been doctored and revised. While the Church claimed that truth was static in nature and had been revealed only once, it continually found cause for changing that truth.
16. Lockhart, Douglas, Ibid., p 46: In his book, The Decline of Rome, the historian Joseph Vogt draws our attention to The Donation of Constantine, a document dated 30 March, 315, but actually composed during the papacy of Stephen III (752-7) to convince Pepin, king of the Franks, that he should defend the Church against the Lombards. A forgery through and through, The Donation claimed that Constantine, suffering from leprosy, had had a vision in which Saints Peter and Paul had told him to contact Pope Sylvester. Healed as a result of obeying this heavenly command, Constantine had in gratitude handed over his palace to Pope Sylvester and made the entire Western Empire subservient to the Holy See. The Sacred See of Blessed Peter was to be exalted above the Empire and the Emperor’s throne, and Sylvester made ruler of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople and all the churches of the world...This document was accepted without a quibble until 1440, when Lorenzo Valla, a papal aide, proved beyong all doubt the The Donation was a fraud. Valla’s book was published in 1517..and in spite of all independent scholars agreeing with Valla, the Papacy continued to deny any skulduggery for the next few centuries... King Pepin, however, was very impressed when he read The Donation; for it appeared to prove beyond doubt that the Pope was successor to both Peter and Constantine. All power on earth, indeed; and behind the scenes the power of heaven to back it up. Routing the Lombards, Pepin dutifully handed over the lands mentioned in The Donation, thus making the Holy See all-powerful at a single stroke.
17. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Ibid., p. 212: One very special lightning bolt from the Spirit was the so –called Donation of Constantine. In it Emperor Constantine (d. 337) showed great generosity toward the Church: “We have transferred our [Lateran] palace and all the provinces, places, and towns belonging to the city of Rome, to Italy, and to the West to the most blessed supreme pontiff, our father Sylvester, the universal pope, and to his – or his successors’ – power and sway.” The date, official seal, and signature authenticated this donation. Constantine, the absolute monarch thus gave to the pope all of Western Roman Empire; and the popes became successors of the Roman Emperors in the West. Constantine himself was content with the East, “because the earthly emperor should not have authority where the head of the Christian religion [the pope] has been appointed by the heavenly emperor [Jesus].” Yet it was all a swindle, a hand-made-homemade inside job, an ecclesiastical forgery. From it, of course, the Church got inestimable advantages in power and possessions, and that for centuries. The forgery had been cooked up in the papal chanceries around the middle of the 8th century; it was not exposed until the 15th century. The detective was a humanist, critic of the papacy, and high official of the Roman Curia, Lorenzo Valla (chết năm 1457). But his work exposing the fraud wasn’t published until 1517 by Ulrich von Hutten at the beginning of the Reformation. The Catholic side did not admit the whole deception until much later. The Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche writes, “since the middle of the 19th century..the contents of the Donation of Constantine have been considered a forgery from the Catholic standpoint” ([1961] VI, 484).
18. Lockhart, Douglas, Ibid., p. 47: By 1187 the forging of documents had become a profitable business, with a whole school of forgers toiling to produce ratification of Gregory III’s ambititions; there were even a policy of making old documents say the reverse of what they actually said. Amusingly, de Rosa points out that some these earlier documents were forgeries in their own right, and states that