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 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 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.
When the protesting children of Roman Catholic Christianity left their mother church, they also rejected its bible, which was Jerome's Latin Vulgate. The Greek texts Jerome had used for his translation was the Western Texts, so-called because they originated inside the Western Roman Catholic Church. Of necessity the Protestants had to find another source of authority for their new-found faith. For this need they turned to what was essentially the only alternative—the large collection of New Testament manuscripts known as the Byzantine Greek Texts, so-called because they surfaced inside the Eastern (Orthodox) Christian Church, which had formally split from the Western Church in the eleventh century. In many important instances the Byzantine Texts differed greatly from the Western Texts, and, as already noted, they also differed greatly in comparison with each other.
In order to use the Byzantine Texts Protestant scholars had to essentially reconstruct a new Greek edition of the New Testament. Such an attempt had already been made by the great Catholic scholar, Erasmus, working in Basel, Switzerland in 1516. However his work left a lot to be desired. Among the many faults in Erasmus' efforts was that he used only a few of the thousands of extant Byzantine manuscripts. As an example of his sloppy work Erasmus used only one manuscript for his translation of the book of Revelation, which indeed was missing six verses. As a substitute for the missing versus Erasmus simply used the Latin Vulgate for "what he supposed the Greek text should read."20 That is why his Greek New Testament has words that do not agree with any known Greek text.
Relevant to this point is that Erasmus, in trying to be the first to get a Greek translation of the Byzantine Texts in print, threw together in a few months what it took his competitors at Alcala de Henares University many years to assemble. (The University's text came to be known as the Complutensian Polyglot.) One critic in England called his work the "least carefully printed book ever published."
For the question of New Testament "infallibility" the main problem with Erasmus' translation, which became known as the "Textus Receptus" or the "received text," is that it formed the foundation for later Greek translations, and hence it essentially forms the foundation of the Protestant New Testament.
The next translator to try his hand at producing a Greek New Testament from the Byzantine Texts, was a "reconstructionist" printer and part-time scholar named Robertus Stephanus (i.e., Robert Etienne). Called the Regia, his Greek Bible was published in Geneva 1551 and must have been more to the liking of the Protestant world because it essentially became the "original Greek" behind the best-known Protestant New Testament, which is to say the Authorized Version or the 1611 King James Bible. In fact, it was this same Stephanus who was responsible for the verse and chapter divisions employed in the present Christian bible.
Although the concept of chapter and verse divisions was in itself a much-needed improvement for bible study, Stephanus' efforts in this area have been greatly criticized because he often broke sentences apart, ruining the train of thought, and inserted chapter breaks in places that broke the continuity of a story. The oddity in this situation is that numerous fundamentalists have argued over the years against anyone trying to correct certain problems caused by Stephanus' clumsy divisions. When, for example, it is pointed out to them that a certain chapter break is in the wrong place, they immediately reprove the individual by declaring that "one doesn't mess around with the infallible word of God!"
But the real problem with the Stephanus translation is that he relied heavily on the translation of Erasmus' Greek text. In fact Stephanus' translation is but a repeat of the fifth Erasmian text with variants. In addition to this Stephanus also used the Greek of The Complutensian Text, which was produced in 1502 under license of Pope Leo X by Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo, Spain. In his work the good cardinal used both the great codices of the Catholic Church (i.e., the Western Texts behind the Latin Vulgate) to augment his limited collection of Byzantine codices, which tells us immediately both the underlying scholarship of Stephanus' text and that of the 1611 King James Bible which was produced almost entirely from Stephanus' work.21
In other words the "inspired original Greek" behind our modern Protestant New Testament, the "infallible word of God," is traceable only to 1502-1516 where we find that it was essentially a piece-mill composition as reconstructed by three different men. And who knows how and by what means they came to select from the thousands of differing texts the final verses for their New Testament?22
The King James Version of the Holy Bible
Ever since its release by King James I back in 1611 the King James Version (KJV) translation has been "the bible" of the majority of English-speaking Protestants. In fact, within the Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of the bible it is virtually always the KJV that is held up as the model. Even today when other translations are used, the majority of fundamentalist ministers strongly recommend that they be checked for "accuracy against the KJV."
Having already seen the real foundation behind the KJV, let's now look a little closer at it history by first noting a glaring flaw. A few years ago the Jewish Publication Society released a new translation of what Christianity calls the Old Testament, which is the same book the Jews call the Tanakh.23 By comparing this translation to the KJV one will immediately notice a great difference: the Tanakh's the translators add numerous footnotes that tell the reader such things as, "Exact meaning of Hebrew uncertain, syntax of Hebrew unclear, the traditional reading madhebah is of unknown meaning, grammar of Hebrew unclear, meaning of first line uncertain."
The immediate question facing the bible student is how the translators of the KJV were able to produce an "inerrant" Old Testament when the so-called guardians of the Jewish bible do not themselves know the meaning of so many of their own Hebrew words? The answer to that question is that they didn't!
When Christian fundamentalist declare that the KJV is the "inerrant" or "infallible" word of God, they don't mention that the present KJV lacks 14 entire books which were in the original King James Bible of 1611—the so-called Apocrypha. They don't mention that the KJV translation has undergone many changes in the last 350 years. They don't remind anyone that the KJV, or the "Authorized Version," was never authorized by anyone other than England's King James I. They don't mention that the original KJV had a calendar of annual holy days which all believers were expected to follow. Days like the Purification of the virgin Mary and The Annunciation of our Lady and Innocents Day.
When the New Testament of the Revised Version (a reworked edition of the KJV) appeared in 1881, the revisers had this to say about the so-called Authorized Version of 1611: "The texts relied on are founded, for the most part, on MSS. [manuscripts] of late date, few in number, and used with little critical skill ..." During the translation disputed points about a given text were settled by a vote of the translators, which, in the case of a deadlock, meant that "God's infallible word" often depended on the deciding vote of the chairman of the translating committee—and his vote depended entirely upon his own religious views.24
As noted above, the man behind the KJV was King James I of England. This man's influence on the translation bearing his name has been negatively commented on by numerous scholars, which is a point that is all but unknown to most Protestants. For instance, King James issued his so-called translation committee 15 rules which they had to follow in their work. Among these were that the "Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops Bible, had to be followed and as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit. When a word hath divers significations, that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by the most of the Ancient Fathers, being agreeable to the Propriety of the Place, and the Analogy of the Faith." Scholars complain that fifteen such rules certainly tied the hands of the translators.
We can add to this point that the translators understood that they had a need to translate certain passages that would uphold King James' "Divine Right of Kings" doctrine which was the cornerstone of his reign—and one, by the way, that caused the English Civil War and the death of his son, King Charles I. If this situation wasn't bad enough, scholars also complain that in certain places the KJV translators changed the meaning of the "original" Hebrew and Greek words to better fit the doctrines of their own Anglican faith. Couple all of this with the fact that the KJV translators were working from a very faulty and piece-meal composition which had flowed from the pens of essentially three men in the previous century, and we have the truth, or perhaps it is better said, we see the farce behind the so-called infallible King James Bible.
This history tells us why Hugh Broughton, the foremost Hebrew scholar of England at that time the KJV was published, rejected the suggestion that he endorse the work by saying that he would rather "be rent to pieces by wild horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of the Bible on the poor people."
As an example of the pitiful situation that surrounded the KJV translation, just two short years after the 1611 edition appeared another edition was released that differed from the 1611 original in over four hundred places. In 1769 Dr. Benjamin Blayney of Oxford produced what he called The Authorized Version, although scholars note that it was never "formally authorized by King or Parliament".25 It was this new edition that dropped the fourteen books of the Apocrypha from the "infallible word of God" while at the same time introducing countless other changes.
If all of this wasn't bad enough, in 1851 the American Bible Society compared six different publisher's editions of the King James Bible then in circulation and discovered over 24,000 variations. One minister rightly asked "how could there be an inerrant King James Bible when even the different editions of the King James Bible had ten's of thousands of variant readings?"
Such a sad state didn't go unnoticed and in 1870 the Church of England formally authorized a revision of the KJV. Fifty scholars, most of whom were Anglicans, went to work. In the New Testament alone some thirty thousand changes were made, with some five thousand based on what they called "a better Greek text." That last notation means that since the time of Stephanus' piece-mill composition men had been steadily working to produce a better "original" Greek New Testament, which was employed by the new translators. These efforts bring us to a something called the Nestle/Aland Greek Text.
Present day New Testament Bible translators use what is called the Westcott and Hort "original" Greek New Testament, titled The New Testament: Translation from the Original Greek, which was produced by Drs. Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort. Interestingly neither Dr. Westcott nor Dr. Hort say where it was that they found the original Greek for their work, nevertheless their work stands behind the Nestle/Aland Greek Text, which was first composed by Eberhard Nestle in 1898. Well-known Christian educator and author Rev. Dr. Donald A. Waite, in his book Defending the King James Bible (p. 39), offers this complaint about the Nestle/Aland translation: "The fact that there have been TWENTY-SIX EDITIONS IN EIGHTY-ONE YEARS (a new edition every 3.1 years) would give you the DISTINCT impression that these men, and their followers, who put confidence in their editions, have NO ASSURANCE WHATEVER of what ARE NOT the very and the exact GREEK WORDS OF GOD in the New Testament!" (The emphasis is Dr. Waite's.)26
Despite the fact that Dr. Waite misses the point that if the New Testament is indeed the word of God, then God has done a miserable job preserving it, his complaint about the present day Greek text behind modern translations speaks volumes about the history of New Testament corruption and needs no further comment.
The Great Codices
To further complicate matters for the "infallible word of God" fundamentalist Christians, within the last few centuries have come the discoveries of the so-called great Uncials, a designation meaning that they were written in Greek capital letters. These works are now the oldest known extant manuscripts of the Christian faith and are as follows: The Codex Alexandrinus from the fifth century AD; the Codex Sinaiticus from the fourth or early fifth centuries; The Codex Vaticanus, the oldest, from the fourth century; the Codex Ephroemi, from the fifth century and the Codex Bezoe from the sixth century.
However, the existence of these mss. is not a welcomed fact in Christendom. This is because they not only disagree with the present-day Christian holy book, these great Uncials show unmistakable signs of having been heavily tampered with. Imagine, the oldest known mss. of the New Testament show disturbing evidence of having been "worked over" by Catholic monks! And, if these facts weren't bad enough, some of the great Uncials include the ancient and so-called spurious books of the bible. For example the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas form part of the Codex Sinaiticus.
To understand why these oldest of all manuscripts are so controversial within fundamental Christianity we need only cite several examples. In 1938 scholar T.C. Skeat examined the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus under ultra-violet light. Under the visible text, he found the following verse which had been erased: "Consider the lilies of the field: they neither card nor spin." Biblical historian Robin Lane Fox writes, "the King James translators have beguiled us with a wrong version; there was growing, no toiling, in what the author wrote. Strictly, there were no 'lilies', because they are a very free translation of the Greek; however, the botanists' favourite candidate for the flower in question (a Sternbergia) would spoil the flow of the saying."27
Another example is Jesus' encounter with the woman taken in adultery. Manfred Barthel writes: "Two passages in this Gospel [John] are not included in the most reliable ancient manuscripts, and stylistic analysis confirms that they were added by another writer."28 Robin Lane Fox writes: "'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her'; 'Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more'. The episode is missing from the surviving fourth-century codices which underpin the rest of the New Testament text; it is not known in an early papyrus or any quotation by an early Christian author, although the subject was relevant to so much which they discussed. Its style is universally held to differ from the rest of the fourth Gospel, and in its present place it interrupts the flow of the text."29
Most Christians are unaware that there are two versions of the Acts of the Apostles. One is almost a tenth longer than the other. "The shorter, usual text is based on one of the main Greek lines, the Alexandrian, whereas the longer alternative is best represented in a book-text, Codex Bezae, of the fifth to sixth century date which contains the Gospels and Acts in Greek and Latin. Its extra wordings and variant readings are sometimes reflected in early Christian quotations or in early papyrus fragments of Acts' text."30
In these few examples we can see why present-day ministers have denounced the great codices as corrupt. Essentially, what we see in the most ancient Greek manuscripts is the evolution, if you'll pardon the expression, of the New Testament Gospel stories. That this is exactly what these mss. prove has caused no small embarrassment for countless theologians who have on more than one occasion said that it was unfortunate that the earliest mss. survived to the present because by their contents they serve no useful purpose for the unity of Christianity, especially in regards to the infallibility of the bible argument.
I can't help but to comment here that if these great Uncials had been in complete agreement with the present-day Christian bible, their discovery would have been hailed as one of the greatest events in Christian history. But the embarrassing truth stands behind the following notice from Christian fundamentalist, Dr. D.A. Waite, in his book Defending the King James Bible. After relating the story about how Professor L.F. Tischendorf discovered the Codex Sinaiticus in a trash basket at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, and buying it for several hundred dollars, Waite quotes a Dr. James Qurollo: "I don't know which of them had the truer evaluation of its worth—Tischendorf, who wanted to buy it, or the monks, who were getting ready to burn it!" Waite adds to this comment, "He had to pay for the trash. It really was that, because of all the heretics' changes."31
In a clumsy effort to dismiss the importance of the most ancient of all Christian bibles, here is one of the more radical excuses offered by Christian fundamentalists: "The oldest extant copies are the most corrupt! ... The oldest fragments of the New Testament are of the 'Western Text,' used by the early Catholic Church fathers in the first three centuries. This type of text is full of spurious additions, notable corruptions, deletions and contradictions. These 'oldest' fragments vary so from each other that there would be no way of knowing what constitutes the New Testament! This 'Western Text' admittedly originated in Rome!"32
With these words ringing in our ears, let's touch on a very significant point. The same Christian fundamentalists laud the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular the Book of Isaiah, as incontrovertible evidence that the Old Testament is valid as the "infallible word of God." That is to say, because the Isaiah scroll essentially agrees with the now accepted book of Isaiah, or the Mesoretic text of the Christian bible, it is proof, say the fundamentalists, of Isaiah's authenticity. This is a fine-sounding argument. However, even within the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls it is one that is fraught with a major pitfall, because among those same Dead Sea Scrolls is a copy of the book of Jeremiah that is more in line with the Septuagint, which is the translation behind the Old Testament of the great Uncials.
This fact aside, the same men who hold up the Dead Sea Scroll example of Isaiah as proving that its great antiquity proves the authenticity of the bible, will not apply the same test to the oldest Greek mss. of the Old Testament. That is because this test, when applied to the New Testament, proves the opposite of what they are claiming, and that is the "infallible" word of God doctrine!
There is, however, a slight exception to this blind stubbornness and that is with the earliest known fragments of the New Testament, which, like the great Uncials, are from the so-called Western Text. Those who denounce the Western text often hold up these fragments, some of which date from the second century AD, up as proof of overall New Testament validity.33 In other words because of their age these fragments are lauded as proof that the New Testament was written by the men to whom later church fathers assigned authorship. But their contents, which often contradict the present-day Byzantine Text-based New Testament, is either denounced (as in the case above) or simply goes unmentioned. If you think this sounds like a double standard—you are right!
But even this argument is weak because none of the early papyrus form a complete New Testament book. In fact there are only some eighty-eight fragments which date before 300 AD. Of this number there are only a few that date before 180 AD. Christian scholars like to say that the errors that are found in these fragments are inconsequential, however we can take the example of two early papyri from the Gospel of John. They overlap across seventy verses, and, as Robin Lane Fox notes, "even if the plain errors of their copyists are excluded, they differ at no less than seventy small places."34
Even with the history of the New Testament squarely in front of them, Christian fundamentalists, in what can only be considered as a dishonest vein, will make statements like this: "None of the modern scholars have thought to look at the bulk of later New Testament Manuscripts—95% of known Greek Biblical Mss—which the Greek people and its church have always used! These later Mss., copied century after century from earlier ones as they wore out, are the fundamental basis of the King James Version (KJV)."
What the author of this statement is referring to is the so-called Byzantine Texts which we have been discussing. There are several things completely dishonest about his statement. One is that modern scholars have indeed "thought to look at the bulk of later New Testament Manuscripts" as we have been noting. Also he fails to mention that the manuscripts that the "Greek people and its church have always used" date back only to the seventh century, with complete texts preserved about 200 years later than this time. He compounds this misinformation with the following notice: "The nearly 4,000 Mss. of this Byzantine or Official Text agree so perfectly with each other that the only work of the critic is to weed out individual scribal mistakes in the copying of each Ms. The text is not in question!"35
This author never bothered to give any sources for his statements, which is wise considering the evidence would expose his dishonesty! Yet, I for one, as a dedicated the "bible is the infallible word of God" advocate, would never have questioned such statements in the past. I would have read this statement in total agreement. Why? Because my natural bias in favor of Christianity led me to accept without question such an argument, just like a born-Buddhist would accept the fundamentals of his faith without question. The fact is that like 99.99% of all Christians I had never bothered to research the history of my New Testament. I had grown up believing in New Testament infallibility and that was good enough for me. What is the fundamentalist rhyme so often quoted—"the bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it!"
The Latin Vulgate
Let us now briefly look at the oldest provable Christian translation, which is the Latin Vulgate. Tradition tells us that it was the work of the Christian saint, Jerome, whose work was heavily influenced by the church father, Origen. It was this earlier church father that produced the Hexapla, which was a reworked edition of the Septuagint, or the original Alexandrian, Egypt Greek edition of the Old Testament, which surfaced in history under disputable circumstances. What is historically certain is that the Septuagint, or the lxx as it is commonly called, became the bible of the early Christian Church.
Although retaining the influence of the lxx, in ca. 393 AD Jerome used the competing Hebrew bible of his time to produce a new translation of the Old Testament. Eventually he augmented this with a new translation of the New Testament, which was based on something called the Old Latin edition. This latter work also has an obscure beginning, the only definite fact being that the surviving fragments exhibit many variations, which means that they are far from representing the "infallible word of God" proclaimed by the Christian Church.
As to Jerome, in time the work of this one man became the authority in Christendom and was not, as noted above, overturned until the Protestant Reformation.
The Septuagint
As just noted, the Septuagint (or lxx) was the foundational text of the early Christian Church's Old Testament bible.36 According to legend it was composed in Alexandria, Egypt by seventy Jewish scholars who, it has been noted, had adopted a definite "Alexandrian" theology—the same theological perspective that produced men like the Jewish neo-plantonist, Philo Judaeus.37 The most notable feature of the Septuagint is that it disagrees with the Mesoretic text, which is the text behind most Protestant bibles. For instance, the lxx rendition of the book of Job is about one-sixth shorter than the Mesoretic Text of the Hebrews. There are large variations in Joshua, I Samuel, I Kings, Proverbs, Esther and Jeremiah and "OT" chronology does not agree with the Mesoretic Text.
More to the purpose of this article is that the Septuagint, written in Greek, would have been totally unacceptable by the Orthodox Jews of first century Judea. This is a destructive fact for Christianity because the Septuagint was apparently the translation used in New Testament quotations: "The New Testament undoubtedly shows a preference for the Septuagint; out of about 350 texts from the Old Testament [cited in the New], 300 favor the Greek version rather than the Hebrew."38
Regarding the use of the Septuagint, one can logically ask how Jesus could have preached to the crowds in Jerusalem and elsewhere using a text that was not only unacceptable to the average Orthodox Jew, but was written in a foreign language? Would he have made on-the-spot translations from Greek into Aramaic? This is especially important when we consider that the first century Jews of Judaea didn't speak the Greek language of the lxx and the common every-day working men who made up the apostles surely lacked the education to use and speak Greek. These points leads us to the blunt accusation that portions of the New Testament were composed by early Greek-speaking church fathers.
Some have rightly asked whether or not the alleged quotes of Jesus from the lxx in the Gospels is the clear evidence of the piecing together of various legends and Jesus-sayings in a late effort by Greek-speaking, Septuagint-reading Gentile men who indeed made up the leadership of the early Christian Church and who were responsible for "preserving" the "original" New Testament? In other words, if the authors of the New Testament scriptures were not Jewish apostles and were indeed the early Greek-speaking church fathers, then the version of the Old Testament that they would have known and quoted from was the Greek Septuagint!
The Original Aramaic
As previously mentioned most scholars agree that the language of Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic. This is a fact that has given rise to the claim that the earliest Gospels were therefore written in Aramaic.
Although this argument seems logical, the Gospels, as just noted, do not bear this fact out. The editors of The Complete Gospels, after first mentioning that most of the quotations or allusions to the Old Testament found in the New depend upon the Septuagint, explain that "The frequent word-for-word agreements between Matthew and Luke are impossible to account for if both were independently translating from Aramaic."39 In other words, the New Testament used by the Christian Church was originally written in Greek.
However, there is a New Testament translation that has been promoted by many as the only reliable text because it is allegedly translated from the "original Aramaic writings" of Jesus' apostles. The translation is known as the Peshitta (reproduced in the Lamsa translation) and purports to have been copied, century after century, from the original Aramaic manuscripts—which are conveniently missing. As to that last assertion history tells us that the earliest version of what is called the Peshitta was known as the Old Syriac, which dates only from ca. 160 AD and survives only in quotes in other writings.
Later surviving manuscripts are the Curetonianus and Sinaiticus, but scholars point out that these translations are really of little value because they were made from an early Greek text with many "Western features." To throw a further "wrench into the works" the Greek text in question was itself revised "on the basis of an early form of the Koine, or Byzantine Greek Text; this revision, eventually called the Peshitta, emerged ca. 400 A.D. to become the standard New Testament of the Syriac Churches."40 In other words the "original" manuscripts of the Peshitta dates only from the fifth century and was not from the "original Aramaic" of the first century apostles, but from fifth century Byzantine Greek texts.
To completely understand the composition of the Peshitta let's look a little closer at its pre-history, meaning the works that were an essential influence. They include a "harmony of the Gospels" called the Diatessaron. According to the church father Eusebius the compiler of the Diatessaron was a man named Tatian a native of Mesopotamia and a disciple of Justin Martyr, meaning that he received his Christian education and training via the Church of Rome. In fact, Tatian is said to have originally composed the Diatessaron in Latin.41
Biblical historians also tell us that this Tatian changed the text of the Gospels during his translation work to support his extreme hostility to sex. Still, it was widely accepted in the Eastern Christian Churches where it made a serious impact on Christian scholarship.42
In ca. 200 AD four different Gospels were translated into the Syriac New Testament. Two manuscripts of the 4th-5th century survive, which were mentioned above: The Sinai Palimpsest and Cureton's ms. of the early 5th century. We read the following in The Encyclopedia Britannica: "The mss. differ considerably in reading, and each has certainly been influenced by the Diatessaron [of Tatian], so that in Syriac-speaking lands about A.D. 400 the Gospel was extant as a Harmony and as 'separated Gospels,'... the single copies having many discordant readings, just as had been the case in Latin before Jerome. To remedy this, Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, prepared a revised edition of the 'Separated Gospels,' freely correcting the text from Greek mss. such as were then current at Antioch: this edition he established by authority and suppressed the Diatessaron with such success that no Syriac copy of the Diatessaron survives, and of the unrevised version only Syr. S and C. Rabbula's revision is now used by both the great divisions of the Syriac-speaking Church: to distinguish it from the elaborate later revision of the (Jacobite) Old and New Testament it is usually called Peshitta, i.e. the simple version ... The Peshitta has only the value of a post-Nicene revision."43
In summation the so-called Peshitta is nothing more than its sister translations and that is a book with a jumbled history produced by the wiles of self-seeking men. It is a history that doesn't lend itself to the "infallibility of the bible" argument!
The New Testament Canon
Perhaps one of the most pointed questions and answers I've read recently is from a magazine article defending the New Testament: "Does it make sense that God would give man His revelation and then stand by helplessly as it became garbled and corrupted? Such an idea is preposterous!"44
I must totally agree with that statement. If a divine being, who created the whole universe, transmitted his divine will into the writing of a book, then it makes no sense that he'd allow that book to become corrupt. This means when one finds a so-called holy writing, claiming to have been handed down from God to mankind, and they find that it is even a little corrupt, then logically one has to conclude that the book is not the divine word of the being who created the universe! With this thought in mind, let's now proceed to the history of the canonization of the New Testament.
Canon is a word describing the much-fought-over, officially accepted books of the Christian Churches which comprise their holy bible. Canonization is the term used to describe the process by which these books became canon. To the untrained ear it all sounds very religious. But to those familiar with ancient church history what canonization really means is that the pious liars, cheats, perverts and murderers who comprised the early Christian Church were the ones who decided irrevocably what books of the New Testament were sacred and what books were to be discarded. In time their pronouncement was backed by torture and a death sentence for anyone who disputed it.
As an example of the kind of men we are dealing with when we discuss the early councils of the Christian Church, let's look at the most famous of all which is the Council of Nicaea called on 20th May 325 AD. The character of the bishops who attended this council can be summed up in this brief admission from the Catholic Church: "The primitive disciplined charity of the early Christians had been diluted by self-willed scholars, ambitious politicians, and easy-going laxists ..."45 These were the men, or church fathers, who had, as historian Michael Grant notes, "crept into the church to secure its benefits."46 And, not only were they politically corrupt in many cases these men were not even interested in Christianity. That the bishop of Troy was known to pray to the sun-god at the same time holding episcopal office is only one example of the kind of church fathers we are dealing with at Nicaea.47
Of course the real power behind the Council at Nicaea was the widely acclaimed first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great. As an example of his Christianity we need only look at the example of his continued devotion to pagan deities long after his conversion. For instance, Constantine removed the great Palladium (the large stone phallus of the sun-god) from Rome to Constantinople, his capital city. On top of this phallus, which he set it up as a symbol of his own masculinity, he placed a statue of himself in the guise of the sun-god Apollo. To this image his faithful subjects bowed and worshiped.
When Constantine called the Council of Nicaea he set the agenda and it was he who issued the final statements decisions. He also let it be publicly known how he would personally deal with those who did not conform to his wishes.
Such tactics set the stage for later councils, such as the Council of Ephesus held in 449 AD, which erupted into bloodshed. When one group of delegates could not get their way, they went after the other side with clubs, until after the battle, they had enforced their decrees on the Christian Church. As one historian wrote: "Fanatical bands of monks terrorized the assembly of Church notables ..."49
For only one example of the character of the early church fathers, we can single out the famous Bishop Eusebius, who is rightly considered as one of Christianity's greatest liars. It is commonly admitted that he forged the Letters between Abgar and Jesus. He falsely declared that he had found the originals and gives a translation of them in his Ecclesiastical History.50 Such an episode was by no means unique and it comments volumes on the integrity of the early church fathers!
However, the notorious lives and history of the early church fathers will be the subject of another booklet. For now, let's see how they arrived at the final canon of the New Testament by first noting how the authorship of the individual New Testament books were determined.
The following quote from a correspondence course lesson offered by a fundamentalist Christian college makes the point: "Prior to the fourth century there was no [official] catalogue of the New Testament canonical books. However, even during the time of the apostles, quotations of some of these books were made by writers of the Christian faith.... Clement, Paul's fellow laborer, referred to I Corinthians as 'Paul's epistle.' ... Tertullion (A.D. 160-220) regarded the four Gospels and most of the books of the New Testament to be genuine. Eusebius of Caesarea (Circa A.D. 260-240) declared in his Ecclesiastical History (A.D. 315) that it was universally admitted that the four Gospels, Acts, the Epistles of Paul, the first Epistles of John, Peter, and Revelation are genuine. The catalogue of origin (circa A.D. 185-254) is the same as that of Eusebius. Jerome's residence in Palestine and great knowledge of the sites of bible history qualifies him to make statements as to the authenticity of the books of the New Testament Scriptures. He [the Catholic Church father Jerome!] assigned authorship of the books to the person whose name the book carried. He assigned the Acts of the Apostles to Luke, and the Epistles of the Hebrews to Paul, noting that there was some doubt as to authorship of this epistle which today is considered anonymous."51
As to the canon itself, history tells us that the first known canon was put together by the "great heretic" Marcion in circa 150 AD. Salomon Reinach notes that, "Down to this time all quotations from 'Scriptures' in the works of the Apostolic Fathers, refer exclusively to the Old Testament."52
Accordingly it was Marcion who collected various books of what would one day be the New Testament. It is very significant that Marcion, being notorious anti-Jewish, deliberately excluded the Old Testament from his teachings. He carried this even further by purging the letters of Paul and Luke of what he considered Jewish traits.53 Despite his obvious lack of character, we find this positive notation about Marcion in The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church: "The significance of Marcion lies in the fact that he compelled representatives of orthodox Christianity to deal seriously with the problems of evil, to think deeply about the biblical teaching concerning creation and redemption, to reexamine the Pauline writings, and to decide upon the question of the canon."54
Let's quote biblical historian Robin Lane Fox here about Marcion's tampering with the NT books: "In the 140s an important Christian, Marcion, troubled many of his fellow Christians by producing a 'Gospel' which abbreviated Luke's so as to suit his theology ... He edited ten letters of Paul, changing and omitting bits which he did not like and also omitted the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. This enterprise played havoc with the written text.... If Christian texts were being changed and edited to this degree, even a gap of a century between the original and its first survival on a papyrus is a long and potentially dangerous time. We simply do not know what may have happened to the author's words at important places."55
We follow the advancement of the New Testament canon by noting that the Thirty-ninth Paschal Letter of Athanasius, who had converted from paganism to Christianity, listed all the books of the present New Testament.56 The editors of The Encyclopedia Britannica tell us the following: "The triumph of the Athanasian Canon, indeed, went along with the triumph of Nicene Christianity. And while the movement received its impulse from Athanasius, the power by which it was carried through and established was largely that of his powerful ally, The Church of Rome."57 The editors of The Oxford Companion to the Bible add that in the Western Church the canon of Athanasius was likely approved at the synod of Rome in 382 AD and that it was definitely confirmed in 405 by papal declaration.58
Here is a partial list of the different books that were considered by the Catholic Church Councils for the canon: A gospel written by Jesus' own hand; letters and other correspondences written by Jesus; letters written by the virgin Mary; Pilate's official report to the emperor of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, with Pilate's confession of faith; the reply to this from Tiberius, and the trial of Pilate; official documents of the Roman Senate about Jesus; Gospels, epistles, acts, by every single one of the twelve apostles; and official documents of church law and government, written in Greek by the apostles. The number comes to about 50 or more documents!59
As to the Gospels themselves, out of which only four were finally selected and canonized, at one time there were 200 different ones circulating in the Christian Church.60 Here are some of the known (or at least the surviving) Gospels, which, keep in mind, were at different times accepted as the "infallible word" of God: The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Signs, Thomas, Greek Fragments of Thomas, Secret Book of James, Dialogue of the Savior, Gospel of Mary, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Infancy Gospel of James, Gospel of Peter, Secret Gospel of Mark, Egerton Gospel, Gospel Oxyrhynchus, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Nazoreans.
With the above facts and the questions they raise one must surely see that the origin of Christianity's canonized bible books is open to grave doubts. They must also surely recognize that these books and the method by which they have been preserved and handed down to this present generation has nothing at all to do with divine intervention and the transmission of the so-called "infallible word of God."
The Synoptic Gospels and the Sayings of Jesus
It is now generally agreed that there was no Gospel account such as we know it today in the first century AD. When such a book was finally produced it is further agreed that the Gospel of Mark was the gospel from which Matthew and Luke were essentially drafted, as the editors of The Oxford Companion to the Bible and many other such competent works note.61
Prior to the Gospel of Mark scholars tell us that the only Christian writings circulating in the first few centuries were the sayings of Jesus. Furthermore these sayings bear traces of having been written originally in Aramaic, which is logical "since this was Jesus' normal language."62
Such information has grave implications for the entire New Testament, which was written in Greek. In other words, if the sayings of the Jewish Jesus were originally written in the first century Jewish language of Aramaic, and they were the only writings known to the early Christians (other than the Old Testament books) then arguably the later Greek books were an addition by Greek-speaking Gentiles—a fact that would easily explain why the legends of pre-Christian pagan crucified savior gods were incorporated into the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life. In essence this is what a discovery in Egypt in 1947 proved!
When The Gospel According to Thomas was found in 1947 amongst the Gnostic Nag Hammadi manuscripts in Egypt in reality it became the oldest known manuscript of Christianity. Even though it was written in Coptic and dates to ca. 350 AD, some portions, which were written in Greek, date to ca. 140 AD. In fact, scholars have determined that the entire mss. is but a translation of a second century original composed in Greek, thus making The Gospel According to Thomas, in certain respects, the oldest known complete mss. of the New Testament in existence.
What The Gospel of Thomas contained was only the sayings of Jesus and they corresponded amazingly close to the sayings found in the four canonized Gospels of the present-day Christian Church. The Gospel of Thomas's discovery should have been a great revelation for the Christian Church ranking right up there with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet the average Christian has never heard of the Nag Hammadi discovery. The question is why?
For one thing The Gospel According to Thomas is a Gnostic Christian work, meaning it is a mixture of pagan theology with Christianity.
Gnosticism is one of those topics that the average Christian will never hear mentioned in a sermon, even though it is an significant part of their heritage. They will never be told, for example, that Gnostic theology competed heavily with the Christian "faith" that finally survived. Nor will they be told that some of the early church fathers were Gnostics and that the way Gnosticism was ultimately defeated in the early Church was by way of compromise. Those compromises explain why traces of Gnosticism are found in the New Testament and why the doctrine of the holy Trinity was adopted into the Christian Church even though it is thoroughly pagan. No, the average Christian will never hear these things because they would necessarily open too many doors behind which a devastating truth is hidden.63
As mentioned above the other significant reason why The Gospel of Thomas isn't mentioned in most Christian churches is because it contains only the sayings of Jesus, which opens one of those forbidden doors and would lead to the revelation that the early sayings were added later to a group of pagan myths. These cold hard facts is why The Gospel of Thomas is ignored by virtually all Christian churches and is kept well hidden from their membership. So much for historical honesty ever becoming stock-and-trade within the Christian Church!
The Pagan Element in the Gospels
The famous Christian historian, Dr. John Laurence von Mosheim, admits that: "... a variety of commentaries, filled with impositions and fables, on our Saviour's life and sentiments, [were] composed soon after his ascent into heaven, by men who, without being bad, perhaps were superstitious, simple, and piously deceitful. To these were afterwards added other writings falsely ascribed to the most holy apostles by fraudulent individuals."64
A footnote to this observation adds: "These [Gospel stories] were all designed, either first to gratify the laudable curiosity of Christians, and subserve the cause of piety; or, secondly, to put to silence the enemies of Christianity, whether Jews or pagans, by demonstrating, from alleged facts and testimony, that Jesus was the Messiah, his doctrines divine, his apostles inspired, etc., or, lastly, to display the ingenuity of the writer, and to gratify the fancy by a harmless fiction."65 If he were still alive my question to Dr. Mosheim would be how, as a Christian, can we distinguish from the "piously deceitful" works of bare-face liars and the truth of the matter?
The editors of The Catholic Encyclopedia admit that, "The genuine Gospels are silent about the long stretches of the life of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Joseph. This reserve of the Evangelists did not satisfy the pardonable curiosity of the many Christians eager for details ... Enterprising spirits responded to this natural craving by pretended gospels full of romantic fables, and fantastic and striking details; their fabrications were eagerly read and accepted as true by common folk who were devoid of any critical faculty and who were predisposed to believe what so luxuriously fed their pious curiosity. Both Catholics and Gnostics were concerned in writing these fictions. The former had no motive other than that of a pious fraud."66
One of the strongest hints that the Gospels were not written by the men to whom the Christian Church fathers assigned them, is that the so-called books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were supposedly written by men who were Jews for Jewish Christians, or more properly, the Nazarenes. But notice that these men, whoever they were, continually refer to "the Jews" in their Gospels as someone distinctly different and alien from themselves. As a Jew, writing in Judaea for the Jews, you would expect the authors to identify themselves with their own people. But notice the opposite instance in the New Testament: Matthew 28:15, "So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day." Mark 7:3, "For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders." Luke 7:3, "And when he heard of Jesus, he sent unto him the elders of the Jews, ..." John 1:19, "And this is the records of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, who art thou?" John 2:6, "And there were set there six water pots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, ... " John 6:4, "And the passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh."
John's Gospel alone has dozens of references to "the Jews" which means that the identity of its author isn't hard to figure out. The the editors of The Complete Gospels write about the Gospel of John: "Nevertheless, this document is ardently anti-Jewish."67
We can further understand the alien authorship of the Gospels by not only citing the above accounts, but by these additional facts: in Luke 5:19 there is mention of a paralytic who was let down through the tiles of the roof to Jesus. Manfred Barthel writes, "Houses with tile roofs were common enough in Athens and Rome, but houses in Galilee were simple, one-room structures with a thatch of reeds and hemps laid over the rafters. Just as Mark uses the Roman system of reckoning time—'the fourth watch of the night'—Luke uses the Greek system of counting days of the week when he writes, 'And Jesus came unto Capernaum on the second day.' This doesn't mean that he was on the road for two days, but that he arrived on a Monday, which is still called 'the second day' in modern Greek." In a note about Zacharias writing on a tablet in Luke 1:63, Barthel writes, "Whereas a wax tablet (which could be written on with a pointed stylus and erased by scraping off the top layer of wax) would have been a common enough household object in Greece, it would have been a rare and expensive luxury in Palestine."68
If one undertakes an exercise to go back into the New Testament texts and consider the way in which the term Jew is applied, it will become evident that the books were written by so-called Gentiles and not Jewish apostles. Moreover, that these Gentiles were actually one and the same with the anti-Jewish Greek and Roman church fathers is a fact that become quite obvious after a detailed study of New Testament and early Christian Church history is complete.69
Conclusion
What is not generally focused upon by either the Protestant or Catholic clergy, and therefore prudently kept from the view of most Christians, is the history of the bible. The average Christian is in complete ignorance of his Christian heritage. He or she will cite the well-rehearsed legends of Jesus or quote some out-of-context favorite verse, but will look at you with a blank stare when you mention any of the facts related in this booklet. My only hope is that you, the reader, will take what is written here and go to the nearest library and seek out the books of scholars, both Christian and secular, and compare their findings and use the logic that all humans were born with to make a final determination.
By way of closing I would like to list some of the more famous bible translations. Read through this list and then contemplate the infallibility claim made by Christianity because all of these bibles contain countless thousands of conflicting and, in some case, fraudulent scriptures and all of these bible at various times were considered by good Christians as the infallible word of God.
From 160 AD, the Old Syriac 160; From the third century Tatian's Diatessaron; From the third century Origen's Hexapla; From the third-fourth centuries, The Old Latin; Jerome's Latin Vulgate. ca. 393 AD; From the fifth century The Peshitta; The Codex Alexandrinus from the fifth century AD; the Codex Sinaiticus from the fourth or early fifth centuries; The Codex Vaticanus, the oldest, from the fourth century; the Codex Ephroemi, from the fifth century and the Codex Bezoe, from the sixth century. Two manuscripts of the 4th-5th century, the Sinai Palimpsest and Cureton's manuscript.
In 1160 AD the French version of Valdus appeared; in 1350 the German Stuttgart translation of the New Testament from the Latin; in 1360 a French version under Charles V; in 1370 a Bohemian German translation of parts of the Teple's version; in 1382 the whole bible in English by Wyclif; in 1394 the German bible of King Wenceslaus; in 1430 the Hussite German Bible; in 11466 the Strasburg Complete German Bible; in 1483 the Kaburger German Bible; the Complutensian Polyglot, which was produced in 1502 under license of Pope Leo X by Cardinal Ximenes de Cisnerosin, and printed in 1514; in 1516 Erasmus produced his Greek New Testament popularly called the Textus Receptus; Robertus Stephanus (i.e., Robert Etienne) produced his Greek New Testament called the Regia, published in Geneva 1551; in 1525 Tyndale's New Testament in English; in 1530 Tyndale's Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament); in 1535 Miles Coverdale's Bible made from Luther's works and the Latin Vulgate; in 1537 Matthew's Bible; in 1539 Tavernier's Bible; in 1539 The Great Bible made on authority of Archbishop Cranmer; in 1557 Whittingham's New Testament; in 1560 the Geneva Bible; in 1568 the Bishop's Bible, a revision of the Great Bible; in 1582 the Rheims Bible from the Latin Vulgate; in 1609-10 the Rheims-Douai Bible; in 1611 the King James Version; 1769 Dr. Benjamin Blayney's The Authorized Version; in 1881 the Revised New Testament in English; in 1885 The Revised Old Testament in English; Nestle/Aland Greek Text from the close of the nineteenth century; Westcott and Hort's The New Testament: Translation from the Original Greek; modern translations include, The American Standard Version, The Revised Standard Version, The Living Bible, Weymouth's New Testament in Modern Speech, The Moffatt Bible, The Fenton Bible, The Goodspeed Bible or The Complete Bible: An American Translation, Phillips' The New Testament in Modern English, Barclay's The New Testament: A New Translation, Schonfield's Authentic New Testament, Scofield's Reference Bible, New World Translation, New Revised Standard Version, The Revised English Bible, Good News for Modern Man, Good New Bible, The Amplified Bible, The Modern Language Bible, New American Standard Bible, The New International Bible, The Jerusalem Bible, The New Jerusalem Bible, The New American Bible and The New King James Version!
We could add to this list bibles that were published in other languages, such as in Germany. There we find Martin Luther's translation, or that of Philipp Melanchthon and Matthaus Aurogallus, the Zwingli Bible, Johann Piscator's bible, J. Friedrich Haug's bible, or the bibles of Franz Eugen Schlachter, Hermann Menge, Hans Bruns, or Hieronymus Emser's New Testament, Johann Dietenberger's bible, Caspar Ulenberg's revision of the bible, Johann Eck's bible, Heinrich Braun's bible, which was revised first by J.F. Allioli and later by B. Weinhart and S. Weber, J.H. Kistemacher bible, Konstantin Rosch and Eugen Henne bible, Pius Parsch's Klosterneubert, the Herder Bible, the Bishops' Bible—Einheitsubersetzung or the common language translation Die gute Nachricht. We could carry this on almost indefinitely, put the point, I feel, is made.
Given the history of the New Testament, my closing question to you, the reader, is which of the above bibles do you care to accept as the infallible word of God?
ENDNOTES:
(1) Vol. I, p. 316.
(2) Vol. IV, p. 498. The Catholic Encyclopedia was published in 1910.
(3) Volume VI, p. 658. Emphasis is the author's throughout unless otherwise noted.
(4) p. 2.
(5) From Snow, Is Christianity A Fraud? A Preliminary Assessment of the Conder Thesis, p. 11, citing McDowell, Josh, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, p. 44.
(6) Quote from the author's response, By Gosh-Josh! An Answer to Eric V. Snow, Salt Lake City, Utah: 1997, p. 20.
(7) Smith, Man and His Gods, pp. 228, 253.
(8) As quoted in Graham, Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, p. 444.
(9) Wheless, Forgery in Christianity, p. 58.
(10) Graham, Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, p. 444.
(11) Barrett, While Peter Sleeps, p. 223.
(12) DeRosa says that this pontiff "... never doubted this blasphemy was his due." Vicars of Christ, p. 67
(13) Halley, Halley's Bible Handbook, p. 776.
(14) Leo XIII, The Great Encyclical Letters of Leo XIII, 3rd ed. p. 304, extracted from The Reunion of Christendom, 20 June, 1894.
(15) 11th ed. Volume 13, p. 516.
(16) Graham, op. cit., pp. 457-458.
(17) Graham, op. cit., p. 444.
(18) Graham, op. cit., p. 458.
(19) Galileo published his work, Dialogo in 1632. Essentially building upon the theory of Copernicus, he was able to demonstrate the fallacy of the church s teaching that the earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it.
(20) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 490.
(21) See The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. V, pp. 289-290.
(22) The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 353. The Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed., vol. 3, p. 518. As to why the majority of Greek manuscripts date back only one thousand or so years, Forlong's Encyclopedia of Religions notes: "From the days of Jerome (400 A.C.) to those of Roger Bacon (1290 A.C.) original study of the Greek Bible ceased, and scarce a Greek Testament was to be found in the monasteries.... Roger Bacon said: 'There are not five men in Christendom who know Greek, and Hebrew, and the Arabik [sic] grammar." Volume I, pp. 429-430.
(23) In the Jewish bible the "Old Testament" is divided into three sections called the Torah, or the Law, the Nevi'im, or the Prophets and the Kethuvim, or the Writings. The first letters of these words, TNK, have been used to create a Hebrew word, Tanakh, by which the Jews designate their bible.
(24) Forlong's Encyclopedia of Religions, vol. 1, p. 300.
(25) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 760.
(26) p. 39.
(27) Fox, The Unauthorized Version, pp. 140-141, referring to Matthew 6:28.
(28) What the Bible Really Says, p. 352.
(29) The Unauthorized Version, p. 143.
(30) Fox, op. cit., p. 141.
(31) Waite, Defending the King James Bible, p. 60.
(32) In another publication, Dr. D.A. Waite writes this about the oldest codices: "... [they] had very little, if any, use by their owners. I believe this was true because the owners recognized them to be perverted texts, having been defaced and polluted by heretics and others ... they are neither the best nor the purest. They were corrupted by heretics." Defending the King James Bible, p. 59.
(33) Current Era. This means the same as "A.D." or "AD" (Anno Domini—Latin for "The Year of Our Lord").
(34) Fox, op. cit., p. 139.
(35) Information from an Ambassador College bible course, ca. 1972, Pasadena, California, p. 4.
(36) The Roman numerals, lxx, is the standard symbol for the Septuagint, because, according to legend, it was first translated into Greek by 70 Jewish scholars.
(37) This can be demonstrated, in one instance, by the works of Philo Judaeus, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt in the first part of the first century AD.
(38) Volume III, p. 271.
(39) The Complete Gospels, p. 250.
(40) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 754.
(41) The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 296, says that it is theorized that the Diatessaron was originally composed in Latin.
(42) Fox, op. cit., pp. 139-140.
(43) 14th ed., vol. 3, p. 517. (43) 14th ed., vol. 3, p. 517. Editor's note: It has been pointed out by an amateur Aramaic enthusiast (Paul Younan of www.Peshitta.org) that since the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published, some current New Testament scholars doubt Rabbula's work on the Peshitta. He is, in fact, correct. Although there is no solid facts, circumstantial evidence has led many to suppose other, obscure hands produced the text used for the current translations of the Peshitta, while other scholars still hold that Rabbula was the original translator. However, history shows that Rabbula was the driving force behind the thorough suppression of the Diatessaron of Tatian, which, if logically considered, means Rabbula must have had another version ready to promote in its place, whether or not he was its translator. Nevertheless, this author thanks Mr. Younan for pointing out this minor update in the on-going historical Christian soap opera. (The full exchange between Darrell Conder and Paul Younan may be seen on darrellwconder.com's Debate Page.)
(44) The World Ahead, October-November 1994, p. 22.
(45) Knights of Columbus, The Catholic Pilgrimage, p. 4.
(46) Grant, Constantine the Great, p. 161.
(47) Ibid., p. 136.
(48) Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, p. 764.
(49) Nigg, The Heretics. p. 121.
(50) See Wheless, op. cit., p. 115.
(51) Zion Faith College, lesson no. 1, pp. 3-4.
(52) Reinach, Salomon, Orpheus. (New York: Horace Liverlight Inc., 1930), p. 229.
(53) Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity, book II, p. 207, citing Irenaeus, bk. I. c. 25, p. 219. See also The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 629.
(54) op. cit.
(55) op. cit., pp. 139-140.
(56) The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 103
(57) 11th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 876-7.
(58) pp. 103-4.
(59) Wheless, op. cit., p. 101. See also, The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VI, p. 656.
(60) "As late as 450, Bishop Theodore of Cyrrhus said there were at least 200 different Gospels revered by the churches of his own diocese, until he destroyed all but the canonical four." Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia ..., p. 467, citing Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician, p. 2 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978)
(61) p. 356. The Synoptic Gospels are those who present the story of Jesus from an apparent common source and refers to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. "There are some powerful arguments to support this conclusion: 1. Agreement between Matthew and Luke begins where Mark begins and ends where Mark ends. 2. Matthew reproduces about 90% of Mark, Luke about 50%. They often reproduce Mark in the same order. When they disagree, either Matthew or Luke supports the sequence in Mark. 3. In segments the three have in common, verbal agreement averages about 50%.... These facts and the close examination of agreements and disagreements in minute detail have led scholars to conclude that Mark is the adopted basis of Matthew and Luke.... Mark is responsible for the chronological outline of the life of Jesus represented by the synoptics; Matthew and Luke do not have independent evidence for the order of events." The Complete Gospels, p. 8.
(62) The Oxford Companion to the Bible p. 356.
(63) The famous historian Edward Gibbon in his book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes: "The Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name ... They were almost without exception of the race of the Gentiles, and their principal founders seem to have been natives of Syria or Egypt ... The Gnostics blended with the faith of Christ many sublime but obscure tenets, which they derived from Oriental philosophy ..."
(64) Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, Vol. I, pp. 93-94.
(65) Note 5, p. 94.
(66) Volume I, p. 606.
(67) "Traditionally translated into English as 'Jews,' the term [Ioudaioi] is indistinguishable in Greek from 'Judeans'." p. 197.
(68) What the Bible Really Says, pp. 337-339.
(69) Perhaps I should answer here the defending argument that the Gospels were written for Gentiles and not the Jews. As we shall see in the coming chapters, if this is the case, then that fact alone should disprove the validity of the New Testament. You see, the Messiah was clearly to come to Israel—all of Israel—not to the Gentiles, and if the Christians abandoned this foundation by going to the Gentiles with their "Gospel" message, then they were not truly followers of the Messiah of Israel. In fact, recall that Jesus himself supposedly admonished his followers not to go to the Gentiles and instructed them to go unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel only. Again, this will be discussed in exacting detail later, but it should in part answer any criticism on what we have just covered.
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