Not so very long ago I was one of those fundamentalist Christians who stubbornly held that the bible was the inspired word of God and was therefore completely infallible. "Every word in the bible is God-breathed," I used to preach to my fellow fundamentalists who would instinctively shake their heads in agreement. But this belief began to come apart at the seams when I concluded a long-overdue bible study and had to finally admit that the "infallible" Christian bible contained hundreds of contradictions and discrepancies. This conclusion, in turn, led me to a thorough examination of Christian Church history and how the bible came to be. The shocking truth essentially sounded the death-knell for my life-long Christian faith. It was then that I was forced to finally admit that I, along with a few billion other Christians, had been the victim of the world's greatest and longest-running hoax!
Like all fundamentalist Christian children, from my earliest childhood I was taught that the bible is the infallible word of God and was beyond question. "It is a book that should guide every aspect of one's life" I was told and thus grew up believing. Like a looming thunder cloud, this lesson followed me around throughout my youth, always ready to rain on my every decision. With "God's word" ever-present and sitting in perpetual judgment I often suffered terrible pangs of guilt because I was living my life the way I wanted.
Eventually I surrendered to my childhood belief in the "word and will of God," gave up my "worldly ways," and began to regularly attend church. Armed with my preconceived Christian prejudice, which were shored up by my weekly church attendance, over the coming years I often cornered those from other Christian denominations to preach my own brand of fundamentalism. In this endeavor I was fairly successful. My approach would always start by asking a potential convert if we could agree that the bible was the word of God? Because I had carefully selected my targets I don't recall anyone ever disagreeing - which meant from that point we, as two Christians, would begin to argue about what the "word of God" actually said in an effort to shoot down each others beliefs.
One of my strongest arguments against opposing Christian doctrines was that the bible says that we should prove all things. That is the key, I would say, to finding the real truth. I would then caution that one shouldn't believe something just because they had been brought up to do so. "Like the bible says, you should PROVE IT," I would emphasize! The interesting - or perhaps it is better said the hypocritical - thing was that never once did it occur to me to apply this principle to the foundations of the bible itself to test its claims of infallibility. The admonishment to "prove all things" would certainly apply to the bible's foundations. However, when it came to the bible at that time I thoroughly believe the cute little fundamentalist Christian ditty, "God said it, I believe it and that settles it!" This attitude was a blind prejudice that was about to change.
In the past all of my religious research had been conducted within a biblical framework. In the past if any thought or idea, whether expressed by an individual or a reference book, contradicted the bible, either outwardly or seemingly, I immediately rejected it. Like billions of Christians before me I would probably have continued in this state of affairs had not a series of unforseen events finally forced me to admit two things. One was that the book I had always believed and preached to be the word of God indeed had some serious problems. The other was that, like a computer, my mind had been programmed from birth to believe certain things as fact, and, like a computer, I finally realized that I had been unable to operate outside the parameters of my programming! This effectively meant that throughout the whole of my Christian life I had never studied to find the truth about the bible but rather I studied only to shore up what I already believed. In this booklet, and somewhat belatedly, I intend to correct this oversight.
Fortunately, like a computer, it is possible to change one's programming. In my case I did this by simply deciding to open my eyes and accept the facts - good or bad - as I found them. To settle a long-overdue account in my life, the results are laid out in this booklet. What I ask here is if the Christian bible is indeed the infallible word of God, or is it, as the critics claim, nothing more than a book written by self-seeking men? In the following pages I will present my research and answer this question.
Things Your Minister Never Told You!
To get an overall perspective of the question of biblical infallibility, let us start by first mentioning that there are two so-called families of Greek texts that stand behind the Christian New Testament. They are the Western Texts and the Byzantine Texts. Regarding these Greek texts, notice the following admission in Forlong's Encyclopedia of Religion: "There are some 1,760 MSS. to be compared; and the various readings are computed at 150,000. The revisors confess to 100,000 in 1,500 MSS."1 In other words there are 150,000 conflicting words or verses in the "original" Greek New Testament from which Christianity derives its holy book.
The 1908 editors of The Catholic Encyclopedia, representing a church that still fully believes is the infallibility of the bible, back the above statement in Forlong's by offering this weak excuse: "It is easy to understand how numerous would be the readings of a text transcribed as often as the Bible, and, as only one reading can represent the original, it follows that all the others are necessarily faulty. Mill estimated the variants of the New Testament at 30,000, and since the discovery of so many MSS. unknown to Mill, this number has greatly increased."2 Concerning the New Testament Gospels they note: "The existence of numerous and, at times, considerable differences between the four canonical Gospels is a fact which has long been noticed and which all scholars readily admit."3
The editors of The Complete Gospels, noting that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are preserved in about 3,500 different and often conflicting manuscripts, bluntly tell their readers how Christianity came to have the present Gospels: "The Greek texts behind our English translation is a reconstruction produced by patient and exacting comparison of thousands of differences in wording among the numerous copies."4
By 1989 the Munster Institute for New Testament Textual Research had catalogued 5,488 Greek New Testament manuscripts. Only 59 of these contain the entire New Testament, while roughly 1500 contain only the Gospels. The relevant information about these 5,488 manuscripts is that virtually all of them differ one from the other!
By way of defending such damaging information, fundamentalist Christian apologist Eric V. Snow, who has written extensively both against my research and me personally, first acknowledges that there are 200,000 estimated variations in the New Testament, but then excuses this fact with the following remark: "Scholars Geisler and Nix, building upon the work of F.J.A. Hort, said only about 1/8 have weight, with 1/60 being 'substantial variation.'"5
My answer to Eric Snow, which I have published elsewhere, was that these statistics do not form much of a defense: "Okay Eric, let's get out our handy pocket calculators. Take the 200,000 NT variations you admit to and divide by 8; we have 25,000 NT variations which your quoted scholars, Geisler and Nix, said have weight. Now, let's divide 200,000 by 60. We come up with 3,333 New Testament variations which your two scholars said were substantial! Taking the low number of 3,333 substantial variations, we still have a major headache for those who uphold the infallibility of the New Testament!"6
The Clergy
Most Christians are completely ignorant of any information that puts the bible in a bad light. This is true even though such knowledge is readily available in countless authoritative works and is openly taught at many religious colleges. That is because any damaging information has been purposely hidden by a clergy that has no illusions as to how their "flocks" would react if they knew the truth about the bible.
As a prime example of this deception in action we need only mention that fundamentalist Christian ministers are notorious for attacking secular and so-called liberal Christian scholarship, which openly and bluntly publishes information like that presented above. In fact such ministers spend as much time denouncing "liberal scholarship" as they do in preaching from "God's infallible" bible. Again I can use the example of Eric Snow, as well as a few dozen ministers from his church, who consistently pointed out that my information had come from "liberal" scholarship. Knowing full well that their congregations had been programmed to react with horror at the mention of such a satanic institution, these ministers were often successful in warning people away from reading my material. In one very real sense, however, the blame for such zealous fundamentalist actions cannot be laid fully at the feet of the present-day clergy. These men are simply utilizing their ministerial training and are carrying on a long Christian tradition.
When Christianity became the religion of the Holy Roman Empire during the rule of Constantine the Great, the entire character of the church underwent a change. The first move was to cement the power and authority of the Christian Church throughout the empire. With empirical backing the mass conversion of pagans took place by some rather inventive methods. One was by offering money to new converts. Another, and more successful, was by the Christian Church's absorption of pagan doctrines, gods, goddess and customs into their ever-expanding catalogue of theology and tradition. When the church had sufficiently accomplished their objectives they proceeded to outlaw pagan religions. Ancient church history is full of examples of the willful destruction of pagan temples and idols, or, as happened in numerous cases when seeking to convert the pagan masses, the church simply rededicated the temples along with their idols as Christian churches and images of Christ, the Virgin Mary and/or as saints.
This new Holy Roman Church also began a concentrated effort to abolish secular education. Under this policy tremendous amounts of historical materials were forever lost to the world, such as the contents of the ancient Palatine Apollo Library which was burned on the orders of Pope Gregory the Great (A.D. 540-604). His decree stated that the library was to be burned "lest its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation of heaven."7 By noting that the library contained thousands of scrolls dealing with the pagan Mystery religions, and also noting that many of these predated Christianity by centuries, the pope might just have well said "lest its secular literature expose the origin of the Christian Church!"
This is why anything that dealt with pagan religions was savagely attacked: Every book in the Gnostic Basilides, Porphyry's thirty-six volumes, 27,000 papyrus rolls of the Mysteries were all burned by order of the church. As Edward Carpenter writes: ". . . [the Christians] took special pains to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own dishonesty."8
Concerning the great library of Alexandria, built by Ptolemy, Joseph Wheless writes: "This Library became the most extensive and celebrated of the ancient world, containing some 700,000 manuscript books at the time it was savagely destroyed, in 391 A.D., by the benighted Christian zeal and fury of Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria and his crazy monks of Nitria, as related in Kingsley's Hypatia or any history of the times."9
This official policy of destroying anything that could in any way call into question the origin of Christianity continued throughout the history of the Christian Church. For instance, when the Spanish invaders arrived in South America one of their first acts was to order the mass destruction of the ancient libraries of the Aztecs. This was imperative when the priests discovered that the natives had a pagan religion that virtually mirrored their own. With native religious customs like a crucified savior god who was born of a virgin, a Eucharist and adoring a golden cross as the symbol of their salvation, the priests had ample reason to be zealous in their actions. We can add to this example that of the Christian Crusaders who destroyed every book and scroll in the so-called holy land that came their way.
Knowing full well how the Christian Church got its bible, and after burning tons of ancient books and scrolls to keep this information concealed, Pope Gregory, who had denounced "all secular education as folly," commanded that the common people should not read the bible.10 And thus the protectors of the "faith of Christ" kept their holy book from any close scrutiny. From that time on the common people could only hear selected bits and pieces of the bible in sermons as read and then interpreted by their priests. Pope Gregory's orders were to finally become the rule of Christianity: "In 1234, the Synod of Taragona declared that ipso facto anyone was a heretic, who, having in his possession a copy of the Scriptures in the vernacular, refused to surrender it to be burned within eighty days."11
The prohibition against bible reading was further made sure by the fact that the Christian Church virtually stamped out education in the Holy Roman Empire. By the Middle Ages ninety-nine percent of Europe couldn't read or write, a number that often included ruling kings and princes.
The absolute control of king and commoner by the church is easily understood in the title of that powerful and notorious pope, Innocent III. In 1198 he was crowned "FATHER OF PRINCES AND KINGS, RULER OF THE WORLD, VICAR OF CHRIST and GOD".12 Innocent, whose name is a joke because he is noted in history as the father of the infamous "holy" Inquisition, added to his power by claiming that "All things on earth and in heaven and in hell are subject to the Vicar of Christ."13 Pope Leo XIII said "We hold upon this earth the place of God Almighty."14
With the bible reading suppressed and the highest place in Western civilization secured, church leadership moved swiftly to suppress knowledge in general, especially in regards to science. The ancient scientists, Democritus and Leucippus, taught the atomic theory of matter in the fifth century BC. Even though the ancient scientist Eratosthenes had measured the circumference of the earth in the third century BC, and his colleague Hipparchus invented longitude and latitude in the second century BC, the church, taking their information from the bible, declared that the earth was flat. In their "infallible" declaration the church was free and completely unopposed because they controlled all avenues that might call into question their brand of science. After all, they had already burned Eratosthenes' books, an act that is surely behind this notice in The Encyclopedia Britannica: "None of his many works has survived except a Commentary on the Phaenomena of Aratus . . ."15
In contrast to Christendom, at the time most Christian kings and princes in couldn't read or write, a Moorish king had a library of 600,000 books available to his subjects. The Moorish city of Cordova had eight hundred public schools, while only one percent of Europe was literate. Religious historian Lloyd Graham writes: "It was difficult to encounter even a Moorish peasant who could not read and write. . . . In Christian Europe scholars were burned at the stake; in Moorish Europe they were the highest paid men in the realm. One Moorish king gave his leading scholar forty thousand pieces of gold each year, while in Christendom, Roger Bacon, credited with inventing the camera, clock, telescope and lens, gunpowder and steam power, was imprisoned fourteen years as a sorcerer and heretic."16 Indeed, once the Spanish had driven the Moors out of Europe, Cardinal Ximenes "delivered to the flames in the square of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts."17
Such an attitude towards the sciences meant that the Christian Church was directly responsible for the "Black Death," a plague that killed between one-third to one-half of Europe's population. The church's attitude towards medical science can be summed up in the Christian wisdom of St. Augustine who declared: "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment first-baptized Christians, yea, even the guileless newborn infant."18 And what was one of the most oft recommended remedies advanced by the church in place of medical science? They recommended "holy water" or the cures of relics, that is to say the touching the bones of the saints, or vials of Jesus' blood, or pieces of the "true Cross," or a piece of the wing of the archangel Gabriel, etc. All of these "Christian cures" were for sale from the Christian Church.
Anyone who attempted to conduct true scientific experiments ran the extreme risk of being branded a heretic. In Christian terminology "heretical" means anything that opposed the dogma of the church and "God's infallible word" and the punishment for this sin was death by burning.
As yet one more example of the church's relentless war on secualr education, early in the seventeenth century one of history's greatest scientist was put on trial for his life charged in an Ecclesiastical court with heresy. Despite his reputation and his advanced age, before the "trial" he had been tortured relentlessly by men claiming to be representing Jesus Christ. His "heretical crime" was to challenge the Christian Church s position that the earth was the center of the universe and therefore that the "universe" revolved around the earth.
After he could no longer endure the torture, and remembering that his colleague, Giordano Bruno, had been burned at the stake for doing the same kind of research that he had been conducting, this old man broke down and recanted. Being led before a group of pious robed Christian clerics, the great Galileo admitted the following: "I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth." And thus the church that had already declared the earth to be flat because that is what the bible teaches, was secure in its belief that the earth did not move but stood stationary at the center of the universe.19
It would not be until 1865 that the major crack came in the strict domination of Christianity over education. Up until that time virtually all universities appointed religious authorities to supervise all fields of scientific inquiry. In 1865 Cornell University was founded and, under a great deal of protest, became the first school to put an end to this practice.
However, when the Christian world finally broke free of the murderous grip of the fanatic fundamentalism, intellectual freedom was far from being a reality. Even after the clergy no longer had the power to tortured and burn people at the stake for thinking or for reading a forbidden book, they still used their considerable influence in people's lives. Evoking the fear of Satan and an ever-burning hell fire in the minds of the faithful, most Christian denominations have at one time forbidden their members to read "un-Christian" books. (In fact, the Roman Catholic Church still produces a list of banned books and films, which is an example that is unofficially followed by numerous fundamentalist churches.) Let us recall that only recently one of the largest Christian fundamentalist groups in America called upon its faithful members to boycott a certain Hollywood studio because they had endorsed a policy that went against the "fundamental teachings of the bible."
However, to the chagrin of the fundamentalists, one of the few fortunate byproducts of late twentieth century life is that people in the West are free—at least in theory if not reality—to read and question anything they want. In the following chapter we are going to see why it was that the church fathers of bygone ages took such great pains to keep Christians from reading and examining the bible.
Original Greek—Indeed!
Over the past centuries countless Christian ministers and scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, have appealed to the "original Greek" of the New Testament while attempting to make some theological argument which may have indeed formed the foundation of an important doctrine. My own former church, which was a Sabbatarian Christian denomination, was quite prolific in using this argument in their efforts to shore up certain key doctrines. The question here is what comprises the original Greek? At every turn one will find that this is a complicated and virtually impossible question to answer.
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