John Foxe's Book of Maryters

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Montie_Claunch

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I was talking with some people some time ago and they had brought up the ubove mentioned title in a demening way towards the church saying it showed how corrupt and horrid the Catholic Church was (is I guess still trying to “save” me from “romanism”) and I ran across it just a few days ago at books-a-million and before I go buy it I was wondering if someone would give me some information on it? Is it just another biased anti-catholic book which has no worth to it and is a waste of time and money?
 
Save your money and read it online, here.

There’s an article on the book in the online Catholic encyclopedia, here.
 
That book is one of my favorites! Such stupid stories!

They mention early Christians, even Popes and their martyrdoms, while ignoring the fact that they were Catholic/
 
This was on the Catholic eyclodia that was refered too
He was criticized in his own day by Catholics such as Harpsfield and Father Parsons and by practically all serious eccesiastical historians.
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does anyone know where I can look at such critques? Thanks and God bless.
 
John Foxe’s Book of Myths and Fabels would be a much more accurate title. The book is weel documented to have been written with bias and anti-Catholic hatred from the outset. Accounts were passed down within the family for generations and then written into this book as fact. Any one could write an account, send it in and have it published, truth meant nothing.

Hand a Protestant a Book and they believe everything written in it without proof.

Even the leading Protestant scholars have ruled the BOM a hoax.
(Not Book Of Mormon but Book Of Martyrs. Of course they were both imagined up in somebodies mind and based on lies to mislead people.)

newadvent.org/cathen/02681a.htm
infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0819389.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foxe

Don’t waste your time on (either) BOM. Lies based on lies.
 
John Foxe writing a history of martyrs is like Gen. McClelland writing a history of the Lincoln administration.

Scott
 
Montie Claunch:
I was talking with some people some time ago and they had brought up the ubove mentioned title in a demening way towards the church saying it showed how corrupt and horrid the Catholic Church was (is I guess still trying to “save” me from “romanism”) and I ran across it just a few days ago at books-a-million and before I go buy it I was wondering if someone would give me some information on it? Is it just another biased anti-catholic book which has no worth to it and is a waste of time and money?
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You can tell the truth of Foxe’s book of martyrs by the fact that it was written by the same people who were torturing and then disembowelling English Catholic priests alive by the dozen and burning their entrails in front of them. None of this appears in Mr Foxe’s book!

Thomas Cromwell, Foxe’s mighty fighter for God." Killed and tortured more Catholics than almost anyone, keeping the plunder of the monasteries for himself.

the work is a propaganda epic, shunned by legitimate historians. It is kept in publication by rabid anti-catholics. It’s a bit like reading an account by Hitler of the evils of the Jews.
 
Malachi,

Could you please name the scholars who think that Foxe’s work is a hoax? In my experience, the more common position is that it needs to be taken with a grain of salt (as does any martyrology) but is still a very valuable historical resource. That is the impression I have received from my mentor David Steinmetz, another of my former professors David Aers (who uses both Bale’s and Foxe’s accounts of Anne Askew’s martyrdom in his classes, if I remember correctly), and the book *Salvation at Stake *by the Catholic scholar Brad Gregory.

For what it’s worth, I just defended my dissertation on Monday and now have a Ph.D. in church history. That of course does not mean that I’m infallible:D, but I do study this stuff for a living. I have yet to see any good reason to dismiss Foxe outright.

Of course he is not a good source for early Christianity, and it drives me crazy that many fundamentalists use him that way. But for the events of his own lifetime he’s an indispensable (though not always reliable) resource.

As for early Christians being Catholic, of course Protestants didn’t think this. Or more precisely, they thought that the Papacy had fallen away from early Catholicism.

Edwin
 
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Contarini:
Malachi,

Could you please name the scholars who think that Foxe’s work is a hoax? In my experience, the more common position is that it needs to be taken with a grain of salt (as does any martyrology) but is still a very valuable historical resource. That is the impression I have received from my mentor David Steinmetz, another of my former professors David Aers (who uses both Bale’s and Foxe’s accounts of Anne Askew’s martyrdom in his classes, if I remember correctly), and the book *Salvation at Stake *by the Catholic scholar Brad Gregory.

For what it’s worth, I just defended my dissertation on Monday and now have a Ph.D. in church history. That of course does not mean that I’m infallible:D, but I do study this stuff for a living. I have yet to see any good reason to dismiss Foxe outright.

Of course he is not a good source for early Christianity, and it drives me crazy that many fundamentalists use him that way. But for the events of his own lifetime he’s an indispensable (though not always reliable) resource.

As for early Christians being Catholic, of course Protestants didn’t think this. Or more precisely, they thought that the Papacy had fallen away from early Catholicism.

Edwin
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Foxe is just not used in the UK as a serious historical source. Simply because he falsifies so much and twists the course of events. there may be some reliable material in his work, but finding it is the problem.
 
But for the events of his own lifetime he’s an indispensable (though not always reliable) resource.
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True. I’ve read the book and found it to be embellished grains of truth. It was written during a time of extreme religious upheaval in England. Foxe wrote from an extremist protestant point of view and that book is largely responsible for the view now held of the reign of Mary I, 1553 - 1558.
I had a copy of it on my bookshelf when a fundie came to my house for DH to work on his car. I silently laughed as he exclaimed with joy at seeing that book.
The fundelmentalists see that book on the same terms as the mormons do the book of mormon - another gospel.
 
I wouldn’t say Foxe was particularly an extremist for his own day. He was actually one of the few people in the sixteenth century who seems really to have believed in religious tolerance, and in fact he protested the mistreatment and execution of Edmund Campion, if I recall correctly. That made him an “extremist” of sorts, but hardly the kind of extremist you have in mind:)

Of course anyone who holds Foxe’s view of Catholicism today *is *an extremist by modern Protestant standards. Just as only extremist Catholics look on Protestants the way sixteenth-century Catholics did . . . .

Edwin
 
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Axion:
Foxe is just not used in the UK as a serious historical source.
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It depends on what you mean by a “serious historical source.” What I’m saying is that if a story is found only in Foxe, the story is going to be taken with some disclaimer such as “according to Foxe . . . .” But it’s not simply going to be dismissed.

I seriously doubt that this is different in the UK. One of the scholars I mentioned earlier, David Aers, is British, and most of the scholarship I’ve read on the English Reformation is British.

Edwin
 
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