Landmarkism
Landmarkism is an attempt to align Baptist theology with Apostolic succession, via a system called Baptist successionism. Landmarkists believe that there have been an unbroken chain of Baptist churches since the time of John the Baptist.
The Trail of Blood is a collection of lectures by Dr J.M. Carroll, a Baptist theologian, about church history and making a case for Landmarkism. According to the book, Early Christianity was Baptist, but following the deaths of the Apostles, many churches became steeped in idolatry and heresy, while a minority retained to the orthodox beliefs. Over time, the orthodox Baptists slowly declined and the "Romanist" churches grew in power. Eventually Novatian, whose theology could be seen as having parallels to that of modern Reformed Baptists, split from Rome and founded his own Church (see Novatianism).
According to Carroll, this church survived much further than Church historians believed and eventual became the Paulician sect in Armenia. Despite the Novatianists and the Paulicians both having similarities to modern Baptists, there is no evidence that they had any connection as the majority of the Novatianist Church was reincorporated into the rest of the church by the 4th century and the dissident Novatianists were extinct by the 5th century, whilst the Paulicians do not show up until the 7th century.
The Paulicians lived alongside another sect known as the Bogomils as they spread into the Balkans. According to Carroll, these sects were actually the same. There is no evidence for this and it is commonly believed that the Paulicians were heavily tied to Biblical Christianity, whilst the Bogomils were neo-Gnostic and opposed to the majority of the Bible, especially the Old Testament.
Berlin Hisel, another Landmarkist scholar, rejected these claims, stating they came from hostile Byzantine scholars with an aim to deride the Baptist church and that the Bogomils actually rejected infant baptism, rather than baptism outright.
Perhaps the most historically improbable claim of Landmarkism is that the Cathars, a neo-Gnostic dualist sect in the 12th - 14th centuries, were actually heavily persecuted proto-protestants who had been slandered by biased Roman Catholic inquisitors. This is highly unlikely, as the amount of forged Cathar texts and scriptures that would've had to be created would've cost the Roman Catholic Church a huge amount.
Landmarkists would then connect the Cathars to later proto-protestant movements such as the Lollards, Hussites and Anabaptists. From there, they claim that these movements founded their Churches prior to the Protestant Reformation, thus providing Baptists with an Apostolic succession.
Despite a lack of historical evidence, many Baptists in the 18th and 19th centuries affirmed the theory. This included the Reformed Baptist pastor, Charles Spurgeon.
