Lateran Council of 649

The Lateran Council of 649 was a synod held in the Basilica of St. John Lateran to condemn Monothelitism, a Christology espoused by many Eastern Christians. The council did not achieve ecumenical status in either East or West, but represented the first attempt of a pope to convene an ecumenical council independent of the Roman emperor.

According to Ekonomou, the irony of the Council was that the denunciation of the theology of Constantinople came from the "collaboration of a Greco-Palestinian pope and a Constantinopolitan monk employing a style of theological discourse whose tradition was purely Eastern". Although Pope Martin I and Maximus the Confessor were abducted by Constans II and tried in Constantinople for their role in the Council (Martin I being replaced as pope before dying in exile), their position was ultimately endorsed by the Third Council of Constantinople in 680.

Most members of the contemporary Roman clergy would have been too uneducated in theology to "grasp even the fundamental issues presented in the Monothelite controversy" due to centuries of decay in both religious and secular learning in the city. However, Rome had been the beneficiary of a brain drain of the Eastern empire, as Greek monks like Maximus the Confessor fled from Africa and the Middle East to Rome. Although the position of the council was substantially similar to that espoused by the Council of Chalcedon, "for the first time in well over a century, the church of Rome would be in a position to debate theological issues with Byzantium from position of equality in both intellectual substance and rhetorical form".

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