith, as interpreted by private inspiration; a rejection of capital punishment and swearing of oaths; a rejection of infant baptism and salvation by faith alone (sola fide) as unscriptural; and communism as the underlying principle of state.
     I am certain that Dr. Carroll would find himself, as a Southern Baptist preacher, rejecting many of these Anabaptist teachings, most notably their views on communism and their rejection of sola fide.
     The Anabaptist movement began with Nicholas Storch and Thomas Münzer (both died in 1525), who first made the attack on infant baptism. Münzer denied infant baptism in theory but not in practice.  Contrary to his heretical views, he received the sacraments of the Catholic Church before his death.  Storch traveled throughout Germany spreading his beliefs, where he was one of the primary instigators of the Peasants’ War that Luther regretted so bitterly.  In the aftermath of the peasants’ defeat, the Anabaptist sect became dispersed.
     In lower Germany and the Netherlands, the movement spread largely due to the influence of Melchior Hofmann.  His followers were called Melchiorites, and they arrived in the town of Münster in 1533, beginning what the Catholic Encyclopedia calls “the most extraordinary period in the history of the Anabaptists.” Two of the leaders were named Bernard Rothmann and John Bockold (aka John of Leyden).

Münster . . . was to become the centre of the projected conquest of the world, the “New Jerusalem,” the founding of which was signaled by a reign of terror and indescribable orgies.  Treasures of literature and art were destroyed; communism, polygamy, and community of women were introduced.  Rothmann took unto himself four wives and John of Leyden, sixteen.  The latter was proclaimed King of the “New Sion” . . . (see the entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia for “Anabaptist”).

   

These Anabaptists rather make one long for the good old days of the “Dark Ages,” as described by Carroll.  Thankfully, the anarchy was eventually put to rest.
     Though fanaticism was a hallmark of the Anabaptist movement, not all of its followers were so violent.  Especially in Switzerland, a more pacific undercurrent existed.  After the repression by Catholics (and most Protestant churches as well), the violent element disappeared and the peaceful adherents survived, though under other names.  The most notable successors of the Anabaptists were the Mennonites.
     Which brings us back to the beginning of this text, and the foundations of the Baptist denomination.  John Smyth, an Englishman, founded the Baptist movement after being influenced by the Anabaptist ideas of the Mennonites he encountered in Amsterdam.  None of this history, however, is recounted in “The Trail of Blood.”
 

RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES

     With his final lecture, Dr. Carroll brings us to America.  Here, at last, he is able to give us some specific details about certain Baptist congregations, their preachers, and their membership.  The marked difference between this and earlier sections is due largely to the fact that during this period the Baptist church actually existed and so has left us historical records.
     The tale Carroll weaves is again of persecution – his main theme – this time at the hands of the Congregationalists (Puritans), Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, all of whom left their native countries themselves in search of religious liberty.  The fact that many sects left their homelands due to religious persecution, only to persecute competing religious groups themselves in the New World, is a sad fact of history that we will not attempt to deny.
     Carroll barely mentions Catholics at all in this section, except to say that “they have never strongly predominated” in North America (pg. 44).  This statement bears correcting, because at present about one out of four professing Christians in the United States is a Catholic (in name at least, which really is all such surveys are good for).
 

IN SUMMATION

     Finally, having reached the modern age in America, Dr. Carroll sums up his lecture series for us.  The highlights:

During every period of the “Dark Ages” there were in existence many Christians and many separate and independent Churches, some of them dating back to the times of the Apostles, which were never in any way connected with the Catholic Church. . . This is a fact clearly demonstrated by credible history. . . These Christians . . . were called by many different names. . . But amid all the many changes of names, there was one special name or rather designation, which clung to at least some of these Christians, throughout all the “Dark Ages,” that designation being “Ana-Baptist.” This compound word applied as a designation . . . even prior to the use of the name Catholic (pp. 54-55).

   

As illustrated throughout this treatise, the above narrative is anything but credible as far as history is concerned.  What is “clearly demonstrated” is that the name Anabaptist seems to only have been applied to a sixteenth century fringe Reformation movement.  Even if the term can be traced back to the third century, as Carroll claims but provides no evidence for, it would still be a couple of hundred years younger than the name Catholic.
     To flesh out his tale, Dr. Carroll seeks to identify the Baptist church of today with nearly every medieval and early heretical group.  Some of the ones he cites most often are the Donatists, Montanists, Paulicians, Albegensians, Waldenses, and Anabaptists.  His claim is best refuted by simply examining who these heretics were and what they taught.  In all cases it is a far cry from what modern Baptists believe.  We have already dealt with the Albigensians and the Anabaptists.  Let us now examine these others.

DONATISTS:
    The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the Donatist movement a schism, not a heresy.  This is an important distinction.  A heresy is a denial of orthodox doctrine, a defined truth of the faith.  It means teaching something contrary to what the Church holds to be true.  A schism is a denial of Church authority.  Schismatics do not differ from the Church on doctrinal issues, but for whatever reason are not united with the Church under the Pope.
     The Donatist schism began in Africa in 311 and lasted about a hundred years.  It had its roots in a controversy over who was the legitimate bishop of Carthage, a man named Caecilian, or another named Majorinus.  Caecilian was ordained to the position first, but some denied the validity of his ordination.   The conflict grew to such a point that soon neighboring areas also had two bishops – one united with Caecilian, the other with Majorinus.
     After it was evident that the situation would not be resolved locally, the matter was brought before the Pope.  Caecilian was summoned with ten of his bishops, and ten opposing bishops, to Rome.  Majorinus was apparently dead by this time and the opposing bishops were led by Donatus of Casae Nigrae, from whom the schism was to take its name.  The Pope heard both sides of the case and decided that Caecilian was the proper bishop of Carthage.  He declared that the Donatist bishops must retire in those sees where a legitimate bishop was already established, and would be provided with another see.
    The Donatists rejected this decision, and the schism was to continue some hundred years before the movement finally died out.  The Donatists would not be the only ones in history to deny the Pope his proper authority when a decision was made not in their favor.  Such can still be seen in the Catholic Church today with schismatic groups such as the Society of St. Pius X.  But the Donatists were not heretics.  They upheld Catholic doctrine and always considered themselves part of the Catholic Church, though separated from Rome.  They had nothing theological in common with modern Baptists.

MONTANISTS:
     This movement began in the late second century, based on the prophesies of the priest Montanus and his “prophetesses,” Priscia and Maximilla.  Whether this sect was in heresy or merely in schism is something that even the church leaders at the time debated.  Indeed, how much of their teaching actually came from Montanus or was attributed to him by later followers is uncertain.  Montanus’ main focus seemed to be on a return to penance and a continuation of the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit.
     However, he also taught that Christ’s second coming was soon to take place in his native town in Phrygia and that he was the Paraclete of whom Christ spoke, not the Holy Spirit.  Thus his teachings were above those of the Church.  In addition, Montanists believed, or later developed belief, in eight different heavens and eight different hells, and that just as the Law of Moses did not save the Isrealites, Christ’s sacrifice was not successful in saving the whole world -- thus the need for Montanus the Paraclete. They also had some erroneous ideas about the nature of the Trinity.
     Though at one time it had some high profile adherents (Tertullian accepted many of their prophesies) the sect gradually became smaller and smaller until it finally died out.

PAULICIANS:
     This heresy derived originally from Manichaeism, as did the Albegensian heresy discussed earlier.  Manichaeism was a religion invented in the third century by a Persian named Mani, as a synthesis of other major religions.  It was primarily a blend of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Babylonian folklore, and some superficial Christian elements.  Manichaeism was an extremely dualistic religion, with its ideas revolving around two eternal forces of good and evil, always in conflict.  It lasted about a thousand years, mostly in its homeland, before finally dying an uncertain death.  Mani claimed to be the Paraclete spoken of by Christ.  He denied the Old Testament, and only accepted some New Testament books.  He claimed that Christ was really a spiritual projection, and the physical person Jesus of Nazareth was merely a false prophet, not the Christ of the Gospels.
     You can see their influence in the Paulician heresy.  Some of the characteristic beliefs of the Paulicians were that there were two Gods, one who made the evil material world, and one that made the good spiritual world.  They believed all physical matter was evil.  They rejected the Old Testament.  They rejected the Incarnation.  They taught that Christ was an angel sent by God and Mary was not His mother.  The real baptism and the real Eucharist consisted of hearing Christ’s word, not in any real physical forms (despite this most Paulicians had their children baptized by Catholic clergy).  They were Iconoclasts, not allowing any religious images.  They did not honor the Cross.  They had an incomplete New Testament, rejecting many books including Peter’s epistles.  They never had an official New Testament canon but seemed to always accept the Gospel of Luke and the epistles of Paul.
     They were against the hierarchy of the Church.  They were against the Sacraments.  They were against all ritual.  They were against monastic lifestyles.  They did not call the buildings they met in churches but “prayer-houses.”  They thought themselves the only true Christians, calling Catholics “Romans.”  They kept most of the attributes of their prayer meetings secret.  Their members took new names, from the writings of St. Paul.  There is some evidence suggesting that they believed they actually became the reincarnation of those whose names they assumed.
     The Catholic Encyclopedia admits that many modern Protestant writers have sought to identify Paulicians as both inheritors of the “pure Christianity” of the early church and as “pre-Reformation Protestants.”  This comes, no doubt, from their rejection of Sacrament and their anti-hierarchical attitude.  However, given their belief in two Gods, their denial of Christ’s divinity, and their denial of most of the Bible, such a connection is absurd.
     The Paulician heresy had its beginnings in the mid-seventh century with the teachings of Constantine of Mananalis, who took the name Silvanus.  It flourished during the ninth century, but eventually died out, though some traces of their teachings likely survived in pockets.  Their influence can be seen in later heresies such as the Albegensians.

WALDENSES:
     This heresy first appeared in the first half of the twelfth century.  The story of their origin, as told by Waldenses at the time, was that the Apostolic Church became corrupt after Constantine elevated Pope Sylvester to a position of power in gratitude for his being healed of leprosy.  Sylvester was indebted to the Emperor for this, and thus the Papacy began a downward spiral of allegiance to the state.  However, some uncorrupted Christian communities remained, most notably a few communities in Spain that had been founded by St. Paul.  From one of these came a missionary, Peter Waldes, in the twelfth century, to found the Waldenses – not a new sect, but a continuation of the Apostolic Church.
     Such a history, however, was not even believed by all Waldenses at the time.  But one can see traces of it even today in books like “The Trail of Blood.”  Most historians record the sect as being founded by a man named Waldo.  The name “Peter” does not seem to be associated with him until the fourteenth century.  It is possibly a name he took after his conversion, or a name later ascribed to him by his followers.
     Waldo’s conversion seems to have been as a result of reading the Gospels.  He especially struck upon Matthew 19:21, where Jesus says, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”  This would lead Waldo to accept a vow of poverty and establish a confraternity of those taking similar vows.  These men created quite a stir, taking to preaching in public places to gain adherents.  Their recruits were generally uneducated and ignorant of theology.  Therefore it is no surprise that quite early on doctrinal error crept into their preaching.  For this it was condemned.  The Waldenses continued, however, saying their obedience was to God only.  This would ultimately lead to their being listed among the great heresies of the Middle Ages.
     Some of their primary errors were the denial of purgatory, the denial of indulgences, the denial of prayer for the dead, the denial of oaths, the denial of the death penalty, and the denial of war.  They saw no just reason for the shedding of human blood.  Their preachers, called “perfects” after Matt. 19:21, took not only a vow of poverty but a vow of celibacy.  Married men wishing to become “perfects” were allowed to dissolve their marital union without consent from their wives.  “Perfects” were not allowed to perform manual labor, but depended upon the support of other sect members, called “friends.”
     The “friends” remained in the Catholic Church, and took all their sacraments from Catholic priests except for confession, which they made to a “perfect.”  The “perfects” eventually were divided into three classes -- bishop, priest, and deacon -- with duties similar to those in the Catholic Church.  Waldensian clergy soon began to administer their own sacraments.
     The Waldensian sect continued in some parts of Europe until the Reformation, at which time various groups joined in with Protestant churches, most accepting a Calvinist confession.  As time went on they became more and more Protestant in their view.  Today, surviving Waldensian churches acknowledge only two sacraments, baptism and “the Lord’s Supper,” and accept the Calvinist confession of 1655.
 

IN CLOSING

     Throughout the history of Christendom, from nearly the beginning until this present day, there have existed sects that have taught, believed, and worshipped differently than the Apostolic Church.  On this, Dr. Carroll, myself, and nearly every other Church historian will be in ready agreement.  It is the nature of these different groups that we disagree on.
     Some were heretical, some schismatic.  Some remained very close to the Catholic Church in their doctrines and practices.  Some hardly qualify as Christian at all.  The point to remember is this – these were all different sects that were separated from the Church at different times and for different reasons.  And these sects do not represent the true nature of Christianity.
     Christ prayed in the garden to His Father for us all to be one, just as He and the Father are one.  Christ built His Church upon Peter – He did not build “churches.”  His Church existed and continues to exist.  The ministry of the Apostles continues today through their successors.  Christ will be with us always and the gates of hell shall never prevail against His Church.  This we know.
     The Church exists, she is real, and she has a very real history.  We can know her story, which is our story.  We can look back and see where we have been and what we have been through.  Christ was a real person.  The Apostles were real people.  So were their disciples.  They left real historical evidence for us to find.
     Some take these pieces of the past and isolate them, misconstrue them, or misrepresent them.  Sometimes a history is made up whole cloth to fit the need of some revisionist theory.  Sometimes we are willing to swallow a tall tale if it helps us believe what we want to believe.
     Dr. Carroll’s main thesis – that the modern Baptist denomination represents the original Christian church, and these “New Testament” churches have existed from the beginning under the labels of various heretical sects – is false.  One can see that by merely examining who those sects were and what they believed.  It’s a far cry from Baptist theology.
     Along the way, he claims that the Catholic Church’s characteristic doctrines are all later additions, that the early Christians believed and practiced as Baptists do, and the Bible was suppressed by the hierarchy for centuries.  All of these charges fade away in the light of history and the truth.  Read the Church Fathers.  Know them and treasure them for they are the ones who pass the light of Christ on to us.  Read about the early councils, for this is the history of the Church.  Christians, know where you came from, and know what you believe.
     Baptists and Catholics do not agree with each other on some very major doctrinal issues.  This should not come as a surprise to anyone.  We do have many good things in common, and these should be celebrated.  But we are separated.  This remains a sad fact of Christian history.  Let’s take an honest look as to why.  Why do we differ in our belief, where did this difference come from, and how can we heal this rift?
     Revisionist histories that only seek to disguise the truth do not help in this goal.  All of us who claim the name Christian need to be wary of such dangers, and seek to correct others who fall victim to them.
     To that end, I hope I have been of some small help to the Body of Christ.

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To obtain a copy of “The Trail of Blood” by J. M. Carroll, contact:
Ashland Avenue Baptist Church
163 N. Ashland Avenue
Lexington, KY 40502
(606)266-4341

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APPENDIX:  Some comments from a Southern Baptist friend

     I was interested in knowing whether or not a Baptist friend whom I correspond with had ever read “The Trail of Blood.”  He admitted that he had heard of it but never read it.  After reading it for the first time, he emailed me his thoughts, which I pass on to you below.
     As a non-Baptist, I was willing to accept Dr. Carroll’s portrayal of the Baptist faith as accurate.  I was surprised to learn that, in addition to misrepresenting Catholic theology, Dr. Carroll missed the mark a few times regarding the beliefs of Baptists (at least as far as my friend in concerned).  The following comments come from Mr. Jeff Hill, who, for the record, is neither an ordained minister nor a representative of his local congregation, or the Southern Baptist Conference.

1.  The Baptists are NOT the descendants of the Ana-Baptists.  The descendants of the Ana-Baptists are Moravians, Mennonites, and Amish.  The Baptist denomination grew out of the Separatist movement in the early seventeenth (possibly late sixth) century.  However, we do trace our spiritual roots to the early Christian churches founded by the Apostles.

2.  John the Baptist was NOT a "Baptist".  Technically, he wasn't even a Christian.  He was the last Old Testament prophet.  Christianity's "birthday", if you will, was Pentecost.

3.  A "New Testament Church" is a local body of believers organized under the guidelines given in the New Testament.  This does NOT mean that we disregard the Old Testament.  We regard the entire Bible (in its original text) to be the complete, inerrant Word of God.  Furthermore, Christ Himself stated that He had come "not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it."  Although some strictures were later lifted, the entire Word applies to Christians.  Dr. Carroll seems to imply that only the New Testament is applicable.

4.  Regarding separation of church and state, most of us support the separation of the state from the church, not the church from the state.  That is, we oppose a state religion, however this does not mean that religion must be kept totally out of government.

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RECOMMENDED READING
 

• Catechism of the Catholic Church, by the Holy See, trans. by the US Catholic Conference, Inc.
• Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by “Bible Christians”, by Karl Keating
• Characters of the Reformation: Historical Portraits of the 23 Men and Women and Their Place in the Great Religious Revolution of the 16th Century, by Hilaire Belloc
• Church and State in Early Christianity, by Hugo Rahner, S.J.
• Dissent from the Creed:  Heresies Past and Present, by Richard M. Hogan
• The Fathers of the Church: An Introduction to the First Christian Fathers, by Mike Aqulina
• The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology, by Leo Donald Davis, S.J.
• Great Heresies, by Hilaire Belloc
• Hail Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God, by Scott Hahn
• Handbook of Denominations in the United States, 10th edition, by Frank S. Mead, revised by Samuel S. Hill
• A History of Christendom, by Warren H. Carroll (projected 7 volumes: four published to date, Vol.1 The Founding of Christendom; Vol. 2 The Building of Christendom; Vol. 3 The Glory of Christendom; Vol. 4 The Cleaving of Christendom)
• How the Reformation Happened, by Hilaire Belloc
• The Mass of the Early Christians, by Mike Aquilina
• One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic: The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, by Kenneth D. Whitehead
• Refuting the Attack on Mary, by Father Mateo
• Separated Brethren: A Survey of Protestant, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and Other Denominations in the United States, by William J. Whalen
• The Teachings of the Church Fathers, by John R. Willis, S.J.
• Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths, by Reginé Pernoud
• Triumph:  The Power and Glory of the Catholic Church, by H. W. Crocker III
• Upon This Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church, by Stephen K. Ray

Turris Fortis
Catholic Apologetics on line at
turrisfortis.com

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
--St. Peter, John 6:68

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