worse: on 21 September 1870, even this small patrimony was taken away by Italian troops. The pope found himself left with just the walled enclave of Vatican City, where his successors continue to rule today.
Just before the loss of Rome, the pope, in what seems to have been considerable desperation, had called a General Council of Bishops to shore up his power. Yet by calling this council, the pope was implicitly recognizing the limitations of that power. The question of who held the reins had long been a festering sore at the Vatican. The uncomfortable truth was that the pope derived his legitimacy, not from the apostle Saint Peter, two thousand years earlier as he claimed, but from a much more mundane and worldly source: a Council of Bishops that had met at Constance in the early fifteenth century. At that time there had been three popes—a trinity of pontiffs united only in mutual loathing—all claiming, simultaneously, to have supreme authority over the Church. This ludicrous situation had been resolved by the bishops, who claimed—and were recognized in this claim—to hold legitimate authority. From that point on, the popes held their authority by virtue of the bishops. Accordingly, every pope was bound, when wishing to make a major change, to seek their approval.
It was Pope Pius IX, though, who wanted to make the most major of changes: he was determined to be declared infallible, thus receiving unprecedented power over all the faithful. But he knew that he would have to use guile to achieve this goal. Hence, the First Vatican Council was convened in late 1869. Its real aims were kept secret by a small group of powerful men that included three cardinals, all of whom were members of the Inquisition. No mention was made of papal infallibility in any of the documents circulated about the objectives and direction of the council. Meanwhile, the bishops gathered and found themselves subjected to strong-arm tactics. There were no secret votes, and the cost of criticism was immediately apparent: the loss of Vatican stipends was the least that a dissenting bishop could expect.
After two months the issue of papal infallibility was introduced to the council. Most of the bishops present were surprised, shocked, even outraged. Certain church leaders who stood and spoke against the move were “dealt with” by house arrest, while others fled. One leader was physically assaulted by the pope himself. Despite the intimidation, only 49 percent of the bishops cast their vote for papal infallibility. And yet, a majority vote in favor of the move was declared, and on 18 July 1870, the pope was pronounced infallible. Just over two months later Italian troops entered Rome and consigned the freshly “infallible” pope to the limits of Vatican City—a divine response, perhaps, to his lack of humility.
The desire of the pope and his supporters, of course, was that the doctrine of infallibility would buttress the Vatican against the challenges it was facing—in particular from biblical criticism and the discoveries of archaeology.
The aim of the Modernists, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. They sought to revise church dogma in light of their scholarly findings. The historical evidence their research produced was helping to unravel the myths the Church had created and perpetuated, especially the myth about Jesus Christ. The Modernists were also greatly opposed to the centralization of the Vatican. The Modernist movement at this time was especially strong in Paris, where the director of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, from 1852 to 1884, was a liberal Irish theologian named John Hogan. Hogan welcomed and openly encouraged Modernist studies at the seminary. Indeed, Canon Lilley saw him as the “greatest single influence” on what became Modernism.2 Many of Hogan’s students also attended lectures by the Assyriologist and Hebrew expert, Father Alfred Loisy, who was director of the Institute Catholique in Paris and another prominent Modernist.
At first the Vatican seemed not to mind. The new pope, Leo XIII (who was elected in 1878 and served until 1903), was sufficiently confident in the strength of Rome’s position to allow scholars access to the Vatican archives. But he had not realized what scholarship would subsequently discover and the church doctrines these findings would call into question. It soon became apparent to him that this scholarship posed a serious threat to the very foundations of the Church. Just before his death in 1903, Pope Leo XIII moved to repair the damage. In 1902 he created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to oversee the work of all theological scholars and to ensure that they did not stray from the teachings of the Church. The Commission had close connections with the Inquisition, having been ruled by the same cardinal.
The danger, apparent to all, was expressed succinctly by Father Loisy: “Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom, but what came was the Church.”3 Loisy, among other Modernists, believed that the historical scholarship conducted during that time had made many church dogmas impossible to maintain, dogmas such as the founding of the Church by Jesus, his virgin birth, and his divine sonship—in essence, Jesus’s very divinity.4
The leading British Modernist George Tyrell opposed the unrelentingly autocratic authority of the Vatican. “The Church, he thought, had no business being an official Institute of Truth.”5 Of course, the Church considered that to be exactly its role.
The Modernists asked an uncomfortable and impertinent question: what should be done when history or science point to a conclusion that contradicts the Church’s tenets? The response of the Church in the face of these direct challenges was to withdraw further behind its walls of dogma: it resolved all uncertainty by ruling that the Church was always right, under all circumstances, about everything.
In 1892 Hogan’s successor at Saint Sulpice ordered students to stop attending lectures by the Modernist Alfred Loisy. The next year Loisy was dismissed from his teaching post at the Institute Catholique, and he was eventually excommunicated. In fact, the Vatican suspended or excommunicated many Modernists and placed their books on the “Index.” In 1907 Pope Pius X issued a formal ban against the entire movement, and on 1 September 1910, all priests and Catholic teachers were required to swear an oath against Modernism. Just to be sure that the ever-changing world outside would not intrude upon their delicate theological sensibilities, students at seminaries and theological colleges were forbidden to read newspapers.
But before the veil came down in 1892, the atmosphere at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice had been very heady. The center was a place of learning, stimulated by curiosity and discovery. Adding continuously to a great sense of excitement was a steady stream of new translations and archaeological discoveries. It was in this milieu that Canon Lilley was called to Paris to look at the document or documents that provided incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was alive in A.D. 45. Upon witnessing this level of analytical study, Lilley must have wondered how much longer the Vatican could maintain its rigidly dogmatic position. He must have guessed that it would soon react against these discoveries and shut the door on free scholarship. As he relayed to Bartlett, he believed that the documents he was working on ended up in the Vatican, either locked away forever or destroyed.
When we first heard this story about Jesus being alive in A.D. 45, we were reminded of a curious statement in the work of the Roman historian Suetonius. In his history of the Roman emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), he reports that, “because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from the city.”6
The events he writes about took place around A.D. 45. This “Chrestus” was evidently an individual present in Rome at the time. We wondered: could this individual have been “Christ”? We should remember that “Christos” was the Greek translation, and “Messiah” the Greek transliteration, of the Aramaic meshiha, which itself derives from the Hebrew ha-mashiah, “the anointed (king).” The Greek “Messiah” thus comes from the Aramaic word, which was the commonly spoken language at the time, rather than from the Hebrew.
Was there a messianic individual active in Rome? And if so, why would the Jews have been rioting? Would they have been attacking the Romans under this agitator’s encouragement, or would they have been attacking the agitator? Or, even more strangely, could this agitator have set one man against another in the Jewish community to provoke rioting among them? Suetonius does not give us any information on the aims of the rioters