Synagogue of Satan
The term Synagogue of Satan has various New Testament and related theological uses. In the letters to the early Christian churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, Jesus makes reference to a "synagogue of Satan", in each case referring to a group persecuting the church "who say they are Jews and are not".
The verse has often been used to justify antisemitism. Evangelical scholars broadly disagree with these interpretations, based on the fact that the suspected author of Revelation was likely Jewish.
Other uses
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".The phrase is also used in a fragment of a lost work on Pope [Dioscorus I of Alexandria|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".