mdo757 said:
I went to a Adventist website and this is what they say: "The Meaning of the Little Horn:
- The Little Horn was different from all the others in that it had eyes
and a mouth and spoke boastful words. It also caused three of the other
horns to fall. History records the rise in power of "Papal Rome" in the
fourth century AD. This was completely different from any other kingdom in
that it was an ecclesiastical (church) power rather than a political power.
The power of the Catholic Church stretched beyond national boundaries and
was only opposed by three of the ten kingdoms mentioned above, the Heruli,
the Vandals and the Ostrogoths. These were eventually defeated by the power
of Papal Rome in 493 AD, 534 AD, and 538 AD respectively."
Well, I expect an Adventist site to say such things. And as expected, the author of the article made a number of claims without providing a single shred of historical evidence. For instance, the article claims that the papacy was
"only opposed by three of the ten kingdoms", referring to the Arian beliefs of the Heruli, Vandals, and Ostrogoths. But the author doesn't seem to realize that the Visigoths, Sueves, and Lombards that he mentioned earlier were also Arians. So if we go by his line of reasoning, the papacy was actually opposed by six of the ten kingdoms, and continued to be “opposed†by three of them even after the fall of the “Heruliâ€, Vandals, and Ostrogoths.
What's even worse is the fact that Odovacer's kingdom and the Ostrogothic kingdom were two of the only Germanic nations in Europe who did
not persecute Catholicism, while the Visigoths and the Lombards were guilty of persecuting Catholics even up to the time of Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the 6th Century.
If you take the time to read books on the Germanic invasion of Europe, you'll quickly discover that Odovacer and Theodoric actually went to great lengths to honor the papacy and to strengthen the Catholic Church throughout Italy, and yet this guy has the nerve to say that the "Heruli" and the Ostrogoths were
opposed to the papacy? To those of us who have studied that period of history, such claims really are ridiculous. And again, he makes the same tired, baseless claim that the tribes were
"defeated by the power of Papal Rome", of course failing to substantiate that idea with anything of substance. I’m willing to guarantee that whoever wrote that article hasn’t spent more than five minutes with their nose in a history book of the Roman Empire, and he is simply repeating the same baseless theories and interpretations that were handed down to him by earlier Adventist commentators.
In Christ,
Acts6:5