Brakelite
Well-Known Member
BoL, you give Ellen way way too much credit my friend. She didn't invent or "discover" that 666 connection to that title. No no no. That was found a couple of hundred years previous to her ministry. Nor was she the first to refer to that in the 19th century. She was merely one of many that referred to it, among many who could not refute it... Including you.
And yes, that title for the Pope is indeed to be found on what you now call, that
Speaking of which, despite the spurious nature of that document, it didn't stop a succession of popes to use it to validate their thefts and claims to supremacy over land and churches that didn't belong to them. In fact, it took from memory, another 5 or 6 hundred years before any Catholic administrator dared suggest it was a forgery. And I bet that didn't go down too well with the Catholic hierarchy.
It was a title which, as Helwig (a prominent intellectual, “a professional teacher of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew for twenty-seven years.” During his life, he was amongst other things the author of an etymological Greek Dictionary, rector at Berlin (1611–1614) and professor of poetry at the University of Rostock (1614–1616) whose “specialty in language and his conspicuous ability in Greek and Latin won him the standing of royal crown poet.” ) expressed it, “all the pontiffs have now already ascribed to themselves for more than 600 years (as is apparent), and do ascribe today, and wish to be ascribed: on which account they vehemently glory and boast with an execrable voice that they hold, shared as it were with the omnipotent God, the rule throughout the earth in human affairs.” As a Renaissance man and erudite Protestant, Helwig was certainly acquainted with The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine (1440) and related documents debunking this forgery. Of this fact, he provided evidence, amongst other things, by mentioning that turncoat scholar Aeneas Silvius27 (Enea Silvio Piccolomini). In 1443, Piccolomini endorsed the Valla document, but when he became Pope Pius II he repudiated his former stance. As people of both the Middle Ages and the Reformation period down to Helwig’s time knew from personal, often bitter experience, the pontiffs ignored Lorenzo Valla’s Treatise and kept on wielding their tremendous power.
Vicarius Filii Dei was also enshrined in the Decretum Gratiani (Gratian’s Decretum), which first appeared in 1140 and became the basis for teaching Catholic canon law. Included in it, not by the original author but by his successors, was the Donation of Constantine and that title. For centuries the Decretum was copied multiple times and, after Gutenberg had invented the means for doing so, printed abundantly, over and over again. Together with other church legislation, it became an important part of Canon Law. The Decretum was first printed in 1500 (from 1586 onward as part of the Corpus Iuris Canonici (Collection of Canon Law), which continuously remained in force for more than another three hundred years, until 1917, when it was replaced by the Codex Iuris Canonici, which omitted the Decretum. Reacting to the sixteenth-century Reformation, after the Council of Trent, Pius V (1504–1572, reigned from 1566) in the year when he became pope appointed a commission to revise the Canon Law. This work was completed in the time of the next pope, Gregory XIII (1505–1585, reigned from 1572). The Decretum formed part of the then official Corpus Iuris Canonici, published at Rome in 1582, which was during Helwig’s lifetime. It included the Donation with the words vicarius Filii Dei.29 During the pontificate of Urban VIII (1568-1644, reigned from 1623), Luca Castellino, also writing in Latin, produced his Theological Elucidation Concerning the Certainty of the Glory of Canonized Saints (1628). Referring to the Emperor Constantine, it quotes from the Donation a passage containing the title vicarius Filij [sic] Dei.
So BoL. All of this history going back 1000 years previous to Ellen White, written of 200 years before Ellen White , refuted by one scholar who later denied it when elected Pope.... no lies but historical fact and evidence that the title was used, was used over centuries, was taken advantage of despite it's 'spurious' history.
Nor is it a title made up by enemies as an epithet against catholicism. It's actually a title created by Catholics to bolster the reputation of the Pope. Nor is the 666 interpretation deniable. It's real. It's in the language of the church. No-one within adventism had made this up.
