Christian Churches of God
No.
F044vii
Acts Part 7:
Timeline of
the Churches of God
(Edition 6.0 20010620-20021118-20081111-20100629-20191116-20220223-20241016)
A historical and contemporary view of the persecution of Sabbath-keepers commencing from 27 CE.
Christian Churches of God
E-mail: secretary@ccg.org
(Copyright © 2001,
2002, 2008, 2010, 2019, 2022, 2024 Christian
Churches of God;
ed. Wade Cox; sub-editors
Scott Rambo anor)
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Acts Part 7: Timeline
of the Churches of God
27
CE |
Early Persecution of the Church
John
the Baptist a man sent by God (John 1:6), A messenger preparing the way
(Mal.3:1) |
28
CE |
John
the Baptist beheaded - Christ begins his ministry. |
30
CE |
Christ,
the Sabbath-keeping Lamb of God crucified on Passover (Wednesday April 5). |
|
The
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth at the end of the Sabbath day (Saturday
April 8/Sunday April 9). Then, on the 1st day of the week (Sunday
April 9, 9:00 a.m.), he ascends into heaven as the wave sheaf offering, the
first of the firstfruits. See the paper The Wave Sheaf Offering (No.
106b). |
30-31
CE |
The
disciples are sent out to the various lands to establish the churches. |
|
Joseph
of Arimathea, with Aristobulus, is held to have taken the faith to Britain.
Judas Timothy took it to India, Mark took it to Alexandria, John to Ephesus,
Peter took it to Antioch and to Parthia with others who also went to the
other nations listed in Acts (see the paper Origin of the Christian Church
in Britain (No. 266) and
also Establishment of the Church
under the 70 (No. 122D)).
This text (No. 122D) covers the diocese and deaths of the early bishops
of the church. |
30-70
CE |
Jerusalem
Church ruthlessly persecuted by Jews. See the paper The Sign of Jonah and the
History of the Reconstruction of the Temple (No. 013). |
34
CE |
Stephen
is stoned to death. Believers are scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. |
|
Sudan.
First Christians; gospel taken to Nubia (Meroc) by Ethiopian eunuch baptized
by Philip. |
|
Mission
extended to Samaritans by Philip; fresh persecution. |
42
CE |
Mark
the Evangelist arrives in Alexandria; founds what became the Coptic Church. |
|
Phoenicia
Cyprus, Antioch: “A great number that believed turned to the Lord” (Acts
11.21). |
44
CE |
Persecution
in Jerusalem under king Herod Agrippa I; James
brother of John executed; imprisonment and escape of Peter. |
50
CE |
Jews
and Christians are banished from Rome. |
|
Assyrian
Christians found Church of the East (later Nestorian). |
54
CE |
1st
imperial Roman persecution of Christians, under Emperor Nero. |
58
CE |
Paul
arrested in Jerusalem. |
60
CE |
Paul
sent for trial to Rome. |
61
CE |
Paul
in Rome under military guard; gospel proclaimed in capital of empire, |
|
Paul
writes: “The Good News which has reached you is spreading all over the world”
(Colossians 1.6, Jerusalem); “The Good News, which you have heard, has been preached
to the whole human race” (Colossians 1.23; Greek “to all creation under the
sky”). Britain (later UK). First resident Christians (Roman soldiers,
merchants); origins of Celtic Church. |
63-64 CE |
End
of the 62 weeks of years of Daniel 9:25. |
|
Martyrdom
of James brother of Christ, first bishop of
Jerusalem. |
|
Martyrdom
of apostle Mark in Baucalis near Alexandria.
|
|
Nero’s
persecutions begin; Paul and Peter martyred.
|
|
Great Fire of
Rome; thousands of Christians burned or killed by Emperor Nero. |
66
CE |
Anti-Jewish
riots and pogroms in Egypt: 50,000 killed in Alexandria, 60,000 elsewhere.
Vespasian with 60,000 troops quells Jewish insurrection; reconquers Galilee. |
70
CE |
End
of the Seventy Weeks of Years and the destruction of the Temple. Destruction
of Jerusalem by Titus with 4 legions; 600,000 killed in Judaea, 10,000 Jews
crucified, 90,000 Jews to Rome as slaves; Jews scattered abroad. Christians
earlier had taken heed to the warnings of the Messiah and fled to Pella under
Symeon to escape the Roman army. (See World Christian Encyclopedia (pp.
23-32), A Comparative Survey of
Churches and Religions in the Modern World, Oxford University Press,
1982.) |
71
CE |
Roman
Coliseum built - makes sport of martyring
Christians. |
72
CE |
Christians
who fled Jerusalem in 70 CE now return to Jerusalem. They set up Christian
churches all over Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia but they came into
conflict with the Greek Christian churches because of the problems with the
observance of the law or Torah. This is thought by modern Catholicism to be
because Peter and Paul had set up a separate system with the Greeks, but that
was not the case. It is also worth mentioning that the title "pope"
was carried by bishops in major Sees such as Alexandria, Jerusalem and
Antioch in the third century, but never by the apostles. |
81
CE |
2nd
imperial Roman persecution, under Domitian. |
98
CE |
3rd
imperial persecution, under Trajan. |
111
CE |
Sunday
worship first entered the church at Rome |
115
CE |
Martyrdom
of Ignatius bishop of Antioch. |
120
CE |
The
Waldensian Church is formed in the Piedmont valleys after the dispatch of
Polycarp, disciple of the Apostle John, from Smyrna. From this date on they
passed down from father to son the teachings they received from the apostles
including the keeping of the Sabbaths, New Moons, and Feasts. See the papers:
General Distribution
of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122),
Establishment
of the Church under the Seventy (No. 122D), The New Moons of Israel (No.
132), and The Role of the Fourth
Commandment in the Historical Sabbath-keeping Churches of God (No. 170)). |
|
Note:
The Waldensians were Sabbath-keeping Subordinationist Unitarians well before
Waldo was on the scene – according to Dugger and Dodd, A History of the True Religion, (3rd ed. Jerusalem, 1972, p.
224ff.). |
132
CE |
Second
Jewish rebellion under Bar Kokhba; second destruction of Jerusalem by Romans
in 134; almost entire Jewish population of Palestine died or fled. |
154
CE |
Anicetus
introduces the Pagan Easter festival into the Roman Church. He is opposed by
Polycarp disciple of John. Polycarp heads the church in the East at Smyrna
and speaks for all Quartodecimans. |
|
Justin
Martyr writes his First Apology to
the Emperor of Rome on behalf of the Church of Rome. He explained that Christ
was the Great Angel of the OT who gave the Law to Moses. On behalf of the
Church at Rome, Justin wrote (Dial. LXXX) that if they came across people who said
they were Christians and that when they died they
would go to heaven not to believe them because they were not Christians. This
was the test of a true Christian. It was a shibboleth in the church. People
who said that when they died they went to heaven
were Gnostic impostors. |
156
CE |
Death
at the stake of Polycarp bishop of Smyrna. |
161
CE |
4th
imperial Roman persecution, under Marcus Aurelius. |
180
CE |
Theophilus
of Antioch makes the first mention of a trias
later incorrectly translated into English as Trinity, and the insipient
beginnings of the Binitarian doctrine emerges for the first time in the
history of the church (see Early Theology of the Godhead
(No. 127)). See
also Binitarian and
Trinitarian Misrepresentation of the Early Theology of the Godhead (No. 127B)). |
192
CE |
Bishop
Victor of Rome forcibly brings in Easter over the Passover and the
Quartodeciman Disputes split the church. Polycrates disciple of Polycarp
stands against the heretical Roman Faction. Irenaeus bishop of Lyon tries to
intercede to no avail. See the paper: The Quartodeciman Disputes (No.277). |
193
CE |
5th imperial Roman persecution, under
Septimius Severus. |
195
CE |
Irenaeus expounds the correct Unitarian doctrine
of the Nature of God in Against
Heresies. He states the goal of the elect is to become elohim or theoi
(in other words gods, cf. Zech. 12:8) according to the Bible text (see the
paper The Elect
as Elohim (No. 001)). |
200
CE |
Sabbath observance widespread and appears to have
been opposed from Rome. It was kept in Egypt as the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus (c.
200-250 CE) shows. |
|
Origen also enjoined Sabbath-keeping. |
|
Similarly the Constitution of the Holy Apostles (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7, p. 413; c. 3rd century) states: Thou
shalt observe the Sabbath, on account of Him who ceased from His work of
creation, but ceased not from His work of providence: it is a rest for
meditation of the law, not for idleness of the hands. |
|
Vicious persecutions of Coptic Christians in Egypt
with thousands martyred. |
|
Tertullian says the
British Church has been long established at this time. |
220
CE |
The problems of Modalism emerge in the discussions
between the popes in Rome and Alexandria. A distinction is attempted in the Trias of The Father, Christ and the
Holy Spirit. Here the influence of the Modalism of Attis is seen in the
Christian church from Rome. Christ is elevated to God as a Modal structure
for the first time. See the paper Early Theology of the Godhead
(No. 127). |
|
The Sabbath
in India |
220
CE |
The introduction of Sabbath-keeping to India
caused a controversy in Buddhism in 220 CE. According to Lloyd (The Creed of Half Japan, p. 23) the
Kushan Dynasty of North India called a council of Buddhist priests at
Vaisalia to bring uniformity among the Buddhist monks on the observance of
their weekly Sabbath. Some had been so impressed by the Old Testament
writings that they had begun to keep the Sabbath. |
235
CE |
6th imperial Roman persecution, under Maximinus. |
249
CE |
7th imperial Roman persecution, under military
ruler Decius; systematic state attempt to destroy Christianity. |
253
CE |
8th imperial Roman persecution, under Valerian. |
270
CE |
9th imperial Roman persecution, under Aurelian. |
300
CE |
By
the fourth century, the priests of the pagan god Attis were complaining that
the Christian ministry at Rome had stolen all their doctrines. |
303
CE |
10th
and last imperial Roman persecution, under Diocletian; destruction of all
church buildings and scriptures ordered. Around 500,000 Christians executed
in 10 years of systematic slaughter. |
|
The Sabbath in Spain
|
305
CE |
From
canon 26 of the Council of Elvira (c. 305), it appears that the church in
Spain had kept the Sabbath. Rome had introduced the practice of fasting on
the Sabbath to counteract Sabbath-keeping. Pope Sylvester (314-335) was the
first to order the churches to fast on the Sabbath, and Pope Innocent
(402-417) made it a binding law in the churches that obeyed him. |
|
Innocentius
did ordain the Sabbath or Saturday to be always fasted on (Peter Heylyn, History of the Sabbath, Part 2, Ch. 2,
London, 1636, p. 44). |
314
CE |
Edict
of Toleration of Milan, the Emperor Constantine sought to use Christianity
for political purposes and initially supported the Roman faction, which came
to adopt the doctrines of Athanasius and, later, that of the Cappadocians.
The doctrinal position of the church had become blurred by Gnostic factions,
influenced by the mystery cults. Constantine supported the Athanasian faction
on the mistaken assumption that, because it was dominant in Rome, it was the
major sect, but the deposition of Arius in the packed Synod of Alexandria led
ultimately to war with his co-Emperor, Licinius, and the troubles of 322-323
CE. |
|
Pope
Sylvester (314-335) was the first to order the churches to fast on the
Sabbath. |
|
Rome
attempts to counteract Sabbath keeping. |
318
CE |
Conference
of the Deposyni: In 318 Constantine had ordered the conference between the bishop of
Rome and the desposyni; the bishops were of the family of Jesus Christ. |
|
The desposyni (meaning literally in Greek ‘Belonging
to the Lord’ as they were blood relatives of Jesus Christ) asked Sylvester,
who now had Roman patronage, to revoke his confirmation of the authority of
the Greek Christian bishops at Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Ephesus, and in
Alexandria, and to name desposynos bishops in their stead. In addition, they
asked that the practice of sending cash to Jerusalem, as the mother church,
be resumed. This practice is easily recognizable as the tithe of the tithe
system, which had been in force in the church until Emperor Hadrian’s ban in
135 CE. These blood relatives of Christ demanded the reintroduction of the
Law, which included the Sabbath and the Holy Day system of Feasts and New
Moons of the Bible. Sylvester dismissed their claims and said that from now
on the mother church was in Rome and he insisted they accept the Greek
bishops to lead them. |
|
This was the last known dialogue with the
Sabbath-keeping church in the East led by the disciples who were descended
from blood relatives of Messiah. |
|
The bishop, or pope, (all
bishops of major sees were called pope initially when the term was introduced
from the cults) then with Roman contrivance, ordered that they be exterminated and this campaign of extermination was
undertaken against Christ’s immediate family from 318 onwards. See the paper The
Virgin Mariam and the Family of
Jesus Christ (No. 232). |
322
CE |
The
deposition of Arius in the packed Synod of Alexandria led ultimately to war
with Constantine’s co-Emperor, Licinius, and the
troubles of 322-323 CE. |
325
CE |
Council
of Nicea convened. The Canons of the Council of Nicea have been lost. It was
later established that there were only 20, which commenced the introduction
of aberrations such as: domiciliary rules for the clergy living with females,
i.e. celibacy; the persecution by the imposition of penance of Unitarians
(incorrectly called Arians) and those who supported Licinius; the
establishment of the diocesan system and its controls on priests and the
prohibition of the clergy lending at interest; and the introduction of
standing prayers at Sunday worship and during the "Paschal Season."
The Paschal Season so-called was in fact the forced introduction and
harmonisation of Easter as practiced in the West from Rome by the Attis
system and by the Greeks in the East under the Adonis system and in Egypt
under the Osiris/Isis system. This festival was instead of the Bible
Passover). The Creed reconstructed from Constantinople itself, introduces the
concept of Binitarianism essential to the formulation of the Trinity and
introduces the aberration that Christ was the "only begotten of the
Father" and hence removes the promise of the elect as begotten sons of
God. Athanasius says (in Ad Afros) that there were 318 bishops present. Arius
was summoned to the Council often, which began possibly on 20 May 325 CE
under the Athanasian Hosius of Cordova. Constantine joined the Council on 14
June. To get agreement Constantine marched in a cohort of Roman troops and
arrested a number of bishops and exiled Arius,
Theonas of Marmarica and Secundus of Ptolemais to Illyrica. Arius' writings
were then burnt and all three were anathematised. The remainder agreed on the
symbol of the Creed on 19 June. The Council ended on 25 August with a 'party'
hosted by Constantine with presents to the bishops. |
|
Three
months after the Council, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognius of Nicea, who
were forced to sign the Creed under duress, were exiled for retracting and
Theodotus of Laodicea, who also signed under duress and retracted, recanted
rather than join them. |
|
Persecution
instituted by the imposition of penance of Unitarians (incorrectly called
Arians) and those who supported Licinius. |
328
CE |
Constantine
realizing that the Athanasians were not the majority sect and were a source
of division and persecution in the Empire recalls the five Unitarian leaders
(it is suggested at the urging of Constantia, widow of Licinius. However, it
is more probable that she was merely a prominent Unitarian of the Eusebian or
Arian faction). The problem with the Unitarian Christian system was that it
followed the Bible tenets and was not concerned with the control of nations.
Each nation was separate and subject to its own leaders and the religious
system of that nation was between them and God. As the nation obeyed God so it was blessed. The empire was concerned with world
domination and the converts to the church in Rome were also imbued with this
mentality. Thus they courted an organization that
wanted world domination and would tolerate no opposition to that model. As a
result, the Roman Church system adapted the pagan system of the sun cults and
among the Aryans to Christianity, such that no Bible believing person can
follow both systems. |
|
The
Sabbath in Persia
|
335
CE |
The
Sabbath-keeping churches in Persia underwent forty years of persecution under
Shapur II, from 335-375 specifically, because they were Sabbath-keeping. |
|
“They
despise our sun-god. Did not Zoroaster, the sainted
founder of our divine beliefs, institute Sunday one thousand years ago in
honour of the sun and supplant the Sabbath of the Old Testament. Yet these
Christians have divine services on Saturday” (O'Leary, The Syriac Church and Fathers, pp. 83-84, requoted Truth Triumphant p. 170). |
|
This
persecution was mirrored in the West by the Council of Laodicea (c. 366).
Hefele notes: |
|
Canon
16 - The Gospels along with other Scripture be read on the Sabbath (cf. also
canons 49 and 51, Bacchiocchi, fn. 15, p. 217). |
|
Canon 29 - Christians must
not Judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work
on that day honouring rather the Lord's day by resting, if possible, as
Christians. However if any shall be found judaizing,
let them be anathema for Christ (Mansi, II, pp. 569-570, see also Hefele Councils, Vol. 2, b. 6) |
337
CE |
The
Emperor Constantine was baptized a Unitarian by Eusebius on his deathbed. |
339
CE |
Severe
persecution of Christians in Persia, until 379; intermittent vicious
persecution by Sassanian rulers until the 640 conquest
by Islam. |
345
CE |
Persecution
in East Syria and Persia drives 400 Nestorians with a bishop to settle in
Malabar, India. |
351
CE |
The
Unitarian Goths publish the Bible in the Gothic Language. |
|
The
Jews Change the Calendar
|
358
CE |
Jewish
calendar is changed from the Temple period model by a calculation system and
delineated under Rabbi Hillel II ca. 358 CE (from input by Babylonian rabbis
of ca. 344 CE). The Waldensian and later the Transylvanian Sabbatarians did
not follow the Jewish calendar but worked on the astronomical conjunction of
the New Moon. See the paper: God's Calendar (No. 156)
and the foreword by Cox to R.
Samuel Kohn, The
Sabbatarians in Transylvania (No. A_B2), [1894], CCG Publishing, 1998. |
380
CE |
The
Montanists in the second century started a cult of worship of the Holy Spirit
as they expected the Holy Spirit to come and take the place of the sons and
announce a more perfect gospel. This view was repressed but led to the Fourth
Council of Rome in 380 where Pope Damasus condemned whoever denied that the
Holy Spirit should be adored like the Father and the Son (ibid., p. 711). Thus the next year (381) at the Council of Constantinople,
the Holy Spirit was added to the Godhead as the Trinity but not perhaps as
successfully as the Cappadocians would have liked. This forms the next great
distinction between the Churches of God and Trinitarianism. |
381
CE |
Council
of Constantinople sees the formulation of the doctrine of the trinity and the
defining of the Holy Spirit as a third part of the Godhead, furthering the Binitarian
heresy emanating from the council of Nicaea. However, the full doctrinal
position was not agreed upon until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. This
council saw the exit of the thirty-six semi-Arians, Macedonians or
Pneumatomachi. The council, after that exit, consisted of only 150 bishops.
It was thus unrepresentative of much of Christianity at the time. |
|
Ambrose
of Milan, with Theodosius gains control of the Roman Church. |
|
The
Athanasian/Arian disputes lead to bitter persecution. |
|
The
doctrines attributed to so-called Arianism, namely of the creation of the
Holy Spirit by Christ, are not substantiated from any writings of Arius or of
the faction. |
|
See
the paper: Socinianism,
Arianism and Unitarianism (No. 185)). |
|
There
was no Trinitarian Emperor on the throne until 381, when the Trinity was
formulated at Constantinople under protection of Theodosius. They had all
been Unitarians until 381 with the exception of
Julian the apostate. |
|
This
Unitarian creed is based on the theology expressed in Psalm 45:6-7 and
Hebrews 1:8-9. The early apologists such as Irenaeus at Lyons held it in the
second century. This theology was held by the Goths, Vandals, Alans, Suevi,
Heruli, Britons, Lombards, Germans, and all the northern tribes. See the
paper: The
Pre-Existence of Jesus Christ (No. 243) for the creed
of the Goths. It came from the teachings of theologians and disciples of the
apostles that were already centuries old before the Council of Nicea in 325
CE, where many of these bishops were present. The heresy of Binitarianism was
commenced from this Council. |
|
In
381 the Trinity was declared at Constantinople from the theology of the
Cappadocians Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. The
destruction of the faith by the Greeks and Romans had begun to take effect.
Trinitarians incorrectly and dishonestly label the creed as Arianism, to give
the impression that their doctrine is older and this
doctrine originated with Arius in the fourth century. The Trinitarians then
alternately label the subordinationist Unitarian doctrine after Arius
(Arianism) and then Eusebius of Nicomedia (Eusebianism) and other bishops
much senior to Arius (who was not even present at Nicea, only being summoned
there for advice on logic). Trinitarians accuse Arians of holding that the Spirit was a creation of the son, when
in fact that is the doctrine of Filioque
advanced from the Council of Toledo, by the Catholics themselves in the sixth
century. Even the Greeks rejected that view. People who label this view as
Arian are either being deliberately dishonest, or do not understand enough to
know what they are saying. |
382
CE |
In
382 Theodosius I had resettled the Visigoths in the empire
but they were still Unitarian. Allegedly it was the Emperors,
especially Valens, who converted the northern tribes to Unitarianism and not
to Trinitarianism. The Goths, Vandals, Alans, Suevi, Heruli, were all Unitarian as were the tribes of the Teutons and
there were a number of bishops from the Unitarian tribes at Nicea. The German
Hermunduri remained Unitarian until the eighth century. So also
the Celtic bishops of Britain were Unitarian Sabbatarians. |
385
CE |
Banishment
of some Sabbatarians from Britain to Ireland after the execution of
Priscillian. |
|
Celtic Sabbath-keeping
|
|
Henry
Charles Lea, the foremost authority on the Papal Inquisitions, records in the
period of the commencement of persecution involving judicial capital
punishment for heresy that at the time of the execution of Priscillian with
six of his followers in 385 AD, "others were
banished to a barbarous island beyond Britain." (A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol.1, New York:
Harper & Brothers 1887, p.213.) What was this barbarous island? Most
likely, it would appear to be Ireland. Britain and Ireland were favourite
places for banishment and the marketing of slaves in those days. If indeed
many faithful "heretics" were banished to Ireland for centuries, it
could not but have had a profound effect on that island, which became a great
centre of light under Patrick (5th century), Columba (521-597), and
Columbanus (c. 540-615) as the darkness of papal tyranny descended over the
continent. Missionaries went forth from Ireland to Switzerland, Bohemia and
Kiev. Ireland was one of the most difficult areas for Rome to subjugate, and
this explains why such unending efforts have been made for over 1200 years to
completely subjugate this island of Ireland. (Taken from Cherith Chronicle, April-June 1998, pp. 46-47.) |
|
The
Celtic Church, which occupied Ireland, Scotland and Britain, had the Syriac
(Byzantine) scriptures instead of the Latin vulgate of Rome. The Celtic
Church, with the Waldenses and the Eastern empire, kept the seventh-day
Sabbath. When Queen Margaret fled to Scotland with her father Edward
Atheling, a pretender to the English throne, she wrote "to her English
cousins expressing astonishment at the religious practices of the Scots.
Among the 'peculiarities' of the Scots was that “they work on Sunday, but keep Saturday in a sabbatical manner.” To
another correspondent she complained, “They are accustomed also to neglect
reverence for the Lord's days (Sundays); and thus to
continue upon them as upon other days all the labours of earthly work.” |
|
"The
observance of the Saturday Sabbath by most Scots went hand in hand with their
refusal to 'recognize the overlordship of the Pope in matters spiritual'.
Despite the best efforts of King Nectan centuries earlier, Scottish
Christianity was still of the 'Columban' or 'Celtic', not the 'Roman',
variety. |
|
"The
most popular narrative history of Scotland--Scotland: A Concise History by P. Hume Brown (Langsyne) --
confirms that at Margaret's accession, 'the people worked on Sundays and
observed Saturday as the Sabbath day'”. Peter Berresford Ellis in Celtic
lnheritance (Constable, 1992) page 45 writes: “When Rome began to take a
particular interest in the Celtic Church towards the end of the sixth century
AD there were several differences between them... The Celtic Sabbath was
celebrated on a Saturday.” Ellis' comment covers the Celtic Church in Wales,
Ireland, Cornwall and Gaul, as well as Scotland. Romanism was, apparently,
coming into Scotland but had no strength north of the Forth. |
|
"This
gave Queen Margaret her crusade (and her route to canonization): 'Margaret
did all she could to make the Scottish clergy do and believe exactly what the
Church of Rome commanded.' This involved the enforcement of Sunday-keeping, a
policy continued by her son, King David I. Nevertheless, on the eve of the
Reformation, there were still many communities in the Scottish Highland loyal
to the seventh-day Sabbath, as opposed to 'the Papal Sunday'. |
|
"Two
books published in 1963-- to commemorate Columba's landing at Iona in 563--
concerned themselves with the 'Celtic distinctives' and counted among them
the observance of the seventh-day Sabbath. Dr. W.D. Simpson published The
Historical St. Columba in Edinburgh. He confirms that Columba and his
companions kept 'the day of the Sabbath' and in case there should be any
doubt adds in a footnote 'Saturday, of course'... F.W. Fawcett was
commissioned to write his Columba--Pilgrim for Christ by the Lord Bishop of
Derry and Raphoe. His book was published in Londonderry and printed by the
Derry Standard in connection with the Irish commemoration of Columba's
mission. Fawcett outlines eight Celtic distinctives. Among these that the
Celts had a married priesthood and that they observed the seventh day as the
Sabbath." --David Marshall, The Celtic Connection, England: Stanborough
Press, 1994, pp.29, 30. |
|
"The
reason why Pope Gregory I had perceived the Celtic Church as such a major
threat and why he and his successors expended such efforts in destroying the
distinctive 'Irish customs' became massively evident. |
|
"A.O.
and M.O. Anderson, in the Introduction to their Adomnan's Life of Columba
(Thomas Nelson 1961), shed light, not only on Columba's seventh-day Sabbath
keeping practice, but on the gradual 'adjustment' of manuscripts by
generations of Roman copyists, in an attempt to
provide an impression that the Celtic saints held Sunday sacred. |
|
"Adomnan's
use of sabbatum for Saturday, the seventh day of the week, is clear
indication from 'Columba's mouth' that 'Sabbath was not Sunday.' Sunday, the
first day of the week is 'Lord's day.' Adomnan's
attitude to Sunday is important, because he wrote at a time when there was
controversy over the question whether the ritual of the biblical Sabbath was
to be transferred to the Christians' Lord's-day.' (A.O. and M.O. Anderson
(eds) Adomnan's Life of Columba (Thomas Nelson's Medieval Texts, 1961), pages
25-26.) |
|
"The
Old Testament required seventh-day Sabbath observance and, reason Adomnan's
editors, since the New Testament nowhere repealed the fourth commandment, the
seventh-day was observed by all early Christians.
The evidence they adduce suggests that no actual confusion between Sunday and
'the Sabbath' occurred until the early sixth century, and then in the
writings of the rather obscure Caesarius of ArIes. (ibid., page 26.) |
|
"'In
England, the question of Sunday may have been among the 'other ecclesiastical
matters' discussed by the Synod of Whitby in 664', reason the Andersons, in
addition to the date of Easter which could not have caused such a rift. A
weekly, not just a yearly observance separated the Celts from the Romans. But
the Romans had the task of writing the history of the Church and of copying
the writings of Church fathers. While those injunctions not to add or take
away from the words of the Book and, in the main, to have done a
conscientious job, the same scruples did not apply when they copied out the
writings of the Church fathers. As the centuries progressed the writings of
the Celtic saints, including Patrick were 'amended' to convey the impression
that the saints held Sunday sacred, whereas, in the earliest versions of
their manuscripts, it is clear that they observed
the seventh-day Sabbath (ibid., pages 26-28). |
|
The
Roman 'movement' to supersede the Celtic Sabbath with Sunday 'culminated in
the production of an (apocryphal) 'Letter of Jesus', or 'Letter of
Lord's-day', alleged to have been found on the altar of Peter in Rome; and is
said in the annals to have been brought to Ireland by a pilgrim (c. 886).
Upon this basis laws were promulgated, imposing heavy penalties for those
that violated on Sunday certain regulations derived from Jewish prohibitions
for Sabbath... There is in fact no historical evidence that Ninian, or
Patrick, or Columba, or any of their contemporaries in Ireland, kept Sunday
as a Sabbath.' (ibid., p. 28). |
|
"The
seventh-day Sabbath, enjoined by the fourth of the ten commandments, had been
observed by Jesus and nowhere in Scripture had its sacredness been diminished
or transferred to another day.... |
|
An
"early version of The Rule of Columba is reproduced in Columba—Pilgrim
for Christ by [Clergyman] F.W. Fawcett, MA. [Clergyman] Fawcett is a Church
of Ireland clergyman. He was commissioned by the Lord Bishop of Derry and
Raphoe to produce this book as part of the celebrations in 1963 of the
departure of Columba for Iona in AD 563." --Marshall, The Celtic
Connection, 46. |
|
The
fifth rule of the Celtic Church listed in The
Rule of Columba is "The Seventh Day was observed as the
Sabbath". |
392
CE |
Theodosius the Great (392-395) reunited the
empire, but it was divided again by his successors Honorius and Arcadius in
395. |
396
CE |
Visigoths under Alaric invade Greece. In obedience
to biblical law, he destroys pagan statues there and hence he is held to have
plundered Athens and then the
Balkans in 398. In 401 they invaded Italy continuing until 403. |
400
CE |
Socrates the
Historian says: |
|
For although almost all Churches throughout the
world celebrate the sacred mysteries [assumed by Catholics to be the
Eucharist or Lord's Supper so-called] on the Sabbath of every week, yet the
Christians of Alexandria and Rome, on account of some ancient tradition,
refuse to do this (Socrates, Ecclesiastical
History, Bk 5, Ch. 22, p. 289). |
|
The Sabbath
in Africa |
|
Augustine of Hippo, a devout Sunday-keeper,
attested that the Sabbath was observed in the greater part of the Christian
world (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
(NPNF), First Series, Vol. 1, pp. 353-354) and deplored the fact that in
two neighboring Churches in Africa, one observed the seventh day Sabbath,
while another fasted on it (Peter Heylyn, op. cit., p. 416). |
|
See the paper: General Distribution
of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122)). |
|
The Churches generally held the Sabbath for some
time. |
|
The ancient Christians were very careful in the
observation of Saturday, or the seventh day ... It is plain that all the
Oriental churches, and the greatest part of the world, observed the Sabbath
as a festival ... Athanasius likewise tells us that they held religious
assemblies on the Sabbath, not because they were infected with Judaism, but
to worship Jesus, the Lord of the Sabbath, Epiphanius says the same (Antiquities of the Christian Church,
Vol. II, Bk. Xx, Ch. 3, Sec 1, 66. 1137,1136). Athanasius was a Binitarian
heretic hence the comment: "worship Jesus". |
|
The Sabbath
in China |
|
In the last half of the fourth century, in 370,
the bishop of the Sabbath-keeping Abyssinian Church, Museus, visited China.
Ambrose of Milan stated that Museus had traveled almost everywhere in the
country of the Seres' (China) (Ambrose, De
Moribus, Brachman-orium Opera Omnia, 1132, found in Migne, Patriologia Latina, Vol. 17, pp.
1131-1132). Mingana holds that the Abyssinian Museus traveled to Arabia,
Persia, India and China in 370 (see also fn. 27 to Truth Triumphant, p. 308). |
|
The Sabbath Churches were established in Persia
and the Tigris-Euphrates basin. They kept the Sabbath and paid tithes to
their Churches (Realencyclopæie fur
Protestantishe und Kirche, art. ‘Nestorianer’; see also Yule, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, Vol. 2, p.
409). |
|
The St. Thomas Christians of India were never in
communion with Rome. |
|
They were Sabbath-keepers, as were those who broke
off communion with Rome after the Council of Chalcedon, namely the
Abyssinian, the Jacobites, the Maronites, and the Armenians and the Kurds,
who kept the food laws and denied confession and purgatory (Schaff-Herzog, The New Encyclopædia of Religious
Knowledge, art. ‘Nestorians’ and ‘Nestorianer’). |
402
CE |
Pope Innocent (402-417) made fasting on the
Sabbath a binding law in the Churches that obeyed him. |
|
“Innocentius did ordaine the Saturday or Sabbath
to be always fasted” (Peter Heylyn, History
of the Sabbath, Part 2, Ch. 2, London, 1636, p. 44). |
406
CE |
Gunderic becomes king of Vandals. |
|
Burgundian kingdom of Worms was founded. |
|
These Teutonic tribes were all Unitarians |
409
CE |
The Vandals were Unitarians and hence iconoclastic
and they despised the icons and idols of the fully emerged system in Rome and
the syncretic adoption of the earlier pagan rites and statues. These they
destroyed initially in Gaul in 409-411 and on arrival in Spain, in Africa and
again in Rome. They were branded as pagan barbarians and from this we derive
the word vandalism, but in fact they were iconoclasts who despised the
idolatry of the syncretics. They would have destroyed Rome because of what
they perceived as idolatry, but relented at the
request of Leo on 2 June 455. |
|
Dr. Peter Heylyn (History of the Sabbath, London 1636, Part 2, para. 5, pp. 73-74)
notes that Milan was Sabbath-keeping from ancient times following the eastern
practices. |
416
CE |
The Vandals had occupied Spain, and Spain was
Unitarian. The Visigoths conquered the Vandal kingdom in Spain in 416. Thus all the areas of the north and west were Unitarian.
Italy was allegedly Trinitarian, but more often subject to the Unitarians. In
418 the Franks settled in parts of Gaul. In the same year Theodoric
I became king of the Visigoths. By 425 these so-called barbarians, who were actually Unitarian, for the most part had settled in the
Roman provinces. The Vandals were in southern Spain, the Huns were in
Pannonia, the Ostrogoths (and subsequently the Heruli) were in Dalmatia and
the Visigoths and Suevi were in northern Portugal and Spain. The European
Huns remained there in Pannonia until ca. 470 when they withdrew from Europe.
|
417
CE |
Milan, (historically Sabbath-keeping) ceases to be
the centre of resolution of dispute when Pope Zosimus makes Patrocoles,
bishop of Arles, his vicar or delegate in Gaul. |
425
CE |
In 425 Valentinian III became Western Roman
Emperor under the guardianship of his mother Galla Placidia. Gaiseric
(428-477) became king of the Vandals in that year. |
|
In 429 the Picts and Scots were expelled from
southern England by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. (The Scots did not enter
Scotland until 501 CE.) In 457, at the
battle of Crayford, the Jutes under Hengest defeated the Britons and occupied
Kent where they remain. In the year 429 Aetius chief minister of Valentinian
III became virtual ruler of the Western Roman Empire (429-454). In the same
year Gaiseric founded the Vandal kingdom of North Africa. In 443 he took the
last Roman possession in North Africa and Africa was under Unitarian
domination again. |
433
CE |
Attila (d. 453) became ruler of the Huns. In 436
the last Roman troops left Britain. In the same year the Huns destroyed the
Burgundian kingdom of Worms. The Burgundians were part of this major thrust
into Europe that was made by the Anglo-Saxons and Lombards and the other
tribes seemingly of the Parthian horde. |
443
CE |
The Alemanni Germans (German Swiss) settled in
Alsace. |
|
In 453 Attila of the Huns died and Theodoric II
(453-466) became king of the Visigoths, until he was murdered by his brother
Eric (466-484), who succeeded him. This event was followed by the sack of
Rome in 455 by the Vandals. The fact of the matter was that the Vandals were
Unitarians. They destroyed the pagan idols given so-called Christian names
considering them an abomination and breach of the second commandment. The
term Vandalism comes from this act.
The destruction was in fact the biblical exercise of power in destruction of
heathen idols. |
451
CE |
The full doctrinal position holding the Holy
Spirit to be an equal part of the Godhead was not agreed upon until the
Council of Chalcedon. The role and function of the sons of God as messengers
and ministering spirits was reduced to the point that their existence had
become trivialized and the word angel ceased to be a descriptive function of a son of God in
execution of the plan of God. It had become an entity in
its own right, which achieved an inferior existence to the perceived
role of Messiah and the elect. This view served to elevate the Christology
and remove Christ from the creation at all levels in accordance with
Trinitarian dogma. This view was not the view of the early Church
and the term angel was simply seen
as a function of the sons of God. |
471
CE |
Theodoric the Great became king of the Ostrogoths
from 471-526. |
|
The Eastern Roman Emperors over that time were Theodosius II (d. 450), Marcian 450-457), Leo I (457-474). In 457 Childeric I (457-481) became king of the Salien Franks. In 460 the Franks captured Cologne. The Vandals also destroyed the Roman fleet of Cartagena in the same year. |
|
The conflicts throughout Europe were
basically over which tribe was to be entrenched in what fertile sector of
Europe. Whilst they were Unitarians they were also governed by uncommitted
avaricious men and that was their undoing. |
|
The last Western Roman Emperors over that period
from 461 were Severus (461-465); Athemius (to 467); Alybrius (to 473);
Glycerius (to 474); Julius Nepos (to 475); and Romulus Augustulus (to 476).
The Western Empire came to an end with the weakness of its rulers. The German
Odoacer (433-493) captured and executed Orestes at Placentia and then
executed his son Romulus Augustulus and was proclaimed king of Italy. |
|
Thus the Western Roman Empire
was brought to a close, with no established Catholic Church and no clear
policy over Europe. |
474
CE |
Suppression
of the Eastern Sects |
|
In 474 Zeno became Eastern
Roman Emperor (474-491). The Trinitarian schools were more extensively
developed in the Eastern empire from this time, with the Neo-Platonist model
being established by Proclus becoming head of the Platonic academy in Athens
in 476. The Trinitarian system had been formalized with the Council of
Chalcedon in 451. The Egyptian Coptic Divisions date from this time. In 483
Pope Simplicius was succeeded by Felix III (-492). In 484 his excommunication
of Patriarch Acacius of Constantinople led to the first schism of the Western
and Eastern Trinitarian churches (484-519). |
476
CE |
Gaiseric king of the Vandals sold eastern Sicily
to Theodoric king of the Visigoths. The Unitarians under Hunneric king of the
Vandals began to take measures against the Catholics, where they had been
exemplary in their tolerance until now, with the obvious exception of
idolatry. The Unitarian/Trinitarian disputes now began to introduce
persecution. The Trinitarian or Catholic/Orthodox faction had in the main
been weak and the Unitarians had sway. This was to change with the support of
the Salien Franks. |
481
CE |
The revolt of Vahan Mamikonian took place from
481-484 and this success secured religious and political freedom for Armenia.
This freedom also appears instrumental in helping the Sabbath-keeping church
become established with the Paulicians in the Taurus Mountains. The
Paulicians were still to be found in the East in the nineteenth century. This
group was still operational in the twentieth century. Their descendants,
numbering a million or more, were exterminated in the area
of Armenia after the First World War. There were perhaps between a
million and two million Sabbatarians exterminated after the outlawing of
Bektashi Islam after 1927. This process of extermination continued up on
through the Holocaust in Europe and on to 1953 and the death of Stalin. |
|
Childeric I died and was succeeded by his son Clovis (d. 511) who became the founder of the Merovingian power. In 484 Hunneric king of the Vandals was succeeded by his nephew Gunthamund (d. 496). In 486 Clovis defeated Syagrius the last Roman governor of Gaul. Rome no longer had power in Gaul. |
487
CE |
At this time also (487-493) the Unitarian
Ostrogoths began their conquest of Italy. Theodoric defeated the German
Odoacer on the Isonzo River and again near Verona (489). |
489
CE |
In 489 the Eastern Emperor Zeno destroyed the
Nestorian Christian school at Edessa and built the church of St. Symeon
Stylites around his pillar. In 491 the Armenian Church severed connection
with Byzantium and Rome and in 498 the Nestorians settled in Nisibis in
Persia. The church that settled from Jerusalem in Armenia was not Trinitarian
Diphysite and it was Sabbath-keeping. It also was the repository, at Edessa,
of the Aramaic texts and the Peshitta version of the Bible, until it was
suppressed. The Sabbath was spread as far away as China by the early church
from the East. See the paper: General Distribution of the
Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122). |
492
CE |
The popes at this time, from the death of Felix
III, were Gelasius (492-496); and Anastasius II (to 498) and Symmachus (to
514). Gelasius introduced the Gelasian
Missal, Book of prayers, chants and instructions for the celebration of
the Mass. |
493
CE |
Odoacer capitulated to the Ostrogoths and was
murdered by Theodoric who then founded the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy and
married a sister of Clovis. The Ostrogoths occupied Malta from 494-534. In
500 Thrasamund married Theodoric’s sister and was given western Sicily as a
dowry. |
498
CE |
The Nestorians settle in Nisibis in Persia. |
499
CE |
In 499 the synod of Rome issued a decree on papal
elections and, in 500, incense was introduced into the Trinitarian church
services for the first time in any Christian church. |
500
CE |
German Marcomanni in Bohemia invaded Bavaria and,
on their departure, the Czechs settled in Bohemia. |
510
CE |
Provence, the south-eastern part
of France, went to the Italian Ostrogoths until 563. These facts explain why
the Sabbatati were all over southern France, northern Spain, and northern
Italy. Christianity observed the Sabbath up until the fifth century and at
the time of Jerome (ca. 420) the
devoutest Christian did ordinary work on Sunday (Dr. White bishop of Ely,
Treatise of the Sabbath Day, p.
219; cf. Augustine of Hippo, NPNF First
Series, Vol. 1, pp. 353-354 and also the paper General Distribution of
Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122), p. 2). |
511
CE |
In 511 Clovis, king of the Franks, died and his
kingdom was divided among his four sons Theodoric I (d. 534); Chlodomer (d.
524); Childebert I (d. 558) and Chlothar (d. 561) and they established courts
at Soissons, Paris, Metz, and Orleans respectively. At this time also the
convent at St Césaire at Arles was established. Monasticism was also to play
a part in the Trinitarian expansions. |
523
CE |
In 523 Thrasamund king of the Vandals died and was
succeeded by Hilderic (to 530). In 524 Sigismund was killed by Chlodomer son
of Clovis I. The Ostrogoths erected the so-called Arian Baptistery now known
as the Baptistery of S Maria in Cosmedin, Ravenna in 525. However, in 526
Theodoric the Great died and was buried at Ravenna. His daughter Amalaswintha
became regent of Italy (to 534). |
|
Massacre of Arab Christians in Najran and Himyar
(Arabia) by Jewish Arab king. |
527
CE |
In 527 Justinian I became Byzantine Emperor (to
565) and a series of reverses and fluctuations were
to occur for the Goths and Vandals and hence the Unitarian church over the
period up until 590. It is the most important turn of European history that
the Franks became Trinitarians, as this fact helped to establish the Catholic
Church in Europe. Without the Franks they would have been nothing. We will
see this move now inexorably forward until the declaration of the Holy Roman
Empire from 590 CE and this empire was to last 1260
years until it was controlled in 1850 and the pope virtually imprisoned from
1870. |
|
|
|
Final Wars
to the rise of Islam and the Holy Roman Empire |
529
CE |
In 529 Justinian closed the 1,000-year
old Greek school of philosophy at Athens. This action was allegedly
directed at Paganism, but it forced the syncretisation of the Neo-Platonists
and effectively forced the professors to go to Persia and Syria where, from
the next year onwards under Chosroes I (531-579), Persia reached new heights
of learning. This was to move the centre of learning to what was to become
the Islamic world, when it formed in the next century in reaction to the
Trinitarian advances of Constantinople. |
532
CE |
In 532 the Franks overthrew the kingdom of
Burgundy, which had covered areas of France, Switzerland and Austria. Also the general Belisarius saved Justinian’s throne by
putting down the Nika revolt in Constantinople. He was recalled the previous
year after he had been dismissed for his defeat by the Persians.
Constantinople was then rebuilt. In 533 Belisarius overthrew the Vandal
kingdom and made North Africa a Byzantine Province. In 534 Toledo became the
capital of the Unitarian Visigothic kingdom in Spain (to 711). In 535
Belisarius occupied the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy and remained until 540.
This action allowed Provence to go from the Ostrogoths to the kingdom of the
Franks and Naples became part of the Byzantine Empire. |
539
CE |
From 539 to 562 the Byzantine Empire was at war
with Persia. The war enabled Totila of the Ostrogoths to end Byzantine rule
in Italy in 540 and become king in 541 on the death of his uncle Hildebad (to
552). In 546 Totila entered Rome (leaving again in 547). In that year Adouin
the Lombard founded the new Lombard dynasty and extended his reign beyond the
Save River. |
543
CE |
In 543 the writings of Origen were condemned by
edict of Justinian. Even though Origen had quasi-Gnostic tendencies, his
writings and Hexapla were also important. This act was part of the
consolidation of the anti-Sabbatarian Trinitarian dogmas in the East. The
Empress Theodora died in 548. |
550
CE |
In 550 Totila re-conquered Rome and the Unitarians
were back in power. In the same year the westward migration of the Turkish
Avars began and the Slav tribes settled in Mecklenburg. |
|
The Poles settled in
western Galicia, and the Ukrainians settled in eastern Galicia. In the same
year also, the Welsh were fully converted to Christianity by David and
Sabbath-keeping became entrenched in Wales, where it was not to be fully
expelled until the eleventh century. Married clergy continued until the
twelfth century there. Columban the Irish missionary in France and Italy
(550-615) also dates from this year. Bells were used in churches in France
for the first time from this year also marking the syncretic Trinitarian
influence through the Franks. |
551
CE |
In 551 the Ostrogoth navy was defeated by the
Byzantines. Totila king of the Ostrogoths was killed the following year by
the Byzantines under the eunuch Narses (c. 478-c. 573) at the battle of
Taginae. In 553 Narses then annexed Naples and Rome for Byzantine
and he was appointed Exarch of Italy, becoming the highest military and civil
authority. The throne of archbishop Maximian was also established at Ravenna
in this year. |
558
CE |
In 558 Clothar I son of Clovis reunited the
kingdom of the Franks which lasted until 561 when it was again divided under
his sons Charibert, Guntram, Sigebert and Chilperic. |
563
CE |
In 563 the Sabbatarian Celtic Missionary Columba,
established himself on the Island of Iona and began to convert the Picts. |
565
CE |
In 565 Justinian I died and was succeeded by his
nephew Justin II (d. 578). The Lombards then drove the Byzantines from
northern Italy to the south, but left them in
Ravenna. Audoin was succeeded by his son Alboin who, helped by the Avars,
destroyed the Gothic kingdom of the Gepidae on the lower Vistula and in 568
founded a Lombard kingdom in northern and central Italy. |
567
CE |
In 567 Leovigild king of the Visigoths (to 586)
drove the Byzantines from Western Spain and conquered all Spain in 585. The
Frankish kingdom was also partitioned in to
Austrasia consisting of Lorraine, Belgium and the right bank of the Rhine and
Neustria (France) and Burgundy. |
570
CE |
In 570 The Prophet Qasim ibn
Abdullah ibn Abdul Muttalib of Quresh at Becca/Petra (incorrectly named
Muhammad), the founder of Islam, was born. In 572 war
between Persia and the Byzantines broke out again and was continued under
Chosroes II after his ascension in 590 to 628, and Islam was established by
632. By 632 the political divisions that will ultimately lead to WWIII were
established. |
573
CE |
In 573 Clothar’s sons Chilperic and Sigebert went
to war. |
589
CE |
The
Council of Toledo is held. The Spirit is declared to be a progression from
the Father and the Son (Filioque: Roman Catholic). Thus, Trinitarians hold
the position contrary to scripture that the Son is a generation of the
Father, yet there was no point at which the Son did not exist. The same is
held to be true for the Holy Spirit. |
|
The
council also prohibits Jews from purchasing Christian slaves and enacted that
any Jew circumcising such a slave on the basis of
Genesis 17:12f. should forfeit him. |
|
Unitarian
Visigoths in Spain converted to Catholicism, declared state religion at
Toledo. 590-1850:
The 1260 years of the Church in the Wilderness |
590
CE |
In
590 Authari, king of the Lombards, was succeeded by Agilulf (d. 615) and pope
Pelagius II was succeeded by pope Gregory I called the Great. He declared the
Holy Roman Empire. Unitarianism is then persecuted by the so-called Roman
Catholic or Triune system. |
591
CE |
In
591 Columbanus (b. 543) arrived in Brittany from Ireland. |
597
CE |
Gregory
sent Augustine as missionary to England in 597 who baptized Ethelbert at Kent
and commenced the Catholic system in Britain. |
|
The
Church began to be persecuted and it came to be
largely outside of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was outside the reach of the
Orthodox church until the progressive conversion of the Unitarians or so-called
“Arians,” which lasted up until the eighth century and also
from the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire in 590. The persecutions of
the faith lasted over a period of time, which
encompassed the power and rule of the Holy Roman Empire from 590 to 1850. See
the paper: General
Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122). |
|
During the
1260 years from 590 to 1850 the Roman Catholic Church has built its theology
on false premises based on Greek Philosophy and pagan systems of worship.
Their adoption of the pagan calendar threw Trinitarianism into conflict with
every tribe and people that had, or read, or studied the Bible and the Law of
God. As a result, in order to preserve its
authority, it introduced national and international systems of persecution
and repression, which were to result in the extermination of millions of peaceful
law-abiding citizens over the continent of Europe and in Asia Minor (and
later in the Americas). Its incursions into the Middle East in the so-called
Crusades saw it inflame the hatred of Islam to the extent that it has now
polarized over half the world. The twentieth century has seen this war
advanced against a peaceful law abiding citizenry of
Europe, with the deliberate mass extermination and genocide of the Jewish and
Sabbath-keeping Christian people of Europe. This matter is further examined at
www.holocaustrevealed.org. |
|
The Sabbath in Britain
|
597
CE |
Catholicism was not
established in Britain until the conversion of the Angles by Augustine of
Canterbury. Ethelbert king of Kent was converted to Catholicism at Pentecost
597 (according to Butler, Lives of the
Saints, ed. Walsh, concise edn., p. 158) and many (some 10,000) subjects
were baptised (sprinkled) at the pagan midwinter Christmas fire festival of
597. The Christians of Britain were, up until that time, predominantly, if
not exclusively, all Sabbath-keeping Subordinationist Unitarians, who kept
the food laws and the Holy Days. They were not dominated by Rome until the
Synod of Whitby in 664 at Hilda's Abbey, where they submitted under duress. |
|
Columba of Iona kept the Sabbath and foretold his
death on the Sabbath, Saturday 9 June 597 (Butler, Lives of the Saints, Vol. 1, art. ‘St. Columba’, p. 762). Butler
says in his footnote that the practice of calling the Lord's
day the Sabbath did not commence until a thousand years later (Adamnan,
Life of Columba, Dublin, 1857, p.
230. This was also commented on by W.T. Skene in his work Adamnan's Life of St. Columba, 1874,
p. 96). (See the paper General
Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122).) |
600
CE |
Gregory commenced the program for the peaceful
conversion of the Jews. He then introduced picture books to replace the Bible
for the illiterate. The Gothic Bible dates from ca. 351. The Bible was
devalued, finally being effectively removed from the general
public by Rome until after the dispersal of the Holy Roman Empire in
1850. |
603
CE |
Lombards converted to
Roman Catholicism. Trinitarian Christianity penetrated the Russian people at
the end of the tenth century from the Greek Orthodox structure at
Constantinople. It may well be that this was entirely a political decision in view of the fact that the Khazars in the south and
through the Ukraine into Europe were all Sabbath-keeping Unitarians, both Jew
and Christian. So also were the Bulgars who came in
at the same time as the Huns in the tenth century. So also were the
Paulicians relocated in Thrace under Constantine Capronymous in the eighth
century and later by John Tsimiskes in the tenth century (see the paper General Distribution of the
Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122)). |
609
CE |
The Roman Pantheon was consecrated as the church
of S. Maria Rotunda. |
610
CE |
The prophet Qasim with the
council of the Muhammad begins preaching in Arabia. |
|
See the paper Christ and the Koran (No. 163) and Commentary on the Koran
Q001, Q001B and Q001D. |
613
CE |
The First Hejira under Jafir to Aksom, Abyssinia |
622
CE |
The Hejira. Flight of the prophet and the church
from Becca to Medina. |
741-775
CE |
Constantine Capronymous, Unitarian Emperor of the East,
invites the Paulicians to settle in Thrace. |
745
CE |
Council of Liftinae in Belgium in 745 in its third
allocution warns against the keeping of the Sabbath and refers to the Council
of Laodicea (ca. 366). |
|
The Sabbath
in Asia |
781
CE |
The Sabbath experience in Asia was predominantly
non-Trinitarian until the Jesuits began their missionary work. The
Nestorians, and the African missionaries (see the paper General
Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122))
followed the early church into Persia, India and then into China. Unitarian
Sabbath-keeping posed a serious threat to Buddhism and was outlawed by
Buddhism. The Sabbath-keeping churches in Asia were also, as a rule,
non-Trinitarian. They kept the food laws and also
denied confession and purgatory. The divisions of these churches followed, in
the main, from the Councils of Constantinople and Chalcedon. |
|
The Chinese had long experienced the Christian
system and, as elsewhere, the Sabbath was a sign of biblical literalism. In
781 it was already well established (see the paper General Distribution of the
Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122)). |
|
In 781 the famous China Monument was inscribed in
marble to tell of the growth of Christianity in China at that time. The
inscription of 763 words was unearthed near the city of Changan in 1625 and
allegedly now stands in the Forest of
Tablets at Changan. The extract from the tablet states: |
|
“On the seventh day we offer sacrifices, after
having purified our hearts, and received absolution for our sins. This
religion, so perfect and so excellent, is difficult to name, but it
enlightens darkness by its brilliant precepts” (M. l'Abbe Hue, Christianity in China, Vol. I, Ch. 2,
pp. 48-49). |
|
The Jacobites were noted as Sabbath-keepers in
1625 in India (Pilgrimmes, Pt. 2,
p. 1269). |
|
The Abyssinian Church remained Sabbath-keeping and
in Ethiopia the Jesuits tried to get the Abyssinians to accept Roman
Catholicism. The Abyssinian legate at the court of Lisbon denied they kept
Sabbath in imitation of the Jews, but rather in obedience to Christ and the
Apostles (Geddes, Church History of
Ethiopia, pp. 87-88). The Jesuits influenced King Zadenghel to propose to
submit to the Papacy in 1604, and prohibiting Sabbath worship under severe
penalty (Geddes, ibid., p. 311 and also Gibbons, Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 47). |
|
The Sabbath in Italy |
791
CE |
Allegedly, Ambrose of Milan kept Sabbath in Milan
and Sunday in Rome, hence giving rise to the saying when in Rome do as Rome does (Heylyn, op. cit., 1612). Heylyn
identifies the Church at Milan from the fourth century as the centre of
Sabbath-keeping in the West (ibid., part 2, para 5, pp. 73-74). It is thus
not surprising that the Sabbatati had their school there, as recorded under
the Vallenses at the time that Peter Waldo joined them. The Sabbath had been
observed in Italy for centuries and the Council of Friaul (c. 791) spoke
against its observance by the peasants at canon 13. "We command all
Christians to observe the Lord's day to be held not
in honour of the past Sabbath, but on account of that holy night of the first
of the week called the Lord's day. When speaking of that Sabbath which the Jews
observe, the last day of the week and which our peasants observe ... "
(Mansi, 13, 851). |
800
CE |
The Huns appear to have moved into the steppes,
becoming allies of the Khazars, and remained there until they occupied
Pannonia again after 800, with the now officially Jewish, Khazar support. The
possibility cannot be dismissed that the Sabbatarians in Transylvania
actually came in as part of the horde of the Huns from Khazaria and Levedia
and had been part of the Eastern church established from the beginning by the
apostles through the Parthian empire (cf. Grun, The Timetable of History, 3rd ed., Touchstone, 1991,
p. 30) (cf. also the foreword by Cox to R. Samuel Kohn, The Sabbatarians in Transylvania
(No. A_B2),
[1894], CCG Publishing, 1998). |
800-900
CE |
The Paulicians were defeated under Chrysocheir at
Tephrike but revived under Smbat in Armenia at Thondrak and hence termed
Thondrakians. Some are called Athingani in Phrygia and were referred to as
Melchizedekites by Timotheus of Constantinople (Reception of Heretics) and also
Selikians. |
|
Nicephorus (802-811) employed the Paulicians in
the protection of the empire on its eastern frontier. |
|
The Emperors Michael and Leo V ruthlessly
persecuted the Paulicians but they were too warlike
and well organised to be dragooned into orthodoxy. Theodora (842-857) exposed
them to even more violent persecution. |
|
The Athingani were in intimate relationship with
Emperor Michael II (821-829). |
970 CE |
Second relocation of the Sabbatarian Paulicians
into Thrace occurs under John Tsimiskes. |
1012
CE |
Persecution of “heretics” begins in Germany |
1064
CE |
Sabbath becomes a bitter dispute in the split of
1064 between western and eastern Churches. |
1095
CE |
Christians banned from Jerusalem. |
1096
CE |
First Crusade under Pope Urban II. |
1123
CE |
First Lateran Council in Rome forbids priests to
marry. Celibates take over the Roman Church, which rapidly degenerates
morally. |
1139
CE |
Malachy O'Morgair archbishop of Armagh (resigned
1138) goes to pope Innocent in Rome and petitions for palliums for the sees
of Armagh and Cashel. He was appointed legate for Ireland. He writes the List
of the Popes until the time of the end of the Roman Church. He returns via
Clairvaux under Bernard. There he obtains five monks under Christian, an
Irishman, and returns to Ireland and founds the Abbey of Mellifont in 1142.
See also The Last Pope
(No.288). |
1147
CE |
Second Crusade. |
1159
CE |
The British born Pope Adrian IV (Nicholas
Brekespear) on his visit to Beneventum is persuaded by John of Salisbury to
hand over Ireland to England under Henry II. The real purpose is to wipe out the
Quartodecimans still operating in Ireland from Cashel. Only priests from
Armagh are endorsed by Rome. Ireland is subjected to incredible barbarism
from this point onwards. The popes for four centuries claimed the
overlordship of Ireland based on Adrian's Donation. The basis of the handover
of what was Hibernia to England was done on the claim of Constantine's
establishment of the Roman Catholic Church: |
|
"At my solicitation
he gave and granted Hibernia to Henry II, the illustrious king of England, to
hold by hereditary right, as his letter [which is extant] to this day
testifies. For all islands of ancient right, according to the Donation of
Constantine, are said to belong to the Roman Church, which he founded.” |
1160
CE |
Peter Waldo becomes head of the Waldensians at
Lyons. Trinitarian historians mistakenly claim the beginnings of the
Waldensians with Peter Waldo in an effort to minimize
their beliefs and teachings; however, he was just following a long history of
Unitarian Subordinationist Christians dating from their conversion by
Polycarp and his bishops from Smyrna from 120 CE. The practice of identifying
leaders of the church over time as founders of separate churches is a common
Trinitarian tactic aimed at obscuring its continuity. |
1179
CE |
Waldensian Barbes interviewed by English monks prior to the Third Lateran Council
and condemned at the Council. The original Sabbatarian Waldensian system was
condemned as heresy. |
|
Third Lateran Council. The
Waldensians are condemned and the Inquisition
becomes established from following councils. The Albigensian Crusades are commenced. Sabbatarians are delivered up to be burnt
in large numbers from this time onwards. The Trinitarian Protestants were
also involved in the persecution of the church from the Reformation. |
1180
CE |
Waldensians (anti-Trinitarians right up until the
Reformation) were condemned with and under the general description Arianism in 1180 in the treatise by
Bernard of Fontcaude (Adversus
Vallenses et Arianos). See the paper The Role of the Fourth
Commandment in the Historical Sabbath-keeping Churches of God (No. 170). |
|
|
1184
CE |
A sentence of
excommunication by the Council of Verona
cleared the remaining followers of Waldo out of Lyons and drove them to
Provence, Dauphine, and the valleys of Piedmont, Lombardy, and some even to
Germany. So numerous had they become that Innocent III sent his best legates
to suppress them in the years 1198, 1201, and 1203. |
1189
CE |
Third Crusade. |
1190
CE |
Council of Genoa orders Waldensians to be
delivered up in chains to be burnt. Bernard of Fontcaude writes Liber Contra Vallenses. |
1190-2
CE |
Sabbatarians persecuted in England and the
Publiani or Pauliani were burnt at Oxford. |
1192
CE |
Bishop Otto of Toul ordered all Waldenses to be
delivered up in chains to the Episcopal tribunal. |
1202
CE |
Fourth Crusade. |
1206
CE |
Genghis Khan rules the Mongols. |
1208
CE |
Albigensian crusade begins, lasting until 1244 and
is the subject of the most ruthless suppression. 20,000 Albigensians
massacred as heretics at papal order. |
1210
CE |
Emperor Otho ordered the archbishop of Turin to
drive the Waldenses out of his diocese, and in 1220 the Statutes of Pignerol
forbade the inhabitants to harbour them. Some fled to Picardy, and Philip
Augustus drove them on to Flanders. Some came to Mayence and Bingen, where 50
were burnt in 1232 (Adeney, ibid.). (See the paper General
Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122).) |
1212
CE |
Children’s Crusade: few of the 50,000 French and
German children return. Most died or became slaves in North Africa. |
1221
CE |
Fifth Crusade. |
1228
CE |
Sixth Crusade. |
1229
CE |
The Inquisition in Toulouse, France forbids laymen
to read the Bible. |
|
The Council of Toulouse published canons against
the Sabbatati. |
|
Canon 3 - The lords of the different districts
shall have the villas, houses and woods diligently searched, and the hiding-
places of the heretics destroyed. |
|
Canon 14 - Lay members are not allowed to possess
the books of either the Old or the New Testaments (Hefele 5, 931,962). |
|
The
Inquisitions Begin |
1231
CE |
Pope Gregory IX designs the Inquisition in an attempt to deal with those labeled “heretics”. |
|
We know from the evidence of the Inquisitions what
the doctrines of the Church were at the various stages of its distribution. |
|
The Albigensian
Crusades |
|
Albigensian Crusades of the thirteenth century
consist of groups that were without doubt Sabbath-keepers. See the paper General
Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122). The desire of the Roman Catholic
Church to disguise this fact has led to some extraordinary claims regarding
the linguistic derivation of the name Sabbatati.
However, we also know that they were Unitarians. |
|
The entire Albigensian
crusade was leveled against both elements by Rome in the thirteenth century.
The Albigensians had protection in the south of France under Raymond Count of
Toulouse. The Vallenses or Sabbatati were the greater and more widespread, and extended into Spain. We can reconstruct
the doctrines of the Vallenses from the Spanish branch of the Sabbatati
because of the intense persecution they suffered. |
1237
CE |
Pope Gregory IX sends a bull to the archbishop of
Tarragona, which results in fifteen Waldensians, so called heretics by the
Roman Church, being burnt; King Ferdinand himself casting wood on the fire.
In the course of time these Spanish Waldensians are exterminated. |
1249
CE |
Seventh Crusade led by King Louis IX of France. |
1270
CE |
Eighth Crusade. |
1310
CE |
The Bohemian Sabbatarians numbered one-fourth of
the population of Bohemia who also abounded in Austria, Lombardy, Bohemia,
North Germany, Thuringia, Brabdenburg and Moravia. |
1315
CE |
Unitarians in Austria martyred and the Inquisitor
of Krems denounces 36 localities, burning 130 martyrs. The bishop of
Neumeister was burnt as one of these heretics in Vienna. He is said to have
declared that there were some 80,000 Waldensians in the duchy of Austria. |
1348
CE |
Flagelants (religious fanatics that
beat themselves with whips etc.) blame Jews (for Black Death plague) and burn
Jews throughout numerous cities in Europe. Sabbatarians are condemned as Jews
from this time on in Europe by all Trinitarian factions. |
1349
CE |
Persecution of Jews breaks out in Germany. |
1351
CE |
1347-1351 CE 75
million Europeans have died from Black Death (Bubonic plague?) |
1415
CE |
Bohemian reformer Jan Hus is burned at the stake
for heresy. |
|
The Orthodox
Persecutions of the Sabbatarians and Others |
1441-1905
CE |
The Orthodox Church in Russia and its adjacent
areas ruthlessly persecuted
religious dissent and attempted to exterminate all Sabbatarians
within their sphere of influence (see
above link for an informative look at the history of Monasteries as Prisons, the
Inmates Incarcerated there, Religious Dissenters and Sectarians, Political
Activists and Criminals, the Intolerance of Imperial Russia, and the Struggle
for Orthodox Supremacy) book by Daniel H. Shubin. |
|
The period covered begins 1441with arrival of Isidore, the metropolitan of Moscow, to the Moscow Chudov (Miracles) Monastery for incarceration. Russian Monasteries were used by the Orthodox Russian Church for the incarceration of religious dissenters and sectarians, political activists and criminals. |
|
From this time until the
edict of religious toleration of Tsar Nicholas II in 1905 CE., when the final
inmates were released from the Suzdal Spasso-Evfimiev Monastery, many
Sabbath-keeping Christians saw the last days of their lives in the dungeons
of these monastery
prisons. Many Sabbath-keeping Christian women were also imprisoned in
Orthodox convents. |
|
The
Sabbath in Northern Europe |
1436
CE |
Sabbatarianism
had been persecuted in Norway, from at least the Church Council in Bergen,
22 August 1435 and the conference in Oslo in 1436. People in different
places of the kingdom had commenced to keep the Sabbath-day holy and the
archbishop forbade it on the grounds that: |
|
It is strictly forbidden - it is stated - in the
Church-Law, for anyone to keep or to adopt holy days, outside of those that
the pope, archbishop, or bishops appoint (R. Keyser, The History of the Norwegian Church under Catholicism, Vol II,
Oslo, 1858, p. 488). |
|
Again we see the day of rest commanded by God
superceded by the day of rest commanded by man. |
|
Also at the
Catholic Provincial Council of Bergen 1435, it was said: |
|
We are informed that some people in different
districts of the kingdom have adopted and observed Saturday-keeping. |
|
It is severely forbidden - in holy church canon-
[for] one and all to observe days excepting those that the holy Pope,
archbishop, or the bishops command. Saturday-keeping must under no
circumstances be permitted hereafter further that the church canon commands. Therefore we counsel all the friends of God throughout all
Norway who want to be obedient towards the holy church to let this evil of
Saturday-keeping alone; and the rest we forbid under penalty of severe church
punishment to keep Saturday holy (Dip. Norveg, 7, 397). |
|
The
Church Conference at Oslo in 1436 stated: |
|
It
is forbidden under the same penalty to keep Saturday holy by refraining from
labour (History of the Norwegian Church
etc., p. 401). |
1458
CE |
Frederic
Reiser, after 25 years among the Waldensians of Bohemia and Austria, was
burnt at Strassburg. |
|
There
are thus at least four groups over some eight countries, some of which were
integrated with Protestants. There were Subordinationists, or Unitarians, in
Austria in the thirteenth century and (see 1315 CE above) the Inquisitor of
Krems denounced 36 localities in 1315, burning 130 martyrs. |
|
The Spanish
Inquisition |
1478
CE |
Pope Sixtus IV begins the Spanish Inquisition and
it continues until suppressed by decree in 1834 CE. |
1488
CE |
The Vaudois Christians inhabiting the Cottian and
Dauphinese Alps are slaughtered. Altogether there perished more than 3,000
Vaudois, including the entire population of Val Loyse, after taking refuge
from the advancing army in a cave. The Lord of La Palu had his men set fire
to huge piles of wood thereby suffocating the valley inhabitants inside the
cave. There were found in it 400 infants suffocated in their cradles or in
the arms of their dead mothers. |
|
The Sabbath
in Moscow |
1503
CE |
Council, Moscow, 1503: "The accused
(Sabbath-keepers) were summoned; they openly acknowledged the new (sic) faith, and defended the same. The most prominent of them,...were condemned to death, and burned publicly in
cages, at Moscow, Dec 17.1503-" H. Sternberfi, Geschichte der Juden.
|
1507
CE |
Church begins selling indulgences to pay for St.
Peter’s Basilica, Rome. |
1517
CE |
Martin Luther allegedly begins the
"Reformation" in Europe. |
1519
CE |
The Edict of
the Faith issued at Valencia by Andres de Palacio, Inquisitor to
Valencia, and has been published by Roth. It can be seen from that Edict that
there were a general series of facts and superstitions listed which
identified three groups of people. The first was the Christians who held to
the so-called Judaising tendencies. The second group was the Jews themselves
and the third group was the Muslims. It is obvious from the Edict that the
doctrines had penetrated the Roman Catholic Church itself as the words spoken
over the Eucharist were specifically identified as an indicator of the
alleged heresy in the Edict. Also the Cross, or the
Sign of the Cross, was not used by the Sabbatati. From an examination of the Edict it seems that the group denied the Soul and the
doctrines of Heaven and Hell. They observed the Sabbath from sunset Friday to
sunset Saturday doing no labour on the Sabbath. They celebrated the feast of
Unleavened Bread and Passover with bitter herbs. They fasted on Atonement
(Roth, pp. 77ff.). |
|
The general views and observance of the Jews were
included in the list as shown in the Edict so that the systems were run
together making it difficult to identify exactly the distinctions between
them. They kept the food laws and also buried their
dead according to the Jewish custom.
Much of the Edict includes superstitions attributed to the sects (e.g. p.
78). They denied Mariolatry and this was grouped with the Judaic denial of
the Messiah. |
|
The doctrine of Transubstantiation was denied, as
was the Catholic form of the doctrine of Omnipresence, which was Platonic
Animism (p. 78). The priests seemed to be involved and were identified from
the consecration. The Christians seemed to dress as Jews adhering to the laws
governing fabrics (p. 79). They met in house churches and read Bibles out of
the vernacular. The property of the heretics was confiscated
and this no doubt helped the zeal of the Inquisitors. |
|
Marranos or New Christians could not be accepted as witnesses in any proceedings. The withholding of the names of witnesses was introduced in the thirteenth century ostensibly to protect the weak against the powerful accused but this became the norm and none could find out the names of their accusers. (Roth correctly points out that even up to 1836 in England accused felons could not have counsel or see copies of the depositions made against them.) The times themselves were barbaric and the Inquisition was the worst of the barbarism. |
|
Eastern European Sabbatati |
|
We know precisely what the doctrines of the
Hungarian and Transylvanian churches were from the fifteenth to the
nineteenth century. The record was preserved by Dr Samuel Kohn, Chief Rabbi
of Budapest, Hungary in DIE
SABBATHARIER IN SIEBENBURGEN Ihre Geschicte, Literatur, und Dogmatik,
Budapest, Verlag von Singer & Wolfer, 1894, Leipzig, Verlag von Franz
Wagner. These points are listed in the paper General Distribution of the
Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122) at pp. 22ff.). The
entire structure is listed in the book translated from German: The Sabbatarians in Transylvania, by
Samuel Kohn, ed. W. Cox, CCG Publishing,
USA 1998 (see The
Sabbatarians in Transylvania (No. A_B2). |
|
We know for certain that
this branch of the Vallenses or Sabbatati was Unitarian for Frances David or
Davidis died in prison in 1579. Kohn says they restored the original and true
Christianity (Kohn, p. 8). The Unitarian church split into Sunday and Sabbath
worshippers in 1579. The Sabbath branch under Eossi was the more faithful to
the truth. |
|
They practiced adult baptism. They kept the
Sabbaths and Holy Days, including Passover, Unleavened Bread, Pentecost,
Atonement, Tabernacles and the Last Great Day and, most importantly, the New
Moons. Trumpets is not listed separately in the hymnal and appears to have
been celebrated with the hymns of the New Moon. |
|
Their doctrines encompassed the physical
Millennium of 1,000 years at the beginning of which Christ will return and
regather Judah and Israel. |
|
They used God’s calendar based on the New Moons. |
|
They taught two resurrections, one to eternal life
at Christ’s coming and another to judgment at the end of the Millennium. |
|
They
taught salvation by grace but that the laws still needed to be kept. |
|
They
held that God calls people and that the world in general is blinded. |
|
Their
doctrine of Christ was absolutely subordinationist Unitarian. |
|
(See
the paper General
Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122), p. 22ff.) |
|
It
can thus be seen that the early Sabbath Church was Unitarian, keeping the Old
Testament laws. The Sabbath was simply a facet of their belief system, which
pointed to the worship of the One True God. They were persecuted in East
Europe for their Unitarianism more than their Sabbath-keeping (Francis
Davidis chose to remain in prison, where he died, rather than compromise the
Unitarian faith, even though Socinus, himself a Unitarian, tried to persuade
him to modify his rigid Unitarianism to save his life). They were denied the
status of a church when even the Jews were accorded that status. They were
denied access to the printing press and thus made their sermons out by hand
in chain letter style. The Inquisition was ruthless in its suppression of
this system and, in the West, Sabbath-keeping alone
was enough to have them executed. |
1544
CE |
The
Church Conference at Oslo reissues the warning of 1436. |
|
It
is forbidden under the same penalty to keep Saturday holy by refraining from
labour (History of the Norwegian Church
etc., p. 401). |
|
Some
of you, contrary to the warning, keep Saturday. You ought to be severely
punished. Whoever shall be found keeping Saturday, must pay a fine of ten
marks (History of King Christian the
Third, Niels Krag and S. Stephanius). |
|
Thus it is evident, that Sabbath-keeping had become
entrenched in Norway, over the period of at least one hundred years. |
|
Sabbatarianism
and at least the understanding of the seventh day Sabbath were
also extant in Norway from the reformation, according to comments made in
notations or translations: for example see Documents and Studies
Concerning the History of the Lutheran Catechism in the Nordish Churches,
Christiania, 1893; and also Theological
Periodicals for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Norway, Vol. 1, Oslo,
p. 184. Sabbath-keeping spread also into Sweden and was suppressed
continuously. |
|
This
zeal for Saturday-keeping continued for a long time: even little things which
might strengthen the practice of keeping Saturday were punished (Bishop
Anjou, Svenska Kirkans Historis,
(after) Motet i Upsala). |
|
The
practice extended into Finland and King Gustavus Vasa I of Sweden wrote to
the people of Finland. |
|
Some
time ago we heard that some people in Finland had fallen into a great error
and observed the seventh day, called Saturday (State Library at Helsingfors,
Reichsregister, Vom. J., 1554, Teil B.B. leaf 1120, pp. 175-180a). |
|
Sabbath-keeping
Churches, however, remained extant in Sweden up until current times. |
|
We
will now endeavour to show that the sanctification of the Sabbath has its
foundation and its origin in a law which God at creation itself established
for the whole world, and as a consequence thereof is
binding on all men in all ages (Evangelisten
(The Evangelist), Stockholm, May 30 to August 15, 1863: organ of the Swedish
Baptist Church). |
1555
CE |
Many Protestants (and Sabbath-keepers) are burned
in England. |
1562
CE |
Lelius Socinius lived mainly at Zurich but was the
mainstay of the party, which met at Cracow. He died in 1562
and the anti-Trinitarians suffered disruption from this point. In 1570 the
Socinians separated and, influenced by John
Sigismund, they established at Racow. |
1566
CE |
Francis Davidis allegedly founds the Unitarian
Church in Transylvania. However the Waldesian system
was entrenched in the East for centuries before. |
1572
CE |
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: many Huguenots in
France are killed. |
1574
CE |
Catechism of the Unitarians issued in Poland. |
1579
CE |
In 1579 Faustus came to Poland with his uncle's
papers. He found the sect divided and was at first refused admission because
he would not submit to a second baptism. His first baptism must therefore
have been as an adult. In 1574 the Socinians had issued a Catechism of the Unitarians. The
nature and perfections of the Godhead were described but the document was
silent on the divine attributes, which were regarded as mysterious (by the
Catholics). Christ was held to be the promised man and the mediator of creation.
It is at this time we see the establishment of what is in fact radical
Unitarianism or the denial of the pre-existence of Christ. |
|
Faustus Socinius united the factions under himself
from 1579. He had been invited to Siebenburg (or Siebenburgen) to counteract
the anti-Trinitarian stand of Francis David (or Davidis) (1510-1579). David
died at Deva Castle where he had been imprisoned for his views on the nature
of Christ. The Church at Siebenburg after the death of Francis David was
headed by Andreas Eossi and this was the Church in East Europe of which the
members were the descendants of the Waldensians. We know without doubt that
they were Unitarian (often termed Arians by the Catholics). They kept the
Sabbath, Holy Days and New Moons and they were the true Church of God in
Europe, being what we would call the Thyatiran era (See the papers: General Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No.
122) and The Role of the Fourth
Commandment in the Historical Sabbath-keeping Churches of God (No. 170).) |
|
David had refused to
accept the peculiarly Socinian tenet that Christ, though not God, was to be
adored. The Church of God in Europe had never accepted that Christ was the
object of worship or adoration. The rejection of worship of Christ was the
consistent view of the Church of God over the centuries, including the
Waldensians of which the church at Siebenburg was a part. David was
imprisoned for this view and died in prison. Hugh Pope also notes that
Budnaeus was degraded for holding the same view as David and was
excommunicated in 1584. These two were thus converted to the
faith from so-called Orthodoxy. |
|
The Socinians at this time suppressed the old
catechism and issued a new one entitled the Catechism of Racow, which although drawn up by Faustus Socinius
was not published until 1605, the year after his death. It was first
published in Polish and then in Latin in 1609. |
|
The Socinians flourished. They established
colleges, held synods, and owned printing presses from which they produced
large amounts of literature. This literature was collected by Sandius under
the title Bibliotheca
Antitrinitarianorum. Faustus' works are collected in the work Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum. |
|
The Church of God at Siebenburg, on the other
hand, was denied the status of a church and denied a printing press. Eossi
wrote his work out by hand and it was copied by
assistants. |
1579
CE |
Unitarian church splits into two parts after the
death of Davidis; Sunday and Sabbath-keepers. Andreas Eossi accepted the
Unitarian faith in 1567. Not satisfied that the Unitarians were teaching all
the biblical truths, he set out to study the Bible thoroughly. He enjoined
the following doctrines upon his followers: |
|
1.The Passover, Days of Unleavened Bread,
Pentecost, [Trumpets omitted in error?] Day of Atonement, Feast of
Tabernacles, the Last Great Day. |
|
Note: the Feast of Trumpets was not
listed in the Old Sabbath Songbook under
its own feast. On pages 62-67 of Kohn’s book (published 1894) it is said of
the hymnal that: The hymnal was written in Hungarian by [Andreas] Eossi, Enok
Alvinczi and Johannes Bokenyi. Thomas Pankotai & Simon Pechi. ... It
consisted of 102 Hymns: 44 for the Sabbath, 5 for the New Moon, 11 for
Passover and Unleavened Bread, 6 for the Feast of Weeks, 6 for Tabernacles, 3
for New Year, 1 for Atonement, 26 for everyday purposes. See the The Sabbatarians in Transylvania
(No. A_B2) and The New Moons of Israel (No.
132). |
|
2.The Ten Commandments. |
|
3.The Health Laws (no eating of blood, pig,
strangled animals). |
|
4.The Millennium to last 1000 years, & at the
beginning of which Christ will return and regather Judah and Israel. |
|
5.The use of God's sacred calendar. |
|
6.Two different resurrections: one to eternal life
at Christ's coming; the other to judgement at the end of 1000 years. |
|
7.Saved by grace, but laws still need to be kept. |
|
8.It is God who calls people into His truth. The
world in general is blinded. |
|
9 Christ was the greatest
of the prophets, the most holy of all people, the "crucified Lord",
"the Supreme Head and King of the real believers, the dearly beloved and
holy Son of God." |
|
The Growth
of Unitarianism |
1600
CE |
With the Reformation, Unitarianism began to grow
and was not confined entirely to Sabbath-keepers. In other words, not all
Unitarians were true members of the Churches of God just as not all
Sabbath-keepers were true members. |
|
The term Unitarianism
is an English word which stems from the Latin unitarius and it was first used
of a legalized religion in 1600 (Encyclopedia
of Religion and Ethics (ERE),
art. ‘Unitarianism’, Vol. 12, p. 519). It is specifically founded on the
conception of the single personality of the Deity in contrast to the orthodox
doctrine of His triune nature. |
1604 CE |
In Ethiopia, 1604 AD, the Jesuits
influenced King Zadenghel to propose to submit to the Papacy "Prohibiting all his subjects, upon severe
penalties, to observe Saturday any longer."- Geddes’ Church History of Eithiopia, page 311 and also
in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, chapter 47. |
1608
CE |
The Pilgrim Fathers, who were Sabbatarian
Unitarians of the Brownist movement, flee from persecution in England to
Amsterdam Holland, later to Leyden and stayed there for almost 12 years (see The Dutch
Connection of the Pilgrim Fathers (No. 264)). |
1620
CE |
Mayflower lands at Plymouth Rock, New England. Pilgrim Fathers go ashore. They
are persecuted by the later Trinitarian arrivals in America. Within twenty
years they have to flee and form a new colony at
Rhode Island. They are subsequently persecuted ruthlessly in the US under the
later Blue Laws. |
1618
CE |
30 Years’ War commences with the Defenestration of
Prague. |
|
The Sabbath
in England |
1618
CE |
In 1618, a violent controversy broke out among
English theologians as to whether the Sabbath of the fourth commandment was
in force and, secondly, on what ground the first day of the week was entitled
to be observed, as the Sabbath
(Haydn's Dictionary of Dates, art. ‘Sabbatarians’,
p. 602). Mrs Traske, a teacher, was imprisoned in 1618 for fifteen or sixteen
years, at Maiden Lane, a prison for those in disagreement with the Church of
England. She had refused to teach on the Sabbath and would teach for only five
days a week |
1628
CE |
Despite English attempts to stop him Cardinal
Richelieu, Louis XIII's chief minister, took the French-Protestant stronghold
La Rochelle and destroyed the power of the Huguenots. |
1633
CE |
The Catholic church forces Galileo to say the sun
revolves around the earth (World
History Encyclopedia, Millennium Edition, p. 235). |
1638
CE |
In
1638 the Catholics insisted that the Socinians be banished. |
1642
CE |
Civil
War began between King and Parliament. From this time onwards, the religious
divisions saw the emergence of Unitarian theology in people such as Milton,
Isaac Newton and others. Cromwell became the symbol of those opposed to
Catholic domination and persecution. In 1645 it was declared a capital
offence to be Sabbatarian or Unitarian. |
1647
CE |
Charles I queried the Parliamentary Commissioners and
asserted that Sunday-worship proceeds directly from the authority of the
Church. |
|
For
it will not be found in Scripture where Saturday is no longer to be kept, or
turned into the Sunday wherefore it must be the Church's authority that
changed the one and instituted the other (R. Cox, Sabbath Laws, p. 333). |
|
The
assumption here is that to reject the papacy necessarily involves the changes
that rest entirely on the Councils of the Church for authority, such as
Sunday-worship. The logic places Protestantism on a dangerous footing. Milton
identified this logic and said: |
|
"It
will surely be far safer to observe the seventh, according to express
commandment of God, than on the authority of mere human conjecture to adopt
the first" (Sab. Lit. 2,
46-54). |
1648
CE |
Treaty of Westphalia brings an end to the 30 Years’
War. |
1661
CE |
Sabbath-keeping Unitarians became more highly
visible in England in the seventeenth century. |
|
The Sabbath in America
|
1664
CE |
Sabbath-keeping
incurred an almost enforced migration to America. According to Jas. Bailey,
Stephen Mumford, the first Sabbath-keeper in America came from London in 1664
(J. Bailey, History of the Seventh Day
Baptist General Conference, pp. 237-238). We know this to be untrue as
the Pilgrim Fathers were Sabbath-keepers and thus the founders of the
American colonies were Sabbatarian Brownists.
In 1671 the Seventh Day Baptists had broken from the Baptist Church in order to keep Sabbath (see Bailey, History, pp. 9-10). However, the Pilgrim Fathers were from a
Sabbath-keeping tradition (cf. the paper The Dutch Connection of the
Pilgrim Fathers (No. 264)). See also the paper General Distribution of the
Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122). |
1671
CE |
Stephen Mumford
(or Momford) organises the Seventh Day Baptists in Rhode Island.
|
1686
CE |
In 1686, the
year after the Edict of Nantes, Louis XIV sent a letter to his cousin, Victor
Amadeus II duke of Savoy, requesting that he
persecute the Waldensians, as he was persecuting the Huguenots, as they were
taking refuge among the Waldensians. When the persecution commenced, the
Swiss Protestants at Basle intervened, offering the Waldensians exile in Switzerland. The Swiss envoys managed, with great difficulty, to
persuade the Waldensians to accept this exile. On 9 April 1686 the duke
signed a decree permitting the exile. However, in spite of this, some who had accepted exile were seized
and imprisoned. The Waldensians resisted after this breach of the terms. War
commenced and by the end of the year, 9,000 were killed and 12,000 were taken
prisoner, many of whom died in the Piedmont dungeons. There were some 200
left in the mountains and they conducted such persistent guerilla warfare
that they finally obtained the release of all the surviving prisoners and
their safe conduct to Switzerland. 3000 survivors were released in 1687. They
set off across the Alps for Geneva (an average twelve-day journey), and many
perished in the snow. This was done despite the Swiss protest, and children
under twelve were detained to be educated as Roman Catholics. They were
dispersed as far as Brabdenburg, Prussia, Wurtemberg and the Palatinate, to
prevent their attempts to return. |
1716
CE |
Chinese Emperor bans teaching of Christianity. |
1738
CE |
Sabbath-keepers led by Count Zinzendorf in
Moravia. They moved to the USA in 1741. |
1789
CE |
The suppression of Sabbatarianism continues in the area of Romania, Czecho-Slovakia and the Balkans
and the Edict of Toleration by Joseph II did not apply to the Sabbatarians,
some of whom lost all their possessions. |
1808
CE |
Napoleon abolishes the Inquisition in Italy and
Spain. |
|
Roth records the opening of the Office in Lisbon
before it was made into the Opera House. The accounts from eyewitnesses
(printed in the Annual Register of
1821) show beyond doubt, that there were human remains found in the dungeons,
which were in use (from an inscription on a dungeon wall) as late as 1809.
These included monks whose garments were found among the human and other
remains lying in the tiers of dungeons and among the evidence of murder both
old and recent, committed there (Roth, pp. 84-85). |
|
Intervals of three to four
years between arrest and sentence were commonplace and in one recorded case
fourteen years elapsed. Pregnant women were dragged to the stake and the
abuse of prisoners, or perhaps interaction with them, prompted Cardinal
Ximenes in 1512 to threaten with death any official found carrying on
intrigues with their prisoners. The expense of the imprisonment was borne by
the accused no matter how long. One example of expenses incurred in the four-year
incarceration of a nun in Sicily, acquitted and released in 1703, was still
being paid off by her heirs as late as 1872 (Roth, p. 87). Normally, the
assets were confiscated at the time of arrest. |
|
Last Inquisition in the Papal States |
|
See link: The
Inquisitions of the Papal States |
1823-1846
CE |
The Last Inquisition took place in the years
1823-1846. It was not on the same scale as the previous Inquisitions simply
because this was limited to the Papal States and the population itself
limited the carnage. However, the brutality of it and the fear it engendered
in the populace was to bring the Holy Roman Empire to an end. |
|
The European Inquisitions began in the south of
France in the thirteenth century and ended in the Papal States in 1846.
Between 1823 and 1846, 200,000 people in the Papal States alone were
sentenced to death, life imprisonment, exile or the galleys, with another 1.5
million placed under surveillance (see Malachi Martin, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church, p. 254 and the paper General
Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122), p. 29
for quotes). Roth quotes the despair of the individuals from the outset in
the thirteenth century in the south of France. |
1850
CE |
1260 years or time, times and half a time from the
Establishment of the Holy Roman Empire under Gregory 1. The Inquisitions are
finally controlled. The Revolutions in Europe in 1848 bring an end to the
tyranny. The later people voted to join the Italian Republic
and the Holy Roman Empire came to an end. |
|
Sabbath keeping was also alive and well at the
time of the Taiping rebellion in 1850. |
|
See the paper General Distribution of the
Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122). |
1894
CE |
The Sultan, Abdul Hamid, first put forth an
official governmental policy of genocide against the Armenians of the Ottoman
Empire in 1894. Systematic massacres took place in 1894-1896 when Abdul
savagely killed 300,000 Armenians throughout the province. |
|
YThe Great Holocaust of the
Twentieth Century See link: Badges of
the Holocaust |
1901
CE |
The Australian Constitution declares religious
freedom. "The Commonwealth shall not make any law for the establishment
of any religion." |
1905
CE |
Edict of Toleration of Czar Nicholas ends the
centuries old Russian Orthodox Persecutions commenced in 1441. The growing
dissent is leading towards the Revolution, which is not far off, commencing
12 years later in 1917. |
1909
CE |
Turkish government troops kill over 20,000
Christian Armenians in the town of Adana alone. |
1914CE |
WWI -wars of the end begin. |
|
See the paper
The Fall
of Egypt The Prophecy of Pharaoh's Broken Arms (No. 036). |
1915
CE |
Next step of Armenian Genocide begins on 24 April
1915 with the mass arrest, and ultimate murder, of religious, political and
intellectual leaders in Constantinople and elsewhere in the empire. Then in
every Armenian community a carefully planned Genocide unfolded: Arrest of
clergy and other prominent persons, disarmament of the population and
Armenian soldiers serving in the Ottoman army, segregation and public
execution of leaders and able-bodied men, and the deportation of the
remaining Armenian women, children and elderly to the deserts. The Genocide
started from the border districts and seacoasts, and
worked inland to the most remote hamlets. Over 1.5 million Armenian
Christians, including over 4,000 bishops and priests, were killed in this
step of the genocide. |
1916
CE |
The Seven times or 2520
years of the Babylonian system from 605 BCE in the prophets Ezekiel (No. 036 and 036_2) and
Daniel (F027iv
and F027xiii)
reaches fruition with the slaughters on the Somme. The planned peace
agreement between UK and Germany for 1916 is shelved on the approaches of the
European Jews who guarantee they will obtain US assistance if the British
Empire continues WWI and declares the Jewish Homeland. UK agrees and
Australia recaptures Beersheba and Jerusalem in accordance with the
prophecies of Habakkuk (No. F021H) and
Haggai (F021J)
with the Australian Light Horse, and then all Palestine in 1917. The Balfour
Declaration is issued declaring the Jewish Homeland, and the Time of Jacob’s Trouble begins. It is
in two arms of forty years and carries on to 1996-7 with the end of the Time
of the Gentiles. The times of the Holocaust go over eighty years from
1941-1945 in the First Holocaust to 2021-2025 in the Second Holocaust from
the Wars of the Fifth and Sixth Trumpets and the Empire of the Ten Toes of
Daniel (F027ii). |
1917
CE |
Russian Revolution begins. The Russian Orthodox
now persecuted as they persecuted dissent before them. |
|
Balfour Declaration: Britain backs homeland for
Jews in Palestine. |
1920
CE |
Joan of Arc is canonized (declared to be a saint). |
1922
CE |
On 9 September
1922, the Turks enter Smyrna; and after systematically murdering the
Armenians in their own homes, the forces of Ataturk turn on the Greeks whose
numbers had swelled with the addition of refugees who had fled their villages
in Turkey's interior to upwards of 400,000 men, women and children. The
conquering Turks went from house to house, looting, pillaging, raping and
murdering the population. Finally, when the wind had turned so that it was
blowing toward the sea so that the small Turkish quarter at the rear of the
city was not in danger, Turkish forces, led by their officers, poured
kerosene on the buildings and homes of the Greek and Armenian sectors and set
them afire. Thus, any remaining live inhabitants of the city were flushed out
to be caught between a wall of fire and the sea. The pier of Smyrna became a
scene of final desperation as the approaching flames forced many thousands to
jump to their death or to be consumed by fire. |
1924
CE |
1260 years or a
time, times and half a time since the establishment of Catholic Trinitarian
hegemony over the British or English-speaking peoples at the Synod of Whitby.
|
|
Armenian
Holocaust involves 1 million or more killed. |
1927
CE |
The Paulicians
were still to be found in the East in the nineteenth century. This group was
still operational in the twentieth century. Their descendants and the
Christians of Armenia numbering a million or more were exterminated in the area of Armenia after the First World War to 1924.
There were perhaps between one million and two million Sabbatarians
exterminated or who simply “disappeared” after the outlawing of Bektashi
Islam after 1927. This process of extermination continued up through the
Holocaust in Europe and on to 1953 and the death of Stalin. |
|
Outlawing of the Bektashi Order in 1927 when the
Turkish State passes legislation prohibiting the Bektashi order of Sufi
Islam. Some 5 million people simply disappear at this time
and well over a million Sabbatarian Christians are among them. |
1932
CE |
The Ukrainian
Persecutions begin under Stalin and 12 million are killed. |
|
The
Sabbatarians under the Russians are sent to Siberia. |
|
Handover of the
first Camp to the Lutheran Diaconate at Hamburg in December 1932 by the
SA. See the link: Holocaust
Timeline. |
1933
CE |
Adolf Hitler
appointed Chancellor of Germany. The first official Nazi concentration camp
opens in Dachau. |
|
See the link: Camp
List |
1936
CE |
Rome-Berlin
Axis formed by Hitler and Mussolini. |
1938
CE |
Kristallnacht
(Night of Broken Glass). |
1939
CE |
WWII declared by the UK and British Commonwealth against Germany and Italy and the later Japan who entered on the Axis side. |
1941
CE |
Pearl
Harbor attack - America declares war on Japan and Germany. |
1944-5
CE |
Hitler commits suicide,
WWII ends. See
Timetable of the Holocaust 1933-1945: Holocaust
Timeline. |
1947
CE |
The
Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered in caves at Qumran, Jordan. |
1953
CE |
Joseph
Stalin dies. He
and the system he set up kills 65 million in the Gulags of the Soviets. |
1967
CE |
2300
evenings and mornings of Daniel chapter 8 (F027viii)
completed and Jerusalem unified and restored to Judah. |
|
|
|
6666666666The Last Days 6666666666 |
1978
CE |
Fortieth
Jubilee since Messiah and the 120th Jubilee since the fall of Adam;
and the expulsion begins. |
|
SDAs
officially become Trinitarian after their penetration and undermining from
the death of Uriah Smith and activities from 1931. |
1990-2001CE |
Ongoing war of extinction of Karen in Burma
because of their ancient-claimed links to the lost ten tribes. |
|
War of extermination of the Kurds continues
systematically. |
1994
CE |
On
7 April 1994, the then Hutu President, Juvenal Habariymana, was killed when
his plane was shot down. It has never been determined who was responsible for
the act but it is widely believed to have been the
work of Hutu extremists opposed to sharing power with the RPF. On the same
day in Kigali, a rump Hutu extremist government was proclaimed, and the
elimination of Tutsis and Hutu moderates began on a massive scale. While the
exact numbers will never be known, it is estimated that around 800,000 people
were killed in a period of about 100 days. The UN withdrew all but 270 of its
troops. Those that stayed had no mandate to intervene in the killings. The
scale and speed of the action has lead to a strong
belief that the killings were highly organized and politically motivated, and
that the death of the president was simply the justification for the killings
to begin. The UN had been informed some months earlier that large-scale
killings were planned but did not take any firm action on the advice. The Tutsi's that
were killed were thought by the mainstream Christian missionaries to be the
possible descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel, and also descended
from the Unitarian Ethiopian Coptic Church dating back to the conversion of
the Ethiopian Eunuch by Philip c.31-34 CE. See
link: Africa |
1995
CE |
Worldwide
Church of God announces Trinitarianism after penetration. |
|
See the paper Binitarianism
and Trinitarianism (No. 076). |
1996
CE |
End of the
Times of the Gentiles. 2000 years or 40 jubilees from the birth of Messiah. |
|
3000th
anniversary of David’s entry to Jerusalem. |
1997
CE |
Church of God
(Seventh Day) announces it is Binitarian and then Trinitarian in 1999. |
|
(The Seventh
Day Adventist movement was also predominantly and officially Unitarian until
1931 with the death of Uriah Smith and on to 1978). |
|
Theology
of the Churches of God was overcome by Binitarians/Ditheism and Trinitarian
heresy almost in total. Daniel’s prophecy almost complete in the overcoming
of the saints by Satan. CCG stands alone with the original doctrines of the
faith. See the paper The
Unitarian/Trinitarian Wars (No. 268) |
1987-2027 |
Measuring
of the Temple declared. |
1997-2027
CE |
Thirty Years of the end. See
the paper The Last Thirty Years: the Final Struggle (No. 219). |
1997-2028
CE |
Princes, Priests and
Prophets removed. See the paper Measuring the Temple (No. 137).
See also the sequence of the
wars in the series P141C, C_2, C_3, C_4; P141D, D_2, D_2B, D_3, D_3A, D_3B; P141E, E_2, E_2B, P141F, P141F_2, P141G, P141H. |
2028 The
Millennium Begins
The Jubilee occurs in the
years 24 and 74 BCE and 27 and 77 CE in each century. The next jubilee, the
fortieth jubilee since the ministry of Messiah and the forty-ninth jubilee
since the reconstruction of the Temple and the restoration of the Law under Ezra
and Nehemiah, is in the sacred year 2027/8. The year 2028 will start the
Jubilee of Jubilees and the new millennial reign of Messiah as 1/50 (See the
papers: Reading the
Law with Ezra and Nehemiah (No. 250); The Meaning of Ezekiel's Vision
(No. 108); Timing of
the Crucifixion and the Resurrection (No. 159); and Outline Timetable of the Age
(No. 272).)
God’s Calendar has stood
perfectly with His plan performed in accordance with that calendar for
millennia. It is perfectly in accord with His law. By accepting correction we seek first the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness (Mat. 6:33) and also eternal life by
knowing the Only True God and Christ whom He has sent (Jn. 17:3). It is the
desire of the Christian Churches of God that
God’s people hold fast to the instruction given by the Father, to Christ for
the Church as proven by the scriptures (IThes. 5:21), thus seeking complete
restoration.
It is obvious from the foregoing
history that the church has been systematically persecuted and destroyed and that the mainstream Christian system has become
drunk on the blood of the saints and martyrs over the centuries as prophesied
in Revelation. See the Commentary on
Revelation (No. F066iv) dealing with the 5th Seal
q