Ken Humphreys has an excellent series of articles titled "Heart of Darkness: Criminal History of the Christian Church"
Here is a little exceprt of Humphrys' writings on the history of early Christain turf-wars:Bloody Annals from the Church of Christ
Callistus
– Embezzler, Extortionist, Friend of Emperor’s Whore, Makes Pope, Dies with Transvestite!
Sex, corruption, murder – the scandal would spice up any era! But this was the Christian church before it was corrupted by power, as it waited in the wings of pagan Rome.
In the late second century a bright and ambitious presbyter Hippolytus was keen to impose his own carefully thought out ideas on the Christ-followers of Rome, a church split into many rival factions. Hippolytus was a Greek-speaking theoretician, schooled under Irenaeus at Lyons and by the eastern 'apologists' like Origen. His best known work is the Refutatio Omnium Haeresium (‘Refutation of All Heresies’). His mentor, Irenaeus, had already censured Pope Victor (189-198) for arrogance towards other bishops and when Hippolytus took up residence in Rome he viewed the church there with some alarm.
Victor was pressing ahead with the Latinization of the Roman Church and had excommunicated the Greek Churches of Asia Minor, ostensibly over the dating of Easter. A Greek-faction under ‘Theodotus the Money Changer’ had established an independent church in Rome which rejected the idea of the Trinity (at that time being promoted by the ruling faction), preferring the 'adoptionist' theology of 'Jesus an ordinary man on whom the Spirit descended at baptism.'
In 198 Victor died but much to Hippolytus's disgust (he had hoped for the top job himself) a cleric called Zephyrinus (198 - 217) took the bishop’s chair. Hippolytus, in the first book of his Refutation – called the ‘Philosophymena’ – described Zephyrinus as ‘a simple man without education.’ In a later work called The Apostolic Tradition he complained that under Zephyrinus’s leadership church discipline had become lax, the church itself corrupt and public worship a scandal.
Turf War
During Zephyrinus’s long tenure factional rivalry in the city became endemic. A group of soothsayers led by Montanus built a strong following, even among the bishop’s own entourage, and a third group, led by Sabellius, rejected the Logos and stressed the ‘modes’ of a unitary god. Hippolytus attacked them all – and Zephyrinus himself for doing nothing about it. A contemporary churchman, Tertullian in Carthage, equally austere, rallied to Hippolytus's support and censured the bishop in Rome.
What really irked Hippolytus was that the new pope relied heavily on the archdeacon Callistus as his enforcer, a rough, tough Roman, who had reached the top the hard way. The contempt felt by Hippolytus became all the greater when Zephyrinus’s right-hand man followed him into the top job. The ideologue Hippolytus locked horns with the mobster, asserting a rival claim to be Bishop of Rome and for several years the two men led rival Christian gangs.
Though Hippolytus was in the end to lose out, and in the process become history’s first ‘Anti-Pope,’ he took obvious delight in recording for posterity some home truths about his rival.
Apparently, as a young man Callistus had been the trusted slave of a Christian master, a freedman in the imperial household called Carpophorus. In fact, Carpophorus had entrusted Callistus with considerable funds deposited by fellow-Christians for the care of widows and orphans. The money ‘disappeared’ and Callistus made a run for it. He was apprehended aboard a ship in the port of Portus. His punishment was time on a pistrinum (a hand-mill).
Not long after his release, Callistus was arrested again, this time after a brawl in a synagogue where he was trying to extract money from a group of Roman Jews. Dragged before city Prefect Fuscianus, he was denounced by Carpophorus and sentenced to a penal colony, the silver mines of Sardinia. But Callistus had by this time friends in high places. He was, it seems, ‘counsellor’ to Bishop Victor and also a friend of a certain Marcia – who happened to be a concubine of Emperor Commodus. Marcia had been ‘brought up’ by the presbyter Hyacinthus before being passed on to Commodus.
Unlike his intellectual father, Marcus Aurelius, the dissolute Commodus entertained a favourable opinion of the Christians and employed several in the imperial court. (Not that it did him any good – the ‘Christian’ Marcia was party to the conspiracy that strangled Commodus in 193).
Party Time
Thanks to the intercession of Marcia, Callistus was soon released from Sardinia and was sent south by Victor to manage the Antium (Anzio) operation on a monthly retainer. With Victor’s death and the election of Zephyrinus, Callistus was summoned back to the capital by the new boss to manage a burial ground that the church had acquired. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Callistus ‘obtained great influence over the ignorant, illiterate and grasping Zephyrinus by bribes.’ With the death of Zephyrinus Callistus moved into the boss's chair.
Callistus’s own time as pope (217-222) coincided precisely with the reign of that most exotic of emperors, Elagabalus. The Syrian transvestite Elagabalus, a teenager of fourteen when he came to the throne, combined outrageous bi-sexuality with a religious fanaticism. Emotionally dependent upon his mother (with whom he was sexually involved), he married, in quick succession, three older women (including a Vestal Virgin) and a male charioteer. Like Caligula and Nero before him, Elagabalus caroused for ‘rough trade’ in the streets of Rome and even solicited ‘tricks’ within the corridors of the imperial palace.
Surrounding himself with a gay court, he gave high office to sexual favourites, among others, an actor (made commander of the Praetorian Guard), a muleteer (appointed imperial tax collector), and a barber.
Elagabalus, like Callistus, was a High Priest – in his case, worshipping a sacred black stone (almost certainly a fallen meteorite), which he brought with him in jewel-encrusted splendour from Emesa in Syria to Rome. But he also believed himself to be that god, the living incarnation of the sun-god. He instituted an annual procession across Rome, in which Elagabalus the man ran backwards before the chariot carrying Elagabalus the stone. Dressed in silk and often a blond wig, his bizarre ‘other-ness’ demonstrated to the populace that he was no mere mortal.
Rapacious taxation and wars of conquest were not for Elagabalus; his pre-occupation was to convert polytheistic Rome to an enforced monotheism. Callistus shared that goal. In keeping with the spirit of the age, Callistus was also notable for a libertine, ‘open door’ policy. Much to the disgust of Hippolytus and the austere Tertullian in Carthage (who wrote a scathing attack, ‘De pudicitia’ ), Callistus admitted ‘fornicators and murderers’ into the church, requiring of them only a statement of ‘contrition’.
Like Elagabalus, Callistus came to a sudden end: he was, it seems, ‘killed in a riot.’ Perhaps this was the same riot, in March 222, which followed the assassination of Elagabalus. After the emperor’s body had been dragged through the streets, ‘a large number of Elagabalus' henchmen subsequently also met with a violent death.’ One writer reports that Callistus was murdered by a pagan lynch mob, enraged by Christian expansion in the Trastevere district (Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p14). According to legend Callistus’s body was ‘thrown into a well.’
Hippolytus (as rival pope) continued his attacks on the ruling faction – first Urban I (222-230), and then Pontianus (230-235) – until a new emperor, Maximinus Thrax, no friend of any Jesus faction, sent Hippolytus (and Pontianus!) to the Sardinian mines, where the old theologian died.
Full Essay Here:
http://jesusneverexisted.com/papal-princes.htm#callistus
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