The Heart of Church History

I will admit the past couple of days have been rather interesting. When we were Monday night out in Magna, I get done speaking on God made them male and female. And I walk outside, and my truck is already buried in snow.

And it's just coming down like I don't know what. And that was a fun trip back to the KOA, I will admit that. But I'll take the heat over not being able to see where in the world you're going any day.

I'll turn the AC on. I'll sweat. That's OK. But that's just weirdness. And now I've sat there the past couple of days. And oh, look, it's sunny. You look down, type a few words.

Oh, look, it's snowing.

You look down, type a few words. Oh, look at that, it's raining.

And I'm just, what is this?

Schizophrenic weather, man.

It's like, whee.

In Phoenix, it's either sunny and hot, or oh, here comes a monsoon.

Oh, it's a dust storm.

Yeah, there you go.

But they last a little while. It's not like every few minutes, oh, it's something new.

That's great.

My poor truck has just been slammed by all this stuff. It's like, what are you doing to me? But anyway, it's good to be here. And what I wanted to do this evening, some of you may know that the first class I ever taught after I graduated in seminary at Grand Canyon back then, and was it university yet, or was it still just Grand Canyon College?

I can't remember at that point in time, was church history. And it's not like in my seminary studies there had been room for a major in that area. But very thankfully, I had a wonderful church history professor in seminary.

Now, the funny thing is, I took a church history class. I started to take a church history class in college, and I dropped it after about three meetings. I did not like where the professor was going. I did not like the book.

It was really way to my left, and I just wasn't interested in it. And it sort of left a bad taste in my mouth. And I already recognized, because I was involved with, Alpha Omega had been founded by then.

I was involved with doing Mormon apologetics. That was the first thing we were really primarily focused on. But I was already dealing with some Jehovah's Witnesses, and you've got to know some stuff about church history if you're going to deal with Jehovah's Witnesses, because they will make some amazing claims about church.

History.

Why Church History Matters for Apologetics

But I'm so thankful that when I went to seminary, I had a church history professor who clearly loved the subject himself. That helps a lot, and he communicated that to me. I still have the notes that I took in that class and have used them and expanded upon them for decades now since then.

And the church history class that I taught at Grand Canyon was a required class, and so I had people coming in there, and you know what it's like to take a required class. It's sort of like, oh, here I am.

And my goal, given that I was sometimes younger than the people in the class, my goal was by the end of that semester that they would love the subject of church history. They would be very, very interested in it.

And that's pretty much how it worked out. And I'm sort of afraid that many Christians today, I was raised sort of independent fundamentalist Baptist, and so church history was Billy Graham. That was about as far back as church history went.

There is, in the fundamentalist mindset, a disconnection from ancient history, with one exception. Have you ever seen the little red booklet, The Trail of Blood? Anybody ever seen that? You've seen it?

I've got a couple of people. The Trail of Blood I ran into as a teenager, and that was the one attempt that we made as fundamentalists to sort of explain, you know, Jesus did say he was going to build his church.

But the reality is that, man, nobody in church history looks like us. They didn't wear white shirts and dark ties and didn't have potlucks and didn't sing out of the Baptist hymnal. And so they probably weren't Christians.

And so where were the Christians during all that time? And the Trail of Blood is just a horrifically bad attempt to say, well, there were Christians. It was a narrow little line, and they hid in the mountains, and they were over here.

And some of the groups that they grab onto were just so ethically heretical, non-Trinitarian, Gnostic, and all the rest of this stuff. But they baptized believers, and so that meant that was the one true church.

And so it was sort of a new thing for me when I took church history and seminary to feel the connection. And I can sort of describe it by something that happened when I went up. In 1993, I don't know if any of you remember, the pope came to Denver, Colorado for World Youth Day.

So you're going, 1993. What were you doing in 1993, Andrew?

I was three.

OK, there you go.

I need some Geritol. Has anybody got one of those chairs? Oh, here we go. So we went up to, you're not much older, Wade, are you? Same as my son, yeah. OK, all right. Anyway, so we went up to Denver. I did two debates up there with a guy named Jerry Matatix on the subject of papacy.

And so, thank you, sir. But one day, we were sitting in a, Rich and I were sitting in a health food store called Winchell's Donuts. And this health food makes you feel good, so that's health.

Food.

And I happened to be looking at the newspaper, and there was a discussion, there was an article about the Papal Treasures exhibit that was there because the pope was there. And I'm reading it, and all of a sudden, I go, Rich, we're going to go to this.

And he's like, we are? And I said, yep, because I saw that they had a page from P72 on display. Now, P72 is the earliest manuscript copy we have of 1st and 2nd Peter and Jude. And so, I'm like, all right, we're going to see this.

And so, you had to get tickets and go at a certain time and stuff like that. And so, we go walking, and it's one of the first things that you encounter. It's under glass, and they've got a description of it and stuff like that.

So here I am looking at this thing, and it's from around the year 200. So it's 1 ,800 years old, and it's amazingly legible. I'm reading it. And 2nd Peter 1 .1, the page they had was the end of 1st Peter and the beginning of 2nd Peter.

And so, 2nd Peter 1 .1 contains what's called a Granville Sharp construction. It's where we're looking for, by the grace of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, where God and Savior are both descriptors of the one person, Jesus Christ, one of the places where theos, God, is used of Jesus.

And so, I'm looking at that, and I'm looking at the gnomon, a sacra, and stuff like that. So I'm just absorbed in this. And people would sort of walk up, and they'd sort of look at it, and they'd read the description, and then they'd sort of look at me, because I'm not moving.

And they'd sort of look over at Rich, and they'd go, can he read that? And Rich would go, yeah, he's reading that. Look at this, Harold. This man's reading this ancient manuscript. People would start gathering around, and the security people are starting to do this number.

And so, Rich would drag me off to go look at a crown or something gold or something, and then I'd right back again when there was a place that was open. And so, it was really awesome to get a chance to see P72 and to read it and things like that.

But the thing was this. I'm looking at this, and the author did not have the world's greatest penmanship. When you compare P72 to Codex Sinaiticus, for example, which is about 200 years later, well, 125 years later, but done by a professional, the lines are a little bit crooked, and it's just not nearly as fancy dancy as the others.

But I'm sitting here thinking, here was a Christian who, 1 ,800 years ago, loved the word of God enough to write out his own copy. And I couldn't help but thinking, first of all, how many of us, how much of the Bible would you have if you had to write out your own copy of it?

We can't bother people to get to church early on a Sunday morning for Sunday school. So getting them to write out their own copy of the scriptures, that's going to be pretty tough. And then, this is a period of persecution.

Now, we don't know if there was persecution going on in this particular area at that particular time when it was copied. We just have no way of knowing these things. But he could have been risking his life.

And we know, for example, about a pair of deacons in the year 303, during the Great Persecution, who were brought before a Roman governor and it was demanded that they were to tell them where all the copies of the scriptures were.

And eventually, basically, what they said was, we will not betray our fellow believers. Here we are. Do with us as you will. And the governor did with them as he would. And they were executed. And you have these people down through history, where they, that's all we know about them.

We've got their names. And they show up in one Roman document. And they were faithful. And they loved the scriptures. And here was somebody who copied this scripture around the year 200 and loved the scriptures.

We don't know the names. And in fact, when you think about history, we only know the names of a tiny fraction of the people who have lived before us. See, one of the problems we have as modern Americans, modern Christians, we are accustomed to having electronic recording devices and any more, anything that happens.

The subway shooting that just took place, what happens almost like that?

You've got video.

You've got pictures. You've got, everyone's got a high-quality recording device instantly connected to the rest of the world in their pocket. We lose track. I realize this, being as old as I am. But you younger folks who have grown up with this kind of technology, you need to realize how absolutely outlandishly unusual that is.

When I think of, I don't know if you saw the Facebook thing. I am really suspicious about all these Facebook things where they ask you about your first car or something like that. Yeah, don't the credit card companies.

Ask you the same thing?

Hmm, that's a little weird. But the question was, what was the first telephone or television news story that you remember? And I've never had a credit card asking me that one, so I feel fairly safe. And I remember it was in our, we lived in this rented farmhouse.

It was 105 years old. And I was about five years of age. And it was about the Vietnam War and the Ho Chi Minh Trail going into Laos and Cambodia and the fighting that was going on there. And it was a grainy, black and white television that I was watching and a guy named Walter Cronkite.

So a few of you know who Walter Cronkite is, but some of you are like, who's Walter Cronkite? Walter Cronkite was like our daddy. I mean, every night you listened to him very calmly reading the news, and you trusted everything that he said.

No one trusts anything that anybody says on news any longer, but it was a different day. But that was still, there was no satellite feeds and stuff like that. And if you did see video, it was normally the next day or days after, and it had to be flown over from Vietnam and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

This instantaneous stuff is, mankind has never, ever.

Experienced it before.

And during World War II, you'd find out about major battles weeks after they took place, weeks after they took place. And so we carry these expectations back into ancient history, and we expect that you could go back to the days of Jesus, and you're going to have the Jerusalem Post, and you're going to have reporters, and they're going to be coming to Jesus's various talks and making recordings and telling us what happened.

None of that's the case. And the vast majority of people who live in the first century, we don't know who they were. And in fact, the only, we've actually had an increase of knowledge of their names because of the cataloging of bone boxes.

Do you know what bone boxes are? A number of years ago, a bone box was discovered, and the guy who did the Titanic stuff came up with the theory that this was the Jesus family bone box, and this means Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

And I wrote a book about it in 17 days. It's my least read book ever, but I did hammer it pretty hard during those two weeks. And it is fascinating because what they've done in Israel is they have cataloged all these bone boxes, and they would inscribe the names.

What the Jews would do is you'd die, they'd put you in a sepulcher, and then on the year anniversary of having put you in there, they'll open it back up again, collect your bones, and put them in a box, in a family box.

And so we didn't know about that for a long time, but what that does is they would inscribe names on it. What the Jews, the Israelis have done is we now have an entire computer database of the names from these bone boxes, and frequently there are ways of dating about where they were from.

By the way, one of the fascinating aspects of that is when you look at the occurrence of names in the New Testament, in the Gospels, and you compare them with the computerized listing of names from that area of Israel during that time period, they're almost identical.

See, if this book, if the New Testament had been made up by someone in Rome, and that's always been a theory that people have thrown out there, how would they have known what the most popular names are.

In Israel?

There's just so much evidence that the New Testament itself is accurately representing the context in which it is claiming to have been written. So for example, at the time of Jesus, if you had been walking down a street in Jerusalem and yelled out, Mary, 40 of the women would turn around and look at you.

And if you've noticed, there are a lot of Marys in the Gospels, especially you look at the, trying to figure out who is at the tomb. Mary, and the other Mary, and there's Mary over here, and Mary Magdalene's over there.

And that's why they use the location names. Mary Magdalene, that is Mary of Migdal. So that's different than Mary of Jerusalem, or Mary of Bethany, or whatever else. That's how you figured out who was who.

But anyway, so the point is that history, when we have tantalizing bits of information, very often we can't fill in a lot of the holes. And so for example, we have, and I'm working on a book that, I've translated this and I'm working on a book to make application, we have a letter.

And I think Andrew and Wade will remember that for a little while we had some voices from the past section of the bulletin at Apologia down in Phoenix. And I provide a number of quotations from this particular document.

And again, what's interesting is, you might say, well, how do we know when it was written? Well, we don't. You look at it and you look at how it describes what's going on in the world at that particular point in time, or the attitudes that people have, and you try to fit it into, as best you can, a period in the early church.

I'd put it around 120. So the beginning of the second century.

But we don't know.

It could be earlier than that. It could be later than that. It's not even complete. And in fact, fascinatingly enough, we only had one manuscript of it. And it was discovered in the mid -1800s. And thankfully, about four scholars had examined the manuscript and had taken notes, handwritten notes, from the manuscript.

You know why I say thankfully? Because the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and where it was stored was shelled and destroyed. So the manuscript's gone. But thankfully, between those four scholars, we were able to recreate the manuscript from the handwritten notes and copies they had made.

And that's the only way we know about this. And who knows how many other? When you think of all the things that can happen to a piece of paper, to a book, over the course of 2 ,000 years, not just wars and shelling, but fires and floods and bugs,.

Especially bugs.

There's all sorts of things. It's actually astonishing that we have the number of papyri manuscripts we have of the early New Testament. Because when you think about it, I'll frequently show pictures in my New Testament presentations of the early manuscripts.

And their edges are all gone, and there's holes in some of them. And there's one that I show that is from the Book of Revelation, and it's chapter 13, and the number of the beast in Revelation chapter 13.

We only have two papyri manuscripts that contain anything of the Book of Revelation. In fact, of all the books in the New Testament, it's the book we have the fewest manuscripts of. And interestingly enough, the two earliest manuscripts do not say 666 for the number of the beast.

They say 616. And interestingly enough, 666 and 616 are either the Greek or Hebrew ways of spelling Caesar Nero, which is pretty much real proof of what was being discussed at that particular point in time.

But anyway, the one of them that contains that, you've got a little part. If the page was like this, you have a little part here, a little part there, a little part there. I mean, it's pretty beat up.

And frequently, people go, man, those things are really in bad shape. And I look at them and go, how are you going to look in 1 ,800 years? Better than you will, I can assure you of that. So when you think about all the stuff that those things survived, it's amazing we have any of them at all.

But going back to this one document, we call it the Epistle to Diognetus because we do have the name of the person to whom it is addressed. We have no idea who wrote it. He calls himself a disciple, and the Greek term for disciple is mathete, so sometimes that name is ascribed to him in a way.

But it's the Epistle to Diognetus. And it's fascinating. We don't have time tonight to go into all the details about it. All this stuff is available online, by the way, free online. Most of your good Bible programs like Accordance, Logos, they'll all have multiple copies and versions of this kind of stuff, the Greek and the whole nine yards.

But the ninth section, I mean, this is obviously just the way we've divided it up. The ninth section, this is a Christian writing to a non-Christian Roman seeking to introduce him to the Christian faith.

So this is how witnessing was being done in this context. And that's what the book project I'm working on is taking this epistle and making modern day application to what we're doing and the situations we face because we're entering into a more and more pagan context all the time.

And that's what they were doing. That's the situation they were in. And so I'm sort of excited about it. I don't know why, but I get almost nothing done on the road. It's very difficult to find time when you're scraping ice off your windshield or doing whatever to be doing some of the stuff you'd rather be doing.

But this particular section of the epistle is just amazing to me. So let me read it to you. I tried to import into this document my own translation, but it just refused to do it. So this is somebody else's translation, but I did just recently work on this section of it.

So then, having already planned, let me back up. He starts off with this great discussion about idols and how idols in temples cannot be the true God. And he literally talks about how you can have, you can have utensils that you use to eat food with that are made by the same people that made your idol out of the same materials.

And your fork could have been your idol, or your idol could have been your fork. I mean, it really is a straightforward, you really can't believe these gods are doing anything for you.

Could you?

It's really, really well done. So he does that at the beginning. And then in the ninth section here, this is what he writes. So then, having already planned everything in his mind together with his child, speaking of the son, Jesus, he permitted us during the former time to be carried away by undisciplined impulses as we desired, led astray by pleasures and lusts.

Not all because he took delight in our sins, but because he was patient. Not because he approved of that former season of unrighteousness, but because he was creating the present season of righteousness in order that we who in the former time were convicted by our own deeds as unworthy of life might now by the goodness of God be made worthy.

And having clearly demonstrated our inability to enter the kingdom of God on our own might be enabled to do so by God's power. But when our unrighteousness reached its peak, and it had been made perfectly clear that its result, punishment and death, were to be expected, the time came when God decided to reveal at last His goodness and power.

Oh, the surpassing kindness and love of God. He did not hate us or cast us off or bear malice toward us, but was patient, forbearing. Being merciful, He Himself took upon Himself our sins. Himself giving His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy in place of the lawless.

The innocent in place of the guilty. The just in place of the unjust. The incorruptible in place of the corruptible. The immortal in the place of the mortal. For what else than the Son's righteousness was able to cover our sins?

In whom was it possible for us, the lawless and ungodly, to be made righteous but in the Son of God alone? Oh, the sweet exchange. Oh, the untraceable accomplishment. Oh, the unexpected acts of kindness.

That the lawlessness of the many should be hidden away in the righteous one, and the righteousness of the one should justify the many lawless ones. Now, looking at it, I discovered that, get updated, since I looked at it just a few minutes ago, that was my translation.

So you listen to that, and you need to understand that it is common in our modern day, if you go to take a class on Christian history anywhere in the secular context, to be told that what we as Christians believe about, for example, the deity of Christ, about the Trinity, about the Atonement, that this is all stuff that developed long after the time of Christ.

And so for me, it is fascinating to be able to read material probably written within the first generation after the last apostles, where plainly you have God's sovereignty, God's decree, His planning of all these things, and you clearly have a heavily Pauline understanding of the imputed righteousness of Christ.

And you might say, well, isn't that what everybody was saying?

No.

We have other works from around this time period a little bit later. Remember something. Ask yourself a question. What would your theology be like if you didn't have Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews in your Bible, and you only had, say, Mark as a gospel?

What would your theology be like? And you've got to remember, it took time for the New Testament to be gathered together, because it wasn't written by one person in one place. There was no group that could control all these things.

Paul was writing, well, the New Testament writers were writing in multiple places to multiple audiences at multiple times, and so it took time to collect these things. So for example, the earliest manuscript we have of Paul's writings is called P46, and it's in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland.

And it's from around the year 200. And interestingly enough, it contains Hebrews, so that gives you some idea of at least what someone around 200 thought. It's not all of Paul's writings, but the epistles like Timothy and Titus, they're not there, but it's the major epistles.

So by 200, there has been a collection of the major epistles, but that took some work. Because those epistles weren't sent to the same place. And it is fascinating to read it. I guess I shouldn't take the time to do this, but I got to visit and see the manuscript in Ireland and Dublin a number of years ago.

And for proper reasons, they were under special kind of light, because you don't want these lights. You're going to fade it out in a very short period of time. And even as it is, they are fading. You can tell by the pictures we've taken.

But they were sort of at an angle, and the Philippians was what we were looking at. And the light came from the top of the case, and it was hard to read. Then all of a sudden, it hit me. I said, well, if the light's up here, it's at an angle, then where is it going to be brightest?

Well, down here. And so I get down. Oh, yeah, yeah, that. Finally, I just get down. OK, yep, yep, that's that. OK, so yeah, we're definitely here in Philippians 2. And OK, there's the participle. And sir, what are you doing?

And here's the security guy, because you know they've got cameras. And I can just imagine what was happening up in the security place when they saw me get down on my knees. Oh, all right, Fred, the Christians are worshipping the manuscripts again.

Better go down there and take care of it. So, well, I'm reading the manuscript.

Sure you are, yeah, mm-hmm, yeah.

Right, we did eventually convince them that we were reading the manuscript. But the only thing that bugged me about seeing it that one time was I wanted to see the Carmen Christi, Philippians 2, 5 through 11.

But they had it displayed to where it was on the backside of what was facing toward me. So I mean, I have high quality digital photography of that page. But still, I know that I saw the backside of that page.

But that's sort of how it goes. But the point is, we have these early collections. We have gospel collections. We have collections of Paul. But even then, it took time for all that stuff to be collected together into anything that we would call the New Testament.

So my point is this. What would your theology look like? And so we have books like the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. And they are very sub-biblical in their theology. And you can understand why.

If you didn't have Romans, you'd probably be sub-biblical in your theology too. But here, Diognetus clearly knew about Paul's teachings and is expressing those teachings very clearly in these words. And this beautiful description that parallels what we have, for example, in Peter.

His own son is a ransom for us. The holy in the place of the lawless, the innocent in the place of the guilty, the just in the place of the unjust, the incorruptible in the place of the corruptible, the immortal in the place of the mortal.

I mean, wow. Oh, the unexpected acts of kindness, that the lawlessness of the many should be hidden away in the righteous one, and the righteousness of the one should justify the many lawless ones. This is Isaiah 52.

This is sound theology. It's beautiful theology. But we don't know who wrote it. Now, I sort of automatically go, well, we'll find out someday. And we always assume that, right? And I suppose if it's something that, once you get to heaven, is relevant, and it's not an insult to God to ask, I suppose, maybe we will.

I don't know. We've got a lot of time to be doing stuff, so I suppose. But I've never found anything in the scriptures that said,.

And when we get there, we're going to get to ask every question we ever, ever want.

I don't know.

We sort of assume that. But the point is, here's someone. And for 1 ,700 years, no one saw these words other than the one that he wrote it to.

Now, maybe somebody did along the way,.

But no one ever made any mention of it. And now we get to read them. And we get to be encouraged by them, long after they were written. But for a long time, no knowledge. And we're still finding stuff over there.

People are still finding things in libraries. And they just found a few more of the Dead Sea Scrolls just within the past 18 months. You'd figure that place would be picked over by now. But they found them in a bit of a cave that no one had been able to get down to before.

And lo and behold, there they were. And so the point is, was this epistle worthless for 1 ,700 years?

No. No.

It had been important when it was written, even if it had been only that one person. And yet, we don't know who wrote it. But it sure is encouraging to me. It sure is encouraging to me. Now, we do know who wrote these words.

We do know who wrote these words. There is one physician of flesh and of spirit, generate and ingenerate, God in man, true life in death, of Mary and of God, first passable and then impassable, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now, is that from some 4th century creedal statement after all the arguments had taken place? Because there were lots of arguments. We need to recognize that there were great conflicts in church history.

And you have, for example, the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. Why was that council called? Well, because in the years preceding that, a man by the name of Arius, a very popular fellow, a good looking guy.

And not only that, he was a good singer.

He was.

He could put stuff to music. Music is a powerful way of communicating thoughts. And Arius had decided, Arius taught, that there was a time when the sun was not. There was a time when the sun was not. The sun is an exalted creature, but not truly God.

And his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, said you're wrong and told him to stop teaching that. And so he left and he went up to Caesarea and he began teaching it again. And something important had happened in 313.

Does anyone know what happened in 313? In 313, you have the peace of the church. Between 303 and 313 is the most intense period of persecution by the Roman Empire against the Christian church. The most intense period.

There had been intense periods before, but this was empire wide. This was the last shot the Roman Empire took at destroying Christianity in total. And in 313, you've got a guy named Constantine. And Constantine unifies power in the Roman Empire and he does so under the sign of the cross and claims to be a Christian.

And may well have been one. But he all of a sudden finds out that there are divisions taking place amongst the Christians on this subject. He hears about this controversy. And so he calls for a council.

This has never happened before. Not of the whole church. And he even provides the place for it to happen. And comes himself. Major, major implications for the rest of church history that we don't have time to get into tonight.

But the point is that at that council of about 300 bishops, all but two signed a statement that asserted that Jesus is homoousios of the same substance as the father. Not homoousios of a like substance.

Not heteroousios of a different substance. But truly God. And they had to use an unbiblical, homoousios does not appear in the Bible. So why in the world use it? Because Arius could find a way to believe, to agree with anything else by just twisting what it meant.

But he couldn't agree to that. That was the only way to expose him and his teachings. And so, after that time period, what people don't know, what a lot of people don't know, people figure, oh, council of Nicaea, there you go.

No more controversy. For the next 40 years, the Arians were in charge. By political chicanery, they got the Roman emperor and Constantine's sons and stuff like that to agree with them. And there was one particular fellow, whom you may have heard of before, especially if you're around apologia, a fellow by the name of Athanasius.

Now, Athanasius was not a bishop of the council of Nicaea. But he became a bishop about a year later. And he became the bishop of Alexandria. And when the Roman Empire starts saying, you know, we think Nicaea was wrong, and started putting pressure upon people, Athanasius refused to give in.

And some of the most important books that you'll read from the ancient world come from Athanasius during that time, against the Arians and on the Incarnation. And one of the things I love is that I can read Athanasius' works.

And he's arguing the same way in the 4th century, around 345, that I would argue against Jehovah's Witnesses today, using the same text of scripture. It's the same battle going on, except it was going on a long, long time ago.

And he got kicked out of his church five times during the Arian Ascendancy. Sometimes he was running out the back door of the church while 500 soldiers were running through the front door of the church.

And the story is told at once, while he was hiding out amongst the monks in the deserts of Egypt along the Nile, that he was in a boat going one direction while there were Roman soldiers going the other direction looking for him.

And he's in a monk's cowl, and he's got it up over his head. And people are rowing, and they're going different directions, and the Roman soldiers go, have you seen Athanasius? And Athanasius is in the back of the boat, and he goes, I'm sure he's not far.

Tradition says he was a short, little, ugly guy. But he was powerful. And you may have heard the phrase, Athanasius contramundum, Athanasius against the world.