Sublime

A searing example from religious history is the story of Giordano Bruno, an Italian free-thinker who anticipated many of the ideas of modern science, and in the process clearly contradicted a literalist reading of the creation narrative in the Bible. Arrested by the secret police of the Roman Catholic Church, known as the ‘Holy Office’, he was put

back-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes.

utterly foolish;

But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can’t you see what nonsense that is? What’s to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?

But for reasons that are not entirely clear, the Church in the Middle Ages became obsessed with the idea. Across a period of 250 years, it is estimated that 50,000 witches were executed in Europe, 500 of them in England, 1,500 in Scotland. The last woman executed for witchcraft in England was in 1684, in Scotland in 1727.

The Jewish Revolt of 66 AD effectively ended the Jerusalem church of James, while the Christianity of Paul, who was probably dead or dying in a cell in Rome at the time, would continue to grow.