A Ptolemaic Against False Piety: Bearing False Witness Against Christ

History does not merely record belief; it records what belief authorizes. When reverence is genuine, it produces humility, restraint, and obedience to divine command. When reverence is false, it produces authority without mercy, and violence cloaked in sanctity. It is this latter phenomenon; piety weaponized, that demands examination.

The gravest crimes committed under Holy pretense have never arisen from devotion to Christ’s teachings, but from the assertion of religious authority divorced from them. Such authority does not deny God; it invokes Him relentlessly. It does not reject Scripture; it selectively wields it. And when challenged, it does not persuade; it coerces. Violence, in these cases, is not a tragic excess, but the logical outcome of a piety more concerned with control than obedience.

This necessitates a reversal of accusation. Like Ptolemy Philadelphus, who demanded that law be judged by its fruits rather than its claims, and like Tertullian, who exposed the injustice of his accusers by declaring, “we are accused of the very crimes you commit,” the Christian cannot accept a defensive posture imposed by bloodstained hands. The question is not whether the faith has been accused of cruelty, but whether cruelty has consistently been practiced by those who claimed to guard the faith.

For the charge has never been that Christianity, as taught and embodied by Christ, produces violence, sedition, or cruelty. Rather, history testifies; abundantly and relentlessly; that those who most loudly claimed exclusive piety became the most prolific perpetrators of violence, and did so while invoking Christ’s name. The issue, therefore, is not the presence of religion, but the corruption of it.

The historical record stands as a witness. Acts and Monuments (commonly called Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) is John Foxe’s sixteenth-century historical work documenting persecutions of Christians from the early Church through the Marian burnings in England. The title is deliberate: “Acts” denotes judicial actions; proceedings, trials, examinations, and sentences; while “Monuments” signifies the witnesses themselves, the martyrs whose deaths stand as enduring testimony. The work is not merely a chronicle of deaths nor an appeal to emotion; it functions as a forensic archive, a ledger of punishments and executions carried out by religious authorities who claimed holiness while practicing brutality. By preserving the charges, procedures, and outcomes in the words of the persecutors themselves, it documents what occurs when sacred language is used to sanctify murder; and in doing so, it renders judgment without embellishment.

What follows is not an attempt to inflame, but to indict; not to defend belief, but to measure it. For any piety that requires blood to preserve itself has already confessed its falseness, and any authority that kills in the name of Christ stands condemned by the Christ it invokes.

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The First Martyrs and the False Charge Against the Faith

The first Christian martyrs did not die because Christianity produced disorder, violence, or moral corruption. They died because the faith refused to worship the gods of the state (dead men), sanctify imperial power, or subordinate conscience to command. For nearly two and a half centuries, Christians were subjected to punishments whose variety reveals not justice, but obsession; executions designed not to correct crime, but to eradicate a name.

As Tertullian argued with forensic precision, punishment presupposes guilt, yet no coherent crime was ever proven. Christians were not convicted of theft, rebellion, or bloodshed. They were condemned for refusing idolatry, for confessing Christ, and for obeying God rather than men. This is why the methods of execution were theatrical and excessive: when law has no crime, it substitutes terror.

Scripture had already named this pattern. “They hated me without a cause” (John 15:25). The martyrs did not introduce a new violence into the world; they absorbed the world’s violence without returning it. Their constancy under torture did not testify to fanaticism, but to the power Christ promised when He said, “Fear not them which kill the body” (Matthew 10:28).

The first and decisive proof of this lies not in the martyrs themselves, but in Christ. He is the archetypal martyr; not as a political rebel, but as the Innocent condemned by legal process, religious authority, and popular consent. He is executed to preserve order, accused of blasphemy by theologians. In Him, false piety and state power are already exposed as capable of murder while claiming righteousness.

“Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.

No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.” John 10:17–18

From Christ to His earliest followers, the charge remains consistent and unanswered: Where is the crime? Rome could invent punishments, but not guilt. It could destroy bodies, but not refute doctrine. And so, as Tertullian observed, persecution itself became evidence; not against Christianity, but against its accusers. “The blood of the martyrs,” he argued, “is seed,” because truth does not require the sword to survive, while falsehood inevitably reaches for it.

Thus the early martyrs stand as a standing rebuke to all religious violence. They reveal that when authority resorts to torture, it has already lost the argument; when piety demands blood, it has betrayed God. The martyrs did not die to prove Christianity true by suffering, but to prove their persecutors false by killing.

On the Proto-Martyr and the First Condemnation of False Piety

The first executions carried out against the followers of Christ expose a principle that remains constant wherever religious authority mistakes itself for divine judgment: false piety cannot endure unanswerable truth. When doctrine is defended by force rather than persuasion, it has already confessed its own bankruptcy.

The earliest witness was condemned not for impiety toward God, but for fidelity to Him apart from institutional control. He was charged with blasphemy precisely because his teaching could not be refuted. This alone is sufficient for judgment. As Tertullian argues, accusation without demonstrable crime is not law but pretext; punishment without proven guilt is not justice but fear.

The logic of the accusers condemns them. They claimed to defend the holiness of God, yet violated His own law: “Thou shalt not bear false witness” and “Thou shalt not kill.” They appealed to Moses while transgressing Moses. They claimed zeal for heaven while acting from rage on earth. By their own standard, they stood guilty.

Scripture itself anticipates and indicts this pattern. “Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?” (Acts 7:52). The question is not rhetorical; it is judicial. It establishes continuity between sacred violence and false religion. The moment authority suppresses truth by force, it aligns itself not with God, but with those who killed His messengers while claiming to serve Him.

The vision confessed at the moment of judgment completes the reversal. Earthly courts condemned; heaven vindicated. The accusers claimed custodianship of the Law, yet the Lawgiver stood in defense of the accused. This is the decisive exposure of false piety: it speaks endlessly of God, yet cannot endure His presence.

What followed only confirms the indictment.The attempt to extinguish the testimony revealed its power. As Scripture declares, “The word of God is not bound” (2 Timothy 2:9). Bloodshed is the last refuge of those who have lost authority over conscience.

The same reasoning applies to the apostles who followed. They were eliminated not for crimes against society, but for allegiance that could not be subordinated. Their executioners appealed to law, to stability, to tradition; but these are the very categories Scripture uses to judge them. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). The fruit of their holiness was blood.

Thus the first martyrs stand not merely as examples of courage, but as permanent accusations. They demonstrate that religious murder does not arise from excess devotion, but from devotion displaced; from obedience to God toward preservation of power. Any piety that requires death to defend itself has already declared itself false.

Foxe’s record preserves this not as sentiment, but as evidence: again and again, those who claimed to act for God resorted to false testimony, coercion, and execution, while those they killed prayed, forgave, and committed themselves to God . The contrast is theological, not merely moral.

The First Imperial Theology of Murder

Rome did not persecute Christians because it had proven them guilty. It persecuted them because it needed them guilty.

This distinction is decisive. The violence unleashed against the early Christians did not arise from investigation, evidence, or law, but from the preservation of imperial authority through scapegoating. Rome’s crime was not cruelty alone, but the sanctification of false accusation as public policy.

Tertullian’s legal reversal applies here with full force: punishment without trial is confession of fear. Rome claimed to rule by law, yet abandoned law the moment it threatened power. It claimed to defend order, yet manufactured chaos to preserve its image. It claimed moral authority, yet resorted to spectacle and terror.

The reasoning of the persecutors condemns them. Christians were blamed not for acts committed, but for calamities endured. Fire, famine, plague, and unrest; events beyond human control; were attributed to a people whose defining characteristic was refusal to flatter the gods of the state (dead men deified through ritual).

Scripture anticipates and judges this logic: “The wicked walk on every side, when vileness is exalted among the sons of men” (Psalm 12:8). When power cannot bear responsibility, it invents enemies.

Rome’s accusation was theological in form but political in substance. The Christians were charged not with violence, but with disloyalty; refusal to sacralize the empire. The true offense was not impiety toward God, but impiety toward Caesar. Thus Rome revealed its theology: the state as divine, dissent as blasphemy, obedience as salvation.

Measured against its own claims, the empire fails. A system that advertised law and procedure carried out executions without establishing guilt. A culture that praised discipline relied on punishment meant to be seen rather than judged. A religion that claimed to maintain civic order organized public life around deliberate killing. The spectacle was not incidental to the system; it was how authority was displayed and reinforced.

Scripture again supplies the verdict: “They call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). The persecuted were innocent; the accusers were incendiaries. The Christians were blamed for a fire they did not light, while the true author sought absolution through murder.

Cruelty alone is not the decisive charge. Beast Empires (see book of Daniel and Revelation) that rule by domination have always been violent. What distinguishes Rome is not that it inflicted suffering, but that it redefined virtue in order to justify it. The central crime is not excess, but inversion. Acts that should have discredited authority were presented as its highest expression. Justice was invoked where fear governed. Piety was claimed where cruelty was rewarded.

This inversion exposed a deeper failure. Violence did not achieve its stated ends because it could not. Persecution did not eliminate belief; it stripped belief of all pretense and left only conviction. The attempt to govern conscience by force did not weaken the truth; it revealed how little confidence power had in its own claims. Killing became an admission that persuasion had failed, that authority no longer trusted reason, law, or the pagan gods and idols it professed to serve.

Tertullian identified this fault line with precision. The necessity of bloodshed was itself evidence of falsehood. What is true does not require violence to endure; what is false eventually depends upon it. Each execution therefore functioned not as a defense of order, but as a public confession that the system enforcing it could no longer justify itself by any other means.

Foxe’s record preserves this logic without commentary. Across cases and centuries, the pattern does not change. Christianity was not answered by argument, corrected by law, or defeated by reason. It was met with force, because force was all that remained. In this way Rome exposed itself progressively: first as unjust, then as irrational, and finally as morally void of the very standards it claimed to embody.

Rome did not act as a custodian of order, but as an authority attempting to preserve supremacy by suppressing conscience. Its violence was not devotion to the divine, but anxiety over losing control. And in turning to blood as its final defense, it left behind a permanent record; not of strength, but of disbelief in its own legitimacy.

Whenever power resorts to killing in order to survive, it announces to history that it no longer believes the truth of what it claims to represent.

Jerusalem Laid Waste: When Power Makes War on God

The destruction of Jerusalem and the desecration of the Temple cannot be dismissed as collateral damage of war. It was a theological crime, and its perpetrators knew it. Rome did not merely defeat a people; it assaulted holiness itself, and then sanctified the theft as victory.

By every measure Rome claimed to uphold; law, order, reverence for sacred custom; the act stands condemned. The empire prided itself on respecting the gods of conquered nations, yet here it stripped a sanctuary not for survival, but for spectacle. Sacred vessels were not secured; they were paraded. What had been consecrated to God was absorbed into imperial vanity. This was not governance; it was ritualized blasphemy.

Scripture speaks with precision: “The nations have come into Thine inheritance; Thy holy temple have they defiled” (Psalm 79:1). This is not lament alone; it is indictment. For God does not treat the profanation of holy things as neutral history. Theft from the sanctuary is theft from God Himself. Rome therefore stands not as executor of judgment, but as usurper of divine prerogative.

Nor can Rome plead ignorance. The empire understood sacred space. It guarded its own temples fiercely. The decision to violate Jerusalem was deliberate. It was a declaration: power now judges holiness. In that moment, Rome revealed its true theology; not tolerance, but domination.

And yet the deeper crime lies here: the Jews were not destroyed for rebellion alone. They were destroyed because their existence testified against idolatry. Their law, their refusal to deify power, their insistence that God cannot be represented, controlled, or absorbed into empire; this was the true offense. Thus the Temple had to fall, because it proclaimed a God who answers to no Caesar.

At this point the charge reverses entirely. What Rome labeled obstinacy was in fact fidelity to God. What it described as preservation of peace was the breaking of covenantal obligation. What it called order was the suppression of obedience that refused to yield conscience to power. Scripture calls it “the trampling of the holy city” (Daniel 8:13).

This same logic; unchanged, merely baptized; reappears wherever ecclesial power treats the Jewish people as a theological inconvenience rather than as bearers of irrevocable calling. When the modern papacy confined Jews to ghettos, sanctioned forced conversions, seized property, restricted professions, and theologically branded them as cursed witnesses to their own displacement, it did not transcend Rome. It repeated it.

And here there is no escape.

For the Church confesses that the Law and the Prophets are God-breathed. It reads Moses, Isaiah, and the Psalms as Scripture. It confesses that Christ Himself was born under that Law, worshipped in that Temple, and declared its sanctity. To then degrade the Jewish people is not merely moral failure; it is doctrinal self-annihilation.

Scripture closes every loophole:“God hath not cast away His people whom He foreknew” (Romans 11:2).“The gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:29).

Any theology that treats Jewish suffering as divine necessity therefore accuses God of perjury. Any institution that weaponizes Christ against His own people places itself under the curse of the prophets it claims to honor. “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).

The papacy cannot retreat behind time, nor behind later apologies, nor behind claims of doctrinal development. Doctrine that permits degradation of the image of God is not undeveloped; it is false. And repentance that does not name the crime does not absolve it.

The pattern is now undeniable:

• Pagan Rome destroyed the Temple and stole what was God’s.

• Baptized Rome claimed Christ and did the same in principle; by stripping a people of dignity while reciting their Scriptures.

Both assumed authority to judge whom God had not rejected. Both mistook power for permission. After what was done to Christ’s followers, to the Jews, and to the martyrs, the claim must be tested. Who made the pope Christ’s representative? Not Christ, and not the Father. Scripture grants no such commission. The Creed defines no such office. The apostles exercised no such power.

Christ appointed witnesses, not rulers over conscience. Authority claimed without mandate is not succession but assumption. And authority exercised in contradiction to Christ’s commands cannot originate from Him, regardless of the name it uses.

Representation is proven by conformity. Power that relies on coercion and violence does not represent Christ’s kingdom, but the imperial logic He rejected.

Tertullian’s verdict applies without remainder: those who claim God’s authority while violating God’s commands testify against themselves. When Rome destroyed what God called holy, it declared itself not servant, but rival. When the papacy inherited that posture, it inherited the guilt.

The conclusion is unavoidable and final:

Any power; imperial or ecclesial; that wages war on what God has consecrated does not act as His agent, but as His adversary. And no amount of incense, vestment, pomp, gold or tradition can cleanse hands stained by sacrilege masquerading as holiness.

Rome the “Civilizer”: Barbarity Baptized as Order

Rome justified its conquests by a lie so audacious it required repetition to survive: that violence committed by power is civilization, while resistance to power is barbarism. This lie is not accidental. It is the necessary theology of empire.

The charge Rome leveled against others; savagery, disorder, impiety; returns upon Rome with greater force the moment its actions are measured rather than its claims. For what is barbarity, if not the normalization of cruelty under law? What is savagery, if not the conversion of human suffering into policy? Rome did not merely practice violence; it codified it, aestheticized it, and then named it virtue.

The arena exposes the nature of Roman power. Public killing functioned as indoctrination. Repeated exposure trained citizens to accept suffering as normal and to participate through approval. Violence was not incidental but taught, reinforced, and absorbed into civic life. A society that conditions its people to take pleasure in public death does not restrain cruelty; it produces it. Scripture names this condition directly: “They delight in violence” (Psalm 11:5). When violence is learned and rewarded, judgment follows.

Yet Rome claimed to civilize the world. It called conquered peoples “barbarous” while importing their captives to die for sport. It claimed moral superiority while refining methods of torture. It named itself guardian of order while ruling by terror. This inversion is the hallmark of false authority: it defines good by power and evil by resistance.

This logic did not die with pagan Rome. It was baptized.

When later Rome invoked apostolic language to justify conquest; asserting that Christ granted jurisdiction to divide the world into parcels, peoples into property, and lands into inheritance; it did not elevate its violence; it theologized it. The claim that spiritual authority entitles temporal domination is not an extension of Christianity; it is a reversion to imperial idolatry with Christian vocabulary.

According to the Nicene Creed; the Church’s own boundary of orthodoxy; authority rests not in a monarch over the earth, but in “one holy catholic and apostolic Church,” confessed without mention of universal temporal supremacy, territorial jurisdiction, or papal lordship over nations. The Creed grants no charter for empire. It authorizes no division of the world. It sanctifies no sword.

The absence is decisive. What is essential to the faith is named; what is absent is excluded. Supremacy over kings, lands, and peoples is not merely undeclared; it is uncreedal. To insist upon it is to add to the faith what the faith itself does not confess.

Scripture tightens the noose. Christ explicitly rejects worldly dominion: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Peter is rebuked for the sword, not commissioned with it. The moment ecclesial authority claims the right to conquer, it abandons apostolic succession for imperial succession.

Thus the hypocrisy stands exposed. Rome condemned others as barbarous while practicing conquest by terror. It claimed to civilize while enslaving. It invoked Christ while violating His commands. It appealed to Peter while contradicting the Creed that bears his apostolic witness. This is not development of doctrine; it is displacement of obedience.

The Requerimiento 1513; briefly stated; functions here as confession rather than justification: a declaration that refusal to submit to Rome’s claimed spiritual authority warranted dispossession and death. This is not evangelism; it is ultimatum. It does not call nations to repentance; it demands capitulation. And Scripture has already named such speech: “You lord it over them… it shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25–26).

Rome’s barbarity therefore lies not only in what it did, but in what it claimed God authorized it to do. To call others savage while enforcing conversion by threat is to invert the Gospel. To claim holiness while dividing the world by fiat is to replace Christ with Caesar.

The judgment is unavoidable: barbarity is not defined by lack of culture, but by lack of restraint. Rome had culture, law, liturgy; and no restraint. Those it conquered often lacked power, not humanity. History records who killed, who suffered, and who claimed God while doing so.

By its own standards; creed, canon, and Scripture; Rome stands condemned. The empire that named others barbarous revealed itself as such. And the Church that inherited its logic without renouncing it inherited its guilt.

No authority that requires blood to prove its holiness can claim Christ. And no claim of supremacy absent from creed, Gospel, and apostolic practice can bind conscience without bearing witness against itself.

The Fifth Persecution: When Law Confesses Its Own Falsehood

By the time of the fifth imperial persecution, Rome could no longer pretend ignorance. The charge against the Christians had been tested, repeated, revised; and found wanting. What remained was not misunderstanding, but deliberate injustice sustained by habit.

The logic of this persecution is revealing precisely because it is thin. Christians are no longer accused of secret crimes, but of existence without permission. They are punished not for acts, but for refusal; refusal to conform, to sacrifice, to acknowledge the divinity of power. The crime has been reduced to identity. This is the moment when law ceases to describe wrongdoing and begins to police conscience.

A state confident in its foundations does not fear dissent that bears no arms. A religion secure in its "gods"(souless deified men) does not require coercion. Rome’s violence, therefore, is not evidence of strength, but of theological insecurity.

“And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.” Revelation 18:23

God removes His light from those who claim divinity for themselves through false worship and sorcery.

Tertullian’s reversal applies with surgical precision: that which must be enforced by death has already failed to persuade by truth. The empire punished Christians not because they harmed the common good, but because they exposed the fiction upon which it rested; that peace flows from ritual compliance rather than justice.

Rome boasted of law as its highest achievement, yet in this persecution law is detached from evidence. No inquiry is required. No crime need be proven. The mere confession of faith suffices for condemnation.

Scripture had already named this corruption: “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees” (Isaiah 10:1). The fifth persecution is not an excess of zeal; it is the institutionalization of unrighteous law. Rome does not punish evil; it defines obedience as evil when obedience belongs to God alone.

Christians are accused of atheism because they refuse false gods. Yet Rome’s own theology is exposed as idolatrous: it demands worship not of the divine, but of the state’s image of the divine. The emperor becomes priest; sacrifice becomes loyalty test; religion becomes census.

Rome cannot escape by appeal to tradition. Antiquity does not sanctify injustice. Nor can it appeal to order, for order that requires blood to maintain itself is already disordered. Scripture closes the defense: “The throne of iniquity shall not have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law” (Psalm 94:20).

What, then, was Rome defending? Not the gods; for the gods demanded nothing but ritual. Not justice; for justice requires proof. Not peace; for peace does not rise from terror. Rome was defending its monopoly on ultimate allegiance. The Christians’ refusal to sacrifice was intolerable because it declared that Caesar was not lord.

Thus the fifth persecution exposes Rome’s final confession: it killed because it could not compel worship. And in doing so, it revealed itself as the very thing it accused the Christians of being; impious. For to demand what belongs to God is the definition of sacrilege.

The verdict therefore stands. Rome’s law condemned itself. Its logic inverted justice. Its persecution did not preserve the sacred; it desecrated it. And by making conscience a capital offense, the empire testified; before heaven and history; that it had abandoned both reason and righteousness.

The Christians did not undermine Rome. Rome undermined itself. For no power survives long once it declares war on the human soul.

If the logic of imperial violence was rebaptized rather than destroyed, then the reign of Mary Tudor is its clearest English manifestation. Here the language of salvation was finally perfected as an alibi for murder. The claim was not merely that error endangered society, but that burning the faithful was an act of charity. This is where false piety reaches its most blasphemous form: the assertion that Christ saves souls by fire administered by His servants.

Let the crimes be stated without rhetoric.

Hugh Latimer was condemned for denying transubstantiation, rejecting the mass as a repeated propitiatory sacrifice, and insisting that Scripture; not priestly decree; was the rule of faith. For this, he was stripped, bound to a stake, and burned alive. Yet this condemnation collapses under the authority Rome itself claims to uphold. The Nicene Creed contains no doctrine of Aristotelian metaphysics, no language of sacerdotal power to recreate Christ’s sacrifice, and no warrant for treating the Eucharist as a new offering of Christ’s body. The Nicene fathers speak instead of thanksgiving and prayer. As the canonical excursus states, “The sacrifice of the Supper… is nothing but a sacrifice of prayer.” This places the Eucharist within worship, not coercive metaphysics.

More decisively, the Nicene understanding of canon explicitly forbids doctrinal invention. Canon, as defined by the fathers, is not a license to innovate but a boundary to preserve what has already been received. It “represents the element of definiteness in Christianity,” distinguishing the fixed rule of faith from later disciplinary regulations. To execute a man for rejecting a doctrine unknown to the Creed, undefined by the councils, and imposed centuries later is therefore not the defense of catholic faith but its violation.

Latimer was not executed for denying Christianity. He was executed for refusing to submit to theological additions that postdate the Creed while being enforced as if they were apostolic. By the standard of Nicaea itself, the crime lay not with the one who appealed to the received rule, but with those who demanded assent beyond it; and enforced that demand with fire.

Nicholas Ridley was condemned for denying the real corporal presence, rejecting papal authority, and refusing to affirm the mass as a propitiatory sacrifice. He was burned alongside Latimer. Their deaths were public, slow, and intended as warning.

If supremacy were truly granted by God, it would not require the stake to defend it. Authority that comes from heaven does not tremble before ink and parchment. Scripture is explicit: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” It says nothing of papal vengeance, nothing of fires lit to preserve truth, nothing of killing men to protect doctrine. One is therefore left to ask where this authority was written; if not in Scripture, not in the Creed, and not in the practice of the apostles. Power that must burn dissenters to survive has already answered the question.

Neither the Nicene Creed nor the Nicene canons articulate papal supremacy, universal jurisdiction, or a singular monarch over the Church. The Creed names no pope, grants no supreme see, and establishes no Petrine monarchy. What it confesses is one catholic (meaning Universal) and apostolic Church, governed through episcopal order, not papal sovereignty.

Scripture itself undermines the charge. The authority symbolized by the keys is not exclusive to Peter. Christ grants binding and loosing to all the apostles (Matthew 18:18; John 20:23), and Peter never exercises solitary jurisdiction over the Church. No apostolic text identifies him as universal bishop, pontiff, or supreme ruler. The title pontifex maximus belongs to Roman imperial religion, not the Christian Gospel.

The Nicene canons are explicit and decisive. Episcopal authority is conciliar and provincial, not monarchical. Canon IV states that a bishop is to be appointed by the bishops of the province, with confirmation by the metropolitan. Canon VI reinforces this structure, declaring that episcopal legitimacy depends on communal consent, not unilateral appointment. Authority flows horizontally through the episcopate, not vertically from a single supreme office. Nowhere is supremacy vested in Rome; nowhere is obedience to a pope required as a condition of catholicity.

To condemn Ridley for rejecting papal authority is therefore to condemn him for refusing a doctrine unknown to Scripture and undefined by Nicaea. His execution did not defend the catholic faith; it enforced later claims as if they were apostolic. By the standard of the Creed and its canons, Ridley stood within the received order of the Church, while those who killed him acted outside it.

His death was not punishment for heresy against the ancient faith, but coercion in service of an authority the ancient Church never recognized.

Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned not for treason against the crown, but for doctrinal nonconformity. His crime was authoring reforms, supporting Scripture in the vernacular, and denying Rome’s supremacy. He was imprisoned, psychologically broken, induced to recant, then executed anyway. His right hand; the hand that signed the recantation; was thrust into the fire first. This was not correction; it was vengeance.

John Rogers was condemned for preaching justification by faith and translating Scripture.

Tertullian’s Apology appeals directly to Scripture, which defines justification as grounded in faith, not in works imposed by authority.

He was burned while his wife and children stood nearby, including an infant. His crime was obedience to conscience and fidelity to Scripture.

John Hooper was condemned for rejecting clerical vestments, denying the authority of Rome, and preaching against the mass. His execution was prolonged due to poor materials. He prayed aloud while burning. His crime was theological clarity.

Rowland Taylor was condemned for refusing to affirm transubstantiation and papal supremacy. He was burned in his parish, where he had served faithfully as pastor. His wife and children witnessed his death. His crime was shepherding according to Scripture.

John Bradford was condemned for preaching repentance, justification by faith, and rejection of Rome’s authority. He was burned alive, forgiving those who condemned him. His crime was pastoral faithfulness.

Agnes Prest, a blind woman, was condemned for refusing to affirm the mass. She was burned alive. Her crime was refusing to lie.

Alice Driver was condemned for denying transubstantiation. When asked why she refused the doctrine, she appealed to Scripture. She was burned alive. Her crime was literacy and conscience.

Thomas Hawkes was condemned for rejecting Rome’s doctrines. While burning, he lifted his hands until they were consumed, signaling faith to the crowd. His crime was steadfastness.

These were not isolated cases. Foxe records hundreds more; artisans, laborers, women, the elderly; condemned for the same offenses. The charges repeat with mechanical precision. The punishments never vary. The system did not seek repentance; it sought submission or death.

“And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication…

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” Revelation 17:4–6.

Now the accusation must be turned, and it must be turned decisively.

Which of these crimes warrants death under the law of Christ?

Christ commanded baptism, not burning. Christ commanded teaching, not coercion. Christ commanded correction, not execution. Christ commanded forgiveness, not fire.

If denying transubstantiation merits death, then Christ Himself must answer for never teaching it. If rejecting papal supremacy merits death, then Peter must answer for never claiming it. If translating Scripture merits death, then the apostles must answer for preaching in common tongues.

The claim that these executions saved souls collapses immediately. Christ never taught that truth is preserved by killing its witnesses. Scripture never authorizes the Church to destroy bodies to correct belief. On the contrary: “The servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men” (2 Timothy 2:24).

What then was preserved by these deaths?

Power. Uniformity. Indoctrination in childhood, and Institutional control.

This is not Christian discipline. It is Roman discipline wearing Christian language.

The same logic that once demanded incense to Caesar now demanded assent to Rome. The same empire that once punished refusal to sacrifice now punished refusal to conform. The same machinery;accusation, trial, confession, execution; continued uninterrupted. Only the vocabulary changed.

And now the call is for interfaith dialogue. On what terms? Scripture remains the final authority for those who still take it seriously; not an institution that preserved itself through coercion, bloodshed, and false claims to divine mandate. The faith was delivered once to the saints, not revised by empire, not expanded by decree, and not enforced by fire.

Those who hold to apostolic Christianity do not submit conscience to imperial theology. They do not exchange Scripture for dogma introduced centuries later. They do not pray to the dead, attribute authority where none was given, or bow before objects fashioned from dead matter as though holiness could be transferred by touch. They do not confuse remembrance with invocation, or veneration with obedience.

This is not extremism. It is continuity. It is adherence to what was received, not accommodation to what was imposed. And if fidelity to Scripture, rejection of invented authority, and refusal to sanctify violence still provoke outrage, then nothing has changed.

History has already shown how dissent of conscience is answered by power. The stake has always been the final argument of those who cannot persuade.

This is why the claim of holiness becomes blasphemy. To say that Christ authorized these acts is to attribute to Him what Scripture attributes to His enemies. “They shall kill you, thinking they do God service” (John 16:2). Christ did not excuse this behavior. He condemned it in advance.

The martyrs did not die because Christianity failed. They died because Christianity threatened imperial control. Their deaths expose the lie that the Church ever possessed divine warrant to kill in Christ’s name.

History renders the verdict without appeal. Those who burned the faithful did not act as shepherds, but as executioners. They did not guard the flock; they devoured it. They did not preserve the Gospel; they testified against themselves.

And the martyrs; burned, silenced, erased; stand now as witnesses not against Christianity, but against every power that dares to wear Christ’s name while repeating Rome’s crimes.

Their blood does not cry for revenge. It cries for truth.