Audio only:
Joe responds to the interesting discourse surrounding showcasing of St. Agatha’s relics (her skull) recently. He demonstrates that relics are not only NOT pagan, but are both Scripturally and historically Christian.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I wanted to talk about the weird and maybe even creepy side of Catholicism, relics. Now, a brief video clip from the Festival of Saint Agatha, which the bishop displays the skull of Saint Agatha and then places it in a gold reliquary, creeped out a lot of non-Catholics recently, and even some Catholics. The whole thing struck a lot of people, not only as weird, but even as evil as pagan. James White was hardly alone when he replied, “No amount of absurd scripture twisting can ever, ever come close to substantiating this kind of pagan religiosity, period. Oh, believe me, I could write up the apologetics some Romanist is busily producing right now myself, but the fact remains, no apostle ever dreamed of this kind of activity ever, and no amount of new men can defend it.” Well, first, an emotional level, I get why people find it weird and off-putting, especially if it’s something completely foreign to the way you have practiced Christianity.
I do wish, however, that more Protestants would realize when they feel that way, that if with a little bit of self-awareness, they might recognize that they’ve got elements of their own worship practices, prayer, lived the experience of Christianity that can strike other Christians throughout history as baffling and suspect as well.
CLIP:
Yeah, you’re messing with some worship them prayer, bring a guitar and an amp for this worship and prayer.
Joe:
But more to the point, I think the claims that these practices are number one, contrary to the Bible. And number two, pagan religiosity are demonstrably false because that second argument that relics are pagan isn’t just false. It is almost absurdly false because as we’re going to see, it was actually Greek and Roman pagans who were most vociferously against relics while it was the early Christians who defended them. In fact, once you learn the actual history of relics and early Christianity, I hope you’re going to see how they’re clearly rooted both in scripture and in Christian theology, but also why they were opposed by pagans and why the early Christians were clear, not only about the miraculous healing power of relics in terms of bodily healing, but also about the spiritual effectiveness of relics and neutralizing demons. He felt then perhaps that she was possessed
And he took a relic of the little flower and brought it to her. She reacted violently. In other words, I aim to prove today, both from scripture and from church history, that relics produce both physical healings and spiritual healings, and that it was precisely for this last reason that the demons hate relics. So let’s start here with the alleged pagan connection. When people claim that a Christian practice is actually a pagan practice borrowed by Christians, we should always ask which pagans did the Christians take this one from? Try to get the other person to provide some shred of actual evidence when they make claims like that. Ideally, some shred from primary sources, actual pagan writers, for example, because in nearly every case, people claiming things are pagan, they simply have no idea what they’re talking about. We see atheists do this, certain types of Protestants do it.
Halloween, pagan, Christmas, pagan, worshiping on Sunday, pagan. The only problem with those claims is none of those things are actually pagan. I’ve addressed each of those three elsewhere. You might disagree about whether Christians should worship on Saturday or Sunday. You might disagree whether or not we should honor the birth of Jesus on December 25th, but those are disputes clearly arising within Christianity itself. They’re not coming from some external pagan source. And again, I’ve covered these before, but just to speak briefly on it, the idea that the early Christians worshiped on Sunday because of paganism is contradicted by the early Christians. They tell us they worship on Sunday instead of Saturday because Sunday is the day the Father created the world and the day Jesus froze from the dead. These are not pagan beliefs. And the Roman pagans were not sun worshipers who worship the sun every seven days on Sunday.
It’s completely false. Now again, I’ve covered all of that along with the myth of pagan Halloween and pagan Christmas elsewhere. So I’m going to link to those videos in the description below. For now, my point is simply that Christians need to stop saying, “That’s pagan,” when they really mean, “That’s weird,” or, “I don’t understand why you’re doing that,” or, “I don’t think that’s biblical.” Because if you’re going to make claims about paganism, you need to actually know something about paganism. And the people making these claims overwhelmingly do not, because if they did, one of the very first things they’d recognize is that there wasn’t a single religion just called paganism. In many ways, there wasn’t even a single religion we would call Roman paganism. As Edward Watts, the historian of the Roman Empire points out, the term pagan is a term coined by Christians as a kind of catchall term for the people around them who aren’t Christians or Jews.
So asking what pagans believe is, like today, asking what non-Christians believe. Well, they believe a lot of stuff. They don’t all believe the same thing. In Watts’s words, Roman pagans had no unified or organized church structure. They shared no sacred books or rituals. They didn’t even agree on which gods were real. And he points this out that concretely, they’ve got these wildly different conceptions of what they imagine the gods to be like, and they regularly mocked the religious ideas of other pagans. They even described other pagan gods as unworthy to be worshiped. So Watts argues it’s not really until the emperor Julian the apostate, who’s an ex-Catholic who becomes a pagan, that we find anything like a unified religious system of Roman paganism. And when that system of organized Roman pagan religion does emerge, as we’re going to see, it was both anti-Catholic and anti-relics.
Now, part of this has to do with the difference between how pagans tended to think of death and how Christians think of death. As Jocelyn Toinby in her book, Death and Burial in the Roman World describes, Romans in the first century typically cremated their dead rather than burying them. Tacitus, right in the year 65, actually described cremation as the Romanismos or Roman custom. Now that was going to change even amongst pagan Romans, they would move more towards traditional burials. But the point here is that there wasn’t some widespread Roman tradition of preserving the bodies of their dead at all. And so when the Romans encounter this group called Christians who honor the dead, they bury them and even preserve parts of the bodies of their martyrs, they find the whole thing as strange and repulsive as many Protestants find today. In his book, The Cult of the Saints, Princeton’s Peter Brown even argues that we can chart the rise to prominence of the Christian church most faithfully by listening to pagan reactions to the cult of martyrs, because pagans responded to the Christian treatment of the dead, particularly of martyrs with deep religious anger.
I want to give just a few concrete examples to show the kind of things real life pagans actually though of relics. Remember Julian the apostate, the Roman emperor who renounced Christianity to return to paganism? He wrote a treatise against Christianity called Against the Galileans, and in it he accuses Christians of filling the world with tombs and seplicurs. Remember from much of history, the Romans were cremating even their heroes, even their Caesars, but it’s not just that the Christians buried their dead, it’s how they treat the bodies of the dead afterwards. And here, Julian tries to use the words of Jesus against the Christian practice. He points out that in Matthew 23, Jesus compares the Pharisees to whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within, they’re full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanliness. And Julian argues, “Well, if even Jesus declared that the tombs are full of uncleanliness, how can you say that God can be worshiped there?” And yet, he laments, “The Christians persist in prostrating themselves among the tombs.” Elsewhere, he complains about Christians processing through the cities with the relics of the bodies of the saints.
He says, “The carrying of the corpses of the dead through the great assembly of people in the midst of dense crowds, staining the eyesight of all with ill omened sights of the dead, what day so touched with death could be lucky? How after being present at such ceremonies could anyone approach the gods in their temples?” So Julian is very clear. They find this whole practice of relics as weird and unsettling and off-putting as somebody like James White does today. And as Brown points out, Julian’s not alone in this. We find similar outrage from Unipius of Sardis against the reverence shown to the bones of martyrs and to the idea that the martyrs could somehow serve as ambassadors to carry men’s prayers to God, or in his case to the gods. So if you’ve been taught that these ideas of relics or the intersection of the saints, these things are coming from paganism and you’re not willing to listen to the numerous early Christians who tell you why they believe these things and it’s not coming from paganism, then maybe you’ll at least listen to all of the pagans who tell you, “No, this is not coming from us.
We don’t know where the Christians are getting this, but it’s not from us.” So okay, that raises the question then. If relics aren’t a thing Christians are getting from paganism, where are we getting this idea that there might be a supernatural power tied to the bodies of the saints or the things touched to the bodies of the saints from the Bible, at least for starters? Now I’ve made a longer biblical case before. I’m going to link to that at the end of this episode, but for now I just want to give you five key passages that I think all Christians should reckon with. Number one, in two Kings, a man’s corpse is placed upon the bones of Alicia and he comes back to life. Number two, in Mark five, a woman touches the hymn of Jesus’s garment telling herself, “If I touch even his garments, I shall be made well.” And you know what?
She’s right. Mark tells us she’s immediately healed, that Jesus perceiving in himself that power had gone forth from him, immediately turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” Number three. In Acts chapter five, we read that believers carried out the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and pallets that as Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on some of them. The people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits and they were all healed. So this isn’t something pagans are doing or the superstitious, this is something believers are doing and it seems to be working both for physical healings and spiritual healings. They were all healed. Number four, Acts 19 describes how people were pressing handkerchiefs and aprons against the body of St. Paul and then taking them to the sick and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.
So again, you’ve got relics pressed to St. Paul. These are explicitly then linked to both physical healings and spiritual ones of anguishing of demons. And St. Luke tells us that this shows how God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of St. Paul, even though Paul wasn’t physically there to perform the miracles himself. That then leads to the fifth and final passage, which isn’t really a single passage, but countless passages put together. I want you to simply, when you’re reading the Bible, pay attention to how frequently Jesus A, heals people’s bodies and B, heals through the body or through the things of the earth. The most obvious example of this is of course Jesus’s own death on the cross. He offers his flesh for the life of the world in the Eucharist and on the cross, but just notice how often miraculous power works through the hands of those working with Jesus, whether it’s the apostles performing miracles or the servants of the wedding feast of Cana.
Notice how often Jesus’ miracles involve the use of earthly things like water and wine, bread, clay, spittle and so forth, but then ordered towards miraculous ends. None of those are superstitious. Those are simply the theology of the incarnation. God works through the things of the earth and even the things of the body for divine purposes, for divine ends. Now I would suggest if somebody had only those scriptural passages to go off of, it seems to me that they would naturally come away with a clear sense that God can and does work through the bodies of his saints and even through things pressed to their bodies, even when the saints in question are dead and that these relics, the body parts of the saints or things touched through the bodies of the saints actually produce physical and spiritual healings. But okay, somebody might say, sure, that might have been true during the time of Jesus and the apostles, but how do we know that continues on?
And that’s where we’re going to have to take a look at the incredible early evidence for miraculous relics in the early church, both in the west and in the east, because relics really do offer one of the starkest contrasts between Christianity and the broader pagan world. Take, for example, the martyrdom of St. Pauly Carp. Now, if you’re not familiar, Polly Carp is a student of the apostle John. He’s a disciple of John’s and the account of Pollycarp’s martyrdom is incredibly early. Now, given how early Polycarp is, it’s actually remarkable just how good our evidence is for both his life and for his death. For example, scholars can date the date of his martyrdom seemingly exactly to February 23rd of the year 155. And the Christians of Smyrna write an account of his martyrdom apparently within a year of his death. Now the pagan author Lucian appears to be familiar with the work when Lucian’s writing about 180, which further supports that this really is a second century text that talks about a martyrdom that had just happened.
So with all that in mind, I want to highlight a few of the details that give us an insight into how the earliest post-apostolic Christians treated relics. So for example, when Polycarp removes his own sandals, we’re told that he wasn’t used to doing that because the faithful were eager for the privilege of removing his sandals so they could touch his skin because of his reputation for holiness already during his lifetime. And after Polycarp is stabbed to death, the governor’s father convinces him not to release his body to the Christians saying that they might forsake Jesus that was crucified and begin to worship this one, meaning Polycarp. Now ironically, that sounds like the very objection many Protestants have to relics today. It’s the reason French Hugonauts threw some of the bones of Saint Irenaeus into the river in 1563. They were worried that the bones of Ireneus keeping them was a source of idolatry.
It’s why John Calvin purposely had an unmarked grave so that there was no risk of people preserving his relics. But the Christians back in 156 didn’t think that way at all. They knew perfectly well, we worship Christ alone, but we honor the saints with love, not worship. And they saw in the desire to destroy the bodies of the saints and particularly Saint Polykarp, the work of the devil himself who did his utmost that not the least memorial of him should be taken away by us, although many desired to do this and to become possessors of his holy flesh. That’ll make more sense, I think, when we see the spiritual power of relics against the demons. But for now, just know that the centurion agrees he has the body of Polycarp burned and the Christians still gather what’s left over of his bones, which they described as being more precious than the most exquisite jewels and more purified than gold.
They then place his remains in a fitting place so he could celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom there. And remember, Polycarp is a disciple of the Apostle John and the Christians they were formed by the Apostle John directly. They’re one of the seven churches that John sends greetings to in Revelation two. So how can we explain their theology of relics at such an early date unless it’s coming from the apostles? Because it is clearly not coming from the pagan world, a world that would have preferred to see Polycarp’s remains go entirely up in smoke. The veneration of relics was widespread in the early church. And rather than being a borrowing from paganism, this was something that made the pagans uncomfortable and made them angry. And as we’ve seen, part of the explanation for the Christian practice is that there seems to be a solid biblical case for relics.
But I actually think there’s more to the story, namely that the early Christians had seen with their own eyes incredible miracles that God was performing through relics. And we have great evidence for this. It’s not just from folk stories or something later accounts, years and generations later. No, we have recorded eyewitness testimony from some of the greatest theologians in the church, men like St. Ambrose of Milan and St. Augustine in the West.
CLIP:
One of the greatest ecclesiastical name at this point in church history is Ambrose of Milan. So Ambrose, for example, is going to have a huge impact on Augustine who’s going to come shortly thereafter him.
Joe:
Let’s listen to what these two great luminaries had to say about the miracles being worked by God through relics in their own day. St. Ambrose reminds his own sister that you know, Nay, you have yourself seen that many are cleansed from evil spirits, that very many also having touched with their hands the robe of the saints are freed from those ailments which oppress them. He talks about how the miracles of old are being renewed on earth in his day and how garments placed on the relics of the martyrs, those who touch them are then physically healed and also cleansed from evil spirits. Okay, well concretely, what kind of healings are we talking about here? Is it just somebody says they have a headache and it goes away? No, it’s much more than that. St. Augustine mentions in book nine of the confessions that when the relics of two of the martyrs were being transferred to St.
Ambrose’s Basilica and Milan, not only they who were troubled with unclean spirits were healed, but even a man who’d been blind for years had his sight immediately restored when he touched their relics. And in City of God, Augustine describes how the relics of St. Stephen were brought to Augustine’s own city of Hippo. And there were so many miracles performed there that Augustine, as bishop of the city, asked that the people start to document these miraculous accounts in writing. And by the time that he’s writing City of God, the relics of St. Stephen haven’t even been in the city for two years yet. And already Augustine has nearly 70 documented miracle cases, cases of which he says he has the most certain means of knowing. And he acknowledges it’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless more miracles that weren’t documented in this way.
And again, this is just in the region of Hippo in less than a two year span. Before that, Stephen’s relics were in Kalama where he says there are incomparably more documented miracles. So look, it is one thing for you to say the church fathers are not right about everything. Yo disagree with them on a particular doctrine. Maybe you interpret their reading of scripture differently than they do. If that was all that was happening here, it wouldn’t be a particularly strong argument for relics. I’m not just saying they though the Bible supported relics and James White doesn’t, that would not be a great argument. Rather, I’m saying Ambrose and Augustine are not just theologians. They are witnesses and they’re claiming direct knowledge of dozens of miracles brought about by relics, including indisputable cases like a blind man being restored his sight. So how do we account for this evidence?
The most obvious way it seems to me is that God really is working incredible miracles through relics. But I want to turn here from the west to the east at this point because at the same time all of this is happening in the west, we’re finding some incredible miraculous spiritual healings taking place in the east. And the most fascinating case involving the spiritual power of relics, in my view, it takes place in Antioch in July of the year 362. And look, if you’re somebody who automatically assumes that relics are at best superstitious and at worst pagan, what I’m about to tell you is going to sound like a legend or worse. But I want to be really clear at the outset, this is solid history. These are not once upon a time stories about a place far away. For what I’m about to tell you, we’ve got written evidence from both pagan sources and Christian sources of things that happened in the lifetime of the people that wrote about them.
The conflict involves the emperor Julian the apostate, and it might help to explain his own particular hatred for relics because we’ve got Julian’s own description of the events and it’s going to show why he hates relics. We also have a more neutral pagan perspective from a Roman soldier and historian by the name of Emianis Marcelinus. On the Christian side, the best source we have is St. John Christisdim. He is both an incredibly famous and important theologian in his own right, but he’s also present for what we’re about to hear about because John grew up in Antioch. He was a teenager at the time these events happened, and he ends up becoming the Bishop of Antioch where he’s going to preach on this topic on at least two occasions that I know of. So the whole controversy involves the relics of a saint named St. Babylos of Antioch.
He’d been a holy bishop of Antioch. He was a man who stood up to the Roman Emperor in his own day and he ends up being martyred in the Desian persecution in the year 250. So even though he’s very much at the heart of the story I’m about to tell, he’s not living on earth when it happens. Rather, the Christians of Antioch have preserved his relics. And in the early 350s, Caesar Constantius Galis, who’s actually Julian the Apostate’s Christian half brother, when he’s Caesar over this area, has the relics of Saint Babylos move to what’s called the Grove of Daphne near the temple of Apollo. So for a little further context, Daphne is this famous grove in the suburbs of Antioch. It’s so important that the city is sometimes known to outsiders as Antioch near Daphne. And within the temple at Daphne, there’s this colossal statue of Apollo.
So both the statue and the grove are there in honor of the myth of Apollo and Daphne, which Apollo becomes obsessed with the virgin of Daphne. He pursues her, she tries to run away from him, and when she’s eventually captured, she prays for deliverance and turns into a laurel tree. These things happen. So you’ve got this beautiful grove of trees dedicated to Apollos’ literally Eros inspired pursuit of Daphne. And so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that John Christensen describes as heaven become a kind of ancient lovers lane, a place where young Libertines engaged in debauchery and drunkenness. And in the midst of this place of sin, religiously sanctioned sin, John argues that the devil has installed a demon, and specifically this is tied to this enormous idol to Apollo. Now these days, we often think of Roman and Greek mythology. It’s kind of a bunch of stories like Aesop’s fables, but as St.
Paul says in one Corinthians 10, “What pagans sacrifice, they offer to demons and not to God.” And they were doing a lot of sacrificing to Apollo here. And both the Christians and the pagans agreed when the pagans would go to these demonic shrines and they’d make sacrifice and they’d consult the beings there, they’d often learn things, information which might be helpful in battle if you are, for example, a pagan emperor. And so when Galis places the relics of St. Babylos in the shrine of Daphne near this giant temple to Apollo, a temple that by this point had fallen into disuse, it doesn’t just kind of kill the vibe for young people looking to fornicate. It also annulls the power of the demon in the temple. So John describes how once St. Babylos’ relics arrived, they rendered the demon ineffective, curbed him and made him more silent than the stones.
Now that might sound like Christian propaganda or hysteria, but as we’re going to see in a moment, it matches the pagan accounts we get from people like Julian himself. But this leads to a crucial moment. In July 362, Julian the apostate, he’s at war at the Persians and he goes to the temple at Daphne to seek war counsel. But to his surprise, the oracle is unable to tell him anything. At first, the God or we would know the demon is silent, but eventually the oracle tells him, “The dead prevent me from uttering, but break open the graves, dig up the bones, move the dead.” Both the Christians and Julian himself recognized that this was a reference, not to just the dead generally, but specifically to the tomb of St. Babylos. And so Julian has Babylos’s body dug up and moved to another part of the city away from the grove.
Immediately after, there’s this miraculous fire. The great temple of Daphne catches on fire, burns down the colossal structure to Apollo is destroyed and the pagans are left simply looking on helplessly. The Christians, of course, see this says divine judgment being meted out against the pagans for having moved these relics. But how do we know this whole thing isn’t just a story St. John Christian is making up? Well, as I said, we know about it from pagan sources as well. Julian himself says to the Christians of Antioch, “When I sent away the body from Daphne, some of you, whether by accident or on purpose, hurled fire against the shrine.” So he’s acknowledging that as soon as he moved Babylos’ relics from the grove, the temple caught fire and burnt down, and he knows what body we’re all talking about. He’s just arguing the Christians must have done this themselves somehow.
And the pagan historian, Amanius Marcelinus, who I mentioned earlier, he likewise talks about how the temple was suddenly set on fire and burnt to the ground and no one knows why, that the emperor blames the Christians, but there were rumors that maybe was an accident caused by a worshiper leaving a lit candle overnight. And Labanias writes a monoty, like a lament, lamenting the destruction of the temple in which he writes that the temple was not destroyed by a violent storm, but in a serene and cloudless night. So there really was a mysterious fire right after Babylus’ relics are moved. Now of course, by itself, I admit that does not prove anything. It really could have been arson. It really could have been an accident. It really could have been a coincidence. But Julian tells us something else, something utterly fascinating. He writes that, “In my opinion, even before that fire, that God had forsaken the temple.
When I first entered it, his holy image gave me the sign thereof.” Now, Julian doesn’t tell us exactly what the idol told him in the temple, but that strongly suggests that he received something like what St. John Christensen said that he received, a word that the demon wouldn’t or couldn’t tell him anything while the relics of St. Babylos were there. After all, whatever he was told by this demon led him to demand the body of Babylos be moved from the grove. And this matches as well what Lebeneus writes. He writes to Apollo saying that, “Oh, into the wicked propinquity of a certain dead body whose nearness disturbed you, you’ve withdrawn from the midst of your worship.” So amazingly, the Christians and the pagans actually agree on the basic facts. The pagans used to go to the temple of Apollo to seek occult knowledge. It used to work.
Once the relics of St. Babylos arrive, the oracle falls mute and the God or demon withdraws. Eventually, the demon convinces Julian to have the relics removed, and then the temple and idol are immediately destroyed in a sudden and inexplicable fire. Those are the basic facts of history. That’s why I would suggest it is absurd to imagine that devotion to relics is pagan or demonic because it is quite literally the opposite. The whole theology of relics is rooted not in superstition, but in our belief in the resurrection of the dead. St. John Christensen talks about this. He points out that the pagans are limited in their hope to the present life, whereas as Christians, we recognize that the end of life on earth is just the beginning of another more luminous existence. And because of this, the accomplishments of the noble Babylos after his death suffice to settle the question in great measure.
In other words, we know that death isn’t the end because Babylos is still interceding for us from heaven and his relics are still working these incredible miracles. To put all that another way, one of the reasons that God works miracles through the bodies of his saints, even after their deaths, is so that we will remember that death doesn’t have the final word. The saints are still alive and active in heaven, and their bodies that we honor here below, they will one day rise again in glory at the resurrection of the dead. That isn’t paganism. That is the Christian antidote to paganism. Now look, there’s much more that could be said here. So if you want to understand more of the biblical roots of our belief in relics and find out the answers to some of the other objections you might have against relics, I urge you to check out this video.
For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeier. God bless you.