Roman Catholic Church Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.

The Surprisingly Long History of the Conspiracy Theory that Ancient Rome Didn’t Exist

Despite the fact that I am currently twenty-two years old, I do not have an account on TikTok and I have no intention to create one. It often feels like I’m the only person my age who doesn’t have one, but I don’t mind because I’ve never really been one to follow the crowd. I have, however, over the past week or so, encountered a large number of classicists and ancient historians online discussing a conspiracy theorist named Donna Dickens who uses the TikTok handle “momllennial_” who is apparently attracting an enormous amount of attention on that platform by making absolutely ridiculous claims about ancient history. Their most recent such claim is that the ancient Romans never existed and they were totally invented as “a figment of the Spanish Inquisition’s imagination.”

Right now, all the historians, classicists, and archaeologists who are on TikTok seem to be busy debunking Dickens’s claims. I, however, am not going to try to debunk their claims, because other people are already doing it and, frankly, anyone who knows anything at all about Roman history and literature, the Latin language, archaeology, scientific dating methods, or historical methods in general can easily spot the patent ridiculousness of the things they are claiming.

Instead, I want to do something very different from what I have seen anyone else doing; I want to talk about the history of the conspiracy theory that ancient Rome didn’t exist. Believe it or not, Dickens is not the first person to promote these assertions. In fact, they are actually peddling a conspiracy theory that originated with a reactionary Catholic Jesuit in the seventeenth century CE.

Did Medieval Christians Really Crucify Heretics?

There seems to be a very popular misconception that, in Europe during the Middle Ages, fanatical Christians went around crucifying anyone they suspected of heresy. This trope of medieval Christian crucifixions seems to be especially common in television shows with anti-religious agendas, where the writers are eager to portray medieval Christians in the worst possible light.

It’s easy to see how this misconception might have arisen. After all, medieval Christians did talk a lot about crucifixion because of the crucifixion of Jesus and they do have a well-earned reputation for dealing harshly with those accused of heresy. In historical reality, though, crucifixion was never used as a form of punishment by Christians in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Was Giordano Bruno Really a “Martyr for Science”?

There are two main historical figures that are often cited as supposed “martyrs for science.” The first is the Neoplatonic philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, who was murdered in March 415 AD by a mob of Christians who supported Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. The second is the Italian mystic Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive on 17 February 1600 by the Roman Inquisition.

Hypatia was a real scientist (or at least proto-scientist), but she was murdered for reasons entirely unrelated to her scientific work. As I discuss in this article I published in August 2018, all the surviving contemporary sources indicate that Hypatia was murdered due to her involvement in a bitter political feud between Orestes, the Christian Roman governor of Egypt, and Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. Hypatia was one of Orestes’s major allies. Her murder was basically a political assassination.

Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, was not a scientist at all and he was executed for reasons entirely unrelated to science. Ironically, by insisting on calling him a “martyr for science,” Bruno’s admirers are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by destroying their own credibility.

The So-Called “Vatican Secret Archive” Isn’t Very Secret

There are all kinds of conspiracy theories floating around about what the Roman Catholic Church might be hiding in the notorious Vatican Secret Archive. Many people believe that the Secret Archive may hide secret, incriminating information about the origins of Christianity—or certainly at least shocking revelations about the history of the Catholic Church.

As it turns out, though, there’s not really anything “secret” about the so-called “Vatican Secret Archive”; its location is shown on every map of the Vatican and it is actually surprisingly easy to gain access to it. Indeed, thousands of scholars and journalists are allowed to access it every year. To gain access, you just have to prove your qualifications and provide a decent explanation for why you want access.

Were Cats Really Killed En Masse During the Middle Ages?

The Middle Ages always seem to be the most misunderstood period in history. I wrote an article in May 2019 debunking a number of popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages, but now I think it is time for me to debunk another. There is something of a widespread notion these days that, in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church hated cats because they associated them with witches and that they instigated a massive pogrom to exterminate them. Supposedly, according to the major proponents of this story, this mass killing of cats either resulted in the Black Death or promoted the Black Death’s spread across Europe.

I will admit that my hands are not entirely clean here, since, when I was a freshman in high school, I gave a presentation in one of my classes about the Black Death in which I claimed that people during the time of the Black Death blamed cats for the disease and killed them, thus inadvertently allowing the disease to spread further. Since then, however, I have learned better. The idea people in the Middle Ages killed cats en masse is a misconception. Although some people in the Middle Ages may have killed cats occasionally, the idea of a massive pogrom instigated by the Catholic Church that resulted in the spread of the Black Death is 100% pure fantasy.