Intellect PlusReligious figures
385 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 7.
The Bible never names Salome, and she wasn't consistently called that until the 1800sThe dancing girl who asks for John the Baptist's head is unnamed in the gospels; they call her only the daughter of Herodias. The name Salome comes from the historian Josephus, wh…
Rowan Williams learned Russian just to read Dostoevsky in the originalRowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, speaks or reads around a dozen languages, including Welsh, Syriac and Biblical Hebrew, and picked up Russian to read Dostoevsky…
The first American pope holds a mathematics degree from VillanovaBefore he became Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago earned a mathematics degree, spent years as a missionary in Peru and took Peruvian citizenship. His 2025 election …
A tomb marked LINVS may have belonged to someone called AquilinusPope Linus is usually counted as the second bishop of Rome, after Peter, yet the earliest lists name him as the first to receive the office from the apostles. A tomb found in Sain…- Paul VI became the first reigning pope in over a century to leave ItalyIn January 1964, Pope Paul VI flew to Jordan, the first time a sitting pontiff had left Italy in more than a hundred years. The former Giovanni Battista Montini went on to steer t…
Pius X crammed refugees into the Apostolic Palace after the 1908 earthquakeWhen the 1908 Messina earthquake left survivors homeless, Pope Pius X opened the Apostolic Palace to refugees, moving well ahead of Italy's own government. The son of a village po…
Pius XII's conduct during the Holocaust remains one of the Vatican's great debatesEugenio Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in March 1939 and reigned for 19 years spanning the Second World War, the Holocaust and the start of the Cold War. Defenders say his quiet dip…
France's old provinces were never officially called provinces at allAsk for a map of the provinces of pre-revolutionary France and no two versions will match. Contemporaries never used the word for any official unit: the kingdom was carved separat…
Raphael's name means God has healed, and his first mission involved a fishThe archangel Raphael first appears in the Book of Tobit and 1 Enoch, texts from roughly the 3rd to 2nd century BC. In Tobit he travels disguised as a man named Azariah, using a r…
Raymond Burr's own life story was full of details nobody could verifyRaymond Burr won two Emmys as the unbeatable lawyer Perry Mason, but after his death in 1993 much of his biography proved impossible to confirm. His accounts of what he did around…
Bishop Robert Barron's online videos have drawn over 84 million viewsNicknamed the bishop of the Internet, Robert Barron has produced more than 1,000 online video commentaries with over 84 million views, reviewing films, books and music through a C…
Noomi Rapace invented her surname, choosing a word meaning bird of preyWhen Noomi Norén married actor Ola Norell in 2001, their surnames sounded so alike that neither wanted to take the other's. They made up a new one, Rapace, bird of prey in French …
Augustine's doctrine of original sin leaned on a mistranslated verseThe belief that every human inherits Adam's guilt took centuries to form. Its most influential architect, Augustine of Hippo, built his case on a Latin rendering of Romans 5:12 th…
Mexico's most sacred image was once denounced by friars as a local paintingThe cloak said to bear the Virgin Mary's image, left on Juan Diego's garment in 1531, draws more pilgrims than any other Catholic shrine on Earth. Yet in 1556 a Franciscan leader …
Paul's letters sit in the Bible in order of length, not dateThirteen New Testament books carry Paul's name, but most scholars think he wrote only seven of them. Their running order in Bibles follows a simple rule: longest first, with the p…
Pepin the Short became king by asking the Pope one pointed questionPepin already held real power over the Franks while a powerless Merovingian wore the crown. So he asked Pope Zachary whether it was proper for kings to lack royal power. The Pope …
Polycarp of Smyrna, the bishop who linked Christians to the apostles' generationSecond-century Christians prized Polycarp because he had reportedly known John the Apostle and others who met Jesus. His pupil Irenaeus remembered him vividly decades later. He on…
India marks Engineer's Day on the birthday of one dam builderEvery 15 September, India, Sri Lanka and Tanzania celebrate Engineer's Day in honour of M. Visvesvaraya. He patented automatic floodgates, shielded Hyderabad from its river, ran t…
One Morisco town was expelled from Spain as an undefeated armed columnWhen Spain expelled its converted Muslims, the Moriscos, between 1609 and 1614, most left as refugees. The townsfolk of Hornachos, openly Muslim and famously defiant, were allowed…
A Hasidic master told followers to talk to God like a best friendRabbi Nachman of Breslov asked his disciples to spend an hour a day alone, ideally in a field or forest, speaking aloud to God in their own words. He died of tuberculosis at 38 in…
Neoplatonists thought they were simply reading Plato correctlyFor more than a thousand years, readers took it for granted that Plotinus and his successors had explained what Plato truly meant. Only around the early nineteenth century did sch…- How big is Metro Detroit? It depends which of four maps you useMetro Detroit can hold 3.8 million people or 5.3 million, depending on whether you count three counties, six or nine, and more than five and a half million if you add Windsor acro…
Some early Christians believed the archangel Michael and Christ were the same beingMichael is the warrior angel shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, famous for casting Satan out of heaven. Less known is that from the second century several Christian groups…
Why one ancient rabbi argued the evil impulse is very goodGenesis ends the sixth day with God finding creation very good. A rabbinic reading seized on one small word, and, to argue that the verse praises the evil impulse too: without it,…
The Mishnah exists because rabbis feared an oral law would be forgottenFor generations Jewish law was taught by memory, and writing it down was considered off limits. Then the Temple fell in 70 CE, Judea lost its autonomy, and scholars worried the tr…
In revived Hebrew, an ancient word for hyena came to mean cheetahWhen Hebrew was brought back as an everyday language, old words were drafted into new jobs. Bardelas, a hyena in the Mishnah, became the cheetah; the word for jujube became plum; …
A Byzantine emperor tried to hold his empire together with a theology of one willIn the 7th century Emperor Heraclius faced provinces split over the nature of Christ, and in Egypt about 30,000 Chalcedonian Greeks lived among some five million Copts who rejecte…
M. G. R. won his first assembly seat campaigning from a hospital bedIn January 1967 a fellow actor shot Tamil film star M. G. Ramachandran during a meeting about a movie. He survived with a permanently altered voice, fought that year's election fr…
Herod's massacre of Bethlehem's infants appears in only one ancient sourceMatthew's Gospel says Herod the Great, outwitted by the Magi, ordered the death of Bethlehem's boys aged two and under. Yet Josephus, who catalogued Herod's crimes down to the kil…
A teenage Phish fan who became a Hasidic reggae starMatthew Miller dropped out of high school on the first day of senior year to follow the jam band Phish around the country. A few years later he was studying Torah all day in Crown…
Mary, Queen of Scots, checked the time on a silver skullMary, Queen of Scots, carried a watch carved as a silver skull and engraved with Horace's lines about death knocking equally at huts and royal towers. It was a fashionable object …
The Catholic Church rejects most reported sightings of the Virgin MaryReports of the Virgin Mary appearing to believers have drawn crowds of 70,000 and built shrines that attract 10 million pilgrims a year. Yet the Catholic Church, which accepts suc…
Saint Mark may not have written the gospel that carries his nameTradition names Mark as the author of the shortest gospel, founder of the church of Alexandria and first bishop of Christian Africa. Most modern scholars, however, treat his gospe…
The Talmud blamed Job's suffering on his silence before PharaohThe Book of Job never explains why a righteous man loses his children, wealth and health, beyond a wager in heaven. One Talmudic tradition supplied a reason: Job sat on Pharaoh's …
The fiercely anti-Zionist Satmar Rebbe escaped the Holocaust on a Zionist-organised trainJoel Teitelbaum spent his life denouncing Zionism as heresy and forbade any contact with Zionists. Yet in 1944 he survived by boarding the Kastner train, an evacuation arranged by…- Jonah's 'whale' was never a whale, and he sulked when God forgaveThe Hebrew text says Jonah was swallowed by a 'large fish', not a whale. And the real twist comes afterwards: when the city of Nineveh repents and is spared, the prophet is furiou…
- In John's Gospel, raising Lazarus is what sets Jesus's crucifixion in motionJesus hears his friend Lazarus is gravely ill and deliberately waits two days before setting off. By the time he reaches Bethany, Lazarus has been entombed for four days. The mira…
- One writer, traditionally a doctor named Luke, produced over a quarter of the New TestamentLuke's gospel and the book of Acts were written as one two-part work that makes up 27.5 percent of the New Testament, more than any other author. Tradition names him Luke, a physi…
Rosalía sang in 14 languages, each tied to a female saint, on LuxFor her fourth album, Rosalía spent two to three years learning to sing in languages she does not speak, from Ukrainian to Mandarin, starting with rough drafts in Google Translate…
America's 'mainline' churches may be named after Philadelphia's railway suburbsIn 1970 mainline Protestant churches claimed most American Protestants and over 30 percent of the whole population. By 2009 they had fallen to about 15 percent of adults. Even the…
Jim Lovell reached the Moon twice and never set foot on itA temporarily high bilirubin reading cost Jim Lovell a place among NASA's first seven astronauts. He applied again, got in, and became the first to make four spaceflights. He circ…
Joan of Kent married in secret twice and became a king's motherAt about twelve, Joan of Kent quietly wed a 26-year-old knight without royal permission, then let her family marry her to an earl's heir while he was abroad. A papal ruling sorted…
Herod Antipas built a capital on a graveyard and lost a war over a divorceThe Herod who judged Jesus and had John the Baptist killed was a Roman client ruler of Galilee for 42 years. He named his new capital after the emperor Tiberius, found that devout…
How a persecuted sect became the biggest landowner in the WestWithin three centuries Christianity went from a small Jewish movement to the Roman Empire's state religion. Constantine's gifts of land, cash and tax breaks were so generous that …
Three Rhine towns once formed the heart of Ashkenazi Jewish learningThe earliest document about Jews in Germany is a Roman record from Cologne in 321 AD. Centuries later Speyer, Worms and Mainz, known together by the Hebrew acronym ShUM, became th…- Why was Ignatius of Antioch marched all the way to Rome to die?Condemned Christians were normally punished where they lived. Yet the bishop of Antioch was escorted by ten soldiers across Asia Minor and the Aegean to Rome, taking a strangely r…
- A Jewish historian named Jesus's brother James, and scholars accept the passageJosephus, writing about Judea in the 1st century, mentions the trial of the brother of Jesus called Christ, a man named James. Most scholars accept the line as genuine, not a late…
- Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who kept predicting Jerusalem's fallFor roughly four decades Jeremiah told the people of Judah that invaders from the north would take their city, while rival prophets promised peace. He was plotted against by his o…
- How seven Paris students became the Catholic Church's largest men's orderIn a crypt at Montmartre in August 1534, a wounded Basque ex-soldier and six fellow students at the University of Paris promised poverty, chastity and obedience. Their decision to…
Rome's emperor Geta was erased from marble but survived on coinsAfter Geta was killed in December 211, his brother Caracalla ordered his memory wiped out, and the job was done so thoroughly that hardly any marble portraits of him remain. His f…
Einstein co-founded a university that nearly taught in German instead of HebrewAlbert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann co-founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in July 1918, three decades before Israel existed. Its early planners fought over whether the youn…- An indie YouTube cartoon about imps in Hell landed an Amazon dealHelluva Boss follows a small firm of imps in Hell who sneak into the living world to carry out hits ordered by damned souls. Vivienne Medrano put it on her own YouTube channel, pa…
Medieval anchorites were bricked into tiny cells built against churchesOnce an anchorite moved into their little cell beside a church, the local bishop often held a ceremony to brick up the door. One small window let them hear Mass through the wall, …
Banned from church pulpits, George Whitefield preached to 50,000 in fieldsIn February 1739 parish priests in Bath and Bristol barred George Whitefield from their churches as a dangerous enthusiast. He went outside instead, preaching to coal miners at Ki…
Jacob Frank drilled his followers in armour for a future kingdom of their ownIn the 18th century a self-declared messiah named Jacob Frank gathered perhaps 50,000 followers across Poland-Lithuania and beyond, then told them to break every law. He organised…
A Catholic bishop beat Frank Sinatra in the TV ratingsIn 1952 the DuMont network put Bishop Fulton Sheen on at 8pm on Tuesdays, opposite Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra. With no script and only a chalkboard, his show Life Is Worth Liv…- Kurt Gödel wrote a logical proof of God and hid it for decadesThe first draft of Kurt Gödel's proof that God exists dates from around 1941, yet he told nobody until 1970, when he believed he was dying. Even then he refused to publish, report…
- Gabriel is barely in the Bible yet became heaven's best-known messengerOnly one book of the Hebrew Bible names Gabriel, and neither it nor the New Testament ever calls him an archangel. The promotion came from apocalyptic writings of the Second Templ…
- King David appears outside the Bible on just one broken stoneThe House of David shaped Jewish hopes for a messiah and Christian claims about Jesus, yet evidence for David himself beyond scripture comes down to a single inscription. The Tel …
Francis of Assisi was a deacon, never a priestThe founder of the Franciscans stayed a deacon all his life, an order that began, tradition says, when the apostles chose seven helpers including Stephen. For centuries the Wester…