'When you start hearing voices, you can be pretty sure that there is trouble ahead.'

Matthew Graham continues his look at heretics throughout history with those connected to the letters J, K and L  

When you start hearing voices, you can be pretty sure that there is trouble ahead.

And if you move in religious circles then that invariably means heresy.

Take Jesus, for example. He spent forty days communing with angels and devils in the desert and then really made a name for himself as a troublemaker with a heretical social justice programme.

Or St Joan of Arc (c. 1412 – 1431): one day the daughter of a French farmer, the next the first cross-dressing seventeen year old to lead a national army in history.

And all because St Michael, St Catherine and St Margaret told her to drive the English out of France and bring the Dauphin to Rouen.

Milk

Whatever the cause of her visions (drinking unpasteurised milk has been mooted), Joan turned out to be a skillful strategist and tactician and the French enjoyed a series of much-needed victories under her command.

Unfortunately she was eventually caught by the Burgundians and then sold to the English. She was put on trial for heresy in a legally suspect and politically motivated show but even here continued to confound her enemies.

When asked whether she knew she was in God’s grace, she answered “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me .”

She was found guilty and signed an abjuration agreeing to wear women’s clothes. However, circumstance soon forced her to switch back to male attire and this was her death sentence.

Joan was burnt at the stake on 30 May 1431 in Rouen with her remains further reduced to ashes to prevent the survival of any relics.

In 1456 the Church declared her innocent, the victim of a political struggle, and she was canonized in 1920. Today she remains an inspiration for many and one of the most popular Catholic saints.

Luther

It is a pity that the same cannot be said for Martin Luther (1483 – 1546). His contributions to the course of Western civilization are incontrovertible.

The (quite possibly apocryphal) nailing of his 95 Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 was the tipping point for the Protestant Reformation and his translation of the Bible from Greek into German influenced both the German language and the subsequent production of the King James Bible in English.

He also became the exemplar of married clergy (a debt I owe him) when he wed an ex-nun who had escaped her convent in a herring barrel.

However, contemporary scholarship tends to focus on the consequences of his short temper and abusive nature. In particular, his strident anti-Jewish pronouncements, advocating the destruction of Jewish property and places of worship and the servitude or expulsion of Jewish people have not helped his reputation.

The subsequent employment of his writings by the Nazis just serves to add further tarnish.

Luther died of natural causes on 18 February, 1546. For someone who was the cause of so much ferment and upheaval, who suffered exile, excommunication, and the constant threat of worse – his murder was sanctioned by the Holy Roman Emperor, being regarded as without legal consequence – this is all the more surprising.

Fury

So too is the fact that in spite of all the sound and fury, he was at heart a humble man before God. Unable to speak, he committed his last words to paper: We are beggars: this is true.

Finally we’ll end with mention of Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585 – 1638), a Dutch Catholic theologian who espoused certain Calvinist ideas and taught that only particular people were predestined to be saved.

Among the followers of these heretical teachings was Blaise Pascal, the father of probability theory, although history does not relate whether he ever developed a formula to tell how likely it was that a particular person would enjoy God’s grace.

• Read our A-Z Saints series