secret history

The secret history theory says that there is a secret history that the Catholic Church has covered up. If it ever came to light, it would expose the Church as the great lie that it is. So goes the theory. The name is mine, but the theory has been around long before I was born.

The theory does hold a certain attraction. It is at the heart of The Da Vinci Code and Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels. It is held by God-fearing Baptists and godless intellectuals alike. It was the first thing I thought when the gospel of Judas came out.

Although I admit its attractions, I doubt that it is true:

First, there is no proof. A theory needs proven facts. But this theory lives not on facts, but on ignorance. Look at what it says. So the more we find out, the more the Church turns out to be right and the less true the theory.

For example, it used to be assumed that the gospels were written centuries after the facts. They had to be since they were mere fables that no one could get away with while Jesus was still a living memory. But our best knowledge now says the gospels were written only thirty to sixty years afterwards!

Or take the Nag Hammadi library. It seems these were some of the very books the Church wanted to burn! But what do they say? Where is the secret? Where are the lies exposed? Instead of overturning our ideas of the past, it only fleshes it out. We find out that St Irenaeus had given us a true account of the Gnostics all along, one that the Nag Hammadi books merely filled in. We were missing the details but not the general facts.

In fact, the only people who are shocked or surprised by books like these are those who were ignorant what the Church has said. They have kept themselves in the dark, not the Church.

If you look you will find that the Church Fathers go on and on about what the heretics believed, both to attack the threat head on and to keep the faithful from losing their way. So there is no need to wonder or invent things. It is easy enough to look up.

Most of those who put forward the secret history theory just so happen to have a theory as to what that secret history was! And it just so happens to favour their own beliefs!

But there are no solid facts to back up their secret history. It is all made up, made up to fill the holes created by their own ignorance. Just like those monstrous creatures that used to fill the maps of the Atlantic before it became well known and quite ordinary.

Well, the past is just as ordinary and it can be known well enough for those who really want to know the truth.