A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Although these subsequent popes had discovered that they had helped to create an institution impossible to control from Rome, the pope’s participation in the empire’s foundation had been a dramatic assertion of the papacy’s new self-confidence in its cosmic role, and it signalled the returning vitality of the Latin West. Both these characteristics were reflected in documents which now emerged to prove that this new situation in fact reflected an ancient reality. We can call them forgeries, but our attitudes to such matters are conditioned by the humanist historical scholarship which emerged in Italy in the fifteenth century. That leads us to expect that our history must be based on carefully checked and authenticated evidence, or it simply cannot exist. For centuries before, though, people lived in societies which did not have enough documents to prove what they passionately believed to be true: the only solution was to create the missing documentation.