I love the Internet. Not for the more typical use of finding what you need to know quickly and easily, but rather for the effortless ability to tell you what you did not need to know.
In the space of ten minutes or so today I moved from fruit juice to triclavianism, via the Cathars.
Started with a quick visit to Wikipedia to get some information on the chemical composition of passion-fruit juice. But then you just can’t resist haring off down those links that you find and end up in the most byzantine (tee hee) backwaters of medieval theology… Or at least I can’t.
So my dull juice enquiry ends up with me discovering that triclavianism was declared a sin by Pope Innocent III, much to the annoyance of the Albigenses and the Waldensians, who heretically insisted that only three nails were used to hang Jesus from the cross, and he got a spear in the left side. The Pope’s infallible word was that four nails were used and he got speared on the right side.
Which is wonderful enough. Until you cross-reference to The Catholic Encyclopedia (“Copyright © 2009 by Kevin Knight. Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”), subsection “Holy Nails”, where we discover that there are apparently still in existence up to 30 of the original nails used.
Who’d have thought it?
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