Dear Ian:

We have extant manuscripts (manuscripts that still exist today) that confirm what the Church did and did not do. The Church has never used violence and fear to gain converts. That is just bigoted blather and intellectual dishonesty. While there may have been individual Catholics, even Catholic leaders, such as Queen Isabella, who did such things, actions of violence and fear is not sanctioned by the Catholic Church herself nor the Catholic worldview. Such things are SINS against the Catholic worldview and teaching.

For example, the penalty for heresy in the Church is excommunication, not death. In those pre-Protestant times where people were put to death, that death penalty was imposed and carried out by the State, not the Church, because the state considered heretics a threat to the peace and order of their realms.

Another example are the Crusades. The Crusades were about protecting pilgrims from Muslim marauders in the Holy Land (taking back the Holy Land so that it would be free for pilgrims) and also defending Europe against the invading forces of Islam. Islam was then, before then, after then, and is today, a violent and militant worldview and false-religion that continues, to threaten, as it has done for more than 1500 years, the peace of the world.

After the Protestant Revolution a lot violence was perpetrated against Catholics and others (i.e., witches and other non-conformists) by the Protestants.

England use to have bands of soldiers marching through the cities, much like the Taliban morality police, looking for priests and religious. The famous "cubby holes" in the English manors were called "priest holes" because they were used to hide priests from these roving bands of "catholic-catchers." Once caught, the priests and religious would either be tortured, killed, or deported. It was not until 1830 that the law was changed in England to make it legal to be a Catholic.

You appear to lack interest in the documentary evidence of Jesus in the Bible. The Bible is like any other book in terms of historical research. To ignore the biblical texts in historical research is bigoted and intellectual cowardice.

Nevertheless, the Biblical texts are not the only record of the evidence that Jesus was God. Extra-Biblical historians, witnesses, and various writers attest to the documentary evidence.

Frankly, I am not going to detail all that because it would take a book and because where I live we are in the middle of a killer heat wave (heat indexes over 100) and I am at risk due to my illnesses, I am weary, and frankly, detailing the documentary evidence will not likely move you. We all tend to believe only what suits us regardless of the evidence to the contrary.

No matter what the documentary evidence, there is a point when faith must come in. This is even true in science since many issues in science are not absolutely proven (i.e. macro-evolution, some aspects of quantum theory, string theory, etc.) but are accepted on a kind of "faith", regardless of whether or not the scientists admit that or not.

Instead, I refer you to the Catholic Encyclopedia article, Jesus Christ and in particular an article linked on that page entitled, Early Historical Documents Concerning Jesus Christ, which discusses ancient historical documents — pagan, Jewish, and Christian — referring to Christ's life and work.

In brief, we know Jesus is God because he said so and proved himself by his miracles (something only God can do), the greatest of which was his Resurrection. There were many witnesses who saw him after he resurrected. To counter the speculation, not facts, that Jesus never died on the Cross, the Journal of the American Medical Association did a forensic investigation on the question. They found that it was not possible for Jesus to have survived the Cross.

We know that Jesus is God because he fulfilled more than sixty Old Testament prophecies concerning the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God. Some will say that the Apostles contrived the events in the life of Jesus to make it look like he fulfilled those prophecies. For many of the prophecies, that was impossible and utterly beyond the control of any writer to do.

Again, there are truckloads of documentary evidence and reasoned research to prove all this in as much as anything can be proven. In fact, given all the evidence, from all sources, it is an UNREASONABLE act to deny the Christ.

One man in England submitted all the evidence for the Resurrection gleaned from the Bible and extra-biblical sources. He submitted that evidence to the same evidentiary rules of an English Court of Law. He did this to disprove the divinity of Christ. Once he did this evidentiary analysis, he converted.

But, man, being the arrogant of creatures, most often seems to think he knows more than God, and seems to spend most of his time with his head buried where the sun don't shine (and where the Son doesn't shine either).

God Bless,

One weary and over-hot soul,
Bro. Ignatius Mary