In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss whether the Catholic practice of venerating relics is just a pagan tradition. Joe dives into the historical context and theological significance of relics, revealing their deep roots in Christian belief and practice.
Transcript:
Cy Kellett: Catholics relics. Isn’t that just a pagan practice that Catholics have adopted, this whole relics thing?
Joe Heschmeyer: No, in fact the pagans were horrified by it. So one thing to realize when we, when we talk about pagans is that there wasn’t a single, you know, worldwide or even empire wide system of paganism. Paganism is sort of the Christian catch all term for anyone who wasn’t Jewish or Christian in as much as you find anything like an organized paganism. That really begins with Julian the apostate who grew up Christian and then rejected Christianity and tried to turn the entire empire back to like an organized system of paganism. And he hated relics. And the story about why he hated relics is actually really incredible. And it shows the power of relics. So the first thing to know is just the treatment of the body is very different in the Roman system than it is in Christianity. That in Roman paganism the body was not treated as good, it was treated as impure in death. Whereas Christians, because we believe in the resurrection of the dead, we believed in treating the body with greater reverence. And so where the Romans would just bury bodies in what they called the necropolis, the city of the dead, Christians are the ones who invented the cemetery, the place of temporary rest before rising again. And this is also why the Christians would preserve the bodies of the their saints. And we find this incredibly early on. So Saint Polycarp, one of the disciples of the apostle John, he dies in the mid-1100s. And we know from the accounts written of his martyrdom a year after he died, this is an extremely ancient document, talks about them trying to preserve his relics. And the Romans are aware of this Christian practice and so they order the body to be burnt and they still take like little fragments of bones and preserve them in a place where they can be venerated every year. So we see early on that this was not some pagan practice that was unwittingly carried over into Christianity. This was something that was extremely anti pagan. The view of the body, the view of the hope, of the resurrection, the fact that we still believe God can work miracles through his saints, whether on earth or in heaven, all of that is extremely biblical. Think about the bones of Elisha in the Old Testament. Think about Peter’s shadow or handkerchiefs touched to the body of Paul, he healing people in acts. You have this incredible vision of the goodness of the body and the body being a conduit for divine grace in Christianity. And this is fervently opposed by the Gnostics on the one hand and the pagans on the Other. So as I said, pagans were opposed to this. The Julian the apostate, who returns to paganism, hates relics. And I alluded to there being a special reason why. Do you know what that special reason why is? Sigh.
Cy Kellett: The Julian in particular hated relics. Yes, I’m trying to think. So Julian the apostate, of course was Christian, but then went back to paganism as emperor. Yeah. And I don’t know.
Joe Heschmeyer: Well, let me just ask this. Do you know what emperors would do before battles? They would go to pagan priests and try to foretell the future. So they would.
Caller: The entrails and all that?
Joe Heschmeyer: Yeah, augurs and horseposes. And so there already was a tradition. So under Diocletian, the Christians who were in the party of Diocletian did the sign of the cross when they start to do these pagan rites. And then the pagan rites stop working and they don’t know who did it. But the pagans realize there must be Christians present and they just say like we can’t, we don’t know what’s going on. And it just, it made their rights impotent. Well, something kind of similar happens in July 362. So Julian is at war with the Persians and, and he’s trying to find out about the future. And he goes to the famous temple in Antioch dedicated to Daphne is the name of the grove. There’s a giant temple there to Apollo. And he goes there to consult the priests there about the future. But the Christians had moved the relics of one of their former bishops, St. Pablos, into the grove of Daphne. And so the, the Roman priests who were trying to perform these pagan rites announced that they’re not working. And they quickly realize it’s because of the relics. And in fact the pagans tell them that it’s because of the bones that are present there. And so he orders the removal of St. Bablas’s bones. And then the temple mysteriously burns down. All of a sudden. Now he blames the Christians for it. The Christians say, no, this was divine vengeance. Like did God saw what you did here and he burnt your temple down. But it destroys this enormous statue to Apollo. So this was the great triumph of Christianity over paganism and over idolatry. But it was particularly through relics that all of this happens. And so there’s these incredible accounts written about it from both the pagan side and the Christian side.
Caller: Wow.
Joe Heschmeyer: Because Julian was present there, St. John Chrysostom grew up in Antioch while all this is happening. And there’s a famous Roman pagan poet who talks about this, so this is a very well documented historical fact. And it shows, number one, that the relics were not a pagan borrowing, but were extremely anti pagan. And number two, that God did miraculous things through the relics in the vanquishing of paganism.
Cy Kellett: That is, I, I didn’t know that story at all. That’s a very, that’s an exciting story because of that thing that I do think people think. Well, actually when I say people, I actually think a lot of modern evangelicals think that all this Catholic stuff is just stolen from the pagans. It’s just paganism found its way into Christianity and corrupted it. And that is a wonderful illustration of how that is not true at all. And there is a famous kind of YouTube, famous Protestant apologist who recently did a thing about how there’s nothing about it was Gavin Ortland. And it was about there’s nothing about relics. And I didn’t watch the video. I just saw the first minute where he said, look, there’s nothing in the Bible about relics. This is completely unbiblical. And then you just named several things.
Caller: So it’s very untrue.
Caller: Help me out there. What does the Bible have to say about this?
Joe Heschmeyer: Well, a lot of what Protestant apologists do online is they’ll make these arguments from silence. They’ll say, well, we don’t have a ton of evidence of X or Y or Z and therefore it must not have happened. And therefore you shouldn’t do it. And this is, we should recognize as a general rule of thumb, these are weak arguments intellectually because you don’t have very many prayers to Jesus in the Bible. You have one, St. Stephen has a prayer to Jesus as he’s being martyred. And other than that one incident, you don’t have anyone in the Bible praying to Jesus. You don’t have any descriptions outside of the book of Hebrews, of Jesus as the great high priest. And yet he clearly is. But in terms of him being explicitly called that, only one book of the Bible names him that. So the fact that you say there’s only like one example of a thing in the New Testament is not a good argument against it. Even if you say you don’t see any clear examples, that’s not going to be a very effective argument against it because you’re making these, what are intellectually weak arguments from silence. You can construct a strong argument from silence. You can say, well, they would clearly have talked about X if it was true. And they don’t talk about X and therefore. But the problem is when you say they would clearly talk about X if it was true. That is a very hard thing to prove with the Bible. The Old Testament doesn’t give a very clear depiction of hell. The New Testament doesn’t give an extremely clear depiction of what happens to the saints when they die in their experience of heaven. So, I mean, there are. There are people today who consider themselves Christians who don’t think that you experience heaven when you die until the second Coming. So those kind of things are possible. And the reason they’re possible is there’s a little bit of a paucity of evidence for certain things. Like the Bible is not trying to be what many Protestants take it to be. It is not trying to be a systematic theology telling you every answer to every question you might have. So the fact that you don’t see your answer explicitly there does not mean that you can conclude from that that therefore it’s one thing or the other. In the case of relics, we know you have, as I said, the bones of Elisha in the Old Testament, you’ve got the shadow of St. Peter in Acts, you have the handkerchiefs touched to Paul’s body in Acts, and then you have a wealth of early Christian evidence that all points in the same direction. I think it would be a real mistake to imagine that you reading the book 2,000 years later, you’re going to get a better sense of the lived reality of Christianity than the Christians who lived it back in the 1000s or even earlier. And when you see the Christians in the 1000s and you see that they clearly are acting like there are relics, and you see the Christians in the 200s and the 300s and so on, and there is this unbroken line where it all makes sense. That way of putting the pieces together fits a lot better than trying to say, well, we can’t prove that they did all of these things, therefore we’re going to assume that they didn’t, I think that’s just a mistaken way of thinking about the evidence.
Cy Kellett: All right, we’ll take a quick break and then you can ask Joe your questions on Catholicism. Whether you’re Catholic or not, whether you are friendly to Catholicism or not, your questions are welcome here. 8 8, 8, 3 1, 8, 7, 8, 8 4.