In researching our Crimeline project I came across various quotes that more likely than not came from Helen Ellerbe's "The Dark Side of Christian History" (Morningstar and Lark, 1995). Since as a researcher I like to get at sourcework used by skeptics, plus the ominous flames-behind-a-black-cross front cover with a provocative title, and a MidWest book review that proclaims how this book is "meticulously researched and courageously written", I just had to buy this one. (Note that MidWest book reviews are done by volunteers, not academic professionals.)
With Barbara G Walker giving it the thumbs up I knew immediately where this book would be heading: This is a pro-feminist, post-modern revisionist history of the Church, quoting (and misquoting) mostly popularist and polemical works often instead of primary sources, presenting the reader with an emotional story about how awful the church is - and shouldn't something be done to stop all these terrible events happening again.
Now first up, I'll acknowledge that there are some terrible things the Church has done in the past. No doubt about that: and yes, these things should not happen again. But the book presents the usual, irrelevant skeptical list - sexism, racism, the "intolerance of difference and the desecration of the environment" (1) - yes, that's the modern appeal to tolerance (although we should look after the environment); the Inquisition, Witch hunts - and in general it is critics who are quoted ahead of historians: and I know why. It is generally accepted that you do not write a book on history when you are not qualified to do so; tucked away at the back (as if it is embarrasing) we find Ellerbe doesn't even list what her education is in - simply where - and instead tells us her work experience: she's been, among other things, a sales representative and a stockbroker. (If she wants to write books on how people misuse the stock exchange or some such, she's quite welcome.)
But sorry, work experience does not equal qualifications; the amateurish way the arguments are presented, a writing style that looks like a jigsaw puzzle that was put together without the associated picture, and the combination of politically correct scholarship (Elaine Pagels) with pagan-myth nonsense like Barbara Walker (perhaps the reason she endorsed the book) and Lloyd M Graham speaks for itself.
Further examples of amateurishness are found in the preface where she says she looked for information on church history in a bookstore(!) - apparently the idea of university history departments is beyond her. On the other hand, maybe not; she reports that the work of historians "have largely stayed within the confines of academe" [i], so she knows about academia: and since in an interview with Gretchen Giles in 1996 she states the work is written for laymen, I can only suppose this means she has simply ignored the best works on the subject in order to present her thesis or used them as soundbites. Is it really too much to ask for scholarship presented in an easier-to-understand format?
She recounts, in her preface, how years ago she listened (perhaps with her jaw on the floor, grin) to an acquaintance speak on how the Church did all those good things for Western civilisation...and this book (originally a short presentation) is a response to that. Unfortunately Ellerbe has not been fair enough in printing her friends' words as well, so we can't tell if they have been properly engaged. We are told the book is unbalanced (in that it only gives the dark "side", and at 188 pages + index it is still a short presentation!), which is honest; but sadly I have to report that's about as far as honesty gets.
On the back cover it is said that "By denying evil we do harm", well that's true; but it is equally true that denying the reader definitions and the reasons why the church acted as they did is equally harmful. (How does this help the reader gain "a true understanding of Orthodox Christianity" [2]?) What I want to know is, what is her justification for this statement? The sort of alternative spirituality she presents as a kind of solution to the church is too vague or irrelevant to be clear-cut about "evil".
And so we enter the first chapter, wherein we are immediately greeted with the accusation of church tyranny in the title. What is tyranny? The Oxford English Dictionary defines this as "cruel or oppressive government or rule". What's this got to do with the church? Well, apparently Helen Ellerbe can't stick the idea that the church is the sole possessor of spiritual truth (the Gospel), and the sole authority placed on this earth in order to disseminate that truth among men and women. Apparently, this is cruel: because it excludes heretical things like Gnosticism. Whether the authority of the church is true or valid is never discussed; we are given sound bites by Ignatius, Irenaeus and Tertullian, though (via 19th century translations, mind, not recent works, such as Evans' translation of Tertullian's Against Marcion): however a more careful reading of Ignatius gives a different picture. (i.e. "I do not issue orders to you, as if I were some great person.", Ignatius to the Ephesians III:1)
Not just authority, but male authority - that seems to be quite a problem to Ellerbe. Apparently she likes the Gnostic idea that women can be equal in authority in the church to men; never mind Adam was made first, never mind Jacob's offspring were all male (the model of Jesus' apostles) - simply spend as little time as possible on the real church and then present the alternatives as if this is a valid approach. (She also mentions the Gospel of Thomas; one wonders what Ellerbe would do with its final verse! And to top it off, Pagels has since modified her views on Thomas - see here -- making this book somewhat outdated.)
On the definition of God, of course God is "manifest in only one image" within Christianity (i.e. in Jesus Christ), since it is a branch of Judaism; and there is no problem regarding this as radically different from say, polytheism. But the issue brought up as a result of this is erroneous: She says "Even the notion of two differing opinions existing harmoniously becomes foreign" - as if such things can exist harmoniously in the first place - what if one is true and the other is not? And then she goes on to posit that in such a view God cannot rule on the basis of love. What is agape, Helen? On the issue of the "fear of the Lord", this is to do with acting morally towards a holy God, and is not about striking terror into the believers' heart, as might be implied in Ellerbe's text. Unfortunately she goes about using her misunderstanding elsewhere in the book.
More definition issues: Gnostics are called Christians, and are put on an equal par with them, without telling us what the Gnostics believed. Elaine Pagels, who makes several appearances among the notes (the use of footnotes is one of the better parts of this book) gives a lot of useful detail about the Gnostics in her books The Gnostic Gospels, and also in Adam, Eve and the Serpent; both of these works Ellerbe has used as sources, so why not inform the reader what Gnosticism was? I suspect it is because she seeks to press forward the existance of alternatives to Orthodox Christianity and the facts exclude such an agenda. We know such things existed, what counts is - were their teachings true? There is also no evidence that beyond Pagels she has read any scholarship on the subject.
Regarding Marcion - Ellerbe tells us scholars believe the Apostle's Creed was written in response to him (6), whereas Pagels actually says "some scholars", suggesting there are those who disagree - here is an issue I find time and again in Dark Side where she cannot report her sources properly; she dumbs things down to the extent it no longer means what was originally written.
We are also told Marcion was a Christian - not even the Church Fathers would call him such; he was excommunicated. He shouldn't really be considered Gnostic either since he rejected Judaism. Marcion believed there were two gods, the just and the good; he also denied Christ was even born - just held that He appeared (Tertullian criticizes this view, calling it a "phantom", in Against Marcion book 5, chapter 8), - however we are not told this either. The Essenes are also by implication called Christians (! - they were Jews, and the Nag Hammadi Library - edited by James M Robinson, which she uses as a source in this chapter - clearly states this on p.7) and the supporting evidence for this comes from the Gospel of Peace, whose manuscript was only seen by the person who published it (Edmond Bordeaux Szekely), which makes it suspicious. Speaking of which, when I tried finding the various gospels mentioned in the first two chapters, we only find this Gospel of Peace given in the Index: that means Dark Side cannot be used as a research tool.
Also the Secret Book of John, translated by Meyer, gets cited; though we are not told that it was written in the second century (cf his introduction) and that almost immediately in the text we find John at the temple, and a Pharisee comments on Jesus as his teacher. That's an obvious anachronism, there were no Pharisees and no Temple at the time this work was composed! Why did Ellerbe use this without giving the reader the necessary qualifiers?
On the resurrection see here.
We are told that Hypatia was killed by Christians. Ellerbe gets this from Riane Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade", who found this 'information' in an Encyclopedia. (Eisler's research is so poor she thinks Christians burned the Great Library of Alexandria; see here.) On top of this, Eisler is qualified as a lawyer, not a historian. This chapter, then, is a bizarre mix of scholarly and not-so-scholarly backing; however it is Ellerbe's misreporting of these things and the dumbing-down of information that I find disturbing - and unfortunately this is a trend throughout her work. The weak and uneven foundation of this book makes it look like the literary version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
We've charged Ellerbe's work elsewhere with being unreliable, and now we are in a position to expound on this: Why did Christianity survive and grow amidst hostile and difficult circumstances? "Christianity owes its large membership to the political manoevering of orthodox Christians" (14) - pure bunkum, of course; how ahout "Christianity owes its large membership to the indisputable fact that it is a divine revelation and the truth of this is shown in its continued existance against social factors that shelved imposters and frauds of the same period"? (see here)
We are told that "Christians held attitudes that did little to endear them to Romans" and "Accounts from about the year 200 reflect the dislike Romans had for Christians" [15], citing Holland-Smith, a historian who reports Ellerbe's quote (the "ultimate filth" comment) using a Christian work giving what is thought to be your Average Roman Joe-on-the-Street's view as satire (italics). So this isn't a Roman view, and does she know what satire is?
On the Trinity - we are told the Nicene creed extols "sameness"; not quite, the Father is not a hypostasis but the Son and the Spirit are. We are also told the council "replaced the Hebrew feminine term for spirit, ruah, with the Greek neuter term, pneuma" - considering the council was following the revelation of Scripture over against new teaching that had no grounding in this (i.e. Arianism) it is hardly surprising that they did this, given that the Greek term pneuma appears in the New Testament, and also the Greek Septuagint. Not something that happened at the council, then.
We are then presented with the outrageous claim that the 'new' Holy Trinity "mimicked a much older portrait of divinity" [20] - citing non-Christian and Gnostic texts which are non-Palestinian and involve an androgynous view of God. However such things are not the sort of thing Christians would extract doctrine from. No, sorry, the Trinity is firmly rooted in Jewish Wisdom theology. Besides, the purpose of the council was to officially throw out a teaching where Christ had been demoted to a creature.
The illustration on page 21 looks interesting; we have a head with flowing hair and three semi-combined faces (such that there are three mouths and noses but only four eyes) - yet the beards have the appearance of the later Greek (or Russian) Orthodox rather than the period Ellerbe is discussing on the facing page. In the back of the book we are simply told that this illustration is called "Trinity" and is found in the unfeasably large Library of Congress, which is completely useless if one wishes to track information down about it. Technically you cannot produce a depiction of the Trinity anyway, but that doesn't bother Helen Ellerbe. Further I must ask what is the purpose of the set square, the hook and the cross lying across the open book in this picture? Does this have anything at all to do with Nicea?
Regarding the god Mithra, p22 - we get the usual claims of this pagan religion being parallel to Christian worship, and her sole source is - Barbara Walker! Walker's sources are either Cumont or those who relied heavily on him: writing in 1983 she apparently had no idea that Mithraic scholarship had moved on. Ellerbe makes a silly error in placing the shepherds at the 'Last Supper' that Mithra has with Helios and those who shared his labours - as if worship and labour are related - and not even Cumont mentions shepherds at this point. (Mysteries of Mithra, 138)
Our author thinks the gospels are contradictory: unfortunately the three examples she gives have such simplistic answers one wonders whether she's thinking about this or simply throwing these things at her anti-Christian readership for points and jollies. We are told in Matthew Jesus is presented as being an aristocrat, and in Luke born to a poor carpenter. How about, Joseph was poor but was engaged to a girl of royal lineage? Is that difficult? (see for example, here) Here's another one: In Matthew at his birth, Jesus is visited by kings, and in Luke by shepherds. So...it is altogether implausible that he was visited by shepherds *and* kings? The fact that Matthew has the kings arriving two years later seems to have passed her by. And the last one: Matthew and Mark tell us that Jesus' last words were "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" while Luke says another thing and John yet another. I find this sort of objection also in Hoffman's reconstruction of Porphyry (which is likely where it originates). But why can't Jesus be saying one thing after another and that three evangelists recorded one sentence each? Lastly, I'm not sure why Ellerbe has gospel 'contradictions' in chapter 2 (subtitled with the period 200-500 AD), surely this belongs in the previous chapter - does she need an editor?
On Celsus: (neither Ellerbe nor her source, Lloyd Graham, give the reference: which is Contra Celsus ii,27) - we are told "The Church edited its message with each translation" [16], then she quotes Celsus as being witness to the "falsification of Christian writings already in the second century" but the quote says nothing of translation but of modifying what was said. And Origen's response to this was that he only knew of Gnostics who did this. The reason Ellerbe doesnt point the reader to Origen's Contra Celsus is because she doesn't want you to read the answer. Of course, she might reply that Marcion was a Christian...but we've dealt with that one. What's really ironic is Ellerbe uses Holland-Smith to give us the (supposed) Roman view of Christians from the man-on-the-street, and Lloyd Graham is used for the intellectual Roman Celsus.
Then we get a quotation from the Catholic Encyclopedia about falsifications, but sorry that's in an article on the Renaissance, and the context of the quote is falsifications made in later centuries to the timeline being discussed. We are told "scholars have shown that all four canonized Gospels have been doctored and revised." - but this amounts to parroting the opinions of Baigent and Leigh, whose "research" told them the gospels were late-dated and oral tradition isnt reliable. Baigent and Graham's books have mutually exclusive theses; Graham is a Christ myther, while Baigent presents the "Jesus married Mary Magdelene" theory (popularised in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code") - Ellerbe seems to use these works for their criticisms of church history and the bible, regardless of consistency in her own argument. Since when were Baigent and Leigh "scholars", anyway? Neither of them are qualified historians.
Athanasius is made to be at the Council of Hippo [16] when in fact he died 20 years previously - this error is the result of inferring the wrong thing from her source, which again is Baigent and Leigh. Jesus as political rebel [18] - this also comes from Baigent and Leigh. She also claims Origen died in 284, that happened 30 years earlier.
Finally for this chapter I'll note the accusation that Constantine executed his son (judicially though) and had his wife killed too, without saying why - although officially we'll never know. Holland-Smith posits that the two had been acting promiscuously (but can only say that this is "unlikely" in return) - how come Ellerbe missed this? Oh yes, she doesn't want to give explanations, just shock the reader! (Surprise! Riane Eisler is her source, and her sources include an encyclopedia - again - and H. G. Wells!) The number of errors in this chapter were just amazing, and especially since in her interview with Giles she claimed to know a lot about church history, and had spent five years writing the book. Perhaps it should be renamed "The Dark Side of Helen Ellerbe's Fantasies"?
We next get a classic example of how not to use sources from Church Fathers. We are told Jerome warns,"Regard everything as poison which bears within it the seed of sensual pleasure" (33) - which within the context of Ellerbe's writing appears to have a sexual connotation what with Carpocratians and Augustine on sexuality and Clement on lust; however it is not. Don't believe me? The quote comes from one of Jerome's letters to Furia, a widow intent on maintaining her widowhood having abandoned the desire to remarry and look after her family instead. (Jerome calls widowhood "second of the three degrees of chastity" - still think this is about sex? Read on.)
Here then, is the context of the given quote:
"Some persons who aspire to the life of chastity fall midway in their journey from supposing that they need only abstain from flesh. They load their stomachs with vegetables which are only harmless when taken sparingly and in moderation. If I am to say what I think, there is nothing which so much heats the body and inflames the passions as undigested food and breathing broken with hiccoughs. As for you, my daughter, I would rather wound your modesty than endanger my case by understatement. Regard everything as poison which bears within it the seeds of sensual pleasure. A meagre diet which leaves the appetite always unsatisfied is to be preferred to fasts three days long. It is much better to take a little every day than some days to abstain wholly and on others to surfeit oneself."
So then, the real purpose of the quote is to warn against excessive restraint during fasting! Well, that's what happens when you rely on Barbara Walker; yes, Walker has the quote in her section on Sex. (And her source is Lewis Mumford, a social philosopher who contributed to books on regional planning!)
There's a section on reincarnation which I'd like to look at in the near future. She thinks the Christians burned the Library at Alexandria (46), and Porphyry's "36 volumes" as well - I've no idea what that refers to, his 15 volume "Against the Christians" was burned certainly (but since - according to remaining fragments - it insulted the reader, it's hard to imagine it surviving anyway!) and also various commentaries that quoted from it - but these were responses by the Church and cannot be attributed to Porphyry himself. I have now traced the source of this claim to one Alexander Wilder, a professor of pathology in the 19th century who was an early fellow of the Theosophical Society. Such is what happens when you take L M Graham's esoteric ramblings and assume they are an authority! She further thinks this period of history should be termed the "Dark Ages", something historians today consider inaccurate.
In chapter 5 we get what is one of the most outrageous of all her faulty reportage of sources; regarding the Knight's Templar. We are told that "incredible stories began to circulate about the Templars" and we're given a list of anti-Christian things an initiation ritual was supposed to involve. Then we get this:
"Accused of homosexuality, of killing illegitimate children, and of witchcraft, the Templars were murdered and their property confiscated." (71)
Apart from the non-expert being cited (Walker, p510), upon looking up this source I find reference to witchcraft and homosexuality among the rumours and "similar charges", but nothing specific about killing illegitimate children! However, I do find this in J. B. Russell's Witchcraft in the Middle Ages pp194-8, with the connection to traditional witchcraft accusations of the time. It is possible that she has forged the two sources together, since she does have Russell in front of her and has used him elsewhere. (Walker isnt much better, her sources include the Encyclopedia Britannica and a scholar from 1892!) There's also an inadequate treatment of the Cathar heresy.
Other non-authorities used: Charles Panati, a former physicist and a former science editor for Newsweek. And James Haught, whose book Holy Horrors is indeed a horror - in terms of documentation - it doesn't have any! He also published a cut down version of the book as an article in Penthouse men's magazine (!!) - I wonder what Ellerbe thinks of that, given her pro-feminist type statements elsewhere. Add to this a news-stand magazine (Gnosis) from which we get quotes from Theodore Nottingham, a writer of children's stories and John Kimsey, an English lecturer, neither of whom are relevantly qualified. And here's a 'don't know', Walter Nigg, who gets called a historian, but actually he doesn't tell us what his qualifications were in, in his book The Heretics. Nigg is used several times in the book notably for the quote on page 20, which comes from E Schwartz who wrote in 1913. Since The Heretics was originally written in German, one questions the usefulness of say, the quote from Malleus Maleficarum (p115-116), which by the time it arrives in Dark Side has gone through two translations.
On the Inquisition, see here. A recommended book to answer some of the charges laid down by Ellerbe in the Inquisition section is Richard Kieckhefer's Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany, especially on one of her sources, H C Lea. On slavery, see here.
In chapter 6 we have one of those few times the bible is used to support her argument: here John 15:16 - (it should be 15:6 does she need a proofreader as well as an editor?) but this is poor exegesis: it is not talking about how heretics should be treated, rather it describes the outcome of one who leaves Christ! "If a man abide not in me..." should be a clue. There's also a chapter on the Reformation - it includes inaccurate theology; she thinks God is neither transcendant nor imminent. Lloyd Graham gets used again, this time for a Pope Gregory XIII quote about the St Bartholomew massacre in 1572 ("We rejoice with you that with the help of God you have relieved the world of these wretched heretics", p95); he gives no reference so we still don't know where this quote comes from. (however see the prayer after a mass - not a written letter - see here, The Holy See and the massacre, section D, September 8 mass, for a similar statement, note also the massacre was political) If she's going to write about the Reformation, (or any history) it matters to have your facts right.
The Witch hunts: ah yes, a common complaint and one of the reasons I got this book - however I regret to report that in attempting to define witchcraft Ellerbe does not even know what the terms wicce and wicca mean - she thinks they refer to "the male and female participants in the ancient pagan tradition which holds masculine, feminine and earthly aspects of God in great reverence". This four pages into the chapter, after complaining about the Churches supposed vilification of women(see here) (how do you suppose Mary Magdelene was left in the gospels, then, as a respected follower of Christ?); I find a better source for the definition in Jeffrey Burton Russell's Witchcraft in the Middle Ages p16 (Professor of History at the University of California) that these terms mean "one who divines or casts spells" and from the order Ellerbe gives them it appears that she does not know which one is masculine, i.e. wicca, and wicce is the feminine. It should be noted that she does know of this definition, but instead of using scholarship she appears to prefer the undocumented one given above. She also thinks the church invented witchcraft, then persecuted people to "wipe out dissent". She ignores the folk traditions of previous centuries in making these claims.
Also in Russell I find that there exist "[esoteric] books, usually characterized by a cavalier attitude toward historical criticism and by the effort to accommodate witchcraft in a long and supposititious [sic] tradition of high and ancient wisdom," which he criticises as being "as useless as they are numerous" (29); and goes on to cite in a footnote Leland and A.E.Waite as examples of these - Leland being the sort of person who created spurious works such as Arcadia; of course Walker uses these two Romanticists as sources, apparently as oblivious to this as Ellerbe is - even though Russell wrote in 1972 (the beginning of modern witchcraft scholarship) and both Walker and Ellerbe even know of and quote from his work! (Ellerbe chap.8 n37, Walker, Magic section n1, also p1115) What a hoot! Scholarship can be ignored apart from soundbites, as long as she go on for pages about how witches were tortured and killed, her readers might not notice (nevermind answering the question "was this a valid response?", or "did secular authorities carry out the executions?", or [again!] "Is Walker a valid authority here?")
More self-refutation from her own sources? Sure thing! Again in Russell we find: "Although Lea contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of the repression of witchcraft, his dogmatic liberalism prevented him from seriously studying the witches themselves and thereby grasping that human irrationality and viciousness are not the monopoly of religious people or authoritarian institutions. This prejudice led him into further errors. Because he assumed that the Inquisition, not the witches, invented witchcraft, he insisted that the phenomenon did not begin until the mid-fourteenth century and so in the Materials ignores witch trials before 1321, the connection of witchcraft with earlier heresy, and its partial derivation from twelfth- and thirteenth century currents of religious thought and social change." (31) - and Lea is one of those oft-used sources in Dark Side: Both Lea and Russell are used in Ellerbe's chapter on the Inquisition.
In the prefatory pages she writes:"This book is dedicated to freedom and human dignity". This sounds great, and depending on what you mean by freedom it is a worthy cause. However she manages to shoot herself in the foot: Take the story of the witch from Kramer and Sprenger's infamous Malleus Maleficarum on page 117 - I won't give the sick details. Previous to this, we were not told what medieval witchcraft was about, but this story can give you an idea. It harmed people. I'd like to ask, how does this story uphold human dignity, either for the witch or for the people harmed (or the reader, even, since there is no warning given)? We are then told that there was an older, preChristian tradition - well, sorry this was unacceptable to the Romans for similar reasons: it manipulated supernatural powers to harm people. (Holland-Smith writes about witches in the Roman period who were a secret society and who "[bent] the divine will to human desires" and whom people were wary about because offending them likely got such critics poisoned! He also notes that astrology was never an official priestly function: Death of Classical Paganism p10)
There's no reason to get antsy about the Witch hunts - the Church was trying to destroy something that harmed people, crops and fertility. The witches also did things that were illegal according to secular law, and therefore it is difficult to pin this on the church. Considering she's supposed to be writing a history, I expected Ellerbe to dig up the social reasons why the witches were hunted down - I dont need to tell you her own sources give these things, we are simply not told this as if it did not matter. All that counts apparently is they were tortured or killed. Why not argue that the 20th Century American history be termed "The Frying Times", because criminals were executed in the electric chair? In every instance it is complained that witches were tortured; however this was not always the case: what about Isobel Gowdie who freely confessed? Of course, being an unbalanced book it is unsurprising to omit such details, what counts is to show the church in as bad a light as possible.
I have no problem with criticisms of the church per se, but one should be careful not to impeach oneself in the process. However, Ellerbe succeeds brilliantly. She claims:
"Witches were thought by some to have as much if not more power than Christ: they could raise the dead, turn water into wine or milk, control the weather and know the past and future." (p.127)
The source for this is Reginald Scot (via Walker, who else!) and his work was published in 1584 (not 1972 as Walker erroneously states). First off though, since in the New Testament it clearly states that Jesus is God (John 1:1,14) the claim is obviously fantasy. However, it gets worse: I find in R.H. Robbins' Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology - another source used by Ellerbe - that Scot's work ridiculed the belief in witches. He writes: 'Henry C Lea summarized the work thus: "It has the honor of being the first of the controversial works which resolutely denied the reality of witchcraft and the power of the devil'" (Robbins,454) No comment required: the self-refutation stands as its own testimony.
At this point, I got tired of finding and having to document errors in the book. It's an easy enough read if you're prepared to overlook these problems, (I'm not, and also I advise against reading this book after dinner), or if you are into rhetorical polemic; the illustrations are well printed and mostly relevant but it doesn't warrant the claim that it is "history". Ellerbe's claim of being a researcher is simply an insult to the profession: I realise this is not a work of scholarship but the number of contradictions with actual history, lack of critical thinking and misuse of sources means the book's incompetence cannot be recommended - not even as an introduction to church history.
To parody the quote used on the front cover, "This is simply a book which everyone must jump up and down on and laugh at"!
-"Punkish"
Source
Ellerbe, Helen: The Dark Side of Christian History (Morningstar and Lark, 1995)
Interview Gretchen Giles, 4-10 April 1996 edition of the Sonoma Independant.