   The publication of Rheticus’s Narratio prima did not create a big stir against the heliocentric thesis, and so Copernicus decided to publish On the Revolutions. He added a dedication to Pope Paul III (r. 1534–1549), probably for political reasons, in which he expressed his hesitancy about publishing the work and the reasons he finally decided to publish it. He gave credit to Schönberg and Giese for encouraging him to publish and omitted mention of Rheticus, but it would have been insulting to the pope during the tense period of the Reformation to give credit to a Protestant   minister.[11]   He dismissed critics who might have claimed that it was against the Bible by giving the example of the fourth-century Christian apologist Lactantius, who had rejected the spherical shape of the earth, and by asserting, “Astronomy is written for astronomers” (Revolutions,   5).[12]   In other words, theologians should not meddle with it. He pointed to the difficulty of calendar reform because the motions of the heavenly bodies were inadequately known. And he called attention to the fact that “if the motions of the other planets are correlated with the orbiting of the earth, and are computed for the revolution of each planet, not only do their phenomena follow therefrom but also the order and size of all the planets and spheres, and heaven itself is so linked together that in no portion of it can anything be shifted without disrupting the remaining parts and the universe as a whole” (Revolutions, 5).