Patristic era a canon, for the ‘they have not’ could in like manner be
applied to Jewel and the Church of England. William Fulke was quick to
realize Jewel’s disavowals of the normative nature of the fathers:
For although the bishop of Sarum made challenge of many articles
now holden of the Papists, not to be found within the compass of
the first six hundred years, and therefore to be new and false
doctrines: yet neither he nor any Protestant living or dead, did ever
agree to receive what doctrine soever was taught within the first six
hundred years. But this I dare avow, that what article of doctrine
soever we do affirm, the same hath been affirmed of the godly
Fathers ... whatsoever we deny, the same cannot be proved to have
been universally affirmed or received of all the godly Fathers by the
space of the six hundred years together.^149
When Jewel proffered his 27 items he so closely scripted them that it
was almost impossible by definition for his opponents to answer him.
That did not stop them, nor is it to say that Jewel wisely chose what he
did, for he was ignorant of much about which he spoke. One illustration
shall here suffice. Jewel wrote to Heinrich Bullinger in March 1566,
seeking information on three matters: what can he tell him about the
Carolingian Council of Frankfurt, what does he know about one John
Camotensis, and, especially crucial for the argument here, a point that
touches the Greek Churches, whether the Greeks practice any form of
‘private mass (that the priest alone communicated irrespective of who
else was present)?’^150 Jewel had written on the matter of the Greeks not
practicing private Masses in 1565 against Harding, asserting that the
Greeks had never used the private Mass.^151 Having now made his boast,
Jewel had been called to account and needed Bullinger’s help in
authenticating his claims. The great danger for Jewel, despite his faith
that he would not be proven wrong and that Rome was truly aberrant,
was that someone might find something which he could not explain. The
Greek Church proved a wonderful mine of anti-Roman information in
that they belied the antiquity of the strict uniformity professed by Rome.
But if in this (the private Mass), they agreed with Jewel’s protagonists,
then catholicity would speak against him. The narrow constraints of
Jewel’s challenge addressed what errors Jewel thought could be excluded
from the Fathers; but it also proclaimed that many of the doctrines he
had adopted he was unwilling to assert that the Fathers professed them.
94 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^149) William Fulke, Stapleton’s Fortress overthrown. A rejoinder to Martiall’s Reply. A
discovery of the dangerous rock of the popish church commended by Sanders(Cambridge,
1848), pp. 28–29.
(^150) Jewel,Works,IV, p. 1247. Jewel believed the Carolingians were iconoclasts and thus
his question on the Council of Frankfurt. He never found out that Camotensis was John of
Salisbury.
(^151) Jewel,Works, II, p. 637.
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