Quotes from Jonathan Kirsch

Changing one's undergarments on Saturday, for example, was sufficient evidence to justify the arrest and interrogation under torture of a New Christian on charges of being a secret Jew.

What the men in black did to their victims with such tools was not a crime.

he stood up in church and apologized for the spilling of "innocent blood.

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), a celebrated polymath and an early advocate of the Copernican theory of the universe, on charges of holding erroneous opinions about various aspects of Catholic dogma, including the divinity of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the virginity of Mary. Bruno had offered only a halfhearted recantation rather than the abject confession that the Inquisition always demanded, and he was burned alive as an unrepentant heretic.

as 'an explanation of ignotum ab ignoto'"—a theory that relies on the unknown to explain the unknown.

You have found the word!

Ironically, but also tellingly, the same charges had been laid against the first Christians by their adversaries in ancient Rome, where Christianity was similarly regarded as a secret cult whose members killed and ate babies in the course of the demoniacal sex orgies that served as their worship service.

countless thousands before him. The last of the inquisitors