Elvis, it's true that Rome has altered early church documents to support papal primacy. How do you know if the early church writings are reliable and not altered by Rome? Okay. That question, and I was trying to wreck my brain if this has been answered or rather asked before now, because when I first started reading the early Christian writings and telling people about them, that was the first thing I got hit with. Well, the Catholics, they've altered all of that stuff.
And then later, when I wrote my first book," Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up." Oh, I got asked that question in so many letters. People asked that. And it's a very good question. Of course, you should ask that. You know, a lot of people said," Well, the Bible being God's Word, we can believe that God protected it, but the early Christian writings aren't inspired, so we can't count on God necessarily protecting them." And I think that's valid as well. But there's good news.
We don't have to worry about have these writings been altered. And I'll tell you why. What the early Christians teach about the Trinity, and you've probably heard me talk about it before, if you haven't, on the historic faith, you know one of the topics is what the early Christians believed about the Trinity. And listen to that. But that only goes, I mean, that sums up what they believe.
But when you're reading their writings, they say all kinds of things because orthodoxy didn't depend on, oh, you say this word and you avoid this word. I mean, they say if you take a certain sentence here and there out of just about any of them, if you just take a certain sentence, in the fourth century, you would have been called a heretic because you said that. After the Council of Nicaea, it got extremely narrow what you dared say about the Trinity. It got absurd.
I love the spirit of early Christianity where there was freedom to talk about a subject without somebody you know jumping up, heretic, heretic. But that's the atmosphere you have, like I say, after the Council of Nicaea, 325, and they're on. So when you read these writings, it's like, there is no way a Roman Catholic would make these statements concerning the Trinity or concerning the begetting of the Son or something like that. I mean, that would be heresy.
I mean, you would be, well, in the early Middle Ages, you know put out of the church, disciplined in the center of the Middle Ages, you'd be put to death, burned at the stake, you know, whatever. No one would be making those. So it's nice. We have pretty much a guarantee. And virtually every writer talks about the Trinity is the nice thing. They're all talking about it. And it's obviously in language that would not be acceptable in post-Nicene Christianity, particularly in the West.
The question was the Roman Catholic Church, and Roman Catholics would not say this. Now, the Eastern Orthodox Church, their modern understanding of the Trinity is not very far from that of the pre-Nicene Christians, but still, they wouldn't make some of the same statements that they would be really careful how they phrase this particular statement or that one, where the early church, they just have the freedom to talk about it.
And everyone understood," Okay, we know what you mean." And maybe you didn't explain that quite right. So that's, I think, our biggest guarantee. But then other things, I mean, you know, there are some fake letters of Ignatius, for example, a whole bunch of them. There's a lot of fake gospels, but particularly the letters of Ignatius, I mean, they stand out as a sore thumb. I mean, you can go through there and pick out things. Like one of them is a supposed letter to Mary.
And, well, this is, you know, this is obviously post, not only post-Nicene, but post Council of Ephesus, which was 430. Because one of the things you see in the pre-Nicene writings is very little discussion of Mary, extremely little. And what is said is usually pretty much no more than what's said in the New Testament. So no Roman Catholic in the Middle Ages trying to doctor these up. They're going to stick Mary in there everywhere they turn, and she's not there. So that's another guarantee.
Some of the other things, there's no references to popes. I mean, you do in a few letters, there's encounters with the bishop of Rome, but everyone's not bowing down," Oh, the bishop of Rome says this." In fact, usually it's somebody disagreeing with the bishop of Rome and telling him to mind his own business or something. And then you have, in a lot of the writings, teachings on war, on the two kingdoms that would go totally against the post-Nicene Church.
And then again, if someone from the Middle Ages, even the early Middle Ages were doctoring these up, you'd have a lot of references to saints, to miracles, to things, you know, tying into relics and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it changed very fast after Constantine. So just because of those changes, it does set these writings apart. And it's one reason why the pre-Nicene writings don't have the same stature in the Roman Catholic Church as the post-Nicene writers.
And it's to a degree, not to the same extent, but to a degree, it's the same in the Eastern Orthodox Church. I mean, the big guys they look up to in the Roman Catholic Church, of course, Augustine would be the big ones, Athanasius. And people on, you know, beyond that, Ambrose, they don't pay a lot of attention to the pre-Nicene writers. I mean, when they're thinking of the fathers, they're thinking of post-Nicene writers.
And again, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, their big guys, John Chrysostom and some others, are post-Nicene. So like I say, because the pre-Nicene Christians are saying things that the post-Nicene Church didn't particularly like or appreciate. So that gives us a guarantee that we are reading authentic writings. Plus, no church has controlled these writings.
I mean, some of them have just been discovered, you know, in the early 19th or 20th century, often, you know, in a Coptic monastery or a monastery, you know, somewhere in the East, the Roman Catholic Church never even had control of these writings to be able to doctrine. And yet the new ones, like the Didache wasn't discovered until the late 1800s, it fits in seamlessly with the writings you know from the second century. So it's another guarantee that, yeah, nothing has been changed.
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