Friday, March 24, 2023

Bearing FALSE WITNESS Against Calvin For...Sodomy?

 Thou shalt not bear false witness...... Exodus 20:16
 
"Jerome Bolsec, an ex-Carmelite friar who embraced the reformed faith in Paris, settled in Geneva and served as a physician. He publicly attacked Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, was banished from Geneva, and eventually returned to catholicism. 
His “revenge was to publish in 1577 a scurrilous biography of Calvin, accusing him among other things of sodomy, which
continued to be an arsenal for anti-Calvinist polemics for the next two centuries
” (
Lindberg, 266).
 
The more specific charge, to which reference is now made, was formulated thirteen years after Calvin’s death, by Jerome Hermes Bolsec . . . that Calvin had been convicted of heinous moral turpitude . . . No evidence has ever been produced of the existence of such a document as Bolsec alleges. 
*Jacques Desmay, the earnest Catholic writer who used his stay as Advent and Lenten preacher at Noyon in 1614 and 1615 to learn all he could of Calvin’s life there by records and tradition, found nothing of it. An equally determined Roman historian of Noyon, Jacques Le Vasseur, in his Annales of 1633, expressly repudiated it; and careful modern Roman Catholic scholars, such as Kampschulte and Paulus, reject it as “unworthy of serious refutation."
 
Dr. Moulin observes, that not one of Calvin’s innumerable enemies ever carped at the purity of his life, but this profligate physician, whom Calvin had procured to be banished from Geneva, for his wickedness and impieties."
DaveArmstrong