During my research on J.N.D. Kelly for “Eucharist, Redux #10: AI Misquotations,” I came across an especially egregious example. But, before we talk about that, I highly suggest reading that article first, or else you’re likely to be confused by this one or frustrated by the lack of the substantiated claims found in the other post.

In “The Early Church was the Catholic Church,” Roman Catholic Joe Heschmeyer says this:

We’re not going to primarily be discussing the theological positions contained in Heschmeyer’s book. What we’re going to be talking about is his scholarship, particularly as regards his use of J.N.D. Kelly on pages 59-60 and 80-81 (and the corresponding footnotes) of his 169-page book. Thus, we are not going to be looking at the different five approaches and evaluating their merits or demerits.

In terms of the latter topic—scholarship—it is anti-intellectual “scholarship” like that found in this snippet above that gives so many Catholic apologists a well-deserved black mark. Like all other Catholics, Heschmeyer’s quotation leaves out the important context, leading him to create a strawman out of J.N.D. Kelly’s position.

First, Heschmeyer effectively misquotes Kelly by replacing two extremely important words—the subject’s verb and a subject-modifying adjective—with an implied ellipsis:

This is critical context.

Excising these two words leaves out the fact that the conversion doctrine was not observable prior to the late 4th century. As we discussed last time, Kelly sets the early threshold at c.350AD with Cyril of Jerusalem in the very next paragraph. Thus, no matter what Kelly thinks the observable “realist” view was in the early church, and regardless of what Kelly thinks the laypersons and theologians believed, we know for sure that Kelly didn’t think it was the Roman Catholic view (prior to the late 4th century).

Heschmeyer simply needed to keep on reading^[1] to have seen this. But, the fact that he cut out these two words at all strongly suggests that he knew exactly what he was doing. He was not pressed for space (to insert just two words) and I can’t think of any legitimate reason anyone would want to leave them out, rather than do this and avoid the problem entirely. If anyone ever gets the chance, please ask Heschmeyer if he intended to deceive his readers, because unless a reader checks the source, they are going to be mislead.

Notably, per Kelly, only the conversion doctrine “becomes observable” some time during the late 4th and early 5th centuries. You can see why there exists sufficient incentive for Heschmeyer to leave that out, considering how Kelly only identifies the figurative symbolic view as being visible in the 3rd century.^[1]

Second, just like every other Catholic, Heschmeyer leaves out the “however” sentence that immediately follows the “unquestioningly realist” sentence, skipping forward to the “symbolical view” sentence. Here is what he cut out:

We’ll talk about the second highlight in the next section. For now, we want to know, “what is ‘this identity’ that Kelly speaks of?” It is the “unquestioningly realist” belief that:

According to Kelly, all theologians believed that the body and blood were unquestioningly real, including those who understood the bread to be solely a figurative symbol of the body, they simply disagreed on how to interpret it. After all, the Gospel accounts record that the bread and wine was taken to be, treated as, and designated as, the body and blood. This is true even for the figurative symbolic view.

This requires a pause for emphasis. As a matter of history,^[2] all Christians in the early church, just like all Christians today, believed that the body and blood of Christ were unquestioningly real. Even those who held to a purely symbolic view of the elements still believed that Christ’s flesh and blood were real. They still recited “This is my body…this is my blood,” just the same as everyone else, because Jesus had a body and he had blood. Christians, after all, are not Gnostics.

Third, Heschmeyer cuts his quotation short:

During this time period (325AD to 451AD), the newly emerged conversion doctrine began to replace the symbolic view, but the symbolic view took more than a century to lose the battle (and it’s not been shown that it ever truly disappeared). Writers throughout this period continued to use figurative language simultaneously mixed alongside conversion language. Now, let’s look at that second highlight from the previous sentence:

Neither “mutually exclusive” nor “often” are understatements. The two interpretations are, indeed, logically incompatible, but they were often held collectively by the church as one belief.

Now we get to the most curious part of our analysis. Here is what Heschmeyer wrote in the next paragraph:

It is almost too incredible to believe that Heschmeyer wrote this. He excluded the phrases that completely invalidate his spin on Kelly (that there were competing spiritualist and literalist camps). All Heschmeyer had to do is keep reading and quoting what Kelly wrote^[1] and he would have had everything he needed to realize his error.

Perhaps he saw Kelly write “mutually exclusive [in strict logic]” and assumed that this meant that [in strict logic] there must have been warring factions bitterly divided over their irreconcilable differences. But, Kelly never said this. Functionally, Heschmeyer set up a strawman of Kelly’s position and then, unsurprisingly, easily knocks it down.

He continues:

I, like Kelly and Heschmeyer, have examined the writings from the 4th century. We’re all looking at the same source material.

Prior to c.350AD, the ancient liturgy was highly uniform. There was no hint of a literal conversion doctrine. There were two separate liturgical acts: thanksgiving (eucharist) tithe sacrifice, offering, and oblation, followed by an epiclesis, invocation, consecration, institution, and celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The relationship between the bread and wine and the body and blood was universally figurative, metaphorical, and symbolic.

Starting in c.350AD, the conversion doctrine was introduced. There began a change from the figurative symbolic view to the literal conversion view, which was simply allowed to happen slowly with overlap. Like Kelly, I found it impossible to find a logically coherent ‘catholic’ (universal) belief in this period because of the overlapping logically mutually exclusive nature of their stated beliefs. There was neither coherency within many individual writers nor coherency within the church as a whole.

In “Part 40: Conclusion” (May, 2024), I identified this dichotomy as a transitional liturgy:

Kelly, of course, agrees completely. Here he is noting how Cyril, the pioneer of the literalist conversion doctrine, remained—to borrow Heschmeyer’s term—a spiritualist.

Cyril held two logically mutually exclusive positions at the same time.^[3]

How could someone of Heschmeyer’s reputation could get this so wrong? How could he not know that Cyril referred to the bread and wine as figures, while also saying that the body and blood were offered as sacrifices? Or worse, did he pull his quotes from Kelly out of context without even reading the very next paragraph?^[1]

Go re-read Kelly’s paragraph (as quoted incompletely by Heschmeyer) and you’ll see that he doesn’t use the term “debate” or indicate that there was any conflict at all. He simply observes that there were two mutually exclusive liturgical positions that occurred at the same time. Kelly never perpetuated a “two camps theory” of “fighting over eucharistic theology.” Heschmeyer made this up by looking at a few sentences and sentence fragments that were taken from just a single paragraph.^[1]

Thus, I agree with Kelly: it is clear that there was a dominate hybrid approach by theologians who were trying to balance the older and newer doctrines at the same time, not an either-or approach by competing factions as Heschmeyer’s strawman claimed. In my own research, I saw very little—if any—signs of doctrinal debate between the two interpretations. I’m not aware of a single writer who mentioned a problem.

Heschmeyer’s objection (“…how unlikely it is…”) is an Argument from Incredulity. He can’t imagine how they could have let a giant, glaring logical contradiction into their theology.^[3] But there is no logical or rational reason why they could not have: the church of the late 4th century was not particularly rational. It’s not hard to envision this.^[4] Even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges this:

Kelly is writing about the period in which the doctrine of the Trinity was formally developed, a doctrine that the Catholic Catechism says is non-rational (“inaccessible to reason alone”). The church believed something that is, in strict purely logical terms, irrational.

Not coincidentally, the late 4th century is also when Roman Catholicism and the Papacy arose and a veritable flood of doctrinal error was introduced,^[5] including the various errors propagated with publication of the Latin Vulgate and the new association of “mystery” with “sacrament” (where ‘mystery’ was used to rationalize new or illogical positions). The fact is, the church of the late-4th century was not particularly logical as a matter of the documented historical record.

Fourth, so eager is Heschmeyer to read his theology into Kelly’s words, that he thinks Kelly is claiming that laypersons generally believed in the conversion doctrine:

Kelly does not even mention laypersons,^[6] but I suppose if you squint real hard and don’t read the surrounding context, you might be able to hallucinate it. My best guess is that when Heschmeyer read “Among theologians, however, ….,” he thought that the first sentence was about laypersons and the second sentence was about theologians, even though Kelly says no such thing and it makes much more sense that the theologians were all realist but disagreed on interpretation. This is, after all, what Kelly actually says:

It’s very clear to me that there was, generally speaking, one realist teaching and (at least) two (mutually exclusive but coexisting) interpretations of that realist teaching.

Of course as noted above, if you simply read what Kelly has written (“a new and increasingly potent tendency becomes observable”), Heschmeyer’s strawman of Kelly can have only been drawn completely out-of-context from what Kelly actually wrote. Furthermore, this doesn’t even pass a common sense sanity check: we do not have any documented evidence of what laypersons believed in general from that period. All the writings we have come from a very narrow selection of theologians and our inferences come from them.

Not to put to fine a point on it, since Kelly explicitly notes that the conversion doctrine wasn’t even observable in the early church, it is impossible for him to have rationally argued that laypersons believed in it. The argument requires observable evidence, and there is none. Historians and scholars do not—and may not—recklessly and fallaciously^[7] speculate about what we don’t have evidence for.

Heschmeyer’s insertion of a discussion of laypersons is out of place.^[6] As an apologist and scholar, it is difficult to explain how he could have come to such a conclusion, other than eisegetical bias: he saw what he wanted to see.

Heschmeyer—reading through his own doctrinal lens—thought that the spiritualist or symbolic view was not a realist view. But it very clearly was, and Kelly makes this perfectly clear! It’s hard to read the early writers as they battled Docetism and Gnosticism and not conclude—even though they held to a figurative view of the bread as the body—that they asserted that the body was decidedly real. But, if Heschmeyer were to accept this unquestioning reality, he wouldn’t be Catholic anymore.

Footnotes

^[1] There is strong evidence that Heschmeyer cherry-picked quotes from J.N.D. Kelly. I checked Heschmeyer’s references to Kelly contained in the footnotes of his book:

This is actually quite revealing, because it contains an erroneous citation.

I do not own a physical copy of J.N.D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines. I use the digitized version of the Fourth Edition found on the Internet Archive, which itself comes from a PDF that doesn’t seem to be available anymore. The two page numbers that Heschmeyer cites from (p.452 and p.440) actually refer to the same page. The lower number (p.440) is Kelly’s printed page number and the higher number (p.452) is the page number of the PDF document. Heschmeyer is also using a digitized version of the same edition.

Heschmeyer was not careful and precise when he made his citation. This is, of course, a rather minor error, but it is, nevertheless, a citation error in a formally published work by a scholar and apologist. It is a sloppy handling of source material.

It also reveals a much more significant problem: he only took quotes from a single paragraph of Kelly’s 500-page book. Here are some relevant sections from Kelly’s book (w/ digital page numbers) where he discusses what he means by the realist view.

The paragraph Heschmeyer quoted from is found in the opening paragraph on n452. There is no evidence that Heschmeyer even read more than that single paragraph, and—given Heschmeyer’s demonstrably out-of-context quotations and misunderstanding of Kelly’s use of realist (and its association with platonism!)—this constitutes strong evidence of copy-and-paste cherry-picking.

Even the reference—highlighted in yellow above—is just a reference to the same paragraph:

Kelly is clearly talking about the symbolic view here. Heschmeyer’s spin makes it seem as if it is the conversion view that goes back to an earlier period, which it very clearly does not.

Kelly’s timeline is that the realist figurative symbolic view existed in the 3rd century, then in the late 4th the realist literal conversion doctrine was created and overtook the realist figurative symbolic view, then the realist figurative symbolic view roared back to life with Augustine in the early 5th century.

Now, with this in mind, let’s look at where Heschmeyer adds the footnote:

This is extremely dishonest.

^[2] Kelly spends relatively little time discussing the realist view of the eucharist in his lengthy book, so I don’t intend to put words in his mouth. He clearly sees differences in the way the writers describe it throughout the centuries. He is much more tentative in his handling of the realism found in the first and second centuries. This is a suitable discussion for another time.

^[3] It is not terribly difficult to steelman a somewhat logical argument for the hybrid approach. A contradiction it may be, but it is not difficult to rationalize the contradiction away. In terms of history and sociology, this type of religious rationalization is quite common.

^[4] For the better part of half a century now, a number of Protestant denominations in America have been dominated by irrationality. Long-term and widespread irrationality in religion is not difficult at all to fathom.

^[5] Here is a partial, abridged list of Roman Catholic doctrines that had their true beginning during or after the late 4th century:

Roman  and Papal primacy
Papal infallibility
Priestly celibacy
Elevation of virginity and fasting over marriage
Mariology (immaculate conception, perpetual virginity, assumption of Mary, Mother of the Church, Queen of Heaven)
Kneeling on the Lord’s Day and during Pentecost
Incense and candles
Veneration of relics, images, the cross, and the dead
Baptismal regeneration
Intercession of the saints
Unification of church and state (The title of Pontifex Maximus, Ex communicare replaced by ex civitate, Taking up the civil sword to persecute and kill the faithful, Civil taxes flowing through the Bishops and priestly wealth acquisition)
Church holidays (Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday)
Vestments
The system of sacraments
Eucharistic alterations (including the liturgical order, transubstantiation, the Real Presence, the sacrifice of the Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, communion on the tongue, the liturgical mixing of water with wine)

Time and space do not allow us to discuss them all now.

^[6] Kelly uses the word “lay”—referring to the status of a layperson—once in “Early Christian Doctrines,” four pages earlier (on page 436) during the preceding discussion of the “Sacrament of Penance.” So we know that Kelly uses the word to refer to a layperson, and he does so very close to the section we are discussing, but he never mentions laypersons in the next section on the “Sacrament of the Eucharist” (on page 440).

^[7] For example, using an Argument from Silence