The Letters of Pope Agatho & Pope Hadrian A Dialogue with Erick Ybarra & Craig Truglia

[Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] for [Laughter] [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] for of [Music] everybody how you guys doing? Thank you for joining me. I have two highly esteemed guests, uh, on the channel, good friends of mine, Eric Ibara, Craig Trulia. Thank you guys both for coming on to talk about this topic, um, uh, regarding the letters of Popes Agatho and Hadrian. Both of you guys are authors of books about the papacy. The links for both of their channels and their books are in the description. Please check them out. Uh, two amazing books on the papacy, one way or the other. Uh, and I'm really excited for this. Thank you guys. Thanks to both of you for doing it on my channel, letting me moderate. I really appreciate that.

Uh, oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. I just got to say, did I miss St. Cyril or St. Ephraim? Because I saw St. Isaac in the, uh, opening, and I saw Jacob of Serug and a bunch of other people, but I didn't see Cyril or, or Ephraim.

No, they were both there. They were there. I knew it had to be. I just, yeah. My comment is that, uh, Iara ripped off my hat. Oh, look at that. Yeah, it's in the reverse today. You know, it's, I don't know. Go without a hat. This is the reason theology reunion. At least we brought the hat, so we got a hat here. Uh, open invitation to Mike Lofton. Let's do this thing.

Absolutely. Greg, it's funny you mention that. We just did another a show on Eric's channel like a week or so ago, another reunion, nostalgia thing with, uh, Elijah Yi and William Albre. We were all there, so it's funny these are happening more and more. Uh, and again, this is really exciting. I don't have, kind of, a direction for the show, uh, planned because you guys are the experts on the topic. On on the centuries, as you guys both know, it's non-applicable to me. So, I, I want to let you guys kind of have a normal discussion or conversation like two people sitting having a cup of coffee, something like that, you know? So, however you guys would want to start. But before we do, I want to point out something. Elijah Yasi, the guy, he's like, he, I think we share a sense of humor. While the prayer is happening, I picked that prayer in the intro 'cause it's a very beautiful prayer. I can send you guys a translation. But look what he says in the comments. He goes, "Perfect music for a Latin." And I was just gonna say, "You better send me a translation." Absolutely. He goes, "Pretty sure this chant has RC and EO St. Condom nations." It does not. It's, that would be something, wouldn't it? The lines, Den selling out. They're branching out in topics they used to not branch out in to try to. I'm going, we're gonna have, we're gonna have videos of Subdeacon Daniel, like, "Subdeacon Daniel visits a Bible Baptist Church." And it's like the thumbnails, you doing this. And then so everyone's gonna go, "Wait, is he converting to be a Baptist?" And then you visit an Assyrian Church, like, "Wait, he's becoming an Assyrian." And you just get more and more subscribers.

All right, okay. Let's do it. Let's get in it. So, Pope Agatho, he wrote a letter, um, in Constantinople, 680, right? He wrote a letter to the Synod. And then Pope Hadrian does the same thing in Nicaea, 787. So, we're gonna talk about those two letters and their roles in those Synods and what the implications are. Is that correct? Is that the correct premise?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, like I said, um, when, whatever he'd like, you know, whatever Craig wants to talk about, you know, I, I started off last week with a small, you know, blog post on the issue of statues. I know that was a long time ago. I didn't see your video up on that anymore, so I wasn't sure you still held to that claim, but if you wanted to talk about that, I'm game for that. It's in a YouTube, it's in a YouTube short, so it's like 15 seconds of content.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, or anything I brought up in the last show, you know, I, I didn't come with a lot of preparation.

Well, uh, I, I will give maybe this an overall, like impartial, like what, what these letters are, right? So, like, so people are aware, when we see, like, "Letter, uh, St. Pope Agatho, Letter of Pope Hadrian," these are not quite like a personal letter, right? To make it really simple, like, when we have letters of popes and these bishops, they're not like a private letter you receive in the mail from Grandma on your birthday or something like that, right? They're, they're generally conciliar statements, and they're signed by the primate of the Synod, right? So, um, the letter of Pope Agatho was really actually like the conciliar decree of Rome, 680, which is then sent to the council, Constantinople, the next year. Um, similarly, the letter of Pope Hadrian is the conciliar statement of the Synod of Rome in 785, and then sent to Nicaea too, in 787. So, if they have a tone of authority, they have a tone of having settled things. Well, at least, uh, without going, well, what are the larger ramifications of this? Of course, they will, because they're conciliar decrees. This is what is expected to be believed in that Synod. And so, the question now becomes, why do, you know, laymen like Eric and I, um, or people watching this, like mostly laymen, though, uh, Eric and I, I'm sure, get contacted by more than a few priests these days that are following these topics. Um, why do people care about these conciliar decrees? Well, it's because these decrees are sent to, um, ecumenical councils to give the teaching, and in this instance, the teaching of Rome, right? This is what the Church of Rome teaches. For us to be down at this council, you must accept this. And so, then it becomes relevant, well, what are the contents of these documents? In as much that the councils receive these documents as part of their inheritance, as part of the teaching of the council, and as part of Rome's participation in this council, which is necessary for the council to be rightly ecumenical. And so, I would say with that context, then comes, all right, how does one interpret these letters? And what do these letters actually say? I'm not sure, Eric, if you want to add anything to that.

Yeah, I mean, that sounds good. Yeah. So, it's, uh, so that being said, it's, uh, another issue, and I want to apologize in advance. Uh, I am in, so people aren't aware, I'm in Cambodia. So, if I disappear or things get, uh, worse than usual with my connect, uh, connection, just be aware. I'm in Cambodia right now doing this show. Um, and so this, the council, the Council of Constantinople III, and the Council of Nicaea II, and the letters they receive, are, they're important to us following apologetics for our respective, uh, church communions, really for different reasons. People don't think of them like that. People think of them as proof texts, like, in a quote, "Mine says this, this says that, therefore this." But to really understand what they say, we have to understand that they are addressing different things and making different claims. And so, it'll probably be useful to speak about one issue at a time and to then, um, talk about the potential disagreements, uh, in these issues and things to that effect. Um, so maybe just to break the ice, I'll just put it very plainly. We'll just start sequential order. The letter of St. Agatho, right? The Rome 680s decree sent to Constantinople III, the ecumenical council. Why do people care? Here's why they should care, by the way. It's got a very good, uh, florilegium on the issue of Dyothelitism, right? And, and that is the translation from Cambridge doesn't even have any of the papal stuff. It has just the Dyothelite issues in it. And so, um, that's very, very important. And regrettably, that's something that people are not as concerned about. Um, their interaction tends to be with a translation by an Anglican scholar named Henry Percival. And so, what people zero in on is, does the letter of St. Agatho teach papal infallibility or does it not? I mean, would you say that's really, Eric, what, uh, people generally are interested in when we talk about this letter?

Yeah, generally speaking, in the apologetic sphere, when you say Agatho's letter, um, that's usually what comes up. Uh, I should say here, just for a brief moment, that, uh, even though I do make it a, a point of interest, um, it's good to remind people, like you just did, that the primary intention and context has has little to do with the papacy. Um, and so we're really, we're really just, we're looking at something that is not specifically, uh, trying, you know, I, for example, would I say that the Epistle of Agatho teaches papal infallibility? I would actually say no, um, because it's just not the issue. It's not the, it's not the, Agatho doesn't really think he's scoring any points, uh, when he talks about, you know, Peter, Roman See, perhaps just to say that, you know, what he says has credibility. But the primary issue here is we want, he wants the Byzantines to submit to the Roman view on Christ, you know? So, yeah. And same thing with Hadrian, you know, on the issue of images. And there's other stuff to it, but, you know, what I'm saying?

Yeah, the, the, yeah, the larger thing would be whether or not these letters say things in passing that reveal the mind of the church on a given topic, right? That's right. So, it's not that, unlike maybe what some people believe, Pope Agatho or Pope Hadrian submit papal infallibility or papal supremacy up for vote. The church gives a vote, they accepted it, uh, you know, that's, that's what that would be an inappropriate way of looking at the topic. But from any perspective, the question would be, is this a letter that has authority? Which maybe we should discuss what makes something the council authoritative or not. Um, is this something that has authority? And is the way it is stated in passing, is that relevant? Now, I would say both of us are going to say yes. But that's something actually people don't take for granted. Feel free to interrupt, but in your video, it's very interesting because you bring up, um, I'm forgetting, which was it? Montenero, I think it was, uh, Cardinal Montenero, brings it up there in the Council of Florence where they're arguing over Agatho's letter. And I believe it was Bessarion says, "Well, what do you have canonically that shows these papal doctrines?" And, um, Montenero's reply is, "Let me quote it actually, um, because it's an important quote." Um, "Let's see. He says that the definitions and canons of councils are the result of the study of the writings of the Fathers and the letters quoted in the council. Wherefore, have at least equal authority with the canons." That's a, if we were to take that statement in an OCD literalistic sense, in some sense, it means it's more authoritative than the canons, because he says, "At least." I don't think he actually means that, if I had to interpret that passage out of context. But I think we could, um, agree what he's saying is, we can't take something just because it's a letter or a passing statement in a letter and say, "Well, it has no relevance," because what is stated in the council informs the conciliar decree and the canons, and thereby it shares authority with these things. Now, this is not a peculiar idea of Montenero, uh, because this is something that comes up in the 12th paragraph of the, um, Conciliarity of the Council of Constantinople, 1351. This is part of the Orthodox tradition. This has been called, um, by Father Richard Price, "Conciliar Fundamentalism." It's a pejorative. It somewhat makes it simple to understand for Americans and Western thinkers, that, "Wow, they're saying that even the passing statements in the council are important." Like what we just heard Montenero say. Um, but I think, and this is a terminology I have coined, I think it's more useful and accurate, and ironically much more consistent with what we just heard from Montenero, is the, the church historically has been contextualist. Meaning, it's not that everything stated in the ecumenical council is true because it quotes, you know, Origen, let's say, in the Council of Ephesus. Obviously not in endorsing what Origen says. Actually, for much the opposite, just like the Bible quotes Satan speaking to Jesus, or speaking to God, I don't know which person of the Holy Trinity, in the Book of Job, and obviously we're not seeing what Satan is saying is true. In fact, Satan is proved wrong in both those examples. Um, but contextually speaking, we could see where these false statements or passing statements fit into the larger picture, right? On other than being OCD, if you're just a normal human being reading this, you would understand what the statements from Satan in the Bible, how they fit into a larger theology. And in the ecumenical councils, where, let's say, quoting Nestorius fits into condemning Nestorius, or let's now get to Agatho's letter and quoting Agatho's letter and him making passing statements about, um, the papacy, where that would fit in in showing how the people there understood the papacy, and if they understood the papacy wrong, or the ecclesiology, the church wrong, even if that was not the primary point of issue, on what basis are those Fathers reliable for giving a conciliar decree, right? We, we would not trust a peer-review process for an academic article if the peer reviewers, you know, didn't know what they're doing, right? Would you trust a science journal from people that were geocentrists? Maybe the article they'll publish will be accurate, but they're really wrong in this other crucial side issue. And before people freak out, uh, by the theory of relativity, it's hard to know what's the center of the universe. Everything's relative. But whatever, right? You get the point. Subdeacon is rolling his eyes. I don't know. No, no, I was talking to, talking to somebody. Sorry. Okay. So, so that being said, it's the conciliar fathers to be reliable in a normal way, without thinking of this in a monist way, where only when they issue a decree or canon are they magically beamed down the ability to speak authoritatively, but only in that one instance, to not look at this normally and go, "Well, obviously their decrees and canons are reliable because they are reliable in teaching in a consensus-based setting in a council." Um, that then we could see the relevance of these statements. I'll say one more thing, and then, uh, Eric, maybe give your perspective on this. But for example, uh, Dositheus II of Jerusalem, uh, a lot of people know who he is because he wrote the Confession of the Orthodox, and his book, The Dositheus Biblos, he also gives the conciliar fundamentalist teaching, but he doesn't call it that, of course, that terminology didn't exist. And he gives that teaching as the basis to say that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople has by rights the title Ecumenical Patriarch because he says in the councils, they're calling them Ecumenical Patriarch. So obviously, how are these Fathers reliable if they don't understand something that basic correctly? Right? And so, that same logic could and must be applied to a letter like Agatho's, a letter like Hadrian's. Um, if, again, we're reading these like historians. And at this juncture, I just have to own the label. I'm now published a few times in peer-reviewed journals in history. Um, maybe I'm not a great historian, but I, I do work in history. I'm a historian. And so, looking at this as a historian, and not philosophically, I'm not a theologian, and those are different things, but as a historian, that's how we determine what did the people there actually believe? What were they actually trying to do? That's how we would interpret historical sources. Um, and so I see that in Montenero, I see that in Dositheus, I see that in an Orthodox council. So I see this as both intellectually and from my communion vantage point, um, even dogmatically reliable, because this is what's actually, um, unlike what maybe people will hear from apologists, but you actually see in the authorities of the church, um, and in the actual conciliar statements of my church. So I'll just leave that there. And I know if you want to add anything, Eric.

Yeah, it's a lot to digest, um, but, you know, I, uh, you know, I try my best to say that everything in an ecumenical council has to be assented to. Um, but I'm just, as my, in my experience as a Catholic, uh, you know, going through ecumenical councils, um, you know, there's, our theologians, you know, ever since, you know, probably the Protestant Reformation, because that's really when Protestants put the Catholics to the fire when when it came to continuity, in many ways, Catholic theologians and scholars in that era were not as sharp, due to how the Lutherans and the Calvinists were trying to prove that the Church of the Fathers and the church of the late medieval church were not the same thing. And so the, the Lutheran patristic, the patristic scholars, you know, they really put the fire to the feet of Catholics. And I noticed that one of the results of that was that Catholics were, they felt forced to admit that there is a level of fallibility to ecumenical councils because of certain things that are just either reversed or not believed anymore or contradict current beliefs, whatever it is. And so I think that, you know, conciliar fundamentalism, as Richard Price calls it, uh, I'm not sure that I could really defend that view. But I, what I can say is that it seems that that is the majority view of the, of the, the, the actual bishops at the seven ecumenical councils. Um, I think there are some exceptions, but, uh, you know, then that's not the overwhelming majority. So I think that, yeah, we should treat these letters, um, as part of the council, especially because, like Agatho's letter and Hadrian's letter, they both receive multiple episcopal acclamations. You know, each bishop was supposed to get up and give a verbal statement that he agreed with the, uh, the bilingual recitation of the letter. So it has to be part of the bloodstream of the council, I think.

So, and yeah, that's fairly common in the sessions of councils because the point of the sessions was to conduct authoritative business. When you read the minutes, you find out generally speaking, a lot happens in between sessions, but it's kind of unofficial. And so, right, there's no votes, it's, it doesn't really count, per se. And so, this is where I have to, um, say, I'm admittedly ignorant of the exact proceedings because they're not published. The Council of Florence, because it seems like a lot happened between the sessions and the actual procedure of the council was very unlike the earlier councils. Um, and same, by the way, if people are interested in modern Orthodox topics, see the Council of Crete, for example, in 2016. And so, it, from someone who's looking at this historically, you're like, "All right, well, then what's the exact, um, ecclesiastical procedure in this council, being that it's so different?" And that's where we just need more published to really fully understand those things. But let's now jump into, I'd say, the contents of Agatho's letter. And maybe I'll just speak very broadly, um, whether in passing the document at least explicitly teaches papal infallibility. And I'm going to put forward the idea that in reality, the, what Agatho literally says, what he explicitly says, is neither what the Orthodox or the Roman Catholics believe today. And I'm going to submit to the audience and to Eric and Subdeacon Daniel here, neither what actually Agatho thought, if we understood what he was actually trying to convey in a high-context sort of language. And so, if we see at least what some of these statements are, um, we'll be getting to some of the textual disagreements very broadly speaking, um, because I affirm the, uh, authority of the Latin as stated, okay? So I do think that the Latin accurately conveys what Agatho really wrote. Um, and so I don't believe that in every jot and title that's true in the Greek and what was received in the council. And we could discuss that, but let's just stick with what Agatho really, what wrote, what he, and thereby what he himself was trying to convey, because he died before the council was over. Um, he speaks of the Church of Rome in some context, um, being preserved without error. All right, so inherency. Now, when we speak of infallibility, um, generally speaking, people are presuming upon a much more specific definition and application of the idea of being preserved from error, um, you know, when a pope teaches faith and morals, ex cathedra, to the whole church, something to that effect. But we don't see that definition given in passing, because again, like Eric said, this is wasn't like he was setting out to do. We're seeing what he's saying in passing. We don't see that exact definition or thought conveyed in Agatho's letter. He just says, "without error." So this already puts all of us here, Eric and I, um, interested audience members reading it, it already puts all of us here in the position that now we have to do the hard work of interpretation, because we already know there's no way he meant categorically there's no error of any sort of the Pope, not even silly things like, could a Pope get a math problem wrong? I mean, that's an error, but things of different serious nature. Could a Pope enter into communion with the wrong person? I mean, in apologetic debates, that's seen as unimportant because it's not dogmatic, but in the life of the Church, of course, that's important. You know, could the Pope make a wrong pastoral judgment call? There's stuff in recent memory, but there's stuff in ancient memory as well that, um, just so it's not, uh, what's it called, um, not something that's divisive. I don't like to bring up the modern stuff in Roman Catholicism. We have enough of our own dirty laundry. And in Orthodoxy, where I don't see very useful, but, um, in the third century, we had, uh, you know, Pope Callixtus allowing, um, divorced priests, right? And stuff like that. It's, uh, meaning that that you could ordain someone who is divorced. I'm not saying making a positive claim that he was allowing for divorce. Um, and so, and this is something the Ecumenical Patriarch, by the way, does today. So we say that's a wrong judgment call, that's an error. But that is not what people mean by papal infallibility. Um, then there's issues like, well, then could Popes make errors in private interpretations or in letters that are not ex cathedra? And we could argue whether something's ex cathedra or not, um, or whether something's even faith and morals or not. So, what's the point of this long aside? It's to show, no one is taking, and I don't think Agatho was taking, "without error" to mean categorically without error, because that would be transparently not possible in, by any way. I mean, Pope Vitalian, the Pope preceding him, entered into communion with the Monothelites. So obviously that was an error. Vitalian is a saint in the Roman Catholic communion, as soon as he was able to right the ship. And the Pope, uh, Pope Emperor Constantine IV, I think it was, he's a saint in the Orthodox communion, was a little more amenable to the Dyothelite position. Pope Vitalis, if I remember right, was now not so amenable to, at least being in communion with Monophysites. But the point is, Agatho had been aware of these things. It's not, you know, he was alive at the time, he was in the, he was, I believe, a deacon at that time and would have been in the know of all these matters. And so, we have to admit to ourselves, we got to do the work of interpretation, because no one believes that what is stated is meant to be taken absolutely literally. Now, the question is, what interpretation is appropriate? This is now where I think Eric and I are gonna have more major disagreements, unless there's already disagreement already. I don't know if we're on the same page so far.

Eric, no, everything so far, I'm tracking with. All right, great. So, right, we'll keep going. And Eric will interject, um, if there's, now we're getting to a disjunction. So, the question now is, by inherency, is, uh, Pope Agatho talking about as Roman Catholics understand, say, uh, infallibility? Or let's lessen the claim, is it at least consistent with what we know papal infallibility today? So that then, even if we didn't ascribe to a, a dogmatic idea like doctrinal development, that it's like, "Well, he's just talking about an aspect of it in passing, so at least that's credible that the larger doctrine existed or something to that effect." Now, my honest understanding of the historical, um, evidence of the letter is that the teaching on inherency is fairly common in the seventh century as an honorific. Now, this is something that the, during Florence, was the actual response of the, uh, Orthodox delegation, and it's stuff everyone's heard from apologetics in debates, so it's not the first time ever heard such a thing. Um, but it's something that I think is makes sense of the eternal logic of the passage and, um, makes sense with how ultimately I'm going to argue the Greeks, um, rendered a certain passage so as to prevent the interpretation from being anything other than that. Now, I think what people, um, are not aware of is that there are other infallibility statements which people meant as honorifics. There's a question mark, honorific would be a statement that is very like a, a very kind thing to say about someone, like in the Bible, "Most excellent Theophilus," right? You give him a title that's very kind. Does it really mean he's the most excellent person in the whole world? I mean, that's what most excellent means. Means most excellent. And we understand, no, it's a title. So, "His Holiness." So, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, "His Holiness" was called, uh, "His Holiness" in the process of deposing him until he's deposed, because they didn't really think he was holy. That was his title. So, um, we don't speak like that in America, in the West, in the modern day. So people find it strange, but it's very common back then. And so, I could read in more detail if people want the details, but so as not to bore people, I'll just say it in passing. And if, like, I want more details, I will give more details. But we have statements like from, uh, Pope Leo to, um, the Byzantine Emperor, I think the Emperor was named Anastasius, if I remember right, but no, it was another Emperor Leo. I'm getting their names wrong at this point. I have none of my books here, but, um, long story short is, like, Pope Leo, um, told the Roman Emperor in a letter, um, that, you know, "The Holy Spirit has taught you, and you will not make any error in the faith." And then he goes on the rest of the letter to tell him, "Don't do this wrong, don't do that wrong." So, we know he didn't really mean that, right? Because if the Emperor couldn't make any errors, then why is Pope Leo telling him, "Here's what matters to grow"? Right? Um, but so we understand this is clearly an honorific. Um, now, closer to the seventh century, though, um, we have an effusive letter from Pope Cyrus of Alexandria. He's not a Pope for the Oriental Orthodox communion. He was a Pope of Alexandria for the Eastern Orthodox Roman Catholic communions. But he's, by all of our accounts, well, maybe not the Oriental Orthodox account, but anyway, he was a heretic according to my community. And he writes a letter to the Bishop of Constantinople, believe Sergius, and he calls him "Father of Fathers," um, I think Patriarch, well, just say "Father of Fathers." He says, "The Holy, he's, he's God-taught. Self, the Holy Spirit guides his words. Um, he has written with, he writes without any error." So, it's again, an infallibility statement, um, but not the only one we read in that century. Even, um, St. Agatho himself writes of, uh, Emperor Constantine that the error he wrote, the letter he wrote, wrote is without error, and he's God-taught. Maybe not without error, I'm going to have to look at the letter, but he says he's God-taught. I think he says without error. And so, we could see this is a way people would address one another and saying, "What I'm teaching is correct," or "What my predecessor taught was correct." Um, that doesn't mean it can't be taken in this larger categorical sense, but I think it would have to be demonstrated that there's a context where it is, because we just named several contexts where clearly it can't be. Um, and so, that being said, in the Latin, where everything that we're aware of today, um, on both sides, is intact and I think is reliable in the Latin, um, all these statements are there. And then so the question would be, um, whether St. Agatho, um, would have intended them in the in a sense consistent with the Roman Catholic doctrine, which Eric and I, uh, um, differ on. And my reading as a historian is no, without the demonstration, um, that we have infallibility statements that are ever meant in that larger sense, because we have statements that are not. And so, I'd be reading the statement consistently with that. But I would add one more thing to this equation, which is the meat of my article, which inspired Eric's video, and Eric fairly said that, uh, Craig poses the question, he doesn't really say that the statement from Agatho is interpolated, because actually the answer in my article is no, it's not, it's, it's authentic. So the question is, why is it absent from the most reliable Greek manuscripts? And this is where I argue gives us the valid interpretation of the passage, because it gives us the mind of the conciliar fathers, which is this, that when the statement is made about popes in the past, right, Eric was parsing the Greek and he says, "Well, you know, this is talking about being preserved from error in the past, because Pope Honorius was, uh, anathematized by the council." The council said, "Well, we can't, you know, leave the statement as is because it's going to contradict conciliar business." So we're going to excise the statement. Which again, things like this happen in ecumenical councils. It doesn't show, even like they're banging their chest, offended, "How dare you say such a thing?" It was, they understood this could be confusing. We're going to remove this passage. Um, now, there's other statements which are similarly consistent, or even, I'd say, rightfully from a grammatical sense, could be interpreted just like the excised passage here. Is the difference? The difference is due to the vagaries of grammar. The issue is, those passages could be legitimately interpreted in a different sense. Here is an example. The letter ends, towards the ending, St. Agatho writes that, um, "the holy mother of the Empire must be preserved from every error." And so here we see the mother church being an application to the universal church, where it at least seems earlier that it's the Church of Rome that is maybe given the title. But again, due to grammar, it could be taken either way. It's intentionally vague, I believe. And so he makes this statement that, you know, "that mother church must be preserved from error." So now we know, like, "All right, if the mother church has no error, but it must be preserved from error, we got to, we're in the business of interpretation." Now, there's a sense of the mother church has error, but he's speaking of the universal church. And he talks about keeping the Orthodox Faith immaculate by the help of, um, St. Peter and this church. I think it's an translation. If you look at the Latin, um, it's a little less clear, but, um, read, read consistently with the whole paragraph, Percival's translation, and I think Eric's translation, the Greek concurs of this Latin translation, is that the Church of Rome is being mentioned in this paratactic statement. Then what follows is that, "without error," you know, this will be preserved and taught by the bishops. And the passage continues. So the question now is, is the Church of Rome, which, presuming that is the right way of saying instead of the church, it's this church, is that what's preserved from error? Or is it the Orthodox Faith that's preserved from error? Now, I argue it is the Orthodox Faith that's preserved from error, because the reference to the Roman Church is in a paratactic statement, you know, commas. You could see this in the Latin in M. No Manzi. You can see this in the Greek. You, you could see this in Eric's translation. You could see this in Percival's translation. It's, there's a paratactic statement. Grammatically, one has every justification to read the faith as what's preserved from error. For those who are really curious, both the Greek and the Latin, the nouns for, uh, church and for faith are both female nouns, feminine nouns. And so either could be joined to, um, "without error" due to, if we go to the gender of the verbiage. But this is now precisely my point, which is, in the present tense, Agatho is preser, is exercising precisely this function, because he's notorious, he's not being anathematized. This is something that would not be offensive to the council. It would not contradict conciliar business. Furthermore, even, I say, highly partisan Roman Catholic relators, my favorite, John Carrafi, obviously, interpret it as the faith that's preserved without error. You could read that in Scott Butler and John Carrafi's Keys of the Christian World. So, even if Carrafi is wrong, and there is another way to interpret this, I don't think he's wrong. I concur with his interpretation. It's my interpretation. You can interpret, uh, Eric's translation the same way. But the fact there's two interpretations permits the understanding consistent with the rest of Agatho's letters of interpreting the letter not in the sense that would contradict conciliar business, unlike the earlier passage, which is excised from the Greek because it would have not allowed differing interpretations on that point. And so, because there is this paratactic statement in the L, in the second passage, there's no reason for excision. And so, what I've been saying for years talking about Agatho is, say, Agatho intentionally vague. And so that way, from the Latin perspective, they could give a very strong authoritative teaching, a decree for their patriarchy, and they could send that very authoritative, really demanding, um, decree to the Council of Constantinople, say, "You must accept this." Right? But the conciliar business, Constantinople, due to the intentional vagaries in the language, doesn't have to take what's stated there as something that then could overturn conciliar business, um, or in a sense inconsistent with how they were used to using honorifics. Um, I'd argue that St. Agatho was intentionally writing really, really no different than Cyrus of Alexandria and other guys at the time. And so this is what I refer to on Twitter. It's so much better when we have more than 140 characters, too. I would say maybe the crucial error, and Eric could disagree with this, but the crucial error, if we were to take, uh, what Eric stated in his recent video as the be all end all of his thoughts on this matter, because the fact that there's not a singular interpretation of this passage precisely fits why the council did what they did in excising the earlier passage. It's consistent with all the conciliar business. And so, as the historian, the interpretation that makes sense of all the extant data, being that that's all we have, we don't want to postulate, um, documents that don't exist, which is why so many don't like the QHypothesis and things like that, the Synoptics with other, uh, Christian studies, that is the most workable interpretation. Actually, there it is considered a rule in text criticism, by the way, is that the strongest interpretation of a disputed text is one that can make sense of all of the extant documents. When we do text criticism, and so what I'm posing here is my attempt to follow those pretty much procedural rules on doing text criticism. Sorry to bore you guys, but that's why it's honorific. There you go. You just have your three-word answer. But that is the thought process that goes behind justifying that conclusion. So, um, let's, let's give Eric some time to respond, because, uh, that's essentially my response to at least the, uh, St. Agatho portion of his video for sure.

Let me, let me just, uh, throw in real quick the point on Cyrus of Alexandria, since that was a curious, uh, point. You know, what does, what does the EO think about him? We actually agree with you guys. We, we call him, uh, the Antichrist, Son of Satan. So, poor guy, he's trying to get along with everyone. It doesn't work out. Go ahead, Eric.

No, no, no. Subdeacon, do they literally mean it, like he's a spawn of Satan?

No. Yeah, it's a, uh, honorific.

Well, um, so what I would say is that there's obviously honorifics, right? We can't deny the existence of honorifics. And, you know, Catholic apologists have been guilty of jumping to say that something corresponds to reality, which is an honorific. I mean, and, and the, the proof of that is, we just go through other very either self-grandizing or other statements with reference to other people who are in power and authority, which can't be literal, you know? So, yeah, we, we, scholarship today is all, they, they are well aware of that, you know? But, um, there are some key features that I think distinguish an honorific from something that does correspond to reality, or something that is an honorific that also corresponds to reality, you know? So, for example, like the, some of the, some of the statements about the Virgin Mary, for example, and her holiness, you know? Or, you know, Christ and his power, you know? These are honorifics, perhaps, but they are meant to correspond to reality, you know? The church, angels, the earth, you know, some things that are, they're honorifics, but they correspond to some reality, even if reality is in truth defined in some lesser, you know, way. So, when I read Agatho's letter, I don't see Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus, chapter four, ex cathedra, right? But what I do see is, I see that Agatho is saying that our Lord Jesus Christ did something when he stood in the flesh in front of Peter, you know? He actually did something, and he commissioned him to feed the flock, shepherd the church, and he promised him that his faith would not fail. And that those things are not just, uh, realities bound up in Peter's life, but that are meant to be according to promise. That's, that's the other feature. When Agatho refers to the Petrine commission as a promise, according, he says, "according to the Divine promise." Now, we're getting into something a little bit more real, right? Because that's, that's, you know, literally a promise. So, can we apply promise to an unreal honorific? Yes, it has happened. It, it, it's applied to the empire, it's applied to other bishops, it's applied to, um, but there's a key distinction that I think plays a role when we're reading texts that distinguish honorific that's unreal versus honorific that's real. For example, when we say that when you see conciliar acclamations that the Church of God will not be prevailed against by the gates of hell, most Catholics and Orthodox are going to say that that's real, right? Um, but in the same session, or a session or two prior or after, you'll see something like that said about the empire, you know? And, well, wait a minute. If it's going to be an, an empty honorific, or perhaps, you know, a hopeful honorific of some sort, in one text, maybe it's a hopeful honorific for the church. I think that it depends on the text. I think it depends on the text. So, in Agatho's letter, what I see him doing is he's making a claim about what Jesus did as recorded in the Gospels with Peter, and that this has long-lasting, and I should say, everlasting implications for the government of the church. Um, so, does he say the Pope is always going to be infallible? Some would say that. Some would say that. Some would come out with that interpretation. But I would say he's at least saying that St. Peter's successor inherits certain invested prerogatives that Christ invested in Peter, and because of a promise given to Peter that will last until the consummation, until the end, that that has actual real implications for the government of the church. Whether that means that we can have a heretical Pope, a deposed Pope, that's a sec, that's a question for another room. But in the room of just my reading of Agatho's letter, it does seem to me that he's saying that there's been a Divine investiture in the Apostle Peter, and that that has significance not just for Peter's life and the life of the few decades that he was alive after Pentecost, um, or he was traditionally, traditionally crucified in what, 56? I can't remember. But you get the point. 66. But yeah, yes. Um, so Agatho thinks that he is in a long line of Petrine configuration that's guided and animated by Divine promise, and it does relate, he does relate it to the Roman Church's contribution to the health of the church in her beliefs, what she holds, you know, what she confesses. And he does, he does say that it's going to last until the end of time. So that, you know, the, the specific passage that I'm reading. So, let me move to the question of, uh, how to interpret it. If it's got two different interpretations, or three different, or four different possible interpretations. Well, I mean, even the passage that was excised has more than one possible interpretation. I mean, we could say that what Agatho meant by "never having turned away" means that, well, what he means there is, in each of the previous six councils, or in each of the previous five councils, or something like that. You, you could reduce things, you could reduce things in that excision that would make it compatible with what an Orthodox or Byzantine person is going to say, would not contradict conciliar business. So I think that it's not just, well, there's more than one way of interpreting the passage, right? Because there's more than one, there's more than one way to interpret almost, almost everything. I mean, we can, we can get real crazy here, right? Like, if I, if I was in court and they asked me, "Mr. Ibara, did you commit this? Did you kill victim so-and-so?" And I say, "Yes." And then someone later on says, "Well, in his mind, at the time, he meant what 'yes' is to us is actually 'no' in his mind." Right? That would be, that would be an alternative reading, right? Sounds like my wife. Well, so I think that, you know, there's always going to be a couple, a few different ways to interpret something. And I know there's other ways where that's not the case. But in Agatho's, the, the, the second portion where he talks about Rome being preserved from error, that I thought would make it an even stronger claim to Rome's infallibility or indefectibility of some sort. Some sort is that the text there, the pronouns are referring back to the Church of Rome, which Agatho says is the foundation of the Orthodox Faith. So, I don't know if I can do this, Daniel, but maybe for the both of us, if I could share my screen, I could show that passage.

Yeah, yeah, go for it. Does it let you?

I think it does. Let me see.

Do you see it?

Yeah.

Okay, all right. So here in red on the right side, this is the English translation of the Greek. You know, it says, so this is what Agatho is saying. So that the evangelical and apostolic correctness of the Orthodox faith, and then yes, he has a comma, so he's about to say something about the Orthodox Faith, which has its foundation on top of this stable rock of the Church of the Most Blessed Chief of the Apostles Peter. Now, just pause right there. Traditionally, when you're using a rock foundation to building relationship, you know, where you're talking about a foundation and then the structure on top of the foundation, what you mean is that what's on top of the foundation is receiving strength and protection, right? And so the, the rock here is referring to the Roman Church. Now, what, whether he's right about this, whether he's wrong about this, whether I'm a Catholic or not, it just looks like what's being claimed. And even if we could admit an an alternative interpretation, because in my video, I did say there's, you could read it in another way, but I think it's just hard to read it in another way. Um, but here it's saying the Roman Church is the foundation of the apostolic correctness of the Orthodox faith. And then after referring, referring to the Roman Church, he says it's the Church of Peter, which by his grace, so it's, it's also saying that the, you know, I take this to mean another description about what's just being referred to.

Know, is there a strict, inflexible grammatical rule about this? No. But usually, when we talk like this, we're zeroing in upon the immediate antecedent. And because the immediate antecedent is situating the Roman Church as the supporting strength of the Orthodox faith, it would seem to stand to reason that what he says afterwards, "but well, by whose grace? It's Peter, right? It's talking about Peter. It's a very mystical way of understanding things. We don't even Catholics don't talk like this anymore, which is interesting. But Agatho says, "By Peter's grace and assistance, is kept immaculate from every error." So, what, what, what does it mean for Peter to be active in assisting something? Well, in the context here, he assists the Roman Church because that's his church, right? And, uh, it's the ministry. Elsewhere in Agatho's letter, he says the ministry that Peter was given is the ministry that his successor has. That ministry was also said to be under the animation of Christ's promise, "I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail." So that intersects with what this is saying.

And then Agatho says, "Luke 22 has proven true." How is it? By various patriarchs upholding the faith? Is it by the general laity and the hierarchy of the whole church upholding? And that's some sort of like a corporate Petrine infusion or diffusion around the whole corporate church? Or he, no, he says it's all the apostolic pontiffs, my predecessors. Which again, directly contradicts the conclusion of the council. I even write that in my book. It's, it's, it's, you know, it contradicts the anathema of Honorius. It does. Um, but it does seem to me that Agatho thinks that what he's saying here, and the best way to read this, is that the divine promise given to Peter, which has its application in all of his successors, is what's in, what is what's meant here. Now, I could be wrong about that, but that's my best, you know. Even if I wanted this to be wrong, um, because I mean, there's, there's been times even as a Catholic where I've, I've actually wanted to be dissuaded from my convictions. And even if I wanted this to be wrong, I don't know if I could stand on thin ice trying to interpret this in an alternative way. Is there a second reading? Yes, but like I said, there's a second reading even to the passage that we, that, that the council supposedly excised. I don't, that's the other thing. I don't think that they, they excised it. Of course, that leaves me without an explanation for why some of the Greek copies don't have it, you know. But then, you know, I brought up afterwards how, and you know, copies that existed in monasteries in Thessaloniki and Constantinople and other places, they were aware of that passage about the historical inherency in Rome. It was cited at Florence, and I, I'm not aware, you know, of any objection when it was read in Latin and Greek, uh, at Florence for both, for both speakers. So, yeah, I, I would say, you know, there is, there is a few different interpretations you can give to this. Uh, um, you know, if, if you feel real groovy on a certain night, you could probably pull out 10, 15. Um, but I think the best one, the most straightforward one, is that, um.

Can I, can I ask two questions, Eric, just for clarification? Yeah. Um, so the first one, so, uh, this quote here that is on the screen, this, uh, is understood that it is in the context of a particular geographical Church of Rome locally, not? Yeah. This is not, um, understood by anybody to be like universal, right? I don't know any, I don't know of any commentator who would say that what Agatho means by, um, if you see there in the Greek on the left, the genitive of origin, *Petrou*, when that comes up, I think three times in Agatho's letter, and it comes up so many other times in, uh, in the sixth and seventh and eighth century, always in reference to the historical Roman Church, you know? Okay. Okay. And then the other question is, you mentioned it contradicting Honorius's situation. What did, can you expand on that? Yeah, yeah. So, in, in Agatho's letter, he says that all of his predecessors, which, one, one of them was Honorius, he says all of his predecessors not only did not turn aside from the truth, but he said that they were vigilant in upholding and strengthening the brethren. Well, most Catholic theologians admit that Honorius was at least condemned for negligence. You know, they call it negligence, one of the worst interpretations of it you could possibly get, in my opinion. But they, they at least admit that Honorius, he may have been Orthodox in intention, but he was condemned for negligence. Well, Agatho is even saying that Honorius was not negligent. He's, he's not, not just Orthodox, he was vigilant to protect the faith. Well, that contradicts what the council saw. That contradicts what Pope Leo II, who's the man who came into the papal office right after Agatho. It contradicts what everybody believes today, right? So, would you say then, that's, that's what I would also be kind of an honorific? He's not trying to be. It's like, no. All have sinned, all have fallen short. But it doesn't have to be. I don't, I, I, it's, you know, it's possible that he had, it's possible that he had a distinction in mind where he thought, well, what I mean is all my predecessors did this when they were proclaiming universal decrees. But that's just kind of a stretch, and I don't think it's an honorific either, though. I don't think it's an empty honorific either. I just, I think what we have here is a bald-faced, uh, contradiction. Yeah. Got it. Got it. Thanks for, for that. Go ahead. It's, I wouldn't be that mean-spirited, though. I mean, vigilance means, means, you know, you're awake at night protecting the thief from breaking into the house. Doesn't mean the thief can't succeed in any circumstance, you know? So, it's, uh, I think sometimes we, we need to not go too many steps with, with some, some of these statements.

I know from, from what I heard, it's, uh, I think there's some overstating of the evidence based on what is at least presently available. And what I mean by that, for example, is like, well, this interpretation of Agatho's letter was posed to people, um, during Florence. But again, you know, if we don't have a record of the response saying, yes, it's in our manuscript, that that doesn't inveigh against what we have in the manuscripts. I just want people to be aware. The, what we're talking about the manuscripts is that the most reliable Greek doesn't have it because the most reliable Greek manuscript is Parasinus Graecus 1115. And, um, this manuscript is actually originates from Rome. It's believed to originate from the years 774 to 775. So actually predating all the earliest Latin manuscripts. And, um, it was devised in Rome, actually, as a papal florilegium or florilegia. Says there's several topics, um, against Rome's enemies, particularly the Byzantines, you know, trying to prove, uh, the *filioque* as patristic, um, trying to prove, um, the Pope's role in the church. And so this really demands the question, right? If this manuscript originates in the 8th century and its preserved version today is from the chancellery of Bekos of Constantinople, who's a unionist, who's on board with the Council of Lyon, um, they certainly had no attempt to remove this passage. It's, it, this passage is missing despite itself. And that's why it's sort of like, in a court of law, we'd call this a hostile witness. So there's a hostile witness, but he concurs, um, with, uh, something that's important. This is highly relevant because he has no motive not to. And so, hostile witness for the historian, um, when it comes to text, is very important. Um, and so it's, uh, its absence is something that is important, and not in the sort of, um, unthinking way where this, this means, well, then it wasn't in the Latin either. As I argue here, that doesn't apply in St. Agatho's letter. But the importance is that it demonstrates intent in the council. And if we have something that's demonstrable that was excised and had to have a reason, that at least gives us a basis for interpreting, um, interpreting the text the way, as I put forward, um, you know, Eric has his, um, own reading of, uh, the passage we saw on the screen. Um, and he says he's not aware of any commentator. Um, I, like I said, I will, I already granted because I oppose appeals to just authority, that, um, grammatically Eric could have his interpretation. You know, but if I could simply make the appeal to the authority, is I'm not aware of any translator that interprets that paratheatical statement, um, the way Eric does. There's not a lot of these translations, but of those that exist that are published, I'm not aware of any translator that does. When I read it, it naturally reads to me the way I posed it. And so we both say, well, I'm on thin ice if I go the other way, and feel I'm on thin ice the other way. That, that's where I would go back to again, the excision from the Greek demonstrates intent that the, the council was not willing to grant, um, certain, like, a limitless honorific here, right? So it's not that, um, the role of St. Peter wasn't important, it wasn't that the role of Rome wasn't important, but it was not seen in this unmodified sense. Um, and the council makes that clear. While I may infer that from St. Agatho, I think the excision from the Greek from the *concilia* fathers makes it abundantly clear. And being that that's the case, it kind of loses its force in a papal context where if someone's going to say, well, and we've, we won't name names, but we've seen papal videos that will say, well, look, the Sixth Ecumenical Council accepts this letter. Remember, as we said before, no one's concerned about ditheism, they're all concerned about the passing, uh, and Roman and Petrine observations. Um, well, okay, you could make that argument, but now what do we do when we actually have a documentary reason to say, well, the *concilia* fathers, because the majority are Greek, did not have this limitless, unqualified sense, because through the excision, excision, it demonstrates qualification, right? I know that's boring, sorry audience, boring, but real history does require these procedural, um, these procedural matters to be taken into consideration.

As a larger observation, um, I do think again, the, the methodology of how we're approaching this is very different, which is why I think Eric and I, um, come to different conclusions. I'm really not very theologically minded. It'd be great if I was, but, you know, I'm not. I'm not this philosopher. I'm not this holy man. I'm not very theologically minded. I try to be good for alignment, right? Craig, you'll love that because I'm the same way. You'll love St. Ephraim because he, he gets, he gets people like us. Say that from Assyria. Um, so that being said, you know, I'm not this great theological mind, but like, if I would go, well, how do I feel theologically? Which, because I'm not a teacher in the church or anything, it's kind of irrelevant, you know? I believe there's a universal Petrine, um, inheritance because I think the entire episcopacy, um, originates in St. Peter. We talked about this in your show, by the way, subdeacon. This is something that's in also Oriental Orthodox, in their, um, inheritance, theological inheritance, and in your canons now that I've read your canons. So, it's, it's in their inheritance as well. So, like, when we see an honorific, and says the honorific has to have some literal application here, because the grace of St. Peter himself is what's relevant in the, in the passage we're talking about, that it's theologically, for me, it's not troubling to me because I, I just look at the universal Petrine inheritance, right? This may be something where again, the Roman Catholic perspective, they're not going to, there's Popes that say that all the bishops inherit an inheritance from Peter. So they're not going to object to that. It's the difference would be in what peculiar sense they have a, a stronger or more, um, solitary claim to it, or, or a, I don't know, a majority, I don't know how you'd say it, Eric, but like, you know, you're more Petrine, lack of a better term, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And I would even grant that due to relics. But we're getting off topic here. I would even grant that due to relics. Um, but that being said, it's, we, I do think, me speaking as a historian, is we have to, I don't deal with historical text and then import my theological opinions. You need a theological background to understand the theological historical text, but the actual, um, procedure of interpreting historical text is we have to deal with demonstrable historical and textual realities when interpreting these texts. We can't just take our theological opinions from 2,000 years in the future and then presuppose they exist 2,000 years ago. It must be demonstrated in the documentary text that it did for us then to start doing that. If it's demonstrated from the text, then that's legitimate, which is why I said, well, with the honorifics, um, I'm approaching the honorific as I would approach the excised honorifics I have, right? So that's a historical judgment call for that reason. That's the basis for it. Um, but that's why I think ultimately, like, uh, I'm not sure if, uh, Eric's going to want to respond or if we wanted to jump into Pope Adrian. Um, this actually gets into how Pope Adrian's letter is interpreted, because the Petrine and Pauline inheritance is something that's highly relevant and applied to the whole church, um, by that council. Um, and so it's, we could see why, like, uh, the grace of St. Peter and what he does to preserve the church would not be offensive, would not be offensive to the council fathers. And sadly, has only become offensive in years due to the papal environment within Orthodoxy in the modern era. It's not something you see historically. So that do my comments. Yeah, thank you.

Um, so a few things. Um, I, I totally understand, you know, as a historian, you're looking at documents. If you situate a certain family of, of transmission as most reliable, and then you have to make an explanation for why certain things are not showing up that show up in another family, and you've got to come up with an explanation, you know, we can speculate, right? Um, but, you know, one of the things that I keep in mind here is that, yes, I could see why a historian is going to do that, and I might even do that too. Like, I might say, well, it's, you know, look at this discrepancy, maybe it, maybe this, there was an excision at some point. There obviously was an excision at some point. Um, whether that's in a, you know, whether it was a couple centuries down the line somehow, or, you know, we don't really know. But I, I, I tend to want to go with what the council itself says about Agatho's letter, you know? And over and over again, they make claims that Agatho's letter was received without alteration. So the, sorry, I'm laughing because that's always the code for the opposite. Read these, right? So, so, but my, my first, my first desire would be to say, they actually mean that they accepted the letter, the letter without alteration, right? In other words, I, I, I'm not coming at this thinking that, and I'm not saying you're doing this, I'm just saying this for rhetorical style here. I'm not coming to the letters of the Popes and the Emperors and the Bishops at the council the same way I would go into reading the letter exchanges between the mafia, you know, families in the mafia, you know, where it's like, okay, um, you know, obviously, Mr. Corleone said this, but, you know, how things go here, and, you know, this was going to be interpreted here because we know how business rolls, because I, that's, I don't want to approach it that way. However, being realistic, there is that bit in Byzantine history. But when we add some of the other dominoes, like, okay, they all said that they accepted Agatho's letter without alteration. I mean, Emperor Constantine IV explicitly said that. So that's one thing. He may have meant it, he may not have meant it, but he said that, all right? So that, whether that's two points versus 20 points versus one point, it doesn't really matter. We, we take note of it. That's what they said. Number two, and this is going to be something that's on my side of the table, that is, I interpret another passage in the same letter, not to mention a third one which is more debatable, but I interpret the other passage that I was showing on the screen as an even more clear, more powerful claim to the fact that Rome is being protected from error, all error, in the present active tense. *Diamen*. I would think that if the council was going to sort of cleanse out things that didn't fit with the Honorius anathema, that would have been another passage to exclude, you know, to avoid complications with conciliar business. But it wasn't. It was left in there, you know? So I've got the statements of the bishops and the emperor. We have an internal portion of the letter that has an even more aggressive claim than the, the one that was excised at some point from the Greek, some, some Greek family that was transmitted into the, you know, the manuscript family. And then we have the fact that, you know, staunch opponents like, uh, Barlaam the Calabrian, you know, he who eventually he became a Catholic, but he was an opponent of Catholicism, and he refuted these claims about Agatho and Hadrian and Nestorius. Drew from Barlaam, and when Nestorius did his research into Agatho, he came up with the objections that they would be giving from the Council of the Sixth Council, and he would basically cite in the Greek, this, the same version as the Greek version. And so how did these manuscripts with the, without the excision, end up in the hands of staunch apologists in the East like Nicholas of Cusa, Simeon of Thessaloniki, Mark of Ephesus? You know, because when, when Mark of Ephesus went to the Council of Florence, he brought two, two documents with him. He brought Nestorius's, uh, book against the Roman Primacy and another document with all of his notes from, uh, Nestorius. So, and then when we say at the Council of Florence that they, you know, Julian of Cesarea, John Montenero, cite the aggressive claim of Agatho, and nobody objects. Of course, that cannot be like a thousand-pound proof that's dropped onto the table. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is, we're just letting the woodpecker add all these things to, in a cumulative way, and it just doesn't seem like it would be reasonable to me to say, yeah, the Greeks had intended to remove that passage to, in order to make harmony with the Honorius anathema. It just doesn't seem to make sense to me. But that's my reading, and I think it was a great discussion topic. That's why I made a video on it. Yeah.

It's, I think I think you know, we're lockered heads ultimately at that issue, that final, final point of analysis. Um, because, you know, as your video points out, the former passage with the disputed excision, um, is about the past tense, and the, as you say, stronger passage, though I, I don't see that really as stronger in any papal sense of where we disagree, um, has the present tense. But like I said, that would make sense as with the conciliar business where the authority of Agatho and the, and the Roman, um, see, was necessary for the reception of the council, but also it was necessary ultimately for conciliar business was an appetizing *a fortiori*. So it does make sense to excise the former passage, and the latter passage, even for grammatical reasons. I just don't see any basis for excision. In fact, read, read as is, it seems to me to actually be quite, um, inconvenient for the Roman Catholic papal view, because it kind of contextualizes the assertions of, uh, of mercy to be about the faith ultimately, as opposed to any specific church. Um, like I said, it's, uh, not only a legitimate translation, I believe to be the most compelling translation of that passage. And so, if, if we're even if we argue over what's the most compelling or not of the translation, the fact that, let's just make it a coin flip, it makes it then now it's a non-issue. You don't need to excise anything when you could easily take it in the sense you wanted to. Um, now, when it comes like, uh, um, later text like, uh, Barlaam and whatnot, I'm not aware of the demonstration where they're particularly quoting the excised passage, which would then demonstrate that the excised passage itself textually existed in the Greek that that writer was using. I could be wrong, but I, I didn't see that in your video. Just seemed like they're talking about ideas consistent with overall ideas. And we have to take into consideration Parasinus Graecus 1115 is from the 13th century, time of the Council of Lyon. Barlaam is writing almost a hundred years later at that, which point the Terentian Codex, which includes that disputed passage in the Greek, exists. And it would make sense that Barlaam is dealing with polemics in Italy, and if I remember right, I think he was sent to a delegation from Southern Italy all the way up into France itself, that that he would have came across, um, these altered Greek manuscripts. And this is that get to the conspiracy theories that Barlaam was a, a fifth columnist, that, you know, really didn't have Orthodox convictions and may have intentionally been bringing back to him. I'm not even going to get into conspiracy theories like that. I'm just going to get to the basic, um, it makes sense that he would have, if he even quoted it, which I haven't seen demonstrated that he would be quoting a codex that's from Italy, because that's where he was from. Um, and so that, that would be very surprising. It would not really, um, be that another little hole pecked from the woodpecker. Yeah.

And let me be, let me be fair to Craig here. I should have said this before. Um, I'm actually not aware of a specific quotation from Barlaam. I'm taking this from a summary of where Nestorius got his arguments against the papacy. Um, you know, so this was, this was related to me. I'll have to find the author. I, I could put it into the comments and below, and I'll, I'll try to find the paragraph that I got it from. Um, so I was just trying to color in where Nestorius might have gotten his, you know, because he did throw Agatho into his, I don't know, 70-page book, you know, a few times. So I figured, I don't know, speculating, he may have gotten it from Barlaam. So, yeah. And I would agree with you that the whole reason even Parasinus Graecus 1115 has these passages from Agatho is precisely for the, the same intention that, um, Barlaam and others would have it on the Roman Catholic side, right? And which actually, I argue shows the reliability of the rendering, because their their intent is to show, look at all these great things about the Pope by St. Agatho, right? So, I, like I said, there's a very fine detail here, and I, and I would just quibble. We would need a demonstration textually of that passage, because otherwise we'd have to go with, um, what most reliably is the earliest. Yeah. Completely fair. But if, if you're ready, you say, uh, say, uh, Pope Adrian, we can jump into that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, just for clarification for the audience, because there's a lot of Orthodox watching, Agatho is canonized by both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And Adrian is not. No, he, as far as I know, not a saint in Catholicism. I mean, you've got people saying, of pious memory, you know, within a few years after his death, but I, he's not a canonized saint in our community. It's interesting because actually Pope Adrian was a, a very long-lived Pope, which, you know, usually that helps one's memory. Um, and he was a very, um, strong Pope, was a stable time for the papacy. So it's kind of surprising from my perspective that's the case. I mean, I don't know. I don't, I don't know the, um, hagiography for the Roman Catholic side, but it's because he was a long-lasting Pope. So anyway, I mean, uh, if, if we, um, want to jump into, um, with Pope Adrian, as we were talking about before, this, his letter, there's letters ultimately, the first letter is the *concilia* decree of Rome, 785, and that's where most the debate will be. But with this debate, we have to have recourse to the other letter, um, which is, it would have been written, uh, synodically, but it's not a decree, it's a letter to, um, St. Tarasius of Constantinople. And so one's called the letter to the Emperors, sometimes called in jargon, JE 2448. I prefer calling that because that's shorter. And the letter to, um, Tarasius is JE 449. Um, and so, as a review of this, the Greek lacks a lot of papal stuff in JE 244, JE 2448. And the Latin does not lack these things. And the differences between JE 449 between Greek and Latin are more about jurisdiction and the actual, um, ordination of Tarasius, and not really anything about the papacy, which could or may not be relevant, and maybe we'll unpack some of that. Um, and so with, uh, the first letter to the Emperor, 2448, scholars have generally just taken the sort of, whether it's unthinking or it's well-informed, I'll let the audience decide to said, okay, Greek is what the Greeks thought, Latin is what the Latins thought, right? You know, basic, right? This thesis, though repeated into recent years, Doric Luth, Shensky, so it's not like this is from the ancient past that, you know, from the 1800s where people had this idea. It's been recently published by some very big names. But other big names and important people, I'd say, Leso Wallick, but I mean, Lambers and Richard Price, right? Lambers is the living authority on Nicaea II. So that's important, right? You are the living guy who is the utmost expert on the topic, and obviously Father Richard Price is the living authority on all the ecumenical councils, the primitive church, right? So you have two of the living authorities now with a different thesis. Right? Doesn't mean there's no living authority. Luth and Sensky are still alive, but we're not going to put them at the, they're not the New York Yankees of ecumenical councils. All right? So, I, I think it's fair to say the New York Yankees of the ecumenical councils, um, have a different thesis, which, uh, maybe the really distill what it is, is that the Latin renderings of Nicaea II and the differences are all papal, by the way. They're all papal and jurisdictional. So it's like, unlike the other letter, this is pretty much all we care about because that's where the differences are. Um, if you really want to get into the weeds, Anastasius Bibliothecarius does correct some of the iconophile florilegium, *fragia*, rather, but that's not relevant for our conversation. So that being said, um, when you have living authority saying the Latin is what's reliable and original to the Greek, and the Greek was altered by Photius, for political reasons, you got to pay attention because it's not like this is just some random guy saying this. These are like, if you're going to talk to anyone on Earth that gets started on this topic, you have to talk to them. If you're going to read anything, you have to read what they wrote, because these are the living authorities. Um, and so it's with, uh, you know, with a lot of careful thought that, um, I've recently published against this, and, um, God willing, very soon there'll be also a peer-reviewed article against their thesis, and so this will be an ongoing discussion and scholarship on this topic. And so this is where really we could go with two, three different directions, and I think for any of these directions, it would require demonstration, demonstration that that direction is the right path to go down. If the Latin's authentic, and I'll let, uh, Eric defend that, um, then what we do have would be, um, statements that could be interpreted, if we're not going to take as just, uh, blanket honorifics, statements that are consistent with aspects of Vatican II, Vatican I, sorry, direct jurisdiction could be inferred in the longer ending of the letter to the Emperors, 2448. The idea that the Petrine inheritance is solely Rome's is in the first Petrine passage in that same letter, 2448. So it's, we actually start getting things where, like, yes, if you really want to, you can interpret, like, like Eric said, you get have 15 interpretations on a gnarly evening, you know, if you want to, of anything, right? Um, but then you start getting to, all right, well, this does really sound like what it's trying to say, you know, here in the Latin. Um, and so this makes the absence in the Greek curious. And this is where we get to other directions. The majority scholarly opinion has been, which I don't agree with, by the way, but this is the majority opinion, is that again, the Greek and Latin show what was accepted at the council, what wasn't. And this actually was the, what was the official written opinion of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, who's our sole source for the entire Latin letters on this topic. Um, and so, um, this is an old interpretation and a consistent one. Now, the argument I make, and people make fun of it, but it's going to be published, it's already published largely in my book, and it's going to be further published, is that these are actually interpolations by Anastasius Bibliothecarius, which now opens up a very interesting avenue of the, what the context being in the Photius Schism, as they say, in the 9th century, the context surrounding the deposition of Pope Nicholas. Um, instead of, let's say, the papal doctrines coming out of the Vatican States after the collapse of the, uh, Byzantine papacy and the Byzantine Empire in Italy, what we have is something a hundred years later. It's not directly connected to, um, an ecumenical council where both sides received, which then ties into what Eric and I were talking about in the beginning, that, um, conciliar contextualist mindset where we can't just disregard what's accepted in the council, even if it's in passing, because it's consistent with the minds of the fathers there that are weighing in on the primary topic at issue in Nicaea II, would be icons. And so, as I would say, for any of these paths for us to go down to, it requires demonstration. And I don't know if you want to make the case for Latin, or I'll just very briefly say why Lambers and Price are wrong. And maybe I'll just say this because I actually sum up in very few words. I can't give you moral certainty that the majority scholarly opinion is wrong, even though I disagree with it. But I could give absolute evidence that Lambers and Price's thesis is wrong. And here's where it is. It's in the *Collectio Britannica*. We have independently preserved in the *Collectio Britannica*, largely all the passages, um, that are, um, in Anastasius's translation, Latin, and missing in the Greek minutes of Nicaea II. So we have an independent authority that shows us, okay, so other than what Anastasius himself wrote, perhaps we have at least something else in the Latin that matches it. And so we could see that's at least consistent with the majority opinion, the Latin always had it, the Greek didn't. But I'm going to argue this actually renders impossible, actually impossible. I mean, maybe one out of like a quadrillion, you know, it's not like it's going to oppose the laws of thermodynamics, but probability-wise, renders almost impossible Price and Lambers' thesis. Here's why: because in the passages we have in the *Collectio Britannica*, we know they're an earlier Latin because the Latin preserved by them also includes some of the florilegia of the iconophile florilegia that's in that letter. The Latin is very different. It doesn't say anything different conceptually because Anastasius made a retroversion from the Greek. This is central to the thesis of Lambers and Price, is that when Anastasius made a faithful, supposedly, retroversion from the Greek, the Greek had all those papal passages, because how else did they find themselves in Anastasius's translation of the Greek back into Latin? Here's why that's impossible, because the *Collectio Britannica* in the iconophile passages has says all the same stuff, because, right, Anastasius had no reason to retrovert the Greek into Latin and alter the pro-union stuff. He wasn't against that, right? But it makes sense because whenever you translate something from one language back into your own language, words are going to change, even if the meanings are the same. So this is very common if you speak to anyone that knows more than one language and they're translating between friends. You say something in English, and then they say it in Greek to that person. That person speaks Greek back to them, they say it back to you. It'll be the same stuff, even if they're quoting you, but it'll be slightly different words. This, it's like a rule for retroversion. I know how simple, simpler to make this, and that's why it's impossible to have word-for-word concurrences in a retroversion, right? It's, and not have it once, but to have it over sentences and sentences and paragraphs and paragraphs is literally impossible. It's actually such a glaring problem in what's really rightfully Lambers' thesis, because Father Richard Price has faithfully repeats it, that it's actually surprising that, um, he doesn't appreciate this, and hopefully maybe he will after my published work is out on this, because I demonstrate this line from line from the *Collectio Britannica* and the *Collectio Britannica*, the photocopies of the manuscripts, like, you know, it's actual manuscript is online, though I last I heard it was that the British Museum was, the website was down, but it's probably, I guess, back on up today. Um, anyone could follow this. It's not like this is esoteric stuff. You have to go to Great Britain and and actually open up the book. They photocopied the whole book. It's not copy and paste, but you could look at the Latin and compare it to Lambers' critical edition and whatever you have to do. And so I would concede that the ending of the letter to the Emperors, which contains certain, uh, papal stuff in it, which Eric and I disagree about, the ending of that letter, according to Anastasius, when he's translated, said wasn't in the Greek in his day. So if it matches word for word the *Collectio Britannica*, well, that could work because why wouldn't Anastasius just copy word for word what he had from the Latin that from something that supposedly removed from the Greek? So that's not so persuasive. If I were to argue, well, that shows no retroversion, that would be expected if we trust Anastasius on that point. Um, however, the earlier passage, which gets quoted more, you know, about the singular Petrine inheritance, the earlier passage, um, is word for word, other than literally one or two words which have the same meaning, because back then you would, people would make manuscripts by hearing someone read it, right? So that happens with manuscripts. But almost word for word identical over lines and lines and lines, same with Anastasius. This means it was impossible that earlier passage was retroverted from the Greek, and there collapses the whole thesis of Lambers and Wallick, by the way, on that particular point. It's literally impossible. And so they will have recourse to respond to my evidence, which I pose in my article and in my book, and people could look it up themselves, because it's at least the *Collectio Britannica* getting hands on Lambers and stuff may be more difficult, but that being said, they have recourse to these sources to, uh, check these theses. I will say one other little quibble, which I'm very disappointed about by both Father Richard Price and, uh, back to Eric Lambers, which is this. I found out after I did all my research, did all this hard work, I was posed an article by, um, John Karafi, from a French journal, by a scholar named Els Sra. It's from a hundred years ago. So I read it, and I, but before I asked John, I'm like, like, so what's he exactly saying? And John's like, he sounds like he's saying both my side and your side. It's confusing me. So I read the article, and to make a long story short, to my utter surprise, Sra, Saras, rather, completely anticipates, because doesn't prove out, he says his suspicions, anticipates the conclusions I have. Why is this relevant? Well, one, it shows I'm not a nut. It shows that someone else looking at this was saying, there's something more here. Like, one of the points he makes is, it doesn't make sense that the, um, that the Greek would have been edited for the reasons, let's say, Lambers later gives, because of some offense taken at the papacy, because then they would have edited the letter to Tarasius, which has stuff about the papacy. Says that doesn't make sense. Um, he also mentions, which I agree, that the internal consistency of the Greek rendering makes a lot more sense, if, and we can get into that if Eric wants, but there's much more internal consistency in the Greek where I would say the Latin originally read is the Greek, which is why I favor the interpolation thesis. But what is really disappointing is that Sra is neither cited, even though they cite other old writers, by Price or Lambers. He's completely absent, almost as if what he was perceiving to be the case was inconsistent and inconvenient for their point. And that, that's very disappointing because now what my scholarship puts forward is demonstrations of some of Sra's, uh, speculations being proved out from the sources. Sra didn't have *Collectio Britannica* for example. He didn't have a critical edition in N2 because Lambers made it years after his death, right? Based on standing on the shoulders of these giants, because I'm a nobody. We're able now to solve this question. Um, but I was not the first one that perceived the direction this was going to. This is something Sra perceived a hundred years ago. Um, and so I know this is highly technical, so I'll just summarize very basically, it's that, uh, the best evidence is that Anastasius added papal interpolations to deal with a papal situation in the 860s, ultimately the deposition of Pope Nicholas. And we could get into the weeds, and the more we get into the weeds, the stronger, um, and more demonstrations we have of that. But that would be the distillation. Otherwise, a secondary possibility is, yes, the, the Latin said what the Latin said, and the Greek said what the Greek said, and obviously the Greek is what was accepted by the council. But what is not possible is the double Photius forgery thesis of Lambers and Price. It's literally impossible. And so that's the most recent, um, thesis given in the English language that people have mass exposure to in the minutes of Price. What I offer here, and in my published research, is a corrective to that. So that'd be my comments. Daniel, you have anything to say in between?

Nothing. No. What, so, Craig saying the disappointing thing, I'm really excited to see what you're going to, what you have to say about that. Um, um, I know that you have strong opinions from before when me having dialogue with you, Eric, you have strong opinions about Nicaea II in general. Uh, I would say when I say strong, I mean it's not like the mainstream opinion. I think you have very unique. Unique, yeah. Perhaps, yeah. I mean, I haven't found anybody who says exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, I haven't either, and you've been saying it for years. So, yeah, I'm, I'm actually, yeah, okay. So let me first say that, you know, the research that I found from Richard Price, Eric Lambers, who, you know, he, I was actually able to develop some correspondence with him, and he sent me some material that I just, you know, did my best at trying to read, but I, I got what he was trying to say, you know, I got what he was trying to say. I got that Price was trying to basically just carry over the findings of Lambers. I found some other scholars, uh, for this period, I think the names are Leslie Baker and, uh, Halden, John Halden, and some others, and they kept referring to Lambers and Price. Now, for me, I found the claim that the text manipulation was done under Photius to be kind of a stretch. I did. So I do cite Price, Lambers, and some others for their commentary on how unlikely it is that Hadrian's Latin was interpolated later by Anastasius or that it was somehow omitted from the council in some way. I think that they're right about that. But I don't think that the explanation that they have to explain the discrepancy between the Greek and the Latin is very persuasive. So I actually agree with Craig on that. And what else should I say? Oh, okay. So my, my primary response to this would not be to try and insist on the Latin being the original that the council accepted. Um, I would probably argue for that. It's been a long time, to be honest with you, since I've really looked at this. You know, I, I, if, if I haven't read Craig's book yet, although with as many people that are talking about it, I'm definitely going to get it eventually. But, um, anybody who reads my book on this section, it's not, I think in the footnotes, I make it clear I'm not buying all everything that Price and Lambers are saying. So to make our time the most worthwhile, what I would say is that the Greek, the Greek version of what's recorded in the Acts, let's just go with what, in other words, we could save a lot of time here. Let's just say that it is correct that the Greek version is the, is the original authentic acceptation of the council. Let's just go with that, right? And let's just say perhaps Anastasius interpolated the, the other Latin, you know, additions later for whatever motive, right? So let's just, I would say that the Greek is actually more in support of the papacy than the Latin version. Does that make sense? Yeah. And, uh, like, what is it about the Greek that is that you would say hits, right? So, let me say this. I don't think Hadrian's letter, again, says anything like, like it doesn't detail anything about like what Vatican I says about when the Pope speaks without error, you know, nothing like that. I think, think what I think what both the Latin version and the Greek version say are that again, Christ did something with Peter, or Peter and Paul, okay, that has real everlasting and perpetual implications for the historic Roman Church until the end of time. So that might get you 10 yards away from Vatican I. It may, you know, it may not be Vatican I. It may be very different than Vatican I. But whatever it's saying, if it's real and not an empty honorific, if it's real, I still think that the needle is pointing more in the direction of the papal claims than it is in some other direction, you know, some other direction. Okay. So let me show what I mean. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to share the, what the Greek says from Hadrian and show why I think that, let's just go with the Greek, and I think the Greek will, um, support my perspective, and we'll see maybe it doesn't. But here, I'll share my screen. Tell me if you guys see it. Do you see it? Yeah, we're good. If you could just, uh, put it through the slideshow so that they could, yeah, let me, let me try to do that. Yeah, there we go. Is it better? Yes. Okay. So I'm not going to read all this. This is just some things I jotted down before we did our stream. Um, the first point I, I wanted to make was that the, when they read the letter at Nicaea, they all said that they accepted Hadrian's letter. And so I, I think that militates against the idea that the letter was changed at the council, which I think Craig agrees with. So it, it, it's, it's really not really, it's not too pertinent to our conversation. So there you go. So you're saying it proves it was changed or wasn't changed? I wasn't really, no, I, no, I don't think it proves that it wasn't changed, but I think it's worth noting that when they read the Latin and the Greek of Hadrian's letter at

The council. Afterwards, they said, "Hey everybody, what do you think?" And nobody said, "Well, adjustments need to be made," or anything like that. They just said, "We accept it." Now, that doesn't prove they didn't make any adjustments, but I, I thought that you don't, I, I, it was my understanding that you don't even believe they made changes at the council because no, they, no, they did actually. They made, okay, they removed insults to the consecration of Tasius, right? But not the, and jurisdiction claims, okay? So you did, okay, so you do believe they took out jurisdictional claims? Yeah. And, and that actually explains why they go back and forth saying, "Yeah, we didn't make any changes," right? Because they did. And that's why Anastasius and, um, and we have a, uh, uh, a papal document, the 10th Century, they repeat the same thing. So it's not like I, I'm just pulling this out of my hat. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for clarifying that. So from my perspective, what I'm going to put down, the first domino that I'm putting down on the table is that I noticed that when they read Hadrian's letter in the second session, afterwards, they ask the Bishops, "What do you guys think?" And Tasius says, "I accept it." He refers to, you know, Paul's quote to Romans, Romans 1:5, "Your faith is proclaimed throughout the whole world." I think it was like 266, uh, Bishops and 12 monks. Yeah, 260 Bishops and 10 monks, uh, including one from, including St. Sabas from Studion Monastery, which is, it's a side point, but, um, the council, the Council says they accepted it, right? Now, that doesn't, that's not, that's just the domino on the table. That doesn't mean, oh, Eric's saying that this is proof that there were no changes. It's just a notation that they said they accepted it. That's it.

Is there, is there any particular reason, as a follow-up from a question from earlier, but since we're going over this, I think it's important to ask, um, uh, for Hadrian to not be canonized, was there a particular reason? Is there something questionable? I haven't the slightest clue. In my studies, I've never come across anything that would militate against it, um, other than perhaps an overly compromised toleration of the Frankish resistance to, um, Imperial. But, but, but even then, uh, Popes in the, in the near future are still referring back to Hadrianus of holy or pious memory. So, you know, if somebody knows more than me, please, uh, you know, let me know. Uh, but at this point, I just want to say that the council says, like the Bishops, Tasius, uh, they all say that they accept it, right? Okay. Now, they're primarily thinking about the veneration of images. Let's, let's not be, let's not kid ourselves here. They're not all saying, "Yes, we accept the papal claims." That, I don't even know if that's really what they were thinking about, to be honest with you. I think they were thinking about what he said about the veneration of images. Sure. To be fair. All right. So, um, all right. So here's the Greek version of Hadrian's letter. It's basically what you're going to get in Henry Persall, uh, his translation. But I have a different translation at the end, which comes from, uh, this is another team effort from Greek speakers, Orthodox, Catholic, um, people that I've consulted, who are Greek speakers, to help me in this classical translation. But this is what the Greek says. Can you see it? Can you guys see it, or should I try to make it bigger? I can't see the bottom sentence. Oh, you can't see the bottom? Can you see the bottom, Daniel? Or no? It's just, I can see that the end of the paragraph, but if you, can, all right, I can see it now if I do this. I, I, I don't know if that looks good. There's a way to zoom. I don't know if there is. Or the holy and apostles themselves to set up the Catholic and Orthodox faith and laid it down. You know what? Let me do something here. Let me do something here. Hold on, hold on. Let me go here and then, um, see if I can copy this. Okay, copy it and then, uh, let's see. Subdeacon, you got any jokes you could tell while we're waiting for that to be fixed? You know, it's funny you mention that, Craig. There's a saint in the Syriac Orthodox Church, Bar Sarapion, he actually wrote a joke book. It might be, I don't know the history of joke books, but it might be one of the earliest joke books in history. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that's a defeater or a winner for you guys. I mean, I'm happy about it. I think it's pretty cool. The, um, okay, let's try this one more time. Let me see if this is, if this is gonna work. Let's see. Um, there you go. Yeah, let me, let me zoom in again real quick. Hold on. I'm, I'm still getting used to this new laptop here. Okay, here we go. Zoom. All I could read that. All right, so we'll start here. It'll scroll down. Okay, but can you see that so far? If the ancient Orthodoxy, yes. Yeah. Okay, so this is the portion from Hadrian's letter, uh, an English translation of the Greek, which again, for the listeners and for Craig and Daniel, I think that this version still in the direction of support to something like a Catholic would say is a defense for the papacy. Does it come full circle to exactly, you know, an explicit claim about ex cathedra infallibility where outside condition there because a possibility of error and that it's this and that? No, no, no. But what it does is, it's a rock's throw, it's a, it's a long, it's a far rock's throw in the direction of what Vatican I is saying. All right, so Hadrian says, uh, "If the ancient Orthodoxy be perfected and restored by your means," and what he means here is Irene and her and her son, Constantine the VI, "so if the ancient Orthodoxy be perfected and restored by your means in those regions in the East and the venerable icons be placed in their original state, you will then be partakers with the Lord Constantine, Emperor of old, now in the Divine keeping, and the Empress Helena, who made conspicuous and confirmed the Orthodox faith and exalted still more your holy mother, the Catholic and Roman and spiritual Church, and with the Orthodox Emperors who ruled after them. And so your most pious and heaven-protected name," speaking of honorifics, "likewise will be set forth as that of another Constantine and another Helena, being renowned and praised through the whole world by whom the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is restored. And especially if you follow the tradition of the Orthodox faith of the Church of the Holy Peter and Paul, so that, so the faith of the holy church, uh, of Peter and Paul, the chief Apostles, *koryfai apóstolōn*, you know, this is, plural for head, heads, or the head of the apostles, and embrace their singular *vicar*, *monogenēs* bearon, as opposed to *bararia*, um, so their vicar, singular, as the Emperors who reigned before you of old, both honored their vicar, again singular, and loved him singular with all their heart. And if your sacred Majesty honors the most holy Roman Church of the chief Apostles, again plural, referring to Peter and Paul, to whom [Music] was, was given power, *exousia* or *potestas* in the Latin, to whom was given power by God, the word, uh, that's referring to Jesus Christ, uh, to loose and to bind sins in heaven and earth, for they, it's important to understand, they here is still referring to the singular, is referring to the, the chief of the apostles, Peter and Paul, for they will extend their shield over your power, and all barbarous nations shall be put under your feet, and wherever you go, they will make you conquerors." For the four, and here's here's really where you got to kind of like pay attention, four, so there's reason, there's a reason why, um, that they will extend their shield, okay, over, over, and why the empire would benefit, because the holy and chief Apostles, again Peter and Paul, themselves who set up the Catholic and Orthodox faith, have laid it down as a written decree that all successors who occupy their thrones will hold their faith and remain in it all the way to the end. Okay, so what I take from this passage is Hadrian is claiming, let's just say Hadrian wrote this, right? Hadrian is claiming that the Church of Rome is a recipient of some special power. What's the origin of that power? It's the Apostles Peter and Paul, who themselves received *exousia*, power from Jesus Christ, and it's a reference to Matthew 16, the, the power of the keys, right? And what Hadrian is saying is, if the Emperors, Empress Irene and Constantine the VI, if they follow the Roman Church, then, then will have released upon them all these benefits from Peter and Paul through the singular vicar. Remember I said that *monogenēs* is the singular vicar of Peter and Paul? So this is talking about the Roman Bishop as the vicar of Peter and Paul. And then it says that the empire will have all this benefit, barbarian nations will be dispersed because the protecting shields of Peter and Paul will apply. And then it says, well, that's important to know because Peter and Paul, who set up the Catholic religion, they laid it down as a written decree. And the Greek word here for the written decree, some translations have "law," as if like a command, like, "Hey, you should really keep the faith." That's not what the Greek word means. If you do a study on what this Greek word means, it means a constitutional decree, like laying down a constitutional, uh, a constitutional governing rule. They laid it down that all their successors, okay, and this is still referring to the singular vicar, it's not, this is not a ref, I don't interpret this as a reference to the episcopate at large. I refer, I refer to this as the vicar of Peter and Paul in the Roman Church because that's, that's what's being said, right? Hadrian is talking about the Holy Roman Church. So he's basically saying the Roman pontiffs will keep the faith of Paul and Peter. And some English translations say that they should keep it, but there's no indication in the Greek that the word "should" is there. It's that they will hold their faith and remain in it. There's the same Greek word for *a* when Agathos said that, um, Peter by his grace *diam* keeps the Roman Church free from error. This is that they will hold their faith and *diam* all the way to the end. And the Greek word for the end there, I don't have it in front of me, but I can get you the, I can get you the word and the definition, mean it doesn't just mean, like, to the end of their lives. It's talking about to the end of time, the consummation is what the, is what the term means. And so it's still talking about something that pertains to the Roman Church that will benefit the empire on the basis of a power and a promise given to Peter and Paul that sends to the Roman pontiff and will be reliable all the way to the end of time.

Okay, now, um, let me just give a couple of reasons why I think that, uh, translate, that this is the way to take it, because afterwards, let's see here, um, I don't know if I'm sharing my screen. Present. Agathos, you might have to pull it in. Yeah, there we go. From the current slide. Here we go. Sorry, I didn't have them in front of me, the Greek word, because I had to put it in Microsoft Word for you guys to be able to see it. But that last portion, I translate it like this: "For the holy and chief Apostles Peter and Paul themselves, who set up the Catholic and Orthodox Faith, have laid it down as a written constitution that all their successors who occupy their thrones will hold their faith and remain in it to the end, *suntelēs*." This is *suntelēs*, referring to the consummation of all things. So this kind of language is referring to something that's divine. You don't say this about something that you think is potentially going to fail in 10 years, 20 years, 100 years, and then go dormant for however else long. And what else? Okay, yes, so that we have that. Then Hadrian goes on to quote, uh, from the, uh, story of Sylvester. You know, I'm not sure how familiar the readers are with, uh, some of these apocryphal stories and legends that originated in the fifth century. Some people do not take them as legends anymore. They were not taken as fake in the first millennium, at least by the majority. But almost everybody believed that Constantine gave Pope Sylvester, certain, certain a certain gift of authority as a result of being baptized by him, healing him of his leprosy. You know, this is, I can't really go into the backstory of all this, but there is a collection of legends called the *Acta Sylvestri*, or the Acts of Sylvester. Pope Sylvester, and Pope Hadrian immediately starts to quote from the *Acta Sylvestri* right after he, he says what I told you just now before about how the vicar of Peter and Paul, the Roman pontiff, will remain in the truth until the end of time. He immediately goes into, uh, this *Acta Sylvestri*. And that document itself is, is, is recognized by the council, right? Well, that document, this portion is not cited, but in that document, in the second book of this *Acta Sylvestri*, there's a period of seven days where Constantine gives authority to, uh, Pope Sylvester. And the fourth day of the fourth day gift, it goes like this, and this is in the Greek, in the English, this is how it was understood, um, by everybody who accepted the authenticity of *Acta Sylvestri*, which means Photius of Constantinople, who in his *Nomocanon* refers to the *Acta Sylvestri*. It's very likely that many in the Byzantine liturgical tradition drew from this. So this is not talking about a Western thing only. This is also absorbed into the, into Byzantine thought. Now it says this: "On the fourth day, the privilege was conferred upon the Roman Church and its pontiff that in the entire Roman world, priests might treat him as their head (*kephalē*), just as all judges of the Roman world hold the king, emperor." So, in other words, Hadrian immediately goes into talking about this story with Constantine and Pope Sylvester, and that document, uh, talks, gives this, it gives this authority to the Roman Church. It doesn't matter if it's Paul, Peter, Andrew, James, whoever you want to throw in there, it gives this authority to the Roman Church and its pontiff. And this *Acta Sylvestri* was accepted, uh, even by Mark of Ephesus. In fact, it ended up being the, basically the, the premature version of what became the Donation of Constantine, which was accepted by Theodore Balsamon, an Eastern Orthodox canonist. Mark of Ephesus, you know, you hear about the Donation of Constantine. Some of the listeners here might not know this, but Byzantine canonists, such as Blastus, accepted the *Acta Sylvestri* and the Donation. These were taken by, and some scholars say it was basically unanimously received in Byzantium all the way up until a certain point where it started to be questioned, but it was used for various reasons. But in any case, what Hadrian said in his Latin letter that we say was, you know, where it was the head of the church and all that, I think the Latin, the Greek says the same thing. It even gives that perpetuity part where, you know, the Latin part is like, well, what's the Latin saying that the Greek doesn't? Well, the Latin gives more weight to this idea of Petrine exclusivity, and it gives weight to, perpetuity, like to the end of time, right? Well, I think that's, I, I think that's in the Greek version. You just add Paul there. I, I don't see why that's a problem. I mean, even Anastasius adds Paul to the preeminence of the Roman Church in some of his documents. And so, and then the last thing I want to say here, and I'm not going to read this out loud, the listeners can just hit pause and read it for themselves. This is what shows up in the letter to Tasius, and this is something that Craig did talk about, where in this passage, I see the same claims that are made in the Latin version that Craig says was interpolated by Anastasius later in dealing with Ignatius and Photius. So this would be something that was read out loud at Nicaea 787, and it's got the same claims. In my understanding, to make this very simple for the listeners, it's got the same exact substance as what is purported to have been, you know, not said from the Latin interpolated version later. So I hope that makes sense, Daniel. I have some scholars here who agree with me. I'm not going to go through everything here, but this is another thing you can hit pause at. This is the Greek version of Hadrian's epistle to Tasius with that specific passage in bold and underlined. And this is where I do agree with Price. He says, "It is to be noted that the Greek text of this letter does not water down this talking about the Greek text of the letter to Tasius. It is to be noted that the Greek text of this letter does not water down Hadrian's claim to supreme authority as the successor of St. Peter in the way that the Greek version of the letter to the Emperor does." And then he gives us, you know, he refers to Lamberts here. And I, I know Craig, Craig did mention this, and he gave his reasons why he doesn't believe it. But my, my, my statement would just mean, hey, when I, if you give me Anastasius' interpolated version and I digest it, I get the same exact digestion from reading the Greek version of the letter to Tasius. And so that, that's really what I want to capitalize on. Thanks, Eric. Appreciate you, man. Craig, you got a response to that? Let's go, guys.

I'll just start with saying that Price is incorrect there. Between that, there's papal supremacy, and we now have to define terms, direct jurisdiction. If we're going to, um, speak of, uh, the Pope being the, you know, universal, um, bishop, these are things that are lacking from J2449. We, as a scholar, that's a certain, I would say only because when you're superstar scholars, they could get away with not being precise. Little guys like me can't be, um, publishing on this issue. I was parsing primacy and supremacy, and most academics aren't even comfortable with the word supremacy because it sounds so loaded, like anti-Roman, right? And so my point in saying this is, supremacy has a very specific meaning, and you could click pause to what Eric had on screen at pages 171, 172 of Price's translation, and you don't see supremacy. So you could see his observation, but it's not born out in the source. His observation is incorrect. Supremacy, it could be rightly inferred textually from the first letter, and the reason why that is the case is because in the first letter, it does talk about the Petrine inheritance being something solely in Rome. The relevance of this, I'll discuss in a second, but it's, we have one of the necessary elements of papal supremacy explicit in the first letter. It's absent in the second letter. Also, in the first letter, um, we, in the longer ending of that letter, and I argue in my, uh, my research, is this section is interpolated, and I'll get into the reasons why. And the longer ending of that letter, which is, you know, lacking in both what Eric read in the first letter at the ending there, and in the, uh, second letter, which we paused on screen, is that the jurisdiction of the Balkans rightfully belongs to the Pope, essentially because he has direct jurisdiction. I could quote if people want it, but that's essentially the reason Anastasius gives. That's papal supremacy. That's in the interpolations in the first letter. It's not in the second letter. And so it's, factually, I would say, Father Richard Price is wrong in his analysis. We also see the idea, the whole, um, issue of the Ecumenical Patriarch title is taken issue within the longer ending. It's an interpolation, by the way. But it's taken issue in the longer ending of the first letter, right? And it calls the Pope the Universal Pope. And that's why it takes issue because Pope and Patriarch just mean father, right? So the issue is, no, this title rightly belongs to the Pope. That's papal, um, supremacy. That's in the interpolations in the first letter. It's not in the second letter. And so we have to be very careful, especially now we're going to get into it, the textual evidence, interpolations, as to the qualitative difference between the first and second letters. You know, Eric says that the same claims or same substance, they are manifestly not. And when we conflate these things, like, well, they're similar enough, then I believe we start creating, um, errors in our historical analysis. And so I think it's worth pointing out when it comes to the interpolations is that in the, as we already discussed, the talk, the part where it talks about, um, the Pope, Rome having a singular inheritance, that's at the beginning of the first letter that we're discussing, JE 2448. That's lacking in the Greek, and that passage with the collector Britannica has no signs of retroversion. It was never in the Greek. It's impossible. And it's quite strange that while Anastasius, um, admits that the longer ending was in the Greek, he makes no comment of this earlier section, which we could just Anastasius and trust him and be like, well, he just didn't notify us that he was restoring the original Latin here, or it's also possible, as I argue, it's because it's an interpolation. Why? What's the evidence of this? Well, this ties into Eric's reading of the ending, the shorter ending, by the way. What that's what he was reading with the Greek translation of that first letter, that inheritance from Saints Peter, Saints Peter and Paul. We have, I would say, moral certainty that that the Greek rendering, as compared to that Latin interpolation earlier in the letter, is correct because it also makes reference to Saints Peter and Paul, likewise when it quotes that, not the, when it quotes the life of St. Sylvester, who appears there, Saints Peter and Paul. So it makes no sense to be building up to the point and then showing the demonstration, the point from the life of St. Sylvester with both Peter and Paul, but both Peter and Paul aren't there earlier in the sentence. The Greek is much more cogent than the Latin. Here's another proof. Now, Eric was interpreting that the end of that shorter ending of that first letter was about the inheritance from Saints Peter and Paul of solely the bishop of Rome. But if we recognize, no, this connects to that earlier part of the letter about the, the life of St. Sylvester, about Pope, Saints Peter and Paul, we realize there's that, that earlier section actually gives us the interpretation. All right, and I'm going to read it. I have, because I don't have my books in my library here in Cambodia, this is Migne's translation on page 49. Okay, so people could Google. You want me to pull it up and share it? You could. And so I'm just going to look what I have here. And the very, could share it? Great. So, and I appreciate if you want to just get, if you're able to, uh, give, uh, me the link, or do you have a link to it? Uh, I mean, I do. Did someone mention another stream? I was gone for a second. I got it up. Just tell me what page it is. So page 49, you just, you know, scroll down. It will, it starts at indexes and, you know, the prolog. Okay, so on page 49, you can just kind of go to the middle where it says that, "Now these same holy and chief Apostles, who laid the foundation of the Catholic and Orthodox Faith, have left a written law," right? With this exact same thing, the letter ends with, by the way, right? It's the same exact idea. So we could tell they're connecting with one another, that all whoever should succeed to their thrones should maintain the same faith and should continue in it even onto the end. And thus it is that our church maintains and honors holy images. Right? So we see that all this, see that thrones pertains to the whole church, which is why he introduces afterwards, "Our church," why Rome follows this example. And then what follows after that is a reading from the life of St. Sylvester. Now, to connect back to what, uh, Eric was talking about in the ending of the shorter ending of this letter, it quotes Matthew 16:18 as the basis of, uh, of the binding, loosing, and the authority of his teaching. Well, this is relevant because we could see this conflation that all seas of the thrones is about all the bishops. Well, we say, well, Matthew 16:18 is about the Roman Church, not about the whole church. But that's not the understanding of Nicaea II. Now, if we have the translation up, it might be a little harder to find because it's less of the page, but it's in page 406. This is the sixth session of the council. During the sixth session of the council, they give the response to the Council of Hieria. So they quote Hieria's decree, and then they refute Hieria's decree. It's sort of like a crypto decree of sorts because the council's giving an opinion as to what they really feel in response to a false council. So they quote Matthew 16:18. It says in page 46, in the sixth session, "I would they have had taken into consideration the word which the Lord said to Peter, the chief of the Apostles, Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. But having no part with the erection of this building, they bubble out things worthy of derision." Defining thus, then they quote Hieria's depositions of clergy. Now they say, "Having slandered the whole Church of God, and not satisfied with this, or yet satiated with impiety, contrary to all law and justice, they go on to determine that no one after this shall dare to make any image whatever." So we can see their argument here. To distill it is that the church, quoting Matthew 16:18, the whole church is preserved from error, and this is what invalidates Hieria's depositions of clergy throughout the church. We also see, and I don't have the page number in handy because again, I'm in Cambodia, but I could put it in the comment section if people are sufficiently bothered or want the follow-up, it's also in my book and article that JE 2449, all right, the letter from Tasius from Hadrian to Tasius, the one that supposedly speaks of supremacy according to Father Richard Price, which it doesn't, that same letter actually gives an interpretation of Matthew 16:18 that also is universalized. And so we could see the connections of not only how Nicaea II interpreted Matthew 16:18, but how Pope Hadrian himself, at least to the council and official business, I'm sure is some can dig up a Latin document in in a local Western context that might be just about Rome, but in this conciliar context, the Matthew 16:18 isn't exclusive about Rome. And so when we put all those dominoes on the board, as Eric likes to say, the dominoes show that those who inherit the thrones of Saints Peter and Paul are all the bishops. That's the point. And so now it makes sense, being that we have documentary proof and interpolation, the inconsistency with the life of St. Sylvester, the lack of proof of any sort of retroversion which would authenticate it, why Anastasius would alter this passage, because it invalidates, it proves against what he was trying to prove with the supposed singular inheritance of Rome. We could see that this idea that Saints Peter and Paul will extend their shields over the empire, right? That this is something because all the bishops are Pauling and Petering. This does not mean, of course, that Rome doesn't find themselves to be the head. This is something that's fired away in the Council of Chalcedon. The word head is, and also father, by the way, is used about Rome from the letter of the council to Pope Leo. Why is this relevant? Because in the second letter, Pope Adrian to Tasius, it does speak of Rome, having, and I think this would be an accurate translation even from the Greek, ever having the primacy. But the issue is, this is not something that would have been controversial or opposed during the Seventh Council. They had canons on this question. Third Council, Council of Chalcedon, Canon 28 of Chalcedon. This would not have been a concession to them as compared to the patriarchs, Peter, Paul, or St. Peter in isolation being a singular honor to Rome, because they likewise saw themselves as inheritors of their thrones. So this is why it's so important to realize that what we see in the second letter wouldn't have required interpolation or excision, while the first letter does have very different teachings that we don't find in any other councils, right? Just said I could find stuff in Chalcedon that's in the second letter. We can't find anything in any pre-Anastasian document from those in the first letter. Now, there's other things because we mentioned interpolations which are relevant. In the longer ending, the first letter, it mentions the title of Ecumenical Patriarch and like how it can't possibly ever exist, um, it shouldn't be used. And the only thing I'd add to this is throughout the minutes, in I see it to Tasius, is called Ecumenical Patriarch. So it's a very odd argument to make while the rest of the council has no issue with the title Ecumenical Patriarch. It makes sense, right? That the longer ending with which I do think authentically has some dispute with Ecumenical Patriarch would have this excised, not Ecumenical Patriarch, but the consecration rather, that makes sense. It doesn't make sense that this thing about Ecumenical Patriarch would be there. But this whole idea, both by Rome's legates and both in the Latin and the Greek, that it would just be used and no one would think anything of it. There's, uh, other identifiable fingerprints of forgery. This is very important. It's hard to understand because people have this sort of elementary school understanding of forgeries. The Donation of Constantine, despite Orthodox apologetic videos on this topic, is really not all that important as I think Eric rightfully points out with our Kenna stuff to the question of dispute between us and Roman Catholics. The Donation of Constantine essentially speaks of the same headship of Rome and patriarchal appeals to Rome. This is not something that would have been foreign, um, to the Byzantine Church. I deal with this in my book and really for the sake of her debate, it doesn't get into any of the papal supremacist distinctives, unlike the interpolations which would be relevant to the dispute. And so for that reason, when I talk about a forgery, even a crass forgery like the Donation of Constantine, where the whole thing's made up, really isn't too relevant. If you're wondering why they even made it, had nothing to do with disputes with the East. It had to do with disputes with the Franks. And so that the Roman, uh, the Romans could have political independence. They were looking for essentially written law that justified Vatican States being their own country. Anyone who reads that document cannot but walk away with that's the actual point of the document. That being said, though, there are identifiable fingerprints of forgery because, um, in the longer ending of this first letter, this letter to the Emperors, it contains unattested to, uncited quotations of papal correspondence. You go, well, why is that even relevant? For one, that doesn't exist in the whole entirety of the rest of the letter, only in the sections which still so happen to have unprecedented papal claims. So that's already domino number one, where we have something that textually doesn't exist anywhere in the letter, and anyone can read Lamber's critical edition and go through the rest of the letter, and we don't have unattested papal correspondence in the rest of the letter. If you want to quibble, there's something the Council of Rome 769, but we're going to leave that aside for now. Doesn't exist in the rest of the letter. The second thing is, this is not the first forgery to use that method. The first forgery was made in the year 846, which would have been about 20 years before, no, 13 years before Anastasius' written career in Rome began in earnest, and that's in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. In fact, that is the whole methodology behind the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. That's why they escaped detection for like 800 years because they sound like papal correspondents. Anyone who's read enough documents that are ecclesiastical knows they have a certain sound, they have a certain internal logic. And so when making a forgery, if you make the Donation of Constantine, it just sounds like a forgery. It doesn't sound like any donation or any ecclesiastical document from the era. But this is not true of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, why? Because they'll take something either that's real, quote it in full, and interpolate it, as what happens in Isidore II in the early section without the retroversion, like we talked about, or they'll make something out of full cloth, but it's like a mosaic made of tiles. They're taking a quote from here, from this document, from the council in Isidore, and a quote from here from a letter of Pope Gregory the Great, and a quote from here from a letter of the Emperor to, uh, Pope Leo II, or whatever, and they make a whole new idea with the real words of different letters, like different tiles making a mosaic. This is an identifiable methodology that is persistent throughout the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. This methodology is in the longer ending of the first letter to the Emperors of Pope Adrian. Remember this methodology, or anything consistent with it, uncited papal quotations making pro-papal statements, is absent from the rest of the letter. But it just so happens four times to exist in the end of the letter, sentences one after another, just like the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, which just so happens were made 13 years before Anastasius started writing this stuff. So it's not a coincidence. It's a contemporary method of forgery, identifiable in the Latin minutes of Nicaea II. And so not only do we have zero signs of retroversion, we have the actual fingerprints of forgery consistent with contemporary forgeries, and the best example of contemporary forgeries, the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. This is not something people could have concluded a few years ago because the, the research of Kuttner, and his name, he's an American, he lives in Germany, his name is skipping me for the moment, he's a big expert in the Pseudo-Pseudo-Isidorian. These guys only start publishing on this topic since 2018. So Eric and I were doing apologetics and reading into this stuff when this stuff wasn't figured out yet, but now it is. And so now we have to update how we understand these documents in light of the evidence. So in light of all this, we have very compelling evidence. We have one moral certainty that there's no retroversion, it wasn't in the Greek. But on top of this, very compelling evidence of obvious interpolations. These interpolations containing qualitative statements of papal supremacy absent in pre-Anastasian documents, including that second letter to Tasius from Pope Adrian. These details are very important because I understand someone like Eric, who's a Roman Catholic, they see something about the Pope, honorific, about embracing the vicar, and they, to quote Eric, may jump to, well, that means it's through the vicar, through that vicar. But that's actually not what it states. It's about embracing the vicar and the thrones and the blessings of Saints Peter and Paul. If I remember right, and so it's about all their successors. So we embrace one successor, St. Peter and Paul, but it's through all the successors, which the religion, the divine religion of the Ecumenical Councils, is that preserved? Is being preserved? And so I hope what I offered here, though detailed, I'll sum up holistically, shows what's going on in Nicaea II. We know earlier in the letter, it applies the thrones of Saints Peter and Paul to all the bishops because it's contrasted with the Church of Rome. So it's not just a Church of Rome, they're also among these churches. It crosses with the interpretation of Matthew 16:18 in Hadrian's letter, and in the sixth session of the council, the supremacy statements are all from passages that have obvious evidence of interpolations. So to me, this is pretty settled, and this is why I've, I've published on this. And so hopefully this is something if people want to get more of, they could follow up, they could read it in the book, it's in a lot of it's in footnotes, and future, in an article. All right, awesome. Eric, do you got, you have a response to that? And then we'll do Q&A.

Yeah, I'll try to be really quick. I'll try to be, okay. So, uh, if you could just share my screen so that way we have this, you know, up here. Let me go from the current slide. So for those, for those of you who know Greek, I would, you know, I would recommend you go to the actual full Greek, you know, that you can find in, um, in Migne. Uh, I actually don't have the reference unfortunately right now with me, but I'll try to put that in the comment section for those of you Greek readers, if you kind of want to see what the Greek version of Hadrian's letter actually says, and and see whether Migne's translation is very literal and accurate or not. I consulted an Eastern Orthodox Greek speaker, and I've, and not just one, I also consulted another Greek speaker, and I also consulted people who are in the scholarship of translating classical Greek to get this English translation of that last part of the letter, which it does sound different than Migne's English translation. So you can hit pause here and then or look to the comments later for so you can see the context of the Greek. But, you know, I'll just go back to what I was saying here, and I know this, this is where it's kind of like, you got to zoom in a little bit, but if you can, I I think it's very important to see that Hadrian, in the Greek version, this is the, in English translation of the Greek here, he's got a consistent reference to the Roman Church as the Church of Peter and Paul. So, and that is that is a singular reference to Rome. I don't know any commentator who reading this would say that it's referring to the universal Church of Peter and Paul. It's referring to the local Roman Church of Peter and Paul, the chief of the Apostles. And then it refers to, you know, Hadrian's telling Irene and Constantine that if they do, if they restore image veneration, which was is on the down in Byzantium, if they restore it, then they're opening themselves up to conformity with the Roman Church. And when you do that, the Roman Church being the Church of Peter and Paul, then brings certain benefits to you. And then it says, look in the middle there, "if you follow the tradition of the Orthodox faith of the Church of the Holy Peter and Paul," which is a reference to Rome, "and embrace their vicar," again, it's important to understand when he says vicar there, we got to pause, okay? Vicar is in the singular, you know, not vicars, because if it said vicars, they're referring to more than one person. You know, but because he's referring to vicar, he sees Peter and Paul, in other words, he sees the Roman Bishop as an individual as the vicar of Peter and Paul. And what's a vicar? A vicar is somebody who stands in place of another. So he's saying the Roman pontiff stands in the place of Peter and Paul. And what's the consequence of that? Is that just a name? No, it's because the powers that were given to Peter and Paul are now active in their vicar, who's the Roman pontiff. And it's important to understand that because later when he starts to refer to their, in the Greek, let's see, it's their *doxas*, right here, their *doxas*, their successors. There's, there's really no good reason in my opinion to take this to mean the whole hierarchy of the whole universal church because the context here is Hadrian telling Irene and Constantine to conform themselves to the tradition of Rome, which is the Church of Peter and Paul. And if you embrace their vicar, in other words, if you embrace me, Pope Hadrian, then you get all, you get the benefit of having the power that Christ gave to them in the person of their vicar. And so, just, just shortly after that, it speaks about the successors of Peter and Paul. Who's he talking about? He's talking about the vicar that will last until the end of time. So some people might say he says successors, Eric, that's plural, that's got to, that's got to be referring to Rome, the patriarchs, the rest of the bishops. But again, remember this passage, he's talking about the historical longevity of history until the end of time. Of course, there's going to be more than one Roman pontiff, right? So he's talking, so I interpret this, this is why I come to a different, so for the listeners to make this easier, this is why I come to a different understanding than Craig does because he's seeing this as a general application to the bishop of Ephesus, the bishop of Corinth, the bishop of Asia, everywhere. And in the context, this is talking, I take it as a reference to the Roman pontiff because that's the context. It's talking about the benefits that Constantinople is going to open themselves up to if they conform to the Roman pontiff, you see? The other thing I wanted to say was Peter and Paul, some people might say, well, Eric, it, it says Peter and Paul, therefore Vatican I is flushed down the toilet, right? Well, maybe, maybe Vatican I is flushed down the toilet. I don't think it is. But it's still saying the chief of the Apostles give something to the Roman Church itself. So, and the Roman Catholic Church continued to refer to Peter and Paul. When I read the correspondence of Pope Gregory II, nobody questions, no nobody in scholarship questions that Pope Gregory II was a papal supremacist. Well, then when he refers to the authority of Peter and Paul, does that mean that he didn't believe he wasn't a papal supremacist? Or how about popes later on, like Pope Leo X, in his bull condemning Martin Luther, refers to the authority of Peter and Paul? Uh, so does that mean he's deleting his understanding of what became clear by the 15th, 16th century? So it's not necessary, it's not necessary for us to say, oh, the addition of Paul there definitely depletes this of a strong papal claim. Uh, the other thing is the whole church, Matthew 16, my interpretation of Matthew 16, *ecclesia* is the whole church. It's never the Roman Church. In fact, the only person I know of who makes use of Matthew 16 to refer to the Roman Church is Maximus the Confessor, and his reduction there is actually, it doesn't match well with Popes in the 13th, 14th, Vatican I does not make a reference, it does not interpret it as the local Roman Church. It's always the universal Church. Yeah. And then the last thing I want to, oh, okay. St. Tasius, uh, mentions that Rome, in the, in the Acts of Nicaea 787, Tasius says elsewhere that the Roman Bishop inherits the presidency over the whole hierarchy of the church because of its Petrine succession. And so the council did welcome the claim. Now, did they understand it in an Orthodox Byzantine way? Probably. But they understood it. They didn't have a problem speaking about, uh, Peter alone. And the last thing I, the last thing I want to say is that the Greek version of the letter to Tasius, we will just have to disagree on that. I do think that it has claims to, may, again, Vatican I is not really in my purview here. It just, it makes claims that move the needle far away from contemporary Orthodox beliefs. That's all I'm trying to.

To say, where does that bring us to Catholicism? I don't know. I think it does, but I'm not here to really show that it do. I don't think that it matches Eastern Orthodoxy, um, which is a different, it's a different intention. I could be an atheist, I could be a Buddhist and have that goal in mind. Um, and then the very last thing I want to say is that the Donation of Constantine does have a reference to Peter alone and how the Roman Bishop is his Vicar, the Vicar of Peter, um, in addition to some several other secular endorsements. Um, yeah, so that, that's basically it. Sorry about that, took a little time.

I mean, uh, I just want to say very briefly, I don't have too much to say in response to that, but I think, uh, in summary, I think what we're seeing is, if we're looking at where the needle's moving, it's obviously moving away from Rome, you know, with what we're finding with the forgeries and interpolations, what we're finding with aspects missing, um, in the Greek but there in the Latin, um, the needle moving the other way. And so I think following the evidence, um, what we're finding is the Orthodox position being vindicated from history and the Orthodox position, um, being extant and explicit in the sources that are reliable, but absent, um, from those, the papal, uh, claims that we have today, absent from those.

But to, to quibble one thing, like when we talk about, uh, Matthew 16, its application to the church, because its application is specific to the Church of Rome in Anastasius's impalation, early in the letter, it's a term of vicar, which clearly is used there, uh, for the Church of Rome. But when the passage continues, it speaks of thrones, right? Cathedrals, almost one could say, and we're talking about more than one church now. There, one bishop doesn't have multiple thrones. And so it's not like, oh, well, Saints Peter and Paul, or, you know, we, we focus on other plurals. The issue is the term thrones, and we see that application with other usages in the council and by Hadrian himself. Matthew 16:18, um, particularly the contrast between the thrones and the Church of Rome, we could see he's using it in the sense that the thrones are the whole church and, um, Rome is amongst those churches, another church.

Um, now I think people here, you know, it's, they could be sympathetic to, um, Eric's interpretation, um, that he sees, um, within the ending, um, if we parse it grammatically a certain way and bring in an interpretation that I don't think holistically takes in the rest of the council, but let's say it's just grammatically more compelling, if we want to concede that for the sake of argument, I think it really begs the question, what then motivates the interpolations of Anastasius to make it so specific about the singular honor of Rome, um, if what we already had there in the Greek, um, could be taken in that sense, why alter it so it absolutely must be taken to that sense?

Um, I do think if we're just going to go by, you know, what's more credible, it's when I'm posing the interpretation I give explicit in the sources, um, that now we see a clear motivation for the alteration in the interpolation because what we do have actually disputes, um, the Roman Catholic view, um, that we have today, which Anastasius introduced into the text, um, and so I do think the interpolation is not a matter of, oh, well, it says the same thing. No, the interpolation was added specifically because the person making it knew it didn't say the same thing. Otherwise, what would his motive be to add an interpolation, um, that would say the same thing with different words? Um, I just don't think, uh, I just don't think that's very credible. So, um, that's all I have to say about that.

Okay, uh, yeah, no, I, I disagree, but I totally respect your work. You know, what you're doing here is, you're in the, you're in the trenches. We come to different, a different conclusion, but, uh, you know, I respect, I respect your investigation. Thank you, Eric.

All right, Q&A time. Uh, thank you guys for, for that conversation. I feel like all the internet theology conversation should be like this. I wish they were all like this. All the guys watching, take notes, learn how to talk about theology with each other. This is how you do it.

Um, okay, first question comes from Dioscorus to Eric. Does the Jansenist controversy show that Rome is infallible on matters of fact directly related, like the Augustinian containing heresies, Ebas's letter with V in mind? Before you answer, Eric, I just want to say real quick, um, you mentioned about Peter and Paul always being mentioned together in our diptych. In the Syriac Church, we say the head of the singular head, the head of the apostles, or a can be translated as prince, but it's still singular prince or head of the apostles, Peter and Paul. We say a singular noun and then we give both, both names. Yeah, which I think is very interesting. Yeah.

Um, yeah, so Dioscorus, you know, this is something that is in my stack. I've got a long, a large stack of things to really tackle. So what I'm about to say here is actually scratching at my memory for what we're talking about. I know the Jansenist controversy in the five, uh, the five, um, either the five books or the arguments in Jansen's book, was condemned. And then the Jansenists said, well, we agree with the Pope's rationale, but we don't, we don't agree that it hit the target with what Jansen has actually said. Um, and so, and then the response to that was, no, the Pope, the Pope's referend is included in his infallible authority. I, when I did some research in this a few years ago, I had some Catholic theologians tell me yes and no. So I still don't really know. I could tell you this, if the, if our doctrine of papal infallibility implies that factual, factual terms like whether Ebas's, Ebas's letter was Nestorian or Monophysite, if that is consubstantial with, in, with the infallibility of the Pope in his ex cathedra decrees, no pun intended, and, and if the first constitution is an ex cathedra decree, then I think we have found a, a falsification for papal infallibility in Vigilius. Uh, no, so that's a pending, it's a pending research on my part. Uh, so I'm still doing my, my homework. Thanks as always for your honesty, Eric.

Okay, uh, next question. This one's for me. Uh, to what extent can the Petrine See quotes refer to Rome, Alexandria, Antioch collectively rather than exclusively to Old Rome? Depends on the context. So how do we know if which Petrine it's referring to? It could refer to a particular one, or it could refer to, in then, general Sees of Peter. Um, Craig mentioned earlier that he read our canons. So in our canons, you will see a reference where the Patriarch of Antioch on multiple occasions appeals to his Petrine authority. Um, one off the top of my head is, if anybody looks into the IOC controversy, which is the schismatic Indian group that's schismatic from Antioch, we have Indians in communion with Antioch and Indians excommunicated from Antioch. And ironically, a lot of the arguments made are Petrine arguments, and the Indians under Antioch say they call themselves under the Holy Throne. Okay, so, and when the excommunication, the bull of excommunication, uh, went forth in the letter, it's all this Petrine language of why Antioch has the authority to do such a thing. Um, so in that case, it would be particularly to the See of Antioch. You'll see in other cases in church history where, uh, uh, the Petrine, the Petrine See could refer to Rome particularly, or to Alexandria, or to all three in a general sense. It just depends on the literature that you're reading.

This is for both of you guys. Does John IV of Jerusalem's Roman pontiff in Irene statement in the 570s to the 90s serve as a prelude to how Agathon and Hadrian thought about their writings and stuff? I would need the statement in front of me. Um, I've seen stuff cited even in footnotes, and when you follow up, it's just not there. Um, so it's, uh, I will say this as a general rule though, whether it's Fequ, whether it's Papacy, whether it's NGG Essence distinction, doesn't matter. You have a quote mine, or you see a quote, and or someone provides you the quote, you go, all right, I see what the quote says. Could he tell me what was it talking about before and what was it talking about after the quote? And the person says, well, I don't know. Then they don't know the context of the quote, and you really can't interpret it. Um, and so I do think that, uh, in, in this instance, I would have to read the letter or read the section and really know what's going on here.

I, I don't know. You're on mute, Eric. Sorry about that. So this is another thing I've looked at without, uh, getting the original. Um, I hunted, I tried to hunt it down years ago, and I think I got sent a document like about a year ago, and I, I saved it, but I didn't read it. Um, I don't know. I, I, I don't know what I can tell you is this, and it's relevant to, uh, the, um, Pope Sylvester, is that the, there's actually only one place that I know of, and if, if anybody here or in the comment section knows of another place, you could just say it in the comments. I know of only one place in the entire, um, Byzantine Menologion, the festival feasts of the Saints, where it says that somebody teaches infallibly, and it's actually in, uh, January 2nd, Pope Sylvester, his, his office in the Byzantine Menologion. And, uh, through some scholarship that's being done by Father Christian Caps, um, it's not published yet, there, there is there is a claim that St. John the Hymnographer, who's a saint in both Catholic and Orthodox Churches, was actually influenced by Anastasius Bibliothecarius, the librarian, when they met together at the Council of 869. And that because of Pope Nicholas's usage of Actus Sylvestri in his claim to immunity of judgment and other statements from the Acts of Sylvester, a council of Rome 324, and a few other things, it's thought that maybe St. John Hymnographer actually created the office for Pope Sylvester in 869 and included that in there as a result of an assumed authenticity to the Actus Sylvestri. That's something that's kind of speculative, it seems to me, but it, you know, um, maybe when once things are published, you know, it'll come out looking more, um, pristine. But directly to your question, I, I don't, I don't know.

Yeah, the Oscar, send it over through Subdeacon Daniel. Um, when it comes to Armenian manuscripts, um, a lot of Armenians were in communion of Rome, so it depends on dating, where it comes from. So there's there's textual critical things that are relevant, um, to questions like this. Um, and yeah, the question of him in the Menologion, the timing would be interesting because in reality, um, the Council of Constantinople, 869-870, in some respects adds additional difficulties to the idea of papal infallibility, and it's something that Anastasius only a few years later really clarified on that subject, um, of Honorius and everything. So it's the timing would be interesting to me. Um, and so like Eric said, we'd really have to see everything that comes out on this and how it's interpreted, um, in order to really draw strong conclusions about it.

All right, next question. Could Craig and Eric go over their positions on Stephen of Bostra and Pope Hadrian on whether statues are idols? I started this debate years ago when I asked Eric about Craig's claim, you guys don't, you guys are you guys disagree on this point with each other? I mean, Eric just had a large article which I haven't read, and I haven't looked into this topic for years now. Um, so I'm not sure what the debate is.

Well, so that's, yeah, my article. I open up saying I'm not sure if, uh, Craig would hold to this anymore, but I remember in the past there being a, an appeal to the work of, um, what's Papias, Cardinal Papias, who was used by another, uh, French or French or yeah, French scholar of the 16th century, Bingham, who Mendham, uh, cites or refers to in his comment, in his translation of the Acts, where Hadrian says, Hadrian uses Stephen of Bostra and says there's a difference between an image and a statue that is an idol. And the idea was, look, look, look at there, this, there's an equation being made between a statue and an idol. And I think, um, I think that, uh, B. Mendham, trying to summarize Bingham and Papias, said that there were some commentaries from Gregory of Constantinople and, um, and Stephen of Bostra saying that the early church didn't use statues because of how close they looked to early statuary, idol idols. And, you know, so I thought that you were saying that therefore Pope Hadrian condemns the use of statues, but the way I read it is very different because he goes on to speak about 3D images, um, and the whole council goes on to refer to, and I know you already know this, so I'm not saying this if you don't know this, but the, the woman who made a statue of Jesus in, yep, there you go. So that, that was recorded, that's used by John Malalas, John of Damascus, and then it's used by the Seventh Council. So it seems as though statuary itself is not idolatry, but rather statuary with the intention of using it, um, in correspondence to an idol is what's idolatry. That's, that's that was my position. That's the whole article.

Yeah, this is one of those examples where if we had a stubborn-minded, single-minded one bishop says one thing, um, and so if any other bishop ever disagrees, that bishop in a council, then it it puts itself into like internal contradiction. I think this would be an example that would create that issue because all we have from what is quoted, um, by Pope Hadrian is a, a negative idolatrous evaluation of statutes. Um, that being said, that is not the firm conclusion of the council. And I've been talking about this for years. The council holds statues in tension. So it comes up later in the council, um, the existence of doves, for example, representing the Holy Spirit. It doesn't really endorse it per se, um, it simply, you know, mentions their existence and stuff like that. And so kind of reminds me of something that comes up in the fifth session of the Fifth Ecumenical Council where, um, and I think this was who is the bishop of Con in that council? I'm sorry, in Nicaea. No, no, in Constantinople II. Anyway, he, he writes to Taticus. Uh, Taticus. Okay, yeah. Taticus writes in the fifth session or says, because they're writing what he says, um, that the council doesn't follow, and this is in, uh, the letter of Ibas to Maris, the opinion of one or two bishops in its evaluation. So the point of this observation, his like was, even if one or two bishops in the council approved of the, um, of the Nestorian contents of the supposed letter of Ibas de Maris, that does not mean that was the mind of the Chalcedonian fathers, which makes sense because we have all the subscriptions, only one or two say anything that may, and Subdeacon and I have had videos on this, that may may be construed in the sense that they approved of Nestorianism. Um, and so if we apply that principle, even if, which I do believe textually the answer is yes, um, St. Agathon condemns statutes, that clearly isn't the entire mindset of the council. It doesn't endorse statutes. They're not endorsed. The council's decree, their depiction is not endorsed. The decree endorses icons of Christ and the Saints and Angels, which is interesting, not of the Holy Spirit, even though icons of the Holy Spirit are mentioned, his depictions are not decreed because similar to those statues, it seems like the council didn't have a single teaching on it that was held in tension. Um, and so that's my best understanding of that topic, having, uh, not really visited that in much detail in four years or so, um, but that's what I remember right now.

Okay, so I sent over the, the John IV from Dioscorus to you guys on Facebook whenever you vacation. Good vacation reading. All right, so next question. Could, let's see, that's we did that one just now. Okay, this is to, to you, Craig. Can Craig provide a concentrated summary of how he addresses the stronger papal language in Agathon and Hadrian? He appears, it's just they were later interpolations. That's your, that's your thesis, huh? Not quite. Very distinct. There it was not interpolation. Agathon's letter does not contain interpolations. Okay. Um, I put forward that Agathon's letter contains the sort of VOR fix and content typical of other 7th century documents, um, and that the council, in removing a section from that letter, did so in order to prevent confusion with other conciliar business. If Dioscorus, for whatever reason, wasn't at the council, I don't think they would have, I don't see the reason to. Um, this is very different from Nicaea II, where what we have in the interpolations have explicitly and specifically different content that is lacking in any church documents preceding the 9th century. So, um, that, that would be a distillation of what I'm expounding here.

All right, last question and wrap it up, Eric. Which conciliar act decree has greater magisterial weight? The anathema of Honorius for heresy or Agathon's letter? Yeah, so, well, Agathon's letter was accepted by the council, so it's got a great deal of weight. And Leo II, when he ratified the council, he made reference to Agathon's letter, you know, as the voice of Peter and all that kind of thing. So Agathon's letter was not directly, um, nobody quibbled with it as far as we know at the council. All right, I know that's, you know, some disagreements about that, but nothing at the council has said no. Nothing in the posterior history indicates that, in my understanding. So what has greater magisterial weight? Um, well, in Catholic ecclesiology, the anathema of a person, um, it's a matter of debate in Catholicism as to whether this can be understood as fallible. Um, I don't think it's ever been treated magisterially. You know, for example, we can, we believe that canonizations are infallible. So when somebody's canonized, um, we believe that the infallibility of the church is employed when such a thing happens. So it's a good question to ask, okay, well, if canonizations are infallible, then why wouldn't anathematization be infallible? Um, and, uh, to be honest with you, Cath, I can't speak on behalf of Catholicism. I can tell you that the Byzantines did believe they were, um, infallible. Perhaps not every single last one of them, but that seems to be the overriding consensus. Anastasius the Librarian, he seems to think that it's not infallible because in one of his, one of his writings, he says that the council aired and that we should go with, we should go with another opinion about Honorius. Um, yeah, so I mean, uh, what has greater magisterial weight? I would say if I had to choose one, it would be Agathon's letter. But here, here's the issue. Pope Leo II agreed with the anathema of of Honorius. So there's at least some part of Agathon's letter that remains in conflict with what his successor decreed. Um, so you have a pope against a pope on a matter of fact, namely Honorius's judgment, his failure at at defending the truth.

Right, I say as an observation, the weighting of magisterial authorities, I'm honestly unaware of anyone else who has parsed it like that before Anastasius. Um, so that is a, uh, something I think important because it comes up again and again in our discourse, and that's why I think people ought not be laughing about what I'm putting forward about Anastasius. This is pretty serious stuff, and I think with further research, it's going to be vindicated by history.

Okay, well, I want to thank you guys again. Uh, I really appreciated you guys coming on for this, and, uh, like I said, uh, viewers, their channels and the links to their books are in the description. So check them out. Look out for future content from both of them regarding this topic and other topics. Um, and like, subscribe, do all that stuff that that people say to do. Uh, comment, whatever. And, uh, if you guys have any plug or whatever, go for it.

Eric, Craig, get both our books. Yep, get, get both our books. And, uh, being that I'm in Cambodia and I'm helping with the mission here, Orthodox Christian Theology. Donate, support the evangelism here in Cambodia. And then give us that, that funny story though. Uh, an inquirer came in with him and his wife and a daughter, and, you know, talked a little bit, whatnot, and then my wife starts talking to the wife. It's like, she's my cousin. I'm like, what do you mean? Like, it's her first cousin. Oh, wow. So random. I thought that was pretty, pretty interesting. First, first cousin walked into the door of an Orthodox Church. Yeah, it's awesome. There you go. Give us, give us the verse you always close with.

Craig, fight that for the truth. The Lord God will fight for you. God bless you. Have a good day. I [Laughter] mean. [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] for [Music] the [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] for [Music] amen.