Similar language is found in the
Dead Sea Scrolls, where a small persecuted Jewish sect considered the rest of
Judaism apostate, and called its persecutors "the lot of
Belial" (Satan). The phrase is also used in a fragment of a
lost work on
Dioscorus I of Alexandria found at the
Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in 1923 and identified by American theologian
William Hatch. Hatch believes the term refers to the
Council of Chalcedon, which Dioscorus attended in 451 and from which he was deposed and exiled for his
Miaphysitism. In 1653, Quakers Elizabeth Williams and
Mary Fisher attacked members of
Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge as "Antichrists" and called their college "a Cage of unclean Birds and a Synagogue of Satan". For this, they were publicly flogged.
Billy Graham used the phrase "synagogue of Satan" to refer to "one of two types of Jews" in a private 1973
White House conversation with President
Richard Nixon. When tapes of the conversation were released many years later, Graham apologized for what were deemed by many to be antisemitic remarks. The encyclical
Etsi multa, written by
Pope Pius IX in 1873, refers to
Freemasonry as "the synagogue of Satan". ==See also==