And there was nothing else I wanted to make for Christmas 2025.

Edgy Veg has their full recipe here, but I mutilated it a bit to reduce complexity and scale, and because I am not an influencer making vegan turkey for content and actually ate this for Christmas lunch, I also wanted to tell you the story of what happened to the leftovers afterward.

The Recipe

Here’s my completed recipe, with British measurements, no use of a mixer (as I don’t own one), no wings, and approximately half the size:

A Small Vegan Turkey Roast with Rice-Paper Skin

(serves 3)

This is a scaled-down vegan turkey designed for a small table. It uses seitan for structure, jackfruit for fibre, a simple stuffing to keep the interior tender, and a rice-paper skin adapted from vegan bacon techniques. It is cooked in a pressure cooker, then finished in the oven. This version focuses on good texture, good skin, and leftovers that reheat well.

Required equipment

• Electric pressure cooker (5–6 litre capacity is ideal)

• Trivet for the pressure cooker

• Large mixing bowl

• Blender or stick blender

• Sharp knife

• Foil

• Roasting tin

• Baking parchment

• Small bowls for marinade and basting

• Pastry brush (optional but helpful)

Ingredients

Seitan “turkey” dough

Wet ingredients

• 230 g firm tofu, drained

• 220 ml vegetable stock (double strength)

• 2 tbsp tahini

• 1½ tsp fine sea salt

• 1½ tsp onion powder

• 6 tbsp nutritional yeast

• ½ tsp liquid smoke

• 4 tsp white miso paste

• 1½ tsp poultry seasoning

Add-in

• 260 g young green jackfruit (from tins), well rinsed, seeds removed, squeezed very dry and finely shredded

Dry

• 270 g vital wheat gluten

Stuffing

• 300–350 g unbaked stuffing
  It should be savoury and slightly moist rather than dry.

Rice-paper skin marinade

(all UK spoons)

• 2 tbsp olive oil

• 3 tbsp soy sauce or tamari

• 1½ tsp maple syrup

• ½ tsp liquid smoke

• ¾ tsp garlic powder

• ¾ tsp smoked paprika

• ½ tsp black pepper

• ¾ tsp mushroom seasoning or MSG

• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast

Mix thoroughly and keep whisking occasionally.

Basting liquid

• 2 tbsp oil

• 2 tbsp vegetable stock

• 1½ tsp maple syrup

• Black pepper

Other

• 4–6 sheets rice paper

• Skewers or cocktail sticks

• Foil

Method

1. Make the wet base

Blend the tofu, stock, tahini, salt, onion powder, nutritional yeast, liquid smoke, miso and poultry seasoning until completely smooth. This step matters for texture.

Stir in the shredded jackfruit until evenly distributed.

2. Add gluten and mix

Add the vital wheat gluten all at once. Mix gently with a spoon or your hands until it just comes together into a shaggy dough.

3. Gentle kneading

Turn the dough out onto a clean surface.

Knead gently for 2–3 minutes only, folding and pressing rather than stretching. Stop as soon as the dough becomes cohesive.

If the dough feels crumbly, wet your hands and fold. Add liquid only one tablespoon at a time if absolutely needed.

Do not aim for elasticity. Over-kneading causes rubberiness.

4. Shape and stuff

Divide the dough:

• About two-thirds for the body

• The remaining third into two equal pieces for drumsticks

Flatten the body dough into a thick rectangle. Place the stuffing in the centre, then wrap the dough around it and seal gently. Shape into a compact oval roast.

Roll the two smaller pieces into short cylinders for drumsticks, tapering one end slightly.

5. Wrap and pressure cook

Wrap the body and drumsticks very tightly in foil, smoothing the surface.

Place on the trivet in the pressure cooker with water underneath.

Pressure cook on high pressure for 30 minutes, then allow a natural release of at least 10 minutes.

Remove and cool wrapped for 15 minutes, then unwrap.

Chill for 1–2 hours before skinning.

6. Apply the rice-paper skin

Prepare:

• A bowl of warm (not boiling) water

• The marinade

• The basting liquid

Dip each rice-paper sheet briefly in warm water until pliable, then coat in marinade.

Use:

• 2–3 sheets for the body

• ½–1 sheet per drumstick

Smooth gently over the surface. Attach drumsticks to the body with skewers.

Brush lightly with basting liquid.

7. Roast, with vegetables underneath

Heat the oven to 200°C.

Line a roasting tin with baking parchment.

What to put underneath the turkey

Use chunky vegetables that roast rather than steam:

• Potatoes

• Carrots

• Parsnips

• Onion wedges

Toss lightly with oil, salt and pepper. Keep pieces large.

Place vegetables in a single layer, then sit the turkey on top so it is slightly raised.

Roasting

• Cover loosely and roast for 20 minutes, basting once

• Uncover and roast for 15–20 minutes until the skin is taut and lightly browned

Remove the turkey to rest for 10 minutes.
Return the vegetables to the oven for a further 10–15 minutes if needed.

Serving

Remove drumsticks if desired, then slice the body. Serve with gravy and the roasted vegetables underneath.

Soy-free variant

To make this recipe soy-free, make the following substitutions.

Replace tofu

• Use 230 g cannellini beans or butter beans, drained and blended smooth

Replace miso and soy sauce

• Omit miso entirely

• Increase nutritional yeast by 1 tbsp

• Add ½ tsp MSG or mushroom seasoning to the dough

• In the skin marinade, replace soy sauce with 3 tbsp vegetable stock + ½ tsp salt

Ensure the vegetable stock is soy-free.

The method remains exactly the same. The soy-free version is slightly more tender in the centre and works very well with stuffing.

The Story

First of all, I had to buy a pressure cooker for this. There was no way round it, and I consoled myself that as commercially available meat alternatives are getting steadily more expensive, I could at least have a go at making my own, as nearly all meat alternatives involve pressure cooking vital wheat gluten at some point.

I bought an InstantPot, on the basis that, like airfryers, there is a ravingly enthusiastic fanbase that cannot stop putting everything in the world in their InstantPot. Four weeks later, I can report I am now going through a grief process of how many years I have lived without one and all of the meals that I could have made. You should buy one, and you should’ve bought one yesterday. Buy one now.

Secondly, all the instructions and photos will never explain to you what it actually tasted like, and what it tasted like was a seasoned turkey. As someone who spent the first decade of my vegetarian life consuming quorn and Linda McCartney sausages, I have been thrilled by the development of products like Richmond vegan sausages and Redefine meat, but the sausages  are supposed to be bland and smooth and Redefine meat, which uses 3D printing, costs an absolute fortune. So I was genuinely shocked when I shoved together some flour, some tofu, and some jackfruit out a can and produced something with my own dyspraxic hands that was not unlike something I could’ve bought from a commercial canteen Christmas menu, and cost about £8 all in.

There were two points where you could know that it wasn’t meat – as the instructions warn repeatedly, too much kneading will result in a slight rubberiness. However, there is simply a limit to how much you can avoid kneading it during the process of shaping. My tester turkey (nicknamed the IVF turkey by my test subjects) was more distinguishably rubbery, because my initial recipe had been too dry and I had had to massage it a bit too much with water while sticking it together. For the full go, I was less precise about the amount of water involved and just pressed it together in the mixing bowl, which turned out to be all it needed. But there are still slight points where it just didn’t quite have the same bite. Whether that was inevitable or my neophyte attempt (I also didn’t shred the jackfruit as finely as I could have done), I don’t know.

The second point is – this isn’t a dead animal. At the end of the day, meat is shaped around cartilage, bones, and fat, and a meat alternative, however convincing in taste or even texture, will always have a uniformity that meat-eaters will have an uncanny valley reaction to. You cannot replace the pleasure of eating the oily miscellany of bits that you scraped off the bottom of the tray once you’re done carving around the bones of your dead animal. It is what it is. But for someone with opinions on vegan cheeses, it’s good enough.

Now, photos and commentary:

Because I’d never made this before, I made a small tester version without stuffing, which I fed to a small Christmas gathering of friends the week before. None were vegetarian. I looked at this lonely mass on my serving tray and felt compelled to add some mashed potato and gravy. Everyone ate it all. So the stuffing is not definitively required.

I still had about half the tester leftover though, so the next day, I tried experimentally frying it up for breakfast like a sausage patty.  It fried up well and came out pretty much like a white pudding slice!

The original recipe anticipates you will be making something about three times the size and so I had bought a large roasting tin but, after the tester turned out pretty generously sized, I decided to cut it down considerably and suddenly my large roasting tin looked a bit cavernous. You’re supposed to elevate the turkey while it roasts so the ricepaper underneath doesn’t dissolve on you, so I balanced it on four onion halves and filled the rest of the space with veggies. I have to say that for all my recipe says it’s “for three”, because of my ADHD habit of worrying that we won’t have enough food, in addition to the veggies in this picture, there were also a tray of potatoes and a pot of peas. By the end, I clearly made enough food for six people in one oven and one hob.  Just make sure you get your timings right so it’s all ready at the same time.

The final product. I have to say, I was a bit sceptical about rice paper skin but it was actually quite impressive. The starch means it’s slightly stiffer than dead animal skin and doesn’t pile up all floppy on your plate, but it also carves up much better because it retains the shape of the roast.

The turkey on the plate gives a nice visual – I took a close-up of the bits because it really does tear apart like turkey.

But what to do with the leftovers? Well, the first option is to just eat them cold. The drumstick in particular can be eaten from the stick like a bone and you, too, can pretend to be a medieval baron.

You can also eat it sliced up in a sandwich as a cold cut. The stuffing really comes into its own here and allows thicker slices than you might otherwise carve off.

But after four days of eating turkey and trimmings in various forms, it was time to finish up what was left, so I threw everything in the pressure cooker, added a sauteed onion (you can saute in your InstantPot too!) and a made up jug of casserole powder, put on high pressure for five minutes (ten minutes natural release) and made a turkey casserole ready for boxing up and freezing. The ricepaper skin dissolves in the steamy environment and makes the casserole more gelatinous, which was great.

All in all, it was a genuine Christmas showstopper experience and I am very pleased with it.

The post Vegan Turkey Christmas Recipe appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

In 2007, aged 16, I went on a school trip to Rome, which involved a day trip to Herculaneum, a Roman seaside town also buried by the Vesuvius eruption but considerably less well marketed than Pompeii. Our tour guide was very attractive and very Italian, but also madly in love with Herculaneum, and he told us about the House of the Papyri, a Roman villa where in the 1850s, archaeologists had excavated an entire library of scrolls of unparalleled value to ancient literature, but no-one could read them because although perfectly preserved, they were also burnt to a crisp. Also, only half of Herculaneum is excavated because the rest has the modern town, also called Herculaneum, sitting on top of it. I remember the tour guide looking at us and saying with total conviction, “if it was up to me, I’d tear the entire town down”.

I spent the next ten years monitoring the situation with the scrolls and whether we’d worked out how to read them yet – obviously we’d have to work out how to scan them without opening them, because the ones they’d tried to open had basically fallen to bits and were destroyed and so scholars eventually stopped doing that and focussed on trying to keep them safe while awaiting the tech that would one day be invented that would read them. But very little progress was made and for a decade I was restricted to telling people that there was this ancient library of scrolls that we’d found that would likely revolutionise our understanding of the ancient world – if we could just read them.

In 2018, one Alex Mason showed up in my life and dropped a message into a chat we were having about the origins of noughts and crosses, saying, “I was reading on Reddit yesterday about how they found a load of burnt scrolls that’s probably got loads of ancient literature thought lost and they’re maybe getting somewhere with scanning them with technology, it’s really cool” and I was like ARE YOU INTERESTED IN THE HOUSE OF THE PAPYRI BECAUSE I WOULD LOVE TO TALK MORE WITH SOMEONE ABOUT THIS. A few years of monitoring the situation together pass, and the Vesuvius Prize, offering a million dollars to focus minds on the problem of developing the tech to read the scrolls, was won for the first time in 2023. And we thought, “ok, it’s time we got more involved in what’s actually happening here, this is getting real”.

So we took out joint membership of the Friends of Herculaneum Society (run by Oxford University, membership 147 – I said to Alex, I think we’ve accidentally joined a learned society of professors and the AGM’s going to be a bunch of people in bowties and us, and I was not wrong) and started following the updates they were sending out. This year they decided to mark the 21st anniversary of the Society with a free two day conference on Herculaneum (and the scrolls) in September and so we went along. Two days of badly chaired talks that kept running over because everyone is in love with Herculaneum and can’t stop talking about it. A private tour for Friends to the Greek and Roman Reading Room of the British Museum and their Herculaneum artifacts! I also took the opportunity to finally visit the Parthenon Marbles and was disappointed as I always knew I would be by all these friezes that are not giant round marbles as I have and will always imagine them to be.

But, the conference. I can honestly say I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a more interesting classics conference in my life. I don’t know how big the Herculaneum fandom is, but every big name in this field was there, from America to Italy, talking about their work and hobnobbing in the breaks. We couldn’t work out who the audience was, because it was a very white-haired conference for what is the very cutting edge of the intersection between technology and the Roman Empire, but seemingly everyone who stood and asked a question was either writing a book on Herculaneum, had been there in the last few months, or both. Brent Seales, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, showed up and talked about how the Vesuvius Prize had led to certain breakthroughs in tomography (3D scanning) and the use of AI to identify ink. And the extraordinary thing is that this all happened because the former CEO of GitHub read a book on Ancient Rome as his summer reading and found out about the scrolls, and emailed Brent Seales to go to his unconference to give a session about it. Brent accepted, went and camped in a field in Michigan for a week, told a bunch of bright, bored wealthy guys about the tech problem, and they were like, we’re in, and broke the back of a solution that we have been working on for 150 years!

And only half of the scrolls have even been scanned so far, they’re literally having to use the fame of the Vesuvius Prize to lever the institutions to let them access the scrolls they hold, as they’re scattered around the world. A speaker said that he went to Oxford University regularly for scholarly purposes and he asked them every time he visited for years to let him see the scrolls they hold. They said it was “unthinkable” every time. They’d sat in a box on a shelf for sixty years and that’s where they were going to stay. After the Vesuvius Prize had a winner, they not only let him see them, they let him scan them, and now they’re putting on an exhibition to the public to display them. From “unthinkable” to public display. In a five year period. That’s where we’re at right now.

Alex and I also learned, to our great shock, that there’s almost certainly a second library in the unexcavated part of the Villa dei Papyri, because everything we’ve read found so far (we can decipher the writing on the outside of the scrolls so we know what texts most of them probably are) is from Greek philosophy and it seems very unlikely that the owner of this villa had one library on one subject and didn’t have a more generic working library of Roman ethics and histories. Just imagine what a perfectly preserved Roman library of a wealthy aristocrat could hold. Pliny the Elder’s 20 volume history of the German wars. The lost Annales of Ennius, the greatest poem of all of Latin literature that is entirely gone except for 600 lines preserved because it was quoted so much. Livy’s Histories, one of our primary sources of Roman history, has only come down to us in 35 books out of ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY TWO.

Imagine if it’s in that villa.
Imagine if we saved it.
Imagine if we scanned it, and translated it.
It would completely change all of classical studies for the last two thousand years forever, we’d be back at the very start of the field.
Imagine it.

The reason my school trip was to Herculaneum and not Pompeii was because a couple of academics set out in 2001 to restore the site and make it accessible to visitors. Italy does not take care of its ancient sites just because they have so many of them, and Friends of Herculaneum was founded in part to make people care. In the last twenty years, the people in that room have founded an Archaeological Park, secured the site, cleaned it, launched tours, built a tourist industry, facilitated research, sponsored PhDs, made the site available as a venue for the local community and events, and applied for various grants and funding to sponsor all of this work. That conference was the culmination of decades of effort and collaboration between different fields of scholars working across disciplines that have ostensibly little to do with each other with little credit until the breakthrough.

The breakthrough is now here, but as Brent Seales said, “this is the end of the beginning”. I just don’t think there is possibly a more exciting area of antiquity to be interested in right now. And they need people. Professor Richard Janko said in his talk about the work of actually translating the scrolls once the tech has uncovered the writing was saying that, when we finally start uncovering full passages and texts, “there are too few scholars and too many papyri” – it was heavily implied that everyone who was working on this was a) fewer than a dozen people and b) mostly sitting in the room of white hair in front of us. As Alex was saying to me in the break, “this is insane, can you think of literally any other field where you can start work on a postgrad project and the reward might be getting your name on an work of ancient literature thought lost for two thousand years that the modern world has never seen before?”

Anyway, we left inspired. It was almost stressful how exciting it was, I had to tell myself, “no, Sarah, you cannot dump your entire career and go into ancient papyri translation, you’ve got a mortgage”. At the final plenary, several people said, what can we do to help? and the answers were “learn ancient Greek and get into AI” and “tell people about Herculaneum, we need to preserve it and excavate the rest and that takes money and will”.

So this is me, telling you about Herculaneum, why you should care about it, why you should join the Friends of Herculaneum, and next time you’re in Naples, drop by Herculaneum and have a tour guide tell you why, if it was up to us, we’d tear that entire town down.

Join the Friends of Herculaneum Society.
Visit the Herculaneum Archaeological Park website.

The post On the Herculaneum Society 21st Anniversary Conference 2025 appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

I have published a book! Across Sacred Thresholds: A OneSpirit Anthology is now available to buy from all good bookstores, as long as they are Amazon.

A couple of years ago, I submitted a piece to a planned anthology of interfaith ministers to showcase the breadth of our ministry and the work that we do. This was organised by OneSpirit Ministers in Connection, a CIC of which I have been a director for several years. I had planned to resign from my role this year to free up time for other NED roles, but during that period, the whole board of directors took the decision that OSMIC had served its purpose, and we decided to wind up the organisation.

While considering disposal of the assets, I inquired what had happened with the Book Project, as it was known internally. It turned out that the submissions were sitting in an email folder and, for reasons, had not been edited and no-one really knew what to do with them.

Not wanting all the effort that had gone in so far to be wasted, definitely wanting my own submission to get published, and believing this would be a relatively simple task-and-finish job, I took over the Book Project as project manager. I’ve never edited a book for publication before, and it was certainly a learning curve. Although the use of AI has made the process of copyediting many times easier than it used to be, only humans can make decisions on style, formatting, and themes. It ultimately took twice as long as I had originally projected, although it was still only six months in the end.

The original intention of the Book Project was to create a book based on the elements, which is why so many of the submissions are themed on fire, water, earth, or air. However, on reviewing the material I inherited, this ultimately did not work – although some submissions covered all the elements, the balance was heavily lopsided towards earth, and some submissions were of previously completed work and were unrelated. I therefore arranged it to have a beginning, middle, and end, with the various formats of essays, poems, ceremonies, and photographs evenly distributed in a complementary order.

With all the other activities of OSMIC ended or passed onto other groups, all of the directors of OSMIC put time and effort into making this happen, so we are all jointly editors of this book. I handled the text, Sass managed the design, and Sarah managed the email correspondence with all the contributors.  After I’d done the initial sweep in Scrivener, we then spent several months editing pieces that needed reorienting or tidying for publication, obtaining consents and higher-res images, and then a couple month laying it out to meet Kindle Direct Publishing guidelines (which took five goes! Imagine how we felt when we ordered our first galley copies and there was a thick white stripe at the bottom because we’d calculated the bleed wrong XD).

With pieces by 26 interfaith ministers ordained over the last twenty years, this book covers a wide spectrum of traditions, media and descriptions of the kind of work that we do. From essays on spirituality to artwork to individualised ceremonies, you really will get a sense of why interfaith ministry is a thing. Shout-out to Reverend Chloe Greenwood, a friend and colleague who, entirely unaware of this project, ran into me at Sacred Arts camp in May while I was in full editing mode, asked how I was, and was promptly press-ganged into writing a piece for me on a subject I thought was missing, which went in just under the wire while we were finishing off the design stage.

The book is set up in my KDP account, and I have committed to passing all funds raised once a year when I do my taxes, to the OneSpirit Interfaith Foundation for their student bursary fund. The price has been set at the minimum level to qualify for KDP Expanded Distribution, to allow the book to be added to various global catalogues and enable institutions and bookstores to buy copies. This means that if you buy the book from Amazon, the OSIF bursary fund will make approximately £3, and 99p for institutional orders under Expanded Distribution.

This is currently only a physical paperback — formatting a book as an EPUB from a PDF is not a simple task for a work with full page colour photographs, so it will follow at an unspecified time and date when technology and time allows.

I don’t expect to sell many copies (although at the time of writing, we are 75th for “Spiritual Rituals” on Amazon), but it was the principle more than anything. Most of the challenge was working with material we hadn’t compiled that had been submitted for a different book managed by a different editor and wrangling it into something with its own internal coherence and focus – once we got the hang of it, dare I say, book editing turned out to be quite fun? I did say to Sass, after we’d finally gotten approval from KDP, that we should do more books together. She thought so too. Watch this space!

Check out Across Sacred Thresholds here.

The post Across Sacred Thresholds: A OneSpirit Anthology appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

This was originally written as an indignant Amazon review and it is not my usual custom to post negative reviews to my website, but once my furious typing reached 1700 words, I thought I’d better save it for posterity.

I am a solemnly professed Benedict XVI nerd, and I bought Gerry O’Connor’s Subdued Fires: An Intimate Portrait of Pope Benedict XVI on Kindle in one of those 99p flash sales. I have read most of the notable biographies of Pope Benedict XVI, but am always interested in reading critical biographies because they often contain information that more admiring biographers politely leave out. I can therefore speak from my own knowledge of what has been written elsewhere that this biography is not only biased and shockingly badly written, it simply does not even attempt to understand Pope Benedict as a person and it for that reason I would advise anyone to steer clear of this book.

I have never come across Gerry O’Connor before although reading this book and looking through the list of his other works it would appear that he is a popular celebrity biographer who turned to the field after his actual career as a serious playwright and theatre critic wasn’t paying the bills. You know, someone who doesn’t do any actual research or talk to anyone involved but skims through interviews, puff pieces and any other biographies and does a quick, short write-up in a few weeks or months. This book certainly reads like my celebrity unauthorised biographies of Graham Norton and Leonardo DiCaprio.

A celebrity unauthorised biography would simply make an amusing lens to apply to a Pope and theologian who will almost certainly be declared a Doctor of the Church, if not for the absurd tangents O’Connor insists on taking that suit his predetermined narrative and then concluding “did Pope Benedict agree with this? Who’s knows, I’m just asking questions”. The worst way in which this manifests is O’Connor has gotten his hands on the biography of German poet Gunter Grass, a contemporary of Pope Benedict, and simply quotes large passages from his descriptions of living under the Nazi regime and concludes each copy-paste with comments to the effect of, “and Pope Benedict probably thought that too”. It’s extraordinary that for a man who died aged 94 and left behind such a extensive record of his activities that you can enrol in a master’s degree in his thought, that O’Connor felt it necessary to pad out his pages with so many digressions. It feels like he had a keyboard in one hand and Wikipedia in the other.

More concerningly, however, for some reason O’Connor is convinced that Pope Benedict was a Nazi sympathiser and does everything possible to imply, associate and implicate him in ideas that are just impossible to credit if you have actually read any of Benedict’s work. To be sure, Pope Benedict expressed a very rose-tinted view of his early life and other serious biographers have made excellent criticisms of Pope Benedict’s oft-asserted belief that the Catholic Church was the main opposition to the the Third Reich when in fact the communists were much more active and prepared to publicly organise against the Nazis than anyone in Ratzinger’s circle or the German Church. O’Connor makes much of the fact that Pope Benedict’s family repeatedly moved to avoid Nazi oppression and is critical that they didn’t do more to oppose the regime. It’s not an invalid criticism, but personally I find it decidedly very easy to say that ordinary people living in Nazi Germany should’ve done more to fight fascism from one’s armchair located in a world where the fascists don’t have concentration camps and aren’t shooting their opponents in the streets. Opposition meant certain death and martyrdom is not for everyone.

It is very obvious that O’Connor’s main, perhaps sole, source of biographical material is John L. Allen Jr’s Pope Benedict XVI, which was published in 2005. The eight year period between Pope Benedict’s election in 2004 and his resignation in 2013 has been covered through Google search. I am not being facetious about this – Gerry O’Connor states on pg171 that Pope Benedict had a helicopter pilot’s licence and would flew himself to Castel Gandolfo for summer vacations, a statement which is absolutely insane if you think about it for more than five seconds, and it is not true. The reason Gerry O’Connor writes this is because a defunct Catholic website in English mistranslated an Italian newspaper profile of Monsignor Georg Ganswein, Pope Benedict’s personal secretary, who *does* have a pilot’s licence, and promulgated a myth that was repeated all over the internet as a fun fact about the Pope. I know this because when I saw the claim that this elderly man fitted with a pacemaker liked to fly helicopters on the regular, I spent several hours of my life verifying that Pope Benedict, in fact, never learned to drive, never mind flying. Gerry O’Connor saw this absurd claim and just copy-pasted.

This heavy reliance on John L Allen Jr’s 2005 work results in a lopsided narrative where over 50% of the book is dedicated to Pope Benedict’s early life up to his end of his formal education, and perhaps 10% covers the twenty year period in which he became a world-renowned theologian. Pope Benedict’s first published book, Introduction to Christianity, was on the required reading list of every catholic university theology course in the world by the time he was even called to Rome – O’Connor mentions this in passing to explain why Ratzinger was able to afford to build his own house. The remainder of the book is a series of short chapters dedicated to the beats of Pope Benedict’s papacy as measured by the number of news articles dedicated to any given event. We get an entire chapter on Pope Benedict’s state visit to the UK in 2010, for example, even though this was one of 20 pastoral trips that Benedict made during his papacy and nothing much important happened during it. But there’s tons of coverage in English on Google, so… Similarly, the paedophile crisis and Pope Benedict’s handling of it is described entirely from the headlines that O’Connor came across and the actual, unsexy, work Pope Benedict did to reform canon law and shape the Curia’s response is tedious reading for which you will have to turn to actual journalist John L. Allen Jr.

Between this hodgepodge of pilfered anecdotes, cribbed headlines, and “well, I’ve researched it so it’s going in” rambling, O’Connor makes statements about Joseph Ratzinger’s motivations that are simply preposterous. At several points, he infers that Pope Benedict’s shy, quiet outward demeanour was a calculated persona to hide his ambition and lust for power. The reality is that Joseph Ratzinger was not a complicated man – he was an academic who lived in his head and loved info-dumping on what he read in his books, he was conflict averse in his personal and professional relationships, and he was simply resentful of the world changing from the church-centred small community he had grown up in and loved in 1930s Bavaria. All of his actions as Prefect of the CDF and subsequently as Pope which have been so heavily criticised are explained by this perspective, what he himself described as not burdening those of “simple faith”. Pope Benedict lived with his sister all of her life (she died twenty years before him), and he repeatedly invoked her simple Catholic belief, unbothered by high falutin’ theological niceties that so excited him, as his case study of a faith he wanted to protect. For him, the Catholic Church represented authority, order, and stability, and he didn’t have time for anyone or anything that might undermine the cloister. It was for that reason that his academic curiosity that lit up Vatican II was so sharply curtailed by the 1968 student riots. It was for that reason, finding himself in a position for which Pope John Paul II summoned him to Rome against his will (bear in mind that, if you support the ambition argument, in 1981, Pope Benedict was 54, an archbishop and cardinal in addition to his existing global reputation as a theological rockstar and he had no need to go to Rome to further his career), he campaigned against liberation theology, silenced Father Curran and revoked Matthew Fox’s licence to teach. Many of his public condemnations of the threats to faith and family specifically warn against the consequences of “confusion”. You may disagree with this but there is no mystery here. Besides his role enforcing the teaching of the church, Benedict’s comments on Islam, European identity, and homosexuality are simply views that were commonly believed and expressed by any socially conservative seventy year old man in the early 2000s. You may disagree with his views but I find the criticism that the Pope should’ve been more liberal to be the anachronistic view, not the other way round. Just look around you in 2025.

O’Connor’s random diatribes and extended musings on subjects as varied as the history of music in Salzburg, the writings of Dorothy L. Sayers, and just an incredibly long-winded examination of Pius XII’s relationship with the Jews that seemed like it was originally intended to be the context for a critique on his petrine successor’s relationship with the Jews but which never manifested, are all very interesting but it’s hard to trust the credibility of any of this information given the general hack approach of the book. There are also some very strange bedfellows in the Bibliography – O’Connor includes Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ Dignity of Difference, a book which does not mention Pope Benedict and is itself not mentioned anywhere in the rest of the text. I speculate its inclusion is actually due to a famous photo of Rabbi Sacks meeting Pope Benedict during his state visit to Britain in 2010, a photo which you would be certain to see if you googled “Pope Benedict XVI state visit to Britain”.

In short, this book is trash. I have laboured this review because by every metric, this book is a disgrace – to Joseph Ratzinger’s memory, to writing as a profession, and to Gerry O’Connor’s own dignity. If you are looking for a definitive hagiography of Pope Benedict XVI, you will need to turn to Peter Seewald’s Pope Benedict XVI: A Life Vols. I and II. For the definitive critical biography, we shall have to hope that John Cornwall with squeezes something out before he passes, because there’s nothing to see here.

The post Subdued Fires: An Intimate Portrait of Pope Benedict XVI – Review appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

Please note that Daniel Ladinsky produced several books of “translations” of Hafiz, a 14th century Persian Sufi poet, but scholars of Hafiz concluded that he has essentially written his own poetry and just said they were translations of Hafiz.

This does not, I feel, undermine the beauty of his work, but it certainly made it very challenging when as a young student, I heard a recital of what I was told was a Hafiz poem. I spent fifteen years looking for it within Hafiz’s corpus of work until one day I happened across one of Daniel Landinsky’s books in which I finally found the poem below and realised what had happened.

The Ear that Was Sold to A Fish

It is true.
I once had an ear that got sold to a fish.
Lean back: I will be glad to tell you all about
How it happened,
But first I must digress a bit,
Perhaps way beyond any logical sequence
Of events
We may ever again piece together.

Let’s see,
We could start anywhere,
With any word,
In this fertile luminous world in which I live.

What is the first letter of your alphabet?

A,
O—
That will be just fine.

Art is the conversation between lovers.
Art offers an opening for the heart.
True art makes the divine silence in the soul
Break into applause.

Art is, at last the knowledge of
Where we are standing—
Where we are standing
In this Wonderland
When we rip off all our clothes
And this blind man’s patch, veil,
That got tied across our brow.

We are partners straddling the universe.
Someone inside of us
Has one foot
Upon each resplendent pole.
Someone inside of us is now kissing
The hand of God
And wants to share with us
That grand news.

You will find yourself knee-deep in ecstasy
When all your talents to love
Have reached their heights.

Hafiz, time, space, and boredom
Are just passing fads.
All your pain, worry, sorrow
Will someday apologize and confess
They were a great lie.

Let’s see,
O yes,
Look how we got distracted,
“Beyond logical events.”
I remember we were talking about:
The Ear That Got Sold to a Fish.

It is true
The moon once put a price
Upon my head.
And then hired a gang of
Young thugs.
It seems the Beloved felt
I had been telling too many secrets,
Giving too much of His precious wine
Away for free.

So I got called before a fat burly judge.
But I pleaded my own case well.
I said,

“It is all the fault of prayer,
It has filled me with divine treasures
That I love to loosely spend.”

So,
I brought a ticket for my eye
Upon that White Sky Bird
That never touches ground,

And I bribed an ancient deep-sea fish
To buy my ear and drown.

Now whenever the Beloved whispers
Or even slightly moves
I get a scouting report
That a thousand saints could envy
And would pawn their hearts to know.

Hafiz has become
One of the greatest spies upon God
This world has ever seen.

That is why the moon once got rough.
That is why that fat burly judge
Once crowded all of heaven into a small jury box.

God knowingly did risk my case becoming famous
If I won.
I think He really wanted my name
To spread forever wide.

Have you ever contemplated the thought
As I once did,
That the Beloved already knew, already knew,
Everything long before,
So long before we were ever born.

But now to end this drunken song
With its essence in refrain:

Art is the conversation between lovers.

True art awakes the
Extraordinary
Ovation.

The post The Ear that Was Sold to A Fish – Daniel Ladinsky appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

Two years ago, I had covid for the third time. I have never once had a positive test, but I’m fairly sure I am simply incompetent at taking them. The symptoms were unmistakable each time. The first time I caught covid, in March 2023 when nobody knew what the symptoms were and lateral flow tests didn’t exist, we weren’t sure it was covid but as I told people, I have never been that sick for so long before or since. It flattened me in a way no illness ever had. Six months later, there was a superspreader event at work where everyone in the room caught it except me and one other person who’d already had it, and that was when I was sure. The second time I caught covid, with some immunity from the previous round and a vaccination, it was exactly the same but a bit less severe and a bit shorter (seven days instead of ten).

But this third bout left me in a hole. The classic symptoms went away after a week, but the exhaustion stayed. I tried going back to work, only to end up napping in my car at lunchtime and sitting at my desk like a zombie. Three weeks of this, and I was losing my mind.

A Friend’s Theory

I sent an article about long covid to a friend of mine who had had a CFS-like illness for a year some time ago. He’s not a doctor, but he’s one of those clever people who reads deeply and thinks in systems. His view was that in some people, covid triggers an autoimmune reaction that never quite switches off, resulting in ME/CFS-type symptoms.

He warned me that graded exercise therapy – the slow build-up of activity – is a terrible idea for this sort of condition. In his case, the only thing that had helped was absolute rest. At one point, he had even stopped eating to reduce the body’s energy demands.

The Idea

That caught my attention. I’d read before about two related ideas:

• Calorie restriction—where people eat drastically fewer calories in hopes of extending their lifespan, based on studies showing it slows down metabolism and reduces “unnecessary” processes like cell division.

• Intermittent fasting—where extended breaks between meals trigger the body to recycle white blood cells, potentially “resetting” aspects of the immune system.

Both concepts have their fandoms, with reddits abundant and a plethora of research articles suggesting some kind of evidence base to their theories. Reviewing it all again, I decided to combine them into one programme. My thinking was that if my immune system was stuck in overdrive, shocking my body into a low-resource state might make it reset itself.

The Method (or “Recipe”)

Here’s what I did, which you can season to taste:

• Calorie limit: Under 1,000 calories a day

• Eating window: Six hours, roughly 2 pm–8 pm

• Duration: Four days

• Activity: Minimal.

Example meals:

• Mashed potato with cheese and gravy

• Lentil soup with bread and butter

• Greek yoghurt with chopped nuts and honey

Everything I ate was chosen to be filling and high in protein and fat, to keep me comfortable within the calorie limit. I also took a daily multivitamin.

I won’t pretend it was pleasant. Moments of hunger were largely limited to the couple of hours at lunchtime when my body was telling me I needed to eat. It did make me incredibly weak though, and I found myself spending most of the day lying limply on my bed flicking through Twitter – couldn’t concentrate on writing an email or doing any work. I felt cold all the time. I left the house most days for a short walk to keep myself from going stir-crazy and it felt like walking through treacle.

The Result

Based on what I’d read, when starved of resources, the body uses up its glycogen reserves within 48 hours and then starts contingency measures including burning fat and shutting down processes it thinks you can live without. So I calculated after four days of this, I would either feel better or we’d have to rethink the science. I therefore implemented the programme over a weekend knowing I had a conference in Birmingham on the following Wednesday and that would be a good opportunity to see if anything had worked. So I took up eating three meals a day again on Tuesday, to get my strength up for the conference. The day of the conference, I drove three hours there and back, walked around all day, and felt… fine. The crushing fatigue was gone. I worked a full day the next day without naps, without the sense of being pressed into the ground. I weighed myself the day I returned to work and after my week off from food, I had actually gained a pound (which makes complete sense in terms of the way the body reactions after periods of starvation).

It has now been two years, and the exhaustion never came back. I also haven’t had covid since, either, though I imagine that’s a coincidence.

Why It Might Work

I went back to my friend who was fairly shocked that this had actually worked, because his own ideas contradicted modern medical recommendations and on top of that my theory sounded like it came from some quack homeopathic nutritionist. But after four days of this recipe, I was up and about when a week prior I was in bed exhausted from the effort of my sedentary desk job. The only thing that changed in that period was my diet.

My theory: after about 48 hours without significant calorie intake, your body burns through its glycogen reserves and begins shifting into other modes of energy conservation. This includes breaking down fat for fuel and temporarily shutting down processes that aren’t critical for survival. Some research suggests this period of “resource triage” can prompt your immune system to destroy old or overactive white blood cells and replace them with fresh ones.

The idea, very loosely, is that if your immune system is stuck in a chronic inflammatory state after covid, this enforced reset could help. But this is speculative – it worked for me, but I don’t imagine many doctors will recommend it.

Caution

This is not medical advice. Rapid calorie restriction can be dangerous for people with certain health conditions or nutritional needs. If you want to try it, read up on intermittent fasting and calorie restriction first, and consider speaking to a healthcare professional.

I was otherwise healthy before this—never broken a bone, never stayed in hospital, never had time off work for more than a cold—so my risk level was lower. If you have found your way to this post through desperation and AI, your situation may be different, and your mileage may vary. But I wouldn’t be releasing this to the public sphere if I didn’t think there was something to it that might be able to help you.

Best of luck!

The post How I Got Rid of My Long Covid Fatigue in Four Days appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

Darren Carvill is now known to the world for serial fraud and embezzlement with multiple convictions and is now serving a three year prison sentence for fraud. He’s ruined himself sufficiently over his career that I don’t think he counts as a private individual anymore and I no longer have to respect the privacy of my weirdo former maths teacher.

Mr Carvill was one of the worst teachers I ever had. He started as my school as a newly qualified teaching graduate and was one of those people who loved maths, and became a teacher to pay the bills. He told us that he had been disciplined at university for poor attendance because he hadn’t turned up to any of his lectures because they didn’t have anything to teach him. He was clearly very good at maths, and terrible at teaching. He also blatantly played favourites in class and would spend large portions of lessons sitting on a table talking to the popular girls with his back to everyone else. He was the worst.

When Mr Carvill left our school, he told us it was because he couldn’t afford Essex and so was moving to Kent. And he left at the end of the summer term along with a bunch of other teachers.  And that was that.

For about eighteen months, when suddenly word went round school like wildfire that Mr Carvill was on trial for kidnapping and having sex with a Year 9.

I know who this Year 9 was, we all did, but I never spoke to her or her friends about it. It was obviously beyond mortifying for her and I found the rumour mill deeply dissatisfying. So I attended the trial.

Over three days sitting in Chelmsford Crown Court, I got to experience the criminal justice system and how it worked. There was a jury, judges with wigs, evidence being laid out step by step, cross-examination of Mr Carvill, the only witness. It was super interesting and contributed to my nascent interest in law.

My school was not impressed that I skipped school to attend the trial of their former employee and I had to have a meeting with the Deputy Head. It was legal to leave school at 16 at the time so she had no way of stopping me. But it became apparent in that meeting that she thought I was personally reporting the trial to the press. I had to explain that there was actually a reporter sitting next to me in the public gallery. Not the only one learning about how the court system worked that day!

• Kent Online, January 2006, Sacked teacher: I didn’t have sex with pupil
• There is also an article from the Chelmsford Chronicle which is not available online and I have a physical copy of that I clipped at the time and will, at some point, upload.

Mr Carvill was convicted of abduction but not of having sex with the Year 9. He freely admitted he had taken her ice skating and for a walk in a field, but denied absolutely that he had had any sexual contact with her. It did seem rather unlikely from the evidence, and having missed the day of the trial in which she had given evidence remotely, I believed then that the girl had made that up under pressure from her mother, who was also employed at the school. It seemed to me that this was the story of a schoolgirl crush that Mr Carvill had handled utterly irresponsibly and had spiralled out of control.

Now he’s all over the papers for stealing money to hire sex workers to make him “feel better”, I’m not so sure about that.

I went to his sentencing hearing as well. Hilariously, there was only one bench outside the courtroom and I had turned up 45 minutes early – and so had the defendant. And so, although I sat down and pretended to read my book, I had to spend 45 minutes hearing Darren Carvill, his sister, and his lawyer, talking about how he had a bright future in accountancy and this was all some terrible misunderstanding caused by a silly girl wanting attention.

At the hearing, Mr Carvill’s lawyer said that he was committing never to teach again and that he was going to work in accountancy. The judge issued a suspended prison sentence, court costs and said that he was unable to put him on the sex offenders’ register. And that was that. I kept an eye on the news and his Facebook account, but seemingly he had genuinely gone off to a quiet life as an accountant.

Until 2019.

• The Sun, April 2019, GEEKY FUN TIME – Bullied geek nicks £150k from firm and blows it all in one night on ten escorts, champagne and cocaine
• Daily Mail, April 2019, Accountant, 38, bullied at work wanted to ‘go out with a bang’ so stole £170,000 from his bosses and spent it all in ONE weekend on cocaine and prostitutes
• The Sun, July 2019, CON LET-OFF – Geeky accountant who stole £150,000 and blew it on cocaine and hookers told to pay back just £1

It turned out that Mr Carvill had indeed sought a quiet life as an accountant, but didn’t want a quiet life at all. Feeling miserable and sorry for himself, he had started embezzling funds from his employer, a Mr Clutch franchise, to pay for escorts and parties. Realising he was about to be caught during an audit, he stole as much as he could access and blew it all in one weekend. Eventually he was caught and sent to prison for two and a half years. He ultimately stole £262,000, none of which he paid back.

I was attending the wedding of a high school friend a few days after and seemingly everyone had already found out. Who knew Mr Carvill had it in him?

The pandemic took our minds off petty matters but I roughly remembered when his sentence was likely to end and I posted to Facebook in December 2021:

Mr Carvill’s Facebook went dark and I googled him occasionally but I genuinely thought this had to had been a wake-up moment for him, and we wouldn’t hear about him again.

Until 2024. Another wildfire.

• Kent Online, May 2024, Serial conman from Tovil who blew £260k on drugs and prostitutes jailed again after changing name and defrauding Holiday Inn, Rochester
• Daily Mail, May 2024, Revealed: Britain’s worst employee abducted 14-year-old schoolgirl when he was a teacher, stole £170,000 for prostitutes and cocaine when he was an accountant, and walked out of Holiday Inn with £90,000 when he was a receptionist

After getting out of prison in June 2021, Darren Carvill had changed his name to his mother’s maiden name, Medhurst, and gone to live with his parents in Kent. He got a job as a financial assistant for 360Travel Ltd without disclosing his history. He then embezzled £76,000 from them, and when caught, blamed his father’s recent passing, and his mother’s decline from dementia.

He was caught by 360TravelLtd due to his increasingly erratic behaviour, and the police were called. He was released on bail pending an investigation, and while under police investigation for fraud, got a job at a Holiday Inn where he talked his way into once again being in a financial role and stole £13,000 from them which he spent in another “weekend of madness” in June 2023 after managers found out he had lied about his history and had set up a meeting to prove his identity.

He went on the run and was finally caught a month later lying face-down drunk on a verge by the police. He told them he did it because he was trying to “make himself feel better”.

He was finally convicted in 2024 and sent to prison for another three years. He was working at a Toby Carvery who, for some inexplicable reason, put in a character reference for him during sentencing that he was a “valued and supported” restaurant shift supervisor.  Presumably they hadn’t yet decided to move him to finance.

I decided to write this article because Kent Online, the local paper who covered all of this, evidently had someone at the sentencing hearing who reported in their article that Mr Carvill had 57 prior convictions, of which 52 were for fraud, covering almost his entire adult life. They managed to pull up a conviction that we had known nothing about that he had received a suspended prison sentence in 2011 for embezzling money from a travel company. Totting these up from what we know from this media coverage:

• 2005: 2 counts of abducting a child – Chelmsford Crown Court – suspended prison sentence, community service and court costs
• 2008: 34 counts of unspecified “financial dishonesty” – Maidstone Crown Court – suspended prison sentence
• 2019: 18 counts of financial fraud – Maidstone Crown Court – 2 1/2 years prison sentence
• 2024: 3 counts of financial fraud – Maidstone Crown Court – 3 years prison sentence

I am posting this here because I noticed that 2+34+28 is not 57, and there are 3 counts missing from this which are not part of the cited previous 52 convictions for fraud. I am unclear if this is misreported and the journalist had added the 3 most recent convictions to this total and just miscalculated. I also know that Mr Carvill was acquitted of 2 counts of statutory rape.

But it does also seem to me at this point pretty unlikely with this history that Mr Carvill managed to go 11 years without committing any crimes at all, and I will leave this here in anticipation of Mr Carvill’s release, when he will no doubt immediately try to return to his life of crime. His parents are deceased, he was evicted from his family home, and I can only assume that he has no contact with his remaining family given he reported he was homeless at the time of his last arrest. Journos are going to google him, and I hope they will find this article and be able to clear this up question.

As that fourteen year old who had to learn maths from the worst maths teacher in the world, I have been following these stories with astonishment that Mr Carvill apparently has such charm, and compelling lawyers, that he has now committed the same financial fraud three times using the same methods and the same motives, and still has people making statements to court that he’s a good man, really.

For businesses running background checks: if you employ Darren Carvill/Medhurst, he will work hard, he will get on with his colleagues, he will display his maths talent, he will transfer to your financial department and then he will rob you. Even while he’s on bail for fraud. Even while he is on trial. To make himself feel better.  You have been warned.

The post The Trials of Darren Carvill/Medhurst, Or, How My Maths Teacher Keeps Going To Jail appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

I really liked the grape recipe as given, but I was informed by all of the taste testers that changing the ratios to be equal grape and apple juice was better (and some preferred a higher apple ratio). The recipe below therefore has equal amounts of grape and apple juice, but if you want it to be more grapey or more appley, just skew the ratio 2:1 in either direction.

*Hot Grape Punch*

Ingredients:

– 150 ml grape juice (we have also used “red forest juice” from Lidl but this required some additional sweetener)
– 150 ml apple juice
– 50 ml orange juice
– 1 tsp of the peel (if you are using a carton, we used a box of candied fruit peel to similar effect)
– half a cinnamon stick
– half a star anise pod
– 4 old cloves

Instructions:

1. *Combine Ingredients*: In a large pot, combine the grape juice, apple juice, and orange juice. Add in the orange zest.

2. *Add Spices*: Toss in the cinnamon stick, whole cloves, and star anise.

3. *Sweeten*: Depending on the sweetness of your grape juice, add honey or syrup to taste. You can always add more later.

4. *Heat*: Put the pot on the stove and heat the mixture over medium-low heat. Allow it to come to a gentle simmer. Do not boil, as boiling may cause the juice to lose some of its nuanced flavours.

5. *Simmer*: Let the mixture simmer for about 10-15 minutes, allowing the flavours to blend together.

6. *Serve*: Once heated through and fragrant, strain the punch to remove the whole spices and orange zest. Pour into mugs and serve warm.

7. *Enjoy!* This punch is perfect for cold evenings or gatherings. The aroma from the warm spices and the sweet taste of the grape juice will surely be a hit.

Remember to adjust the sweetness to your liking, as grape juice can vary in sweetness.

The post Hot Non-Alcoholic Punch Recipe appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

Edward VI, King of England (1537-1553) was the only legitimate son of Henry VIII, who broke away from the Catholic Church in order to obtain a divorce from his wife after twenty years of marriage had produced only one daughter, later Mary I. Henry was always a deeply religious man and despite launching the English Reformation, remained in faith and practice a Catholic to the day he died. However, he allowed both Edward and his other daughter Elizabeth to be educated by Protestant tutors.

Under the influence of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and leading Protestant reformer who write the Thirty Nine Articles and the first Book of Common Prayer, Edward turned out to be a religious firebrand. Intellectually precocious and convicted by the certainty of youth, Edward became King at the age of nine and during the seven short years that he reigned, with his encouragement his regents turned the Church of England from a Catholic church which merely rejected papal supremacy to one which was institutionally Protestant. Had Edward not unexpectedly died in 1553 from tuberculosis at the age of fifteen, the Elizabethan religious settlement which has seen off Catholic and Protestant extremists for nearly four hundred years may have turned out rather differently.

 As part of his French studies, Edward had been translating passages of the Bible which addressed idolatry. In 1548, he embarked on a full-length treatise, also in French, which he titled Alencontre Les Abus Du Monde (Against the Abuses of the World) in which he condemned the papacy and defended protestant ideas. The final version was presented to the Duke of Somerset, Edward’s uncle and Lord Protector, as a gift in 1549. Edward was twelve years old.

Many years ago, I was watching a documentary about the Tudors in which the presenter showed a copy of this manuscript commenting that Edward’s tutor had marked it telling him to tone it down in several places. I think the purpose of this clip was to emphasise the religious implications for the country but what I took from it was that the state of modern education is highly unambitious. When I was twelve, I wrote two page essays on Northern Lights, not 10,000 word analyses of the doctrine of papal supremacy.

While reading an article on home education recently, I was reminded of this work by Edward VI and decided to track it down to read it and see if it was actually any good. I think it is. This took me quite a long time and as is now customary, having gone to this much effort, I have uploaded the full text to my own website to make it easier for the next person.

The first draft of this treatise was written in French between 1548-1549. The manuscript Add MS 5464 is held by the British Library. They have digitised their copy which you can read here.

A completed copy is held by the British Library under the reference Add MS 9000. The completed gift that was presented to the Duke of Somerset is held by the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.12.59.

This manuscript was discussed in the following book:

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Allen Lane–The Penguin Press, 1999), pp. 26-27, 31 (fig. 11), p. 226 (ns 41 and 47).

I suspect that this reference is how it came to the attention of the researchers of the documentary that I saw.

The treatise was then translated and published in English in 1682. I am unclear by whom exactly but to judge by the title, I assume a Protestant tract society:

K. Edward the VIth his own arguments against the Pope’s supremacy wherein several popish doctrines and practices, contrary to God’s word, are animadverted on, and the marks of anti-Christ are applied to the Pope of Rome / translated out of the original, written with the King’s own hand in French, and still preserved ; to which are subjoined some remarks upon his life and reign, in vindication of his memory, from Dr. Heylin’s severe and unjust censure.
Edward VI, King of England, 1537-1553.
London: Printed by J.D. for Jonathan Robinson, 1682.

This is the version handed down to us and is replicated across several other archives available on the web, but due to their intention to preserve a printed manuscript, these texts are paginated and retain several aspects of the printed work which make it difficult to actually read.

I obtained my copy of this text from a quite strange Christian apologetics website whose domain name and other content is rather off-putting and in some places quite offensive. I have linked to them out of respect for the work they did in formatting this translation, updating some of the archaic spellings and adding some helpful textual references in brackets, but have removed their commentary and formatted it further myself.

A Small Treatise Against the Primacy of the Pope

Edward the Sixth, by the grace of God, King of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and on Earth after God, Head of the Church of England and of Ireland.

To his most dear and well beloved Uncle, Edward Duke of Somerset, Governour of his person, and protector of his Kingdoms, Countries, and Subjects.

After having considered (my dear and well beloved Uncle) how much they displease God who waste all their time on the follies and vanities of this world, spending it in trifling Sports and Diversions, from whence comes no profit or benefit to themselves, or mankind ; I have determined to employ myself about the doing something which will be (as I hope) profitable to myself, and acceptable unto you. Having then considered that we see many Papists not only curse us, but call and name us Hereticks, because we have forsaken their Antichrist and its Traditions, and followed the Light which God hath been pleased to afford us; we are inclined to write something to defend us against their contumelies, and lay them (as it is just) upon their own Back. For they call us Hereticks, but Alas ! they are so themselves, whilst they forsake the pure voice of the Gospel, and follow their own imaginations, as is most evident from Boniface the Third, who thought (when he was made the universal Bishop) that that falling away which St. Paul speaks of in his second Epistle to the Thessalonians, and second chapter, had happened to himself.

For Saint Paul saith, We beseech you brethren, by the coming of our Lord, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or he troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means ; for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that Man of Sin be revealed, the Son of Perdition; who exalteth himself above all that is called God, so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of GOD, &c.

Notwithstanding he followed his own proud imaginations and fancies, and did not forsake his errors, which he knew to be very wicked.

Considering then by your life and actions, that you have a great Affection to the divine word, and the sincere Religion ; I dedicate the present work to you praying you to take it in good part. GOD give you his perpetual grace, and show his benignity upon you for ever.

From our Palace at Westminster, in London, this last day of August, 1549.

A Small Treatise Against the
Primacy of the Pope.

We may easily find and perceive by the experience of the world, that human nature is disposed to all evils, and entangled by all manner of vices. For what nation is there in the earth in which there is not some vice, and many disorders? And principally in this age because now there is such an exaltation of the Great Empire of Antichrist : which is the source of all evil, the fountain of all abomination, and true son of the devil. For when God had sent his only Son to heal our infirmities, and to reconcile the world unto himself by his death, the devil instantly changed the institutions of Christ into human traditions, and perverted the Holy Scriptures to his purposes and designs, by his minister the Pope. And therefore if the Astrologers (who maintain that all things shall return to their own element) say a truth, the Pope shall descend into hell: for he cannot belong unto God, or be his servant, whilst under the pretence of Religion and the command of God, he usurps unto himself the authority of Christ, as appears in all his works.

Therefore it seemed best to me in this little book, first to condemn the Papacy and afterwards the doctrine of the said Pope. Though I am not ignorant that it is a difficult task, because there are many that will contradict it : notwithstanding we will condemn the Supremacy of the Pope, from the following Reasons.

The First Part.

First then, whereas the papists say, that Rome is the mother of all other churches, and therefore the bishop of Rome ought to be superiour to all other bishops, I answer that it is impossible, because the first promise was made unto the Jews : And Rome was heathen when Jerusalem was Christian ; for St. Paul writing to the Romans, says (Rom. xi.) through their fall, salvation is come unto the Gentiles. And because the papists cannot prove Rome to have been the mother of all the other churches, they therefore say the bishop of Rome hath received his power from St. Peter : to whom had been given the same Authority with Christ, and remains in the said bishop of Rome to this day, which they endeavour to prove out of these following texts (Mat. xvi.) Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my church, saith Christ, and a little after, And I will give thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; And they allege that other place of Scripture, where Peter says to Christ, Lord, thou knowest that I love Thee: saying that he that loves Christ is the chief, and Peter loving Christ, more than any of the other apostles loved him, is therefore the chief and principal of the apostles. Again, they affirm that he only was commanded to feed the sheep of Christ, and be the fisher of men, and that he was the first speaker, and made answer to Jesus (Luke xxii.). Behold here are two swords : from whence the Papists conclude that Peter had a temporal and a spiritual sword. They allege also some human reasons, that as the Bees have one King, so all Christians ought to have one Pope. And that as there was of old amongst the Jews (Exod. iv.), a principal priest or bishop (as Moses and Aaron), so now it is necessary there should be a bishop of the bishops.

Here are two great falsehoods in these few words : the one is, that the authority and supremacy over the Church was given to St. Peter ; the other that Peter was at Rome. To the first, where they say that the authority was given him by these words. Thou art Peter, &c., I answer that if you remark the preceding and following words (Mat. xvi.) in that chapter of the Gospel, you will find that Christ did not speak of Peter, as he was barely a man, but as he was a believer : for the foregoing words are, how Peter had said. Thou art the Son of God: by which it is evident that Christ did not say that Peter was the foundation of the church, but spake of the faith of Peter. The following words declare how Christ called Peter satan, but the church of God is not founded upon satan, therefore it is not founded upon Peter : for if the church was founded upon St. Peter, it would have a weak foundation, and, like that house, a sandy foundation that could not stand long (Mat. vii.) but the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell. In like manner would the Church fall, if it had so poor a foundation. By which one may see from these words in the text, Thou art Peter, and upon this, stone will I build my church, must not be understood of Peter, but of the faith of Peter ; upon which the church is founded. For he was a frail and weak vessel, who denied Christ thrice.

Their second text is, that the keys of heaven were given to St. Peter (Mat. xvi.). To which I answer that the keys were given not only to Peter, but also to the other apostles. And by this argument I answer that he was not principal, because the rest received the same authority of the keys that was committed to him. On which account St. Paul calls St. Peter (Gal. ii.) the pillar, not the foundation of the church ; his companion, not his governor. And what are the keys of heaven, the authority of pardoning sin? No, it is the preaching of the gospel of God the Father, the gospel, I say, of God, not the Pope’s or devil’s. And as when a door is open, every one who will, may enter therein ; to whom God sent his sincere commandments and gospel, he opened truth, which is the gate of heaven. And he gave unto him an understanding of the Scriptures, which, if they obeyed (2 Cor. ii.) they should thereby be saved. By which we see that the gospel and the truth of the Scriptures are the only gates that conduct men to the kingdom of God. Whence St. Paul says (Rom. x.) Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall he saved. How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And a little after he saith, So then faith Cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. And in the fourth chapter to the Romans he also saith (Rom. iv.) But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. Moreover we will prove that the preachingof the gospel is the key of heaven. In the eighth chapter to the Romans, Paul affirms that, Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved ; and that the preaching of the gospel is the door that leads to the invocation of the name of God. Whence it follows, that the preaching of the gospel is the way and entrance of salvation.

Again, Paul affirms that faith justifies, and that the preaching of the gospel causes faith (which I have shewn before) whence it follows that the true preaching of the Word is the door and entrance to justification. Like as ground which is sowed may produce fruit, if the seed be not cast into the ground which is full of thistles, or thorns, or stones (Mat. xiii., Mark iv., Luke viii.) and yet although it be sowed on such ground, it will a little meliorate the earth. So if the word of God be sowed in the hearts of honest people, or such as have a zeal for truth, it will confirm them in all goodness ; but if any be obstinate and perverse they cannot impute the fault unto the Scriptures, that is really in themselves.

Therefore we ought to do our utmost endeavours to cause the gospel to be preached throughout all the world, as it is written (Matt, xxviii., Mark xvi., Luke xxiv.) All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth; go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in my name.

Since, then, it is proved that the keys of heaven is the authority of preaching, and that the authority of preaching was given to all the apostles, I cannot see how, by that text (Mat, xvi.) any more authority was given to Peter than to the other disciples. And St. Paul says, he was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles. Then, if he said true, St. Peter was not above him. And, if I were asked which of them was the better, I should say Paul, because he preached more than them all. But we ought to account certainly that the Spirit of God was poured out upon them all (Gal. ii., Acts ii.) and that the same spirit of God which filled St. Peter, filled also St. Paul, from whence may be proved that neither of them was superior to the other.

Again, the Papists say that after Christ was raised from the dead, he asked (Joh. xxi.) who loved him, and that Peter answered, he loved him, and therefore (say they) he was the chief apostle. By which reason every good man ought to have the supremacy over every other, because each good and pious person loves God; for it is the duty and office of every true Christian. Now the question is not, whether Peter was faithful, pious, good, a holy and true Christian; but whether he was principal, head, governor, and king above and over the rest of the apostles and ministers of Jesus Christ? For if the Pope would have the authority of St. Peter, which was to preach, I would be content to give it him; but he regards but little the precept of God (Joh. vi.) for Jesus departed into a mountain alone; when he perceived the Jews would make him a king and emperor. And the Pope, by wrong, or violence, or deceit, hath made all nations subject unto him.

Jesus wore a crown of thorns, and a purple robe was thrown upon Him in derision, and all the multitude mocked and spit upon Him; but the Pope decks himself with a triple crown, and is adored by kings, princes, emperors, and all estates of persons. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet (Joh. xiii.); and kings kiss the feet of the Pope. Jesus paid tribute (Mat, xvii.); but the Pope receives, and pays none. Jesus opened his mouth and taught the people (Mat. v.); the Pope takes his ease, and rests in his Castle of St. Angelo. Jesus healed all diseases (Luke vi.); the Pope rejoices in blood andmassacres. Christ bore His cross upon His shoulders (Joh. xix.) ; the Pope is borne upon the shoulders of men. Christ came with peace and poverty into the world; the Pope delights in stirring up war amongst the kings and princes of the earth. Christ came meekly, humbly, and compassionately, sitting upon an ass (Mat. xxi.) ; but the Pope rides in all pomp and splendour. Christ was a lamb (Joh. i.) ; the Pope is a wolf. Christ was poor (Luke ix.) the Pope would have all christian kingdoms under his power and command. Christ drove the money-changers and sellers out of the temple (Joh. ii., Mat. xxi.) ; the Pope receives them in. Jesus instituted the sacrament in commemoration of Himself (Mark xiv., Luke xxii.); the Pope formed the mass, a master-piece of imposture. Jesus ascended into heaven (Mark xvi.) ; and the Pope falls into hell. God hath commanded that we should have no other God but Him (Deut. vi., Exod. xx.) ; and the Pope makes himself to be honoured like unto a great god. God forbids us to commit idolatry (Mat. iv.); and the Pope is the author of image worship. God hath prohibited swearing in vain (Exod. xx.) but the Pope allows his friends perjury. God hath commanded the use of festivals in good works, prayers, and devotions ; but the Pope allows pomp, games, idleness, mimicry to be exercised on those days in churches. God hath forbidden murder, and killing any person ; and it is a matter of great compassion and sorrow to see how cruelly the Pope persecutes Christians. God foretold this persecution in the four-and-twentieth chapter of Matthew (Mat. xxiv.) Many false prophets, says Christ, shall arise at that time ; and because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold ; but the gospel shall be preached in all the world ; when ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains.

And is not this come to pass now? Yea, for there are many wolves in sheep’s clothing, who, under the pretence of religion, obscure the true doctrine of Christ ; and almost all abominations were introduced into the holy place, that is to say, brought into the church of God.

But to return to our matter, God hath forbidden adultery ; notwithstanding the Pope, who will be obedient to his father the Devil, commands his priests to keep concubines and harlots, rather than give themselves to any in marriage. God hath forbidden stealing from either man, woman, or child ; but the Pope is such an old thief that he robs even God of his honour, and transfers it to himself. God hath forbidden bearing false witness against any one ; but the Pope cries all is good grist which comes to his mill. God hath commanded us to be content with what is our own, but the Pope will have every house pay him a tribute. To conclude, he is in every thing opposite to God. But I cannot blame him, for he fulfils the command of Paul, which says (Eph. vi.), Children obey your parents : and the Demon of hypocrisy is his father, to whom he pays all obedience. The Devil walketh about as a roaring lion (saith St. Peter) seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet. v.). And does not the Pope do the same? Yes, certainly, for he not only ordains wicked and unjust laws, but he pursues to death all who have a true zeal and love towards God.

But to return to the primacy of Peter. I ask how many kingdoms St. Peter had under his dominion? For it was impossible that all kingdoms should be under him, when St. James was then bishop of Jerusalem, and that city then christian. Neither can I see how Peter should be the chief. For St. Paul says to the Corinthians, concerning the Apostles (1 Cor. viii.). All are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. Likewise St. Peter calls himself by no other title (1 Pet. i.), but Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by which it is manifest, that we are not Peter’s, but Peter ours. Again, when Paul came to Antioch he withstood Peter to his face, because he was to be blamed (Gal. ii.) : which he would not have done if Peter had any such authority, or could not have lyed, as they say : but (as I have said thereupon) Paul, seeing the dis- simulation of Peter, said unto him, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? We, who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law, &c. Let us then see how it is possible that Peter should be chief ; for if he was principal, who loved Christ the best, it is evident that St. John would be the chief of the Apostles, for Christ appointed him to take care of his Mother, and John lay in the bosom of Jesus, whilst he supped (Joh. xix. ; Joh. xiii.).

But to the matter in hand, I ask, Whether a lawful council can be called but by the Pope? to which I am sure the papists will answer negatively. Then I ask if the Pope can call a council before his election, to which I know they will reply he cannot. If, then, no Council is lawful without a Pope, and that none who is labouring to be elected Pope can assemble a Council, then the Council which confirms the Pope superior over the Church is not lawful, because it was not convocated by a Pope, being there was then none elected. But being thus driven from the argument, they fly to another, and say that Christ commanded Peter to feed his sheep (Joh. xxi.) ; but he commanded all the rest to do the same (Mat. xxviii.), saying, Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in My name. But the Pope does not obey the commandment of Jesus Christ. For he doth not feed his sheep, but devours them like a roaring lion (I Pet. v.), who walks about to seek his prey. Now I wish the Pope would obey the commandment of God which he gave to St. Peter : for I should not regret his having authority to preach Christ to all the world, but he leaves the preaching of the gospel and usurps the authority of being head of the church, which of right belongs to none but Christ. ‘Tis true the Pope is primate of the church, but ’tis not the divine or Catholick Church, but the diabolical one. For he transgresses the commandment given in general to St. Peter and the rest of the Apostles. For when Christ sent his twelve Disciples to preach the gospel of repentance and the kingdom of God, he said (Mat. X.), Behold, I send you forth as sheep among wolves. But the bishop of Rome is like a wolf among sheep, eating and devouring the poor sheep of Christ, and when they are hid by fear he takes the voice of the sheep to betray and devour them. He excuses himself from preaching upon its being too low and mean an office for him, saying he hath lower officers and ministers for that work, whilst he is taken up with seeing and attending to the singing out of the masses. But I answer to the first, that if the office of preaching was not below St. Peter, who had received all his authority and power from Christ himself, methinks that those who call themselves the successors of Peter, should not esteem the office too mean for them.

St. Paul writes to Timothy what every Bishop ought to be (1 Tim. iii.) : A Bishop (saith he) must he blameless, the husband of one wife, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre, but one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity. Now let us arraign the Pope before St. Paul, and examine whether by St. Paul’s rule he be guilty or not. The first commandment to a bishop is to be blameless ; but we have proved that the bishop of Rome transgresses all the commandments of God, by which he stands guilty. The second is, that he be the husband of one wife, in which the bishop of Rome errs mightily ; for he allows concubines, and counts filthy fornication better than lawful and honest marriage. The third is that he should be sober, and full of wisdom and virtue, which the bishop of Rome very little observes. The fourth is that he be liberal, given to hospitality, not greedy of filthy lucre ; but the bishop of Rome is full of avarice and oppression. The fifth is that he be apt to teach, but our devil or diabolical father accounts maintaining the glory of God by preaching, is too mean an office for him, notwithstanding his predecessor Peter, either preached the gospel, or sinned against God in not observing that commandment (Mat. xxviii.). Go ye and preach the gospel over all the world. But he will imprison, slay, and burn those who do preach the word, and would himself be their executioner if he did not find others to do it in his stead, by which we may see that he loves himself more than he loves God. What shall I say more? He disobeys all the orders of St. Paul, give verdict therefore whether he be guilty or innocent.

But now we will proceed to their other arguments, and first to their maintaining Peter to be the chief, for which they allege his being commanded to feed the sheep (Joh. xxi.). To which I answer that all the Apostles were commanded as well as he to feed the sheep of Christ, in these words of the Gospel (Mat. xxviii.). Go ye all and preach, &c. For the preaching of the Gospel signifies nothing else but feeding the sheep. And their other argument is not more substantial, when they say, Peter was a fisher of men : for I say, Andrew and John were by the same authority made fishers of men; for fishers of men are really nothing but preachers of Christ.

Now if the preaching of the gospel be unlawful, without authority from Peter the Pope ; then the preaching of St. Paul was not lawful, because he did not receive the authority from Peter; notwithstanding the pope accounts himself a God, saying, I cannot lie, therefore I have spoken truth. To which I answer, that if he be not greater than Peter, he may lie ; for Peter denied Christ thrice (Mat. xxvi.), Peter then lied thrice; and St. Paul afterwards reproved him for his dissimulation (Gal. ii.). But the bishop of Rome lies notoriously, if in nothing else, but in his pretending to be the head of the Christian Church, and having the keys of heaven. For if the pope have the keys of heaven, make this query : when the pope is dead, and none hath the keys, how can any soul enter into heaven? No person till he be elected pope having the keys : whence it must follow, that the pope being dead, heaven’s gates are closed. But it is a folly to say that the pope hath the keys of heaven and hell, when Christ is our only mediator (1 Tim. ii.), our gate, Head, Shepherd, Redeemer, and sovereign Lord ; who (after he had taught, instructed, done many miracles, and suffered death for us (Matt, xxvii.), and pronounced salvation to all that believe on his name (Mark xvi.; Luke xxiv.; Joh. xix.; Mat. xxviii.), and from the power of his passion faithfully believes to be saved) ascended into heaven with great honour and glory, and is seated on the right hand of God his father, where he intercedes for us ; remaining for ever with his blessed father and the Holy Ghost, one God in Trinity, and three persons in Unity, full of power and virtue, and free from vice and sin; remaining with us by his spirit, and being in every respect equal with his father, till he shall come in glory to be judge of all the world (Eph. i. ; Heb. i., iv. ; Matt, xxv.), whose greatness is inscrutable, mercy unexpressible, and glory most inestimable ; He is our Governor and Master ; He is our Shepherd and Redeemer, and we are his subjects and sheep (Psal. xxii.); we are ransomed by his blood, and washed by the waters of baptism to show that we are his sheep (Joh. x.); none else is our pastor or Lord: neither the pope nor any on earth can be our Lord; else we should become a monster having two heads. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says (1 Cor. iii.), that all is ours ; Peter, Apollos, and all the other apostles were ours, and we are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s ; whereby it appears that Peter is not a head but a minister unto us. Therefore we must esteem God our spiritual father, who by the passion of Christ, took from us all the pains of death and hell, to all who believe in him; that is the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father (Rom. viii.) If the pope then will be called our spiritual father, we shall have three fathers, whereof the one is carnal, and two spiritual, neither can the pope be so, for as Christ is the immaculate lamb, and only son of God, endued with all power: on the other side, the pope is an unclean and ravenous wolf, and only son of the devil his father, from whom he hath received his authority and office.

But I would fain know whether the pope be our spiritual, carnal, or diabolical father. In the first place. I cannot allow he can be our carnal father, because he lives celibate, and makes a profession of chastity : neither can he be our spiritual father, being so addicted to the world, and worldliness ; then it follows that he must be our diabolical father. Let us, therefore, conclude, that it was said of Christ, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee (Psal. 2) ; God will say to the pope, Thou art my enemy, this day have I destroyed thee: and as Christ was of the order of Melchisedek (Psalm cx.), so the pope is of the order diabolic. But as Christianity is spiritually very good, and well designed; yet if there be not good order to preserve it, it must decay. As the body of a man could not be healthy with two heads, four arms, or four feet ; so these Christian countries could never well subsist under the distraction of two equal sovereigns. But some may question me then, and say, What then, you would not have any kings or emperors? But to that I answer, that God who sent his only son down into the world, made him king over it (Mat. i.), putting all spiritual and temporal authority into his hands (Psalm cx.); he by his sovereignty hath placed kings to be his lieutenants over the earth; but he hath not ordained any supreme bishop, for we find none so authorised by the Holy Scripture. Now if the papists say that the pope is heir to him, I would advise him then, to stay till Christ were dead before they seized upon his kingdom : because no heirs take the possession of their inheritances till after the death of their predecessors.

Moreover, the papists say, that as under the old law (Exod. iv.) there was a high priest, or archbishop of the Jews ; so there ought now to be a head or supreme minister amongst christians. To which I answer, that the priesthood of Aaron and Moses represented the supremacy of our Saviour Christ, not the Pope. For Christ who came down to the earth (Mat. i.) and suffered death for us, says of himself, that he was our Messias (John iv.), and that he was the true bread which came dawn from heaven (John vi.), and our only shepherd ; for St. John testifies that he says (John x.), I am the door; he that entereth not by me into the sheepfold, but climbeth some other way, is a thief; but he that entereth in by the door is the Shepherd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth, and the sheep hear his voice : And he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice ; and a stranger will they not follow. But the pope not coming by Christ is an abominable thief: therefore all true and good sheep ought to fly from him: for he comes to devour, not to feed them ; to prey upon them, not to instruct them. But the papists, being thus scourged with their own rod (to wit, with their own argument) say farther, that after the disciples had preached about the cities, after they returned to Jesus, he asked them: Whether they had any sword with them? and that they answered, Here are two swords. Now they urge farther, that the one of the swords signifies the spiritual, the other the temporal power: which reason (as shall be shewn hereafter) is selfish and vain. For first, we ought to consider from whence the apostles came; they had been sent (Mark vi.) to preach Christ to all people, and (Luke ix.) to shew the light to those that sat in darkness. Secondly, we must consider the power Christ had on earth, for he said himself, that his kingdom was not of this world; and there are two sorts of authority, the one spiritual and the other temporal. On which account St. Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. xii.) as the body is one, and hath many members, for several uses, so there are also in the church of Christ, amongst the spiritual ministers; first, apostles; secondarily, prophets ; thirdly, teachers; and some temporal ministers, as kings, emperors, governors, and lieutenants. Now Christ was a spiritual minister, as he testifies of himself, saying, My kingdom is not of this world. And again, when two brethren came unto him and requested him to divide their inheritance between them, he answered (Luke xii.), Man, who made me a judge or divider over you? The third thing to be considered is, that Christ spake to the disciples concerning the swords ironically. Fourthly, that all the apostles answered together, Behold here are two swords. Fifthly, you may observe in the text, that the apostles understood not what Christ meant.

By all which things we may easily understand that text; for after the apostles had been sent to preach the gospel of truth, when they returned to Jesus, he said unto them, Had you any sword with you then? (as much as to say). When I sent you first out, you would have staves with you, but now what do you think, hath not my grace kept you from all evil? or else, what need have you had of a sword? Then his disciples (not Peter only), understanding not what Christ said, answered, there were two swords.

By which we see Christ spoke ironically, and that all his disciples made answer, not Peter alone; as if he should say I have two swords, the one signifying my temporal authority, and the other signifying the spiritual jurisdiction; neither would nor could Christ give a temporal authority, forasmuch as he was a spiritual minister. And the Papists err extremely in one argument, where they say, that Cephas is a head, whereas in truth Cephas is a stone; (but when these their arguments were weakened) then they cry it is probable, that Peter was the chief apostle, because he spake first at that time concerning our dispute, and so answered in behalf of all the Apostles.

But it is more likely he was not the prince over the rest, because St. Paul says (1 Cor. xi.) For I suppose I was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles; for in nothing I am behind the very chiefest apostles (2 Cor. xii.) In which number Peter is comprised. Now we must not dispute what is most probably true, but what is most certainly true. Nevertheless, let us examine whether it be probable or not: for Andrew sometimes spake first, and it is not to be doubted but that each of them sometimes spake first; but it does not therefore follow that he who speaks sometimes first, must be bishop of the bishops : his first speaking at that time may signify that he was of a very courageous spirit; or else that he could have desired to have been the greatest : But Christ said (Matt, xviii. ; Luke i.) They that humble themselves like a little child shall be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven ; neither is there any lofty, proud title, in the kingdom or church of Christ, as you may see in that magnificate in Luke, for God loves humility (Rom. xii. ; Phil, ii.) ; and Christ says (Luke ix.) in Luke, If any man desire to be first, the same shall he the last of all and servant unto all. And in another evangelist, he saith (Matt, xviii.) Whoso receiveth one such little child in my name receiveth me; and unless ye become as little children, ye shall not be fit for the kingdom of heaven. Nor does Peter attribute so high a title to himself, as the Pope takes upon him. For he writes thus in his epistle (2 Pet. i.), Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, and no more. But the Pope what does he say? Paul the third by the grace of God, the most Holy Pope and Father, Deputy to Peter, and Vicar to Christ, King of Kings, Prince of Princes, Bishop of the Bishops, and God on earth. Behold, therefore, how he calls himself God, and blasphemes Christ. Behold how he is filled and puffed up with pride and vanity. Behold how large and fair a name and title he takes, though he be a venomous serpent, calling himself the most holy father, whereas he is a detestable thief, and contaminated with all uncleanness. He calls himself the pope, which word signifies father unto all nations, whilst he brings them to destruction. Nay, he calls himself the vicar of Christ, and deputy of St. Peter, and god upon earth ; whilst he is vicar to Beelzebub, deputy to Lucifer, and a terrestrial demon ; for he would seem to be very good, whilst he is very wicked. And it is no wonder if the ministers of the devil appear brave and triumphant outwardly, for St. Paul writes to the Corinthians (2 Cor. ii.), No marvel what false apostles, and deceitful workers can transform themselves into; Satan himself being transformed into an angel of light.

Wherefore you may easily discern the true ministers of the word from the false antichrists; because the true apostles walk after the spirit of God, and the false walk after the flesh. Let us, therefore, see whether the Pope be the minister of God, or of the devil ; which I fear he will prove ; proclaiming himself a good man, a most holy bishop, a king of kings ; whereas he is the tyrant of tyrants ; for all others exercise their tyranny over bodies, but this devil, wolf, tyrant, exercises his over the souls of men, constraining the poor and simple lambs of God to forsake their faith, whereby they are saved, to follow his abominable traditions and diabolical precepts. Which if they refuse to obey, to wit, adoring images, and offering to his idols and devils, he burns, racks, and torments them, or forces them to a costly recantation.

During the reign of my late father the king, when the pope’s name was blotted out of our books, he stopped the mouths of christians with his Six Articles, as if he would choke them.

And at this day in France, before any one is burnt, a little before the execution, they cut out his tongue, that they might not speak. Considering then that the Pope is the minister of Lucifer, I am in good hopes, that as Lucifer fell from heaven into hell, so the pope, his vicar, will fall from the great glory of the papacy into contemptible derision. For David hath said (Ps. xviii.) in the Psalms, With the pure thou wilt shew thyself pure, and with the froward thou wilt shew thyself froward. Again, the Pope hath taken God’s honour away from him, therefore I hope God will divest him of his honours and glory. As Mary the mother of Jesus saith (Luke i.), He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. Take heed of thyself, then, O Pope, for if thou tumblest thou wilt have a terrible fall. As a man who has got up into a high tower would have a huge leap if he should fall down, so thou who hast exalted thyself unto the heavens, would fall down unto the abyss of hell, as Christ foretold of Tyre and Sidon (Matt. xi.).

But to return to the pope’s primacy. I know very well that the Scripture speaks of one God, one faith, one baptism (Eph. iv.; 1 Cor. viii. ; 1 Tim. ii.; Matt, xix.), but no mention of one Pope. Now if Peter had been a god on earth, and vicar of Christ, we should have been baptized into his name. But (2 Cor. xi. ; 2 Cor. xii.) Paul (who affirms himself to be inferior to none of the other apostles) will not allow us to be baptized into his name; nay he is so far from having us baptised into the name of Peter, that he will not have it said, I am of Peter, or of Paul, or of Apollos.

And now that the papists cannot prove by the Scriptures that we ought to have one pope, they run to similitudes, saying, that as the creatures in the earth (as the bees) have a king over them, so all Christians ought to have one king and pope. To which I will answer three ways. First, that their reason is not extracted from the Holy Scripture, but from their own invention. Secondly, that all the bees which are in the world, or in Christendom, have not one king. Thirdly, that if all bees have their king; so have we, to wit, Jesus Christ (Eph. i.).

But the papists will then say, that if we condemn the papacy, we shall condemn our forefathers as heretics. I will answer to that, as God answered Elijah (1 Kin. xix.) when he said to the Lord, that the children of Israel had forsaken his covenant, and were unjust and wicked, yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed to Baal. Neither must we imagine, but that there have been many Christians in the world, some of which have spoken openly against the papacy, and others that have kept their knowledge and sentiments to themselves; but the papists will not suffer us to know more than our fathers. But I know very well, that our religion consists not of old customs, or the usage of our fathers ; but in the Holy Scriptures, and Divine word. And that (if you think antiquity and custom makes a thing good) is older than the world. For God is the Word, who was without beginning (Joh. i.), and shall continue without end (Exod. ii.), and if you think truth ought to be followed and obeyed, all truth is contained in that book. Our religion ought not to be steered or governed by our forefathers : for Ezechiel saith (Ezech. xx.) Walk ye not in the statutes of your fathers, for they were polluted. Moreover, our God and Saviour, and Redeemer, Jesus Christ said (John xiv.), I am the way, and the truth, and the life: he did not say, I am the old custom.

The papists then say, that though Christ did not indeed ordain the pope, yet he left it to the church to do it. To which I ask, how Peter then was elected the universal bishop? For all things necessary to our salvation are written in the Bible; as St. Paul testifies (1 Tim. iii.) in his Epistle to Timothy, where he says, But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned, &c. And that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

The Second Part.

But to what purpose do we go about to prove that Peter is not the head of the Church? For allow he had been so, that does not conclude that the bishop of Rome is the principal head. For the papists themselves cannot prove that Peter was ever at Rome, because by the Scripture they cannot prove it ; nor by any true history. Therefore the bishop of Rome loses one of his great titles, of Papa ex jure Divino, for no authority can be ex jure Divino, unless it be confirmed by the Scripture. Well, then, we have him in a great plunge, since he must be forced to say, Paul, pope by human traditions ; for if he be not bishop by the divine word, but only by human traditions then all kings, princes, and other magistrates, may abrogate the statutes and institutions made by their fathers, as we have seen before. If every one then had known this, the pope had been poor long ago. Now the papists say, that the bishop of Rome was instituted by the primitive church; but no more than Mahomet, for they begun near the same age, and the pope was elected when all manner of wicked errors were advanced in Christendom.

Nevertheless to prove that Peter was at Rome, they produce the Clementine Epistles ; but we will prove them counterfeited, and falsified by the Papists. For in them it is written that Peter was at Rome, in the second year of the reign of Claudius, and lived there twenty-five years; but Christ was crucified in the eighteenth year of Tiberius, and he reigned five years after the Crucifixion. Caius Caligula reigned four years, and Claudius two, which makes it eleven years before Peter went to Rome. And in the eighteenth year of our Lord, Paul found St. Peter in Jerusalem (Gal. i.) ; by which we see their history is false. And we will prove that it is not true that Clement wrote these epistles unto James, for James was dead before Clement was bishop. Moreover, St. Peter was the bishop of the Jews, and not of the Gentiles (Gal. ii): for St. Paul glories in several places that he was the Apostle of the Gentiles. Again St. Paul writing to the Galatians says (Gal. i.) that he went up to Jerusalem to see Peter; therefore it is most probable, that Peter dwelt for the most part in Jerusalem, or in the adjacent cities. And here we may see the craft of the devil and the power of God; for notwithstanding the devil (to establish his power) invented the Clementine Epistles (though they be counterfeited by the papists); yet I say, God by his goodness and clemency towards his elect, hath caused the said epistles to be so written, that every one who hath read history, may plainly comprehend and understand, that they were feigned by serpentine subtilty, and by some abominable and obdurate papists.

In several other instances also, we may discover their false subtilty; for notwithstanding that the Holy Scripture saith, idols are senseless things and without life, they have often framed images which sometimes rolled their eyes, sometimes turned their heads, sometimes moved their hands, and sometimes their whole bodies; by which means they made people believe, that an image made of wood, heard and understood them; all of it being made so to the life, that (as they turned them) they made the head and eyes of the image to turn also. But as Daniel with ashes or sand, proved the idol Bel did not eat, but his priests; so by the Holy Scriptures, the confession of several persons, and by observation and experience, they have been proved to have been mere machines, and other instruments.

The Third Part.

Since we see that Peter neither was the chief, nor was at Rome (considering that they say the Pope cannot lie), we will examine whether they themselves have not acknowledged that no person ought to be the primate of the Church.

For Gregory the first hath written, that none ought to be Pope. Gregory was then bishop of Rome, and Maurice was emperor, and there were many heretics in Christendom; and the bishop and patriarch of Constantinople, at that time pretended to be the universal bishop, who was much favoured by Maurice. But Gregory declared then in his writings, that there ought to be no principal in the Church.

And now the papists are overthrown by this; they say that by the consent of the General Councils, and doctors, an universal bishop was established under the name of pope : whereas for four or five hundred years after Christ, there was no person in the world that was distinguished or called by that name. Moreover, when there were several contentions about the papacy, all learned persons detested the opinion that there must be a pope : and sometimes the very bishops of Rome themselves abhorred it. And St. Cyprian,* [* Cyprian, De Simplicitate Prelatorum.] writing concerning the unity of the Church, saith, There is one bishop, of whom every bishop holds a share. For as there are many beams in the sun, yet the brightness is but one : many branches in a tree : several streams from a fountain ; in like manner, the Church is but one, which being illuminated by the brightness of our Lord, who extends his beams throughout all the world, yet nevertheless the clarity is but one, to wit, Jesus Christ. Likewise the same Cyprian+, [+Cyprian, Epist. ad Corn.] being bishop of Carthage, calls the bishop of Rome his companion. Moreover St. Jerome, ++ [++ Jerom, Epist. ad Evag.] bishop of Rome, humbles the style of primate, saying, if there be any question of the authority of a primate of the church, although there are bishops of nations and cities, it follows not therefore that there is a primate over all the world, for the world is much greater than any city. And also in the Council of Carthage it was decreed, that none should he called the first or primate of the bishops. What shall I say more? It was consented and agreed by all,* [*August. Ep. 28 ad Const.] for six hundred years after Christ, that none ought to be Pope. How could Peter then have been primate, or the Pope his successor? For Peter in his Epistles does not command, but pray and beseech the ministers of God. Likewise when he is accused for having communicated with the Gentiles (Acts xi.), he does not burn his accusers, as the Pope does his: but excuses himself, and shews a submission.

Again, when he was sent to Samaria by his brethren and companions (Acts viii.) he readily obeyed their decree and went down to that City.

The Fourth Part.

Of this detestable and diabolical pope, the holy Scriptures in several places give us a plenary demonstration; some of which I shall shew unto you. As first, in the fourth of Daniel, it is set down how that Daniel (that was beloved by Belshazzar) saw a vision, which appeared to him thus : I saw, says Daniel, in my vision by night, and behold the four winds of heaven strove upon the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the earth ; the first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings ; and I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and a man’s heart was given to it. The second beast was like unto a bear, and it raised up itself on one side ; and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh. The third was like unto a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl, and the said beast had also four heads. After this I beheld the fourth beast, which was dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly ; and it had great iron teeth; and devoured everything; and it had ten horns. And behold, there came up among them another little horn, Before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots ; and it had eyes, and a mouth, speaking blasphemies. And I beheld till I saw the Ancient of Days did sit, and I beheld, saith Daniel, till the judgment was set for the horn, and till the beast was slain, and his body given to the burning fame : and it shall be for a time, times, and a half. Now the four winds and the four beasts (as Melanethon, OEcolampadius, and all the learned writers say) signify the four monarchies; the first was that of the Assyrians, whereof Nebuchadnezzar was emperor ; who (after he had been made like unto the beasts for a long season) had the understanding of a man given him again. The second signified the empire of the Persians, which was a dominion of great cruelty. The third notified the Grecian Empire, which was immediately raised to its grandeur ; and the four wings, and four heads signify the four emperors, who succeeded Alexander, and divided among them the Grecian monarchy.

For Seleucus was made king of Syria, Ptolemy got Egypt, Antigonus Asia, and Cassander Greece. The fourth beast signifies the terrible monarchy of the Romans, out of which arises a little horn, which is Antichrist; and Antichrist hath two eyes, viz., the pope and Mahomet; for notwithstanding that the pope doth not speak against Christ (as Mahomet doth), nevertheless I answer that the pope is as much, or rather more an Antichrist than Mahomet. For as he who flatters us is our enemy (though he seems to be our friend), so the pope, who styles himself the servant of the servants of God, is the enemy of Christ; whilst under the shadow of religion, he puts in practice all hypocrisy, idolatry, dissimulation, and all sorts of traditions ; his time shall be a time, times, and a half; that is to say, his days shall be shortened. For the number seven stands for a perfect number in Scripture ; for St. Paul says, the just fall seven times a day ; to wit, often. Now the half of seven is three and-a-half; therefore we must interpret by that imperfect time, that those days shall be shortened. St. Paul also in two Epistles prophesies of the pope. First, writing to the Thessalonians, he says (2 Thess. ii.), Now we beseech you brethren, by the coining of our Lord, that ye be not soon shaken in mind or be troubled, neither by spirit nor by word nor by letter, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means, for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the Son of Perdition ; who opposeth and exalteth himself above God, so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, &c. Again, St. Paul, writing to Timothy (1 Tim. iv.) speaks thus : Now the spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe.

Now let every one be asked if the Pope hath not forbidden certain meats at certain times, and they must all confess he hath, for most folks have felt it ; or perchance I should not be a liar if I said that almost all folks have. And concerning the prohibition of marriage, ask their own priests. St. Peter tells us that there shall come in the last days, scoffers, &c. (2 Pet. iii.). St. John, in the Apocalypse, says (Apo. xvi.) : Seven angels poured out the vials of God’s wrath upon the earth : and the signification is probable to be thus. The first vial to be the Assyrian Monarchy, when the people of Israel became captive to Nebuchadnezzar. The second the Persian Monarchy. The third the Monarchy of the Grecians, which Alexander first established. The fourth was the Roman Monarchy, which the Apocalypse (because of its grandeur) says, the fourth vial was poured upon the sun. The fifth is our Antichrist, the pope. The sixth vial is the dominion of Mahomet. The seventh vial signifies the end of the world, and the day of judgment.

In the following chapter he declares that one of the Seven Angels came and talked with him, and showed him the state, honour, and riches of the pope ; for he says, (Apo. xvii.) he saw A woman sit upon the beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns ; and the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold, having a golden cup in her hand, full of abominations and filthiness of her fornications ; and upon her forehead was written, Babylon, the mother of harlots, and abominations of the earth. The seven heads signify the seven hills which Antichrist dwells on (Apo. xvii.) for Rome is built upon seven mountains. The ten horns are the number of the kings who made war with the lamb, and the lamb overcame them, for he is Lord of Lords, and King of Kings. Then another angel came down from heaven (Apo. xviii.) crying, Babylon is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils; thence I hope that the kingdom of Antichrist shall be destroyed. For, though the wicked may prosper for a time, their dominion shall not last ; but those who study the law of the Lord, their prosperity shall last for ever. St. Paul, writing to Timothy (1 Tim. iii.) says, This know also, that in the last days, men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, &c. And the prophet Isaiah saith (Isa. xi.) that Christ shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.

Since we see, then, that the reign of Antichrist shall not last for ever, we must wait for the destruction of Babylon, and submit ourselves to the will of the Lord.

The Conclusion.

In the first part of our book, we have proved and declared that Peter was not primate of the Church, by confuting all the papistical reasons for it.

In the second, we have proved that they cannot produce and allege any true testimony that St. Peter was at Rome.

In the third part we have proved from themselves that they have said they ought not to have the primacy.

In the fourth part, we have explained the prophecies speaking of Antichrist. Since, then, the pope is that wicked one–very son of the devil, an Antichrist, and an abominable tyrant ; let us pray unto the Lord to preserve those still in the light who have seen it, and that He will show the sincere, pure, and true light unto those who sit in darkness ; that all the world may glorify God in this life, and be partakers of the eternal Kingdom of Heaven in the world to come, by the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour; to whom with the Father, and the Holy Ghost, be all honour, glory, dominion, and praise, for ever and ever. Amen.

The post A Small Treatise Against the Primacy of the Pope by Edward VI (FULL TEXT) appeared first on SarahMcCulloch.com | With Strength and Spirit.

The goblins of Hogwarts Legacy. Credit: Avalanche Software

The release earlier this month of Hogwarts Legacy, the new video game set in the Harry Potter universe, has generated a flurry of online debate regarding the ethics of buying a game based on the work of a bigot who very explicitly regards her royalty cheques as an endorsement of her views. Naturally, most of this discourse has related to JK Rowling’s very public and very frequent displays of transphobia in recent years. But on top of this, the new game reinforces – and even intensifies – the anti-semitic tropes for which the books and films have long been lambasted.

When I was first asked by a non-Jewish work colleague, two years ago, whether I thought the Harry Potter franchise was anti-semitic due to the way it depicts goblins, I was initially unsure how to answer; given that traditional characterisations of goblins derive from European folklore, which is itself inherently anti-semitic, my doubts centred around whether or not Rowling’s choice was conscious. I concluded that she had likely just drawn on her cultural background, and to me, the goblins’ depiction seemed adjacent to anti-semitism rather than directly racist.

Jewish communal institutions agreed. The London-based Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is not known for its lenient stance on defining antisemitism, released a statement last year in response to remarks from Jon Stewart on his eponymous podcast in which he argued that the goblins were based on obvious Jewish caricatures:

“The portrayal of the goblins in the Harry Potter series is of a piece with their portrayal in Western literature as a whole,” the statement read. “It is the product of centuries of association of Jews with grotesque and malevolent creatures in folklore, as well as money and finance. The mythological associations have become so ingrained in the western mind that their provenance no longer registers with creators or consumers. Those who continue to use such representations are often not thinking of Jews at all but simply how readers or viewers will imagine goblins to look, which is a testament more to centuries of Christendom’s antisemitism than it is to malice by contemporary artists.”

Much time has passed since the publication of the final Harry Potter book (2007) and the release of the last movie (2011), and there has been ample discussion about the anti-semitic imagery used to depict the goblins. What is truly remarkable about the Harry Potter franchise, then, is that, all these years later, and despite these criticisms, the hundreds of creators who have worked on the lore of the Wizarding World have continued to lean into these ideas across mediums and formats.

By the time the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them was released in 2016, Rowling was no doubt aware of the pushback to the goblins, and, perhaps in response, chose to name one of her main characters Tina Goldstein (in much the same way, the developers have introduced a trans character in Hogwarts Legacy). Yet Goldstein doesn’t do anything recognisably Jewish throughout the whole franchise; in fact, Rowling has a long history of feigning diversity by including “ethnic” sounding characters with stereotypical or downright racist names and then abandoning this characterisation entirely.

And all the while, there are plenty of Jewish stereotypes reserved for the definitely-not-Jewish goblins – and especially for the character Gnarlak. In the screenplay, Rowling described Gnarlak as “sly” and “interested in anything he can sell,” but also wrote that he was “like a Mafia boss” and didn’t include any specific physical description. The character we see on screen, though, thanks to director David Yates and (Jewish) actor Ron Perlman, is a hook-nosed goblin with a Brooklyn accent, who ends up betraying the protagonists in exchange for a financial reward.

Then, in 2019, Warner Bros. announced a major expansion to the London studio tour The Making of Harry Potter, with the addition of the Gringotts bank. Their advance publicity photos represented the goblin bankers like this:

A goblin banker at Gringotts, as seen in the promotional materials for the Warner Bros. The Making of Harry Potter studio tour in London. Credit: Warner Bros.

In 2019!

That brings us to the Harry Potter universe’s latest offering, Hogwarts Legacy. As soon as the trailer was released, the game’s plot – which centres around a Goblin Rebellion that players must support or oppose – was criticised for its anti-semitic undertones. In Harry Potter lore, the Goblin Rebellions are intermittent uprisings against goblin repression by the rest of the Wizarding World. Indignities against the goblins include: “lack of goblin representation in [magical Parliament], attempts to enslave goblins as house-elves, stripping of wand privileges, wizard attempts to control Gringotts, or the brutal goblin slayings of Yardley Platt”. Sound familiar?

As many games do, Hogwarts Legacy gives you the freedom to choose light or dark. But the light side – supporting the crushing of the Goblin Rebellion and putting the Je–I mean the goblins in their place – is very morally dubious. Nonetheless, it is framed by the game as the right thing to do. After all, who would want to associate with a group that seeks to kidnap and harm our children, which the Je–I mean the goblins are into for reasons that are ill-defined but definitely evil?

Again, this was all discussed publicly while the game was under development. Now that it’s out and people are playing, from the reports it is evident that the developers were aware of, and doubled down on, the anti-semitic underpinnings of Rowling’s goblins. As two examples, they’ve added in a reference to blood libel, and equipped the goblins with war horns that look remarkably like shofars. Presumably this series of very unfortunate coincidences could have been avoided by consulting with Jewish people, but that would involve admitting that the Harry Potter franchise has a problem with racist character tropes – a can of worms that they evidently preferred not to open.

It is true that people can enjoy a game for its gameplay and graphics. But that does not alter the harm that material depicting society’s stereotypes about minorities can do in the real world. Individuals have the right to decide whether or not to play Hogwarts Legacy, just as we have the duty to hold both creators and consumers accountable for the media they produce and consume. And in thirty years’ time, I have no doubt, the anti-semitic legacy of JK Rowling’s goblins will be something our children will find indefensible▼

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