As an example, the Roman Catholics deal with mix-up in their faith. They honor the “Powerful Ones” (Elohim, a Hebrew word in plural form often meaning “God”) along with YHWH (the Jewish national name of God, rendered “the Lord” in the King James Version) in the Old Testament of the Bible, alongside Jesus, who refers to “Abba” an Aramaic word for “father” that suggests a close, trusting bond like a child’s call.
Paul Wallis on the name Jesus used for God:
Firstly, Jesus never used the name Yahweh as a name for God. It’s that simple. End of story. Just let that gold nugget of information sink in for a moment.
Paul Wallis, The Eden Conspiracy (2023), © Paul Wallis (short excerpt for review and study)
In this site’s reading, Jesus questions the actions of YHWH in Matthew.
Jesus on the Father’s good gifts:
Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?
Matthew 7:9-11, King James Version, public domain
In this site’s view, YHWH is a label that joins many gods of the Old Testament, gods with very human characters and cruel demands, and in the end Yahweh demands the worship of one and orders the others to be called idols. In Strong’s Hebrew dictionary, Elohim is the plural of Eloah and means “gods in the ordinary sense”, while “specifically used (in the plural thus, especially with the article) of the supreme God”. The Aramaic word Abba, which Jesus uses in Mark 14:36 (“Abba, Father”), is defined in Strong’s Greek dictionary as “father as a vocative”.
Jesus Teachings
The Essenes on knowing oneself:
Compared to the spiritual traditions of the past, this connection with the Divine Presence is a simple and straightforward way of moving to the Light. The work of Jesus was like a signpost pointing to this new way …
Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis, The Essenes: Children of the Light (Ozark Mountain Publishing, 2005), © the authors (short excerpt for review and study)
Mary Magdalene
The Essenes on Mary Magdalene:
Mary Magdalene was “the teacher of teachers” is not denied by the Roman Catholic Church. Within Catholic tradition she is accorded the title of “apostola apostolorum”, which means “the apostle to the apostles”.
Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis, The Essenes: Children of the Light (Ozark Mountain Publishing, 2005), © the authors (short excerpt for review and study)
The European witch hunts
In Ethan Doyle White’s article on witchcraft in Britannica, the great European witch trials belong to the early modern period, the 15th to 17th centuries, not to the earlier Middle Ages. Sporadic cases against people accused of cursing others are found throughout the Middle Ages, but only in the early modern period did Europeans increasingly link witchcraft with the worship of the Devil and prosecute it on a large scale.
The idea that witches were Devil worshipers first appears in trials in the western Alps in the 1420s and 1430s. It drew on older church claims against groups such as the Waldensians, on clerical fear of ceremonial magic and demonic pacts, and on the folk belief that some women travelled at night to revels with supernatural beings. The Council of Basel (1431 to 1449) and books such as Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (1457) helped spread these ideas.
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, in which, in Britannica’s words, he “deplored the spread of witchcraft in Germany and authorized Sprenger and Kraemer to extirpate it”. The two Dominicans Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich (Institoris) Kraemer wrote the Malleus maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”, c. 1486), which became the standard handbook on detecting and punishing witches until well into the 18th century. It sanctioned torture to obtain confessions and went through 28 editions between 1486 and 1600, accepted by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike.
Doyle White points to legal change as another cause. Many courts moved from private accusation to the inquisitorial procedure, in which court officers investigated crimes themselves, and since a confession could prove guilt, torture came into use. Torture led the accused to confess to impossible things and to name others, which spread the hunts. The worst area was west-central Europe: Switzerland, several French principalities and the German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Historians now estimate that close to 100,000 people were prosecuted, of whom between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. In most regions women made up more than 75 percent of the accused, many of them older.
The trials declined in the late 17th and 18th centuries, as courts demanded stronger evidence, grew wary of torture and acquitted more often, and as elite doubt about witchcraft itself grew. Over the 18th and 19th centuries European states changed or repealed their witchcraft laws.
Exodus 22:18 and the hunts
The King James Version’s rendering of Exodus 22:18 (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”) was frequently cited as biblical justification during the hunts; Britannica notes that the Malleus itself was dedicated to carrying out this verse. However, the Hebrew verb behind “witch” is kashaph (Strong’s H3784), “properly, to whisper a spell, i.e. to inchant or practise magic”, not the later European stereotype of devil-pacting, flying witches.
In this site’s view, the witch hunts were not simply “the Church starting something in one year”. They emerged from a convergence of late medieval demonology, the printing press, religious conflict, social stress, and legal evolution, with significant theological and institutional contributions from the Church (especially Dominican inquisitors) in the crucial late-15th-century moment.
