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... Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan (She probably didn't actually exist, but it's interesting that until
by rsynnott 6mo ago
... Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan
(She probably didn't actually exist, but it's interesting that until quite recently she was generally believed to have existed.)
- drybjed 6mo agoWhat do you mean? Catcholic Church has records, did they just came up with something about a nonexistent Pope Joan out of thin air? How could they...
- rsynnott 6mo agoCatholic Church's records on early popes are often surprisingly bad, particularly in antipope-heavy eras. There are a _number_ of popes where the detail is pretty vague. Use of damnatio memoriae also confuses the issue, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Formosus#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Formosus#Legacy
- karel-3d 6mo agoeh not really, we NOW have quite good records on most popes except for the first few ones that we get just in a list from St Irenaeus (for example from St Linus - the guy immediately after St Peter - we get almost nothing) but about the middle age popes we know quite a lot NOW. But it used to be different.
- swat535 6mo agoYes, that was satire, in Latin, John is spelled Joannes, or Joan for short.