The Babylonian Captivity

This expression is found in Christian literature to mean different things depending on the contexts. Three of the most widely understood include:

1) Correctly, but less frequently, it is used to mean the exile suffered by the Jews when they were taken away into captivity during the 6th Cent BC by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. The relevant events of this period are recorded in the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. It ended with the Persian victory over the Babylonians in 539 BC.

2) The split in the papacy when competing factions in the Western European church elected their own popes so that there existed two papal centres, one in Rome and the other in Avignon in France in 1309. The latter became a tool for the French. The expression "Babylonian capitivity" to describe the papacy in Avignon was first coined by the Italian poet Petrach.

3) Martin Luther used the expression in the title of one of three works he published in 1520. Called The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he attacked the corruption of the Catholic Church as a betrayal of the gospel, in sense not much different from Petrach's use of it of the Avignon exile.