EP 06 - The Real-Life Magisterium

‘She will be called a man’ (Jerome)

- Episode 06 -

The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

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'She will be called a man' (Jerome)

19 November 2025

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The real life magisterium: the secret history of the ROMAN Catholic Church

EPISODE 6 - 'She will be called a man' (Jerome)

Hilarious petition (closed with only 143 signatures) to make Charlemagne a saint again! as a reward for making the Vatican a separate state. It says 'Decision maker Pope Francis'!

Not a single original manuscript from the ancient world

We have literally not a single surviving literary manuscript from the ancient world – Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ignatius, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or anyone else. All we have are later copies, and translations, and translations of copies of edited versions of translations of copies.

In fact, we have hardly anything at all from before the eighth and ninth centuries.

Church records are no exception. By the AD580s monks were complaining that they just couldn’t read any of the old texts. So, of course, they were using them to light their fires. By the AD740s the church councils were openly saying that they knew of no documentary continuity with the past.

But in the eighth century the Merovingian and Carolingian kings needed to justify their newly proclaimed Holy Roman Empire. On Christmas Day AD800 Charles the Great - Charlemagne - had himself crowned by Pope Leo III. It was the symbolic seal on their new alliance - joint authority (of church and state) over Europe.

They had sent the monks to find old documents to back it all up. The historian Michael Edward Moore says the intention was to ‘reimagine Christian antiquity as a time of sacred origins, when the ancient fathers wrote with perfect clarity and authority.’

Of course, the only documents they ‘found’ – in other words allowed to survive – were the ones that backed up the authoritarian politics of church and state. Don’t imagine for a moment that the work of any author who defended the spirit-filled egalitarianism of the first church would have survived.

#118 'She will be called a man' (Jerome) - Ep 6 The Real-Life Magisterium: the secret history of the Roman Catholic Church

The 'Church Fathers' in an 11th Century miniature from Kievan Rus. As we show in Ep 5 Church Father Athanasius was a wealthy and unscrupulous urban mafioso

So what about the 'Church Fathers'?

For a very long time, classicists and theologians simply turned a blind eye to the problems with the evidence they were using. It was all they had, and anyway it was written in fine classical Latin or Greek, so who were we, like snotty schoolboys, to question it? All those texts by the 'Church Fathers' (Clement, Irenaeus, Ignatius, Eusebius, Athanasius, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine) have a reassuring look of solidity and served as a comforting basis for theological studies and learned articles.

But over the last couple of generations there has been a turn towards a much more forensic – not to say professional - examination of the old texts.

The historian Bernice Kaczynski concludes that the whole notion of the ‘Church Fathers’, the early writings that somehow deserve special respect, only began to coalesce in the 9^th century as manuscripts drifted from the remains of what had been the Roman Empire, northward across the Alps. Many were in fact preserved in Ireland.

Historians Bernhard Bischoff and Birgit Ebersperger reckon that, from the ninth century, there might be 8000 surviving manuscripts across Europe. Others went east, where, around Constantinople at least, Roman institutions clung on in one way or another until the 15^th century. But much of this stuff was fragmentary, and virtually every last scrap was a copy or a translation.

Furthermore, Bischoff once guessed that what we now have is probably only about a sixth of what existed even in the 9^th century. And here is the key point. The survival of documents might be random. But it was certainly often not. What now survives from the Roman Empire – and the Church in particular - only tells one, heavily redacted, medieval version of the past. The reason is that it was all carefully sifted and sorted and censored with a strongly political motive.

'‘When she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man’ - Jerome (Church Father)

Jesus in early Christian art is beardless and effeminate.*

'She will be called a man' (Jerome)

The elite of the late Roman empire had a view of gender very different from our own. According to Eric Stewart, the American historian of religion, male and female genders were believed to be as much about behaviour as what then passed for biology. A man became a man by penetrating. He was unmanned by being penetrated.

Which goes a long way to explaining why the gang of wealthy men that took over the church in the 4th century decided that virginity could make women at least acceptable in junior religious positions. Jerome wrote ‘when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man’ (and therefore presumably could be ordained)

The historian Dyan Elliott coolly concludes her fascinating book by saying that from the 4th century onwards, ‘an individual’s reward in the afterlife was considered to be at least partially determined by his or her sexual past…. It was advanced that virgins would receive a hundredfold reward in heaven, chaste widows only sixtyfold reward, and the married a thirtyfold reward.’

From this point in the 4th century onwards, of course, most of the evidence of women’s earlier importance in the church disappeared because the men in charge suppressed all the documents they did not want anyone to see. The point is that you can’t draw theological conclusions from any of this mess. It all looks pretty cynical and pecuniary. At best it reflected the habits of secular society at the time.

But you’d need to be an historian to work all that out and, as we have seen, the Vatican does not believe in them.

*For more on the androgynous Jesus in early Christian art see Dr Ally Kateusz

The skull of St. Valentine on display in a glass reliquary at the Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome

'Dem bones, dem bones... '

The poor left no documents. But there’s now a surprising amount we can say about them, chiefly from archeology. And it’s a pretty sobering picture for a church that was formed – as we have discovered the Catholic Church to have been - in the fourth century AD.

Excluded from the new basilica designed for the clergy and the rich, the poor went off to develop their own version of Christianity. They did what they’d always done, visiting their dead in the graveyards around the towns (as they still do in Mexico and some places in Eastern Europe).

In Rome and elsewhere many their ancestors' graves were in underground passages and had rooms decorated with feasts. (We talk more about the catacombs in our podcast. Read historian Ramsay MacMullen on ‘the second church’.) Most feasting was in fact done above ground. Some graves had tubes down which you could send a shot of your deceased ancestor’s favourite tipple.

All this did not pass unnoticed in the smart new basilicas in the town centre. From the middle of the 4th century, therefore, the bishops began discovering the bones of martyrs – often those killed in the persecution at the beginning of the century – so that they could attract the poor to visit their holy dead in the new basilicas, presumably when the clergy and rich had gone home.

Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was the most notorious trader in relics. Already rich he was able to build a vast hall to house those relics he hadn't sold - and called it the Ambrosiana.

If the poor wanted bones – or, for example, candles to light as they always had back in pagan days – well, Ambrose could provide both at a price. And hence a whole new trade in martyrs, relics (and candles) was born. It is, of course, still very much with us.

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