Literature Review

The rise of the papacy as supreme power was presented in a book and paper by Frances Dvornik in 1961. 

Byzantium and the Roman Primacy. The American Ecclesiastical Review 289-312. Online available 12th of June 2016 at http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=1355.

 

The Collectio Avellana is a prime source for research of this type. These 244 manuscripts dealt with heresies and schism and how the papal and imperial powers approached the issues. 

It ends with the last letter written by emperor Justinian to pope

Vigilius on the 14th of May 553. 

 

The Corpus Novellae of Justinian is an ingredient part of this research.

 

The Liber Pontificalis is another source that is essential for a study like this. It originated in the year 510 in the days of the primacy of the papacy insistence pope Homisdas and the intention was to illustrate the role of the popes.

 

D. Deliyannis, (2014). The Roman Liber Pontificalis, Papal Primacy, and the Acacian Schism. Viator Vol. 45/2: 1-16. For
the date of its compilation as between 514-530 see Liber Pontificalis by Duchesne 1886: XLV. Duchesne knows of two manuscripts Parisinus 5140 and Vaticanus 3764 (Duchesne 1886: XLVII).

 

The popes with whom Justinian and Theodora dealt that are relevant here are pope Johannes II (533-535); pope Agapetus (535-536); pope Silverius (536-537); Vigilius (537-555).

 

A helpful source for those who struggle to get access to the originals or good translations thereof of the papal letters to Justinian and other pertinent sources mentioned in this writing, is the Source Book Vol. 2 on AD 538 by Heidi Heiks (2010). 

 

For a helpful chronology of Justinian, the Gothic kings, the Vandals as well as the year from Creation as calculated by Jerome, see the Chronica Minora edited by T. Mommsen 1894.

 

Newton all calculated the 1260 days of Revelation and Daniel as 1260 years.

He felt that any period that indicated a division of the Roman Empire is a candidate for this event starting the 1260 years.
Bishop Newton apparently said that if one is to find the ten kings, one has to look at the broken pieces of the Roman Empire” 

For Frere the starting date for the 1260 years is 536.

Faber wanted it to start before 325 A.D. and Cuninghame suggested the thirteenth century.

Maitland used Frere and Cuninghame to argue against Faber that the date is not 606 but 533 with the Edict of Justinian.

For Mede the prophetic persecution started in 456 A.D.23 

Frere was in search for the year the Edict was published.

Hales suggested 620 A.D. Bishop Newton in 727 A.D. and Lowman in 757A.D. 

These are the times given for the ‘saints given in the hands of the beast’ as predicted by Daniel and Revelation. Maitland himself seems to say the event took place sometime in the fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth centuries. He called on all researchers of the 1260 days as 1260 years to cite their sources with accuracy and check
whether the source was correctly used and cited.
W. Spicer (1918) wrote on the 1260 years. In his diagram he dates it either between 533 to 1793 or between 538 to
1798. Spicer said that in 533 came the recognition of the supremacy of the pope and in 538 the sword came to Rome.

He found from secondary sources that used the originals that a turning point was in the year 538 when Vigilius became pope in the place of pope Silverius. He was removed in 537 but Justinian intervened and he was kept until 538.

H. S. Prenier, (1919), “on the 1260 days” Andrews University, James White library, Adventist Research Center lower floor.

In 1854 T. M. Preble wrote a manuscript which is a review of the argument to prove that the 1260 years started in 519 A.D.

A Millerite F. H. Berick (1853) wrote a research on 1260, 1290 and 1335. An article appeared on the opic of the end of the 1260 years in 1843. W. Digby, (1831), also wrote on the 1260 years. K. van Wyk, (1992), presented a devotional on new aspects surrounding the historicity of 538 regarding numismatics and Justinian.

 

Revelation 13:12 says that the “dragon gave him his power, his seat and great authority”... then the actions of Justinian, Belisarius answering the call of the pope to come to Rome with his military for defense, the coin change of Justinian in 538, his public announcement to the whole empire that he is a theologian and not a

soldier in 538 on his coins, his ecumenical and theological interest in Systematic Theology recognized by pope Johannes in his 533 letter to Justinian, Justinian’s emphasizing the supremacy of the papacy in his letter to Johannes, all these factors point to a paradigm shift in the history of that time: that is to say, the fall of the Pagan Rome Empire and the Ascendancy and development of the papacy to form the Holy Roman Empire. 

--With the seat of Justinian symbolically “vacant” as emperor, the “symbolic power gap” was there for the papacy to take it. Augsburger (1952) indicated that it was the church who fed the people after 538 A.D. described as disastrous years. 

--Diehl wrote “In this hour which marks for her (Rome) the end of ancient times, she was taking on the aspect that she was to keep during the whole Middle Ages and upon the debris of the palaces of the Caesars was slowly rising the authority of the popes.”

--Gregory the Great described the rise of the church on the ruins of Rome of the Gothic wars Gregory described very eloquently the summary of the churches’ rise to power “Amid the frightful storms of the Gothic War classical civilization perished in Rome and throughout Italy. In cities burnt, desolated and mutilated, ruins remained the sole evidence of former splendor. 

The prophecy of the Sybil was fulfilled. The night of barbarism had descended on the Latin world, a darkness in which no light was visible other than of the tapers of the church and the lonely studentlamp of the monk brooding in his cloister.”

--George Butler in 1885, as a president of the Seventh Day Adventist church, cites a speech of a bishop at the Ecumenical Council in
1870 which said: "Pope Vigilius, A.D. 538, bought the papacy from Belisarius, agent of the Emperor Justinian; though to be sure he broke his promise, and paid nothing Is this mode of gaining the tiara canonical?" (Vatican Council 1870: 189 cited in George Butler 1885: from the American Tract Society Pamphlet with the title: "The
Speech of a Bishop in the Vatican Council"). 

Butler listed many outside scholars who already understood the 1260
years prophecy, the fall in 1798 and the beginning in 538. 

It was not an invention by Seventh Day Adventists since it is historical and Biblical, recognized earlier by many commentators and historians.

Introduction

"There is something to be said about each legal system, that they represent some fingerprint that gives it a peculiar character and even if that system is warmed up and rebaked in other centuries later, one can trace the fingerprint back to its original inventors. 

 

The code of Justinian became a handy tool in the hands of the successors in ecclesiastical circles in Middle-Age legal systems. This biased legal system led to the persecution of many people during the period between 538-1798.

 

When the new Catholic Canon Law came out, the role of Justinian in its design was fully recognized.

Justinian was the great compiler of a legal system that brought together ecclesiastical related matters to the civil law from the time of Constantine to his own and presented his world in 534 A.D. with a code mixed with Christian religion and state matters. 

He recognized only one religion and that is the Christian Orthodox religion with the supreme head at Rome. 

He became increasingly disinterested in state affairs and studied himself into Systematic Theology and the area of Christology.
--By 538 A.D. he publicly laid down his interest by declaring that he is no longer chief in Staff for the army but a theologian and that is how his image on the coins should look like. 

This religious fire in him brought him in trouble with many and he abused his imperial power for his own goals. It is very likely that the evils that he and his wife did (according to his biographer Procopius) were true and that their conscience plagued them every night and in order to squash the inner voice of self-acknowledged guilt, so that they embarked upon a religious overdrive, giving themselves the license to steal from the rich (with a robin-hoodism rationalization) and give to the ecclesiastical poor in many forms, which included the building-programs of 37 enormous churches throughout the empire. Many scholars have written about this imperial couple but none have made the iconography on the coins of 538 A.D. the pivotal point of investigation to understand Justinian in the context of a broader picture relevant also in our own times. 

 

The date 538 A.D. is fixed archaeologically by numismatics and with

the clear marker XII of twelve year of Justinian on it, which is significantly the first time they appeared. 

Why this happened and how it happened and what the consequences were for the shift in the life of Justinian was to produce a paradigm shift from Pagan Rome to the Holy Roman Empire. 

 

The more Justinian tried to be the Elijah preparer of the way for the millennium of the Messiah by building projects all over the empire, by trying to unify every aspect of the empire, politics, nations, religion, spreading Christianity, building Constantinople rather than
Jerusalem to impress Him, the more suspicious he had the papal See and them all concerned that he was playing in the hands of the Antichrist. 

*Procopius gave evidence of these eschatological concerns in those days. According to Procopius in Anecdota VIII 13-21 there is a correlation between the Antichrist connections of both Domitian and Iustinian. In this paragraph Procopius depicted the demonic aspects of Justinian that someone saw that he was suddenly headless and then the head appeared again. 

 

The relevancy of the investigation of the role of 538 A.D. in the life of Justinian, the papacy and prophetic interpretation is part of the modus operandi of this research.

Abstract

The year 538 A.D. became the turning point in the history of the Roman Empire since so many aspects on political, administrative and economical levels were already switched off that when Justinian declared himself to be a theologian from this year and no longer a soldier, he crossed the barrier of his mandate between what is purely civil obligation and what is religious obligation, similarly to Constantine before, and entered in competition with the papal function and this role is evidence of Justinian’s ongoing caesaro-papism. 

 

The quest for unification of the empire by unification of the church, the fever for church-building projects with his wife

Theodora, the persecution of enemies of the church and heretics, his disdain with the Sabbath although his second name was Sabbatini, his support for suppressing any eschatological fever in line with the church fathers and Oecumenius and yet trying to build the ‘Kingdom of God’ on earth, all this indicate the problem 538 was for the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. 

 

Archaeological and historical original sources of Justinian and contemporaries of popes, biographer of Justinian and a commentator on Revelation (Oecumenius) are very revealing of these times and the shift or transition of what belonged to the Roman Empire handed over since 538 A.D. to the church and the papal function. 

 

The Code of Justinian was a persecuting instrument. 

 

Justinian upheld the supremacy of the papacy. 

--He permitted through the Council of Orleans actions to be done on Sunday that Constantine prohibited like travel and preparation of food and cleaning the house. 

--In Novellae CXLIV Justinian instituted a Seventh-day Sabbath persecution. 

--He changed the times and laws ad hoc as his Novellae XLVI and coins of 538 A.D. (XII year) indicate. 

--Private gatherings were persecuted. 

--He had church-manual laws. Justinian studied Systematic Theology on the nature of Christ and wrote homiletical rules for preachers. 

--He gave text- critical advice to Jews and condemned their doctrinal deviations. 

 

This theological hobby of the ruler of the once mighty Roman Empire was to be taken over by a more theological competent power that would eventually lead to papal-caesarism until the unsettling of this new aggrandizing paradigm in 1798 by Napoleon. 

 

The prophetic embedding of the 1260 days as “years” prophecies in both Daniel 7 and Revelation 12 definitely started in 538 A.D. contrary to W. Spicer’s (1918) suggestion of 533 or 538 as two alternative dates or any other dates suggested by other scholars in the history of interpretation in historicism. 

 

It is also not just a case of history of interpretation hermeneutics but data solidly supported by archaeology, iconography and original historical sources that coincides with the parameters provided by exegesis of the rest of the Books of Daniel and Revelation added with the exegesis of the detail of the passages under consideration. 

 

A necessary ingredient for the historical researcher remains to be the faith that God 

can predict the future and He did 

and that the data as well as the prophecies 

of the Biblical Text are evidence of that.