32 page printout, pages 24 to 55 of 322
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY

"Being crafty, I caught you with guile" ...
For if the truth of God hath more abounded
through my LIE unto his glory; why yet am
I also adjudged a sinner?"
St. Paul.


"What profit has not that fable of Christ
brought us!"
Pope Leo X.

**** ****

CHAPTER I

PAGAN FRAUDS -- CHRISTIAN PRECEDENTS

"Neither in the confusion of paganism, nor in the
defilement of heresy, nor yet in the blindness of Judaism, is
religion to be sought, but among those alone who are called
Catholic Christians." (St. Augustine, De Vera Religions, v.)


EVERY RELIGION, PRIESTCRAFT, and Sacred Book, other than the
Roman Catholic Christian, is thus branded as false in fact and
fraudulent in practice. The Jews, however, excluded by those who
have expropriated their ancient faith, make the same imputations of
falsity and fraud against the Christian religion, based on their
own ancient sacred Scriptures, and founded, as the Christians
claim, by a Jewish Incarnation of the Hebrew God, -- which, say the
Jews, is a horrid blasphemy; and they brand the Sacred Books of
Christian origin as false and forged.

The Christians, all their hundreds of warring Sects, in their
turn impute to the Jews the blasphemous repudiation and monstrous
murder of the Son of the ancient Hebrew God, Yahweh; and with ample
usury of blood and torture have visited that fabulous iniquity upon
the hapless sons and daughters of Jewry unto half a hundred
generations of "God's Chosen People."

But, of the countless Sects of Christians, one alone, it
avers, is of the True Faith; all the others are false and beyond
the hope of heaven: "Whoever will be saved, it is necessary above
all else that he hold to the Catholic Faith," -- so reads the
venerable forged Athanasian Creed. (CE. ii, 33, 34.) The Protestant
Sects, however, though they all admit the same origin and accept in
full fatuity of faith most of the same forged sacred writings for
their rule of faith as the One True Church, yet apply the scornful
epithet "Antichrist" to their venerable Mother in Christ; freely
dub a dozen of her canonical sacred Books of Jewish origin, and
most of her thousands of canonized Saints, forgeries and frauds;
and assert many of her most holy dogmas and sacraments to be
blasphemous and degrading superstitions. The while their own scores
of hostile factions mutually recriminate each the other as blind
leaders of the blind and perverters of the sacred Truth.




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It will serve a useful purpose to take a look behind all this dust-and-smoke screen of "Odium Theologicum" and make a brief
survey of the origins of religious superstitions and priestcraft,
and of the known and admitted falsities and frauds of Paganism, and
some venerable other religious 'isms.' This will demonstrate that
these same things are now part and parcel of Christianity. This
induces the inquiry, Wherein the data of Christianity as a whole
may haply differ from the admitted frauds of the false religions
and priestcrafts of the Past. We shall learn whether and to what
degree truth may be found in any of the confused and confusing
Christian claims of Truth.

THE DAWN-MAN AND THE SHAMAN

"There is no origin for the idea of an after-life save
the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion
suggested by dreams." -- Herbert Spencer.

Lo, the poor Indian, with his untutored mind, saw his god in
clouds and heard him in the wind. Ages before him, the Dawn-man,
the earliest Cave-man, saw his shadow in the sun, his reflection in
the water, and crudely thought that he had a sort of shadowy
double, which accompanied him and at times showed itself visible to
him. At night, when the Dawn-man, gorged with raw and often putrid
flesh, in a night-mare dream saw terrible monsters assailing him,
or in more normal sleep wandered forth and visited distant scenes
of his previous roamings, or saw, as in the flesh living and acting
before his eyes, his dead father or friend, thus he got further
immature notions of a double, "ka," or detachable spirit of man,
dwelling within him, which could leave the body and return at will,
or which survived the death of the body and lived on in spirit
form, and could revisit the old habitation and hold converse with,
do good or harm to, the frightened living. Thus came the belief in
the existence and survival after death of this double or spirit-
ghost, thus the notion of the immortality of the soul, it primitive
belief held by every people of antiquity, and surviving yet by
inheritance among the priest-taught of modern times.

These strange phantoms of the night naturally worked further
upon the fear-filled mind of the early child-men, terrified by the
frightful vicissitudes of life, the violent deaths by wild animals,
the storms and floods that killed and maimed them, the lightnings
and thunders that terrified them. All these things were to them
clearly the manifestations of the anger and revenge of the departed
spirits, especially of the Old Man of the clan who had bossed it
in life and had grudges against all who had not been sufficiently
obedient to him. Awaking from these dread visions of the night, the
frightened Down-man would relate the uncanny visitations to his
fellows, who would have like ghostly dream-stuff to exchange;
together they would wonder whether something could be done to
propitiate or pileate the wandering ghost-men and to win their
favor for benefits to be had from their superior other-worldly
status and powers.

It could not be long before some old and crafty member of the
nomadic clan would hint that he had known the Old Man well during
life, had been very friendly with him living and had a powerful


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influence with him; that he was wise to the ways and whims of
ghosts or gods; and no doubt he could get in touch with his spirit
and cajole him into reasonableness and favor. This suggestion
meeting with awed acquiescence, it would quickly be followed by the
forthright bold claim to super-ghostly powers, and by sundry weird
mumblings and mystic rites and incantations the old faker would
further awe the clan into credulous faith in the claim. The new
spiritualist would pretend to get into communion with the Old Man's
spirit, and to receive from him "revelations" of his will and
commands for the obedience of the clan. Thus began spirit-worship
or religion -- the fancied relations between man and the spirits of
the dead or gods. Here, too, we have the first shaman, medicine-
man, magician, witch-doctor, or what-not; in a word, the first
priest; and the priestly game was on. The pretended ghost-cajoler
would naturally be held in dread awe and reverence by his credulous
dupes, and would gain enormous respect and prestige: he could quit
the drudgery of hunting and fishing for his precarious living, and
let the awed and believing members of the clan keep him in food and
idle ease; here the first social parasite. This is priestcraft --
by whatever name and in whatever age and guise pursued.

A very modern instance comes to hand and is added for
confirmation. Fortunately, or lamentably for Christian pretensions,
there yet exist in the world races of very primitive descendants of
Adam, who yet preserve their primeval forms of superstition and
priestcraft, wherein may be seen their origins in yet active
reality of operation. In no more remote a region of these our
United States than the Diomede Islands of the Aleutian archipelago
of Alaska, tribal superstition and primitive priestcraft may be
seen in all their ridiculous crudity today. In the Report of the Stoll-McCracken Expedition of the American Museum of Natural
History, 1928, primitive religious superstition and the power of
the priest are graphically described; with simple change of form
and ritual it is Religion through the Ages, the war-blessers and
rain-makers in action to cajole and control the deity through his
priests. As one reads the following extracts from the Report, let
him see what differences he may discover, other than of technique,
between the Diomeder and the Dupe of any other Cult. "For the
Diomeder humbles himself before the imaginary forces of his spirit
world, often disregarding the realities of life with typical
primitive inconsistency. ... The only powers really worthy of his
respect are the supernatural ones. This is why the Eskimo medicine
man, or angutkok, as he is called, holds a position of such
influence. He is the middleman between the natural and supernatural
world. The Diomeders have no real chiefs or any system of
government. Each family is able to manage its own affairs. The
common events of life take care of themselves. But whatever is
unusual, whatever cannot be readily understood, engages the
attention of every Diomeder. Such things as sickness and weather,
good or bad luck and the complicated workings of nature fascinate
him because they are utterly beyond his comprehension. Indeed,
superstition is the basis of the angutkok's hold over his people.
It is chiefly for his supposed alliance with the forces of the
supernatural that he is venerated. ... He is supposed to have
marvelous powers over bodily ailments. ... The power of
conversation with the ancestral spirits is one of the angutkok's
strongest holds upon his public. For the ancestral spirits are said


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to exert a tremendous influence over the lives of the natives. The
Diomeder's attitude toward them is more than one of wholesome
respect. It is made up of a definite and deep-sated fear. This is
because the spirits, if they choose, can send down either good luck
or bad -- and usually elect the latter. And clever must be the
ruses whereby they may be tricked into benignity. For a departed
soul, no matter how kindly has been its earthly owner, is a
potential agent of misfortune and must be treated accordingly" (New
York Times Magazine, Dee. 16, 1928, p. 9.) The methods of
incantation, of placating the spirits and gods, the charms and
amulets used for these conjurations, differ only in material from
those in holy vogue today in some very Christian countries.
Angutkok, shaman, medicine-man, exorciser, priest, Pennsylvania
Witch-doctors, nature-fakers and superstition-mongers, parasites
preying on ignorance and fear -- the whole genealogy of dupe-craft,
of priest-craft, -- what difference in kind and craft is
discernible between the one and the others of the god-placating,
devil-chasing Genus Shamanensis? Bombarding the irate god with
eggs, as with the Diomedes, or by the prayer of faith as with more
up-to-date God-compellers, the cause is the same, and the effect is
equally ineffective and desultory.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, describing the Doctors of Divinity
as in vogue among sundry African tribes, well describes the entire confraternity in all religions: "Certain specialists, however,
exist, known to us as sorcerers, witch-doctors, etc. who are
familiar with the mysterious secrets of things, who make use of
them on behalf of those interested, and hand them down to chosen
disciples." (CE. i, 183.) One of the highest and most potent
functions of all these primitive shamans and devil-doctors is the
conjuring of the infinitude of devils which afflict the inner-works
of the superstitious, and work havoc in weather, crops, herds,
etc.; the practice and its ceremonial of incantation are very
elaborate in some modern schemes: "This ceremony takes up over
thirty pages of the Roman Ritual. It is, however, but rarely used
-- [in these more enlightened and skeptical days], and never
without the express permission of the Bishop, for there is room for
no end of deception and hallucination when it is a question of
dealing with the unseen powers"! (CE. i, 142). Thus the System is
yet in vogue; and its priestcraft has waxed very powerful and very
wealthy. Artificial Fear and Credulity are its sole source and
sustenance. As the Roman poet Lucretius said: "Fear was the first
thing on earth to make gods."

Reinach, after a critique of many varied definitions of
Religion, thus formulates his own -- which a moment's reflection
upon the infinite sacred "Thou Shalt Not's" of Faith will fully
justify: "A sum of scruples (Taboos) which impede the, free
exercise of our faculties." (Orpheus, 1930 ed. p. 3.)

As primitive society progressed towards organization, the
Headman of the clan or tribe would find advantage in a close and
not disinterested association with the Shaman, whose intimations of
good from the spirits or dreadful evil would assist powerfully in
the subordination and control of maybe otherwise ambitious or
unruly subjects: thus began the cooperation of ruler and priest for
the subjection of the ruled. Later yet, as government and


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priestcraft developed, the ruler was also priest or the priest
ruler, as in early Egypt and Assyria, and as in ancient theocratic
Israel before the Kings and after the return from Captivity. So
too, later, in Greece and Rome. In Egypt and under the Empire in
Rome the King was God, in Egypt by divine descent, in Rome by
apotheosis. Even Alexander of Macedon was a god by divine
generation, as declared by the Pagan Oracle of Jupiter Ammon, to
the great scandal of Alexander's mother Olympias, who was wont to
complain, "I wish that Alexander would cease from incessantly
embroiling me with the wife of Jupiter!" Thus priestcraft thrived
and gained immense dominion over the superstitious minds of men, to
say nothing of powers and prestige unlimited, privileges,
immunities, wealth and aggrandizement beyond rivalry -- in ancient
Pagan times.

The temples of the ancient gods throughout Pagandom were
marvels of sumptuous wealth and beauty, thanks to the lavish
munificence of rulers and the offerings of the votaries of the
respective false gods. The Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the
Parthenon or Temple of the Virgin-goddess at Athens, were wonders
of the ancient world. The greatest ruins of antiquity yet standing
in splendid ruin or unearthed by the excavations of the
archaeologists, are the temples of the Pagan gods, testifying in
their decayed grandeur to their pristine magnificence and wealth.

Through the priests and the fear of the gods the rulers ruled:
"Thus saith our god" was the awful sanction of their commands and
of their legal enactments. The Hebrews had no word for religion";
their nearest approximation to the idea is the oft-repeated Bible
phrase, "The fear of Yahweh [the Lord]." The ancient Code of
Hammurabi, graven on the stela discovered by De Morgan in the ruins
of Susa at the beginning of this century and now preserved in the
Louvre at Paris, represents the King humbly receiving the Code of
Laws from the great god Bel through the Sun-god Shamash; this for
its greater sanction to obedience by the superstitious people, who
knew no better than to believe the pious fraud of the priests and
King. A thousand years more or less later, the Hebrew God Yahweh,
along with many divine laws, delivered to Moses his Code of
Commandments neatly scratched with his own finger on two stone
slabs; of these, like the grave of Moses, no man knoweth the
whereabouts unto this day. It was plain but pious fraud for
Hammurabi to issue his laws under the name of his god. Common sense
and common honesty make us disbelieve and condemn the Hammurabi
fraud, and no one chides us for disbelieving it. Perforce we must
believe the Moses-tale of identical import, or be dubbed atheists,
reviled and ostracized, and be damned in the Christian Hell
forever, to boot. Both fables of Divine enactment were invented for
and served the same purpose to dupe the credulous to believe and
obey King and Priest. Is it honest?

This principle, involved in the pretense of divine Sanctions,
and effective through the cooperation of King and Priest for
dominion over the ruled, was frankly recognized by many ancient
writers, and even by some lauded as salutary for the ignorant.
Critics, friend of Socrates, saw the State "with false reason
covering truth," which by this device "quenched lawlessness,; with
laws." Diodorus Siculus admitted it to be the duty of the State "to


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establish effective gods to do the work of police," and laid it
down, that "It is to the interest of States to be deceived in
religion." Livy admires the wisdom of Numa, who "introduced the
fear of the gods as a most efficacious means of controlling an
ignorant and barbarous populace." Polybius, the celebrated Greet
historian, gives his philosophic admiration to the religious system
of the Romans as an effective means of government of the populace:

"In my opinion their object is to use it as a cheek upon the
common people. If it were possible to form a State wholly of
philosophers, such a custom would perhaps be unnecessary. But
seeing that every multitude is fickle and full of lawless desires,
unreasoning anger and violent passions, the only recourse is to
keep them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this
sort. Wherefore, to my mind the ancients were not acting without
purpose or it random, when they brought in among the Vulgar those
opinions about the gods and the belief in the punishments in
Hades." (Historiae, quoted by Grover, The Conflict of Religions in
the Early Roman Empire, pp. 3-4.)

This pious notion of God and religion as the Big Policeman of
the common herd, is not yet extinct. the Attorney General of
England, in a celebrated State trial for the sale of it copy of
Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, urged to the jury the necessity
"to prevent its circulation among the industrious poor"; for, he
declaimed, "Of all human beings they stand most in need of the
consolations of religion; ... because no man can be expected to be
faithful to the authority of man who revolts against the government
of God"! (Williams' Case, 26 Howard's State Trials, p. 719;
1798-99.) But times and creeds change; this is the Twentieth
century. The professional religionists of today, however, forever
dingdong the old "Morality Lie," that without the God-given Ten
Commandments and like divine laws, ministered by them and reenacted
and enforced by the State there can be no morality, no human
virtues, no decent government. The "True Church" makes mighty boast
of its "saving civilization" after the Fall of Rome by the
industrious preachment -- as we shall amply see -- of pious lies
and practice of most unholy frauds among the semi-pagan Christian
peoples who rose -- despite the Church -- on the ruins of Rome, --

. . . Whilst human kind
Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
Before all eyes beneath Religion -- who
Would show her head along the region skies,
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face."
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I.)

PAGANISM AT THE CROSS-ROADS WITH CHRISTIANITY

At the time of the advent of "that newer form of Paganism
later called Christianity," the Greeco-Roman world seethed with
religions in a great state of flux and re-formation. Wonder-
workers, miracle-mongers, impostors in the guise of gods and
Christs abounded. Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana, Apuleius,
Alexander, Porphyry, Iamblichus, -- performed prodigies of divine
power and were hailed as genuine gods, -- just as were Paul and
Barnabas (Acts xiv, 11-12), and, later, Jesus the Christ. Of these


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Pagan and Jewish "Christs" two will be briefly noted, for their
very important Christian contacts and analogies. But first, some
analogies of Pagan priestly fakeries.

The petty frauds of the Pagan priests to dupe their credulous
votaries would fill a large book; the ancient poets and
philosophers, and modern histories of Gentilic religions, abound in
instances. Simply for examples of a few of the more common frauds
of the Pagan priests, outdone a thousand-fold by the Christian
priests and church, as -- (out of the Catholic Encyclopedia) we
shall see, -- we may mention some well-known pious frauds of the
Greeks and Romans prevalent around the beginning of the Christian
era and forming the religious atmosphere of the times in which the
new faith was born and propagated.

False prophecies and miracles and fraudulent relics were the
chief reliance among the Pagans, as among the Christians, for
stimulating the faith, or credulity, of the ignorant and
superstitious masses. The images of the gods were believed to be
endowed with supernatural power. Of some, the wounds could bleed;
of others, the eyes could wink, of others, the heads could nod, the
limbs could be raised; the statues of Minerva could brandish
spears, those of Venus could weep; others could sweat; paintings
there were which could blush. The Holy Crucifix of Boxley, in Kent,
moved, lifted its head, moved its lips and eyes; it was broken up
in London, and the springs exposed, and shown to the deriding
public;, but this relation is out of place, -- this was a pious
Christian, not Pagan, fake. One of the marvels of many centuries
was the vocal statue of Memnon, whose divine voice was heard at the
first dawn of day, "the sweet voice of Memnon" which greeted the
sun, as sung by poets and attested by inscriptions on the statue
made by noted visitors, who credited the assertion of the priests
that the voice was that of the god Ammon; the secret was discovered
by Wilkinson: a cavity in which a priest was concealed, who struck
a stone at sunrise when the worshippers were assembled, thus giving
out a melodious ringing sound. Very famous was the Palladium or
statute of Minerva, thrown down from heaven by Zeus into Troy, and
guarded sacredly in the citadel as protection of the city, which
was believed to be impregnable so long as the statue was in the
city; Ulysses and Diomede entered the city in disguise and stole
out the sacred statue to the Greek camp; thence AEneas is said to
have taken it to Italy, where it was preserved in the Temple of
Vesta. Many cities of Greece and Rome claimed to have the genuine
original. Another miraculous statue of like divine origin was that
of "the great goddess, Diana" at Ephesus, which the Town-clerk (in
Acts 3 xix, 35) declared that all men knew "fell down from
Jupiter." Other holy relics galore were preserved and shown to the
pious: The AEgis of Jove, forged by Vulcan and ornamented with the
head of the Gorgon; the very tools with which the Trojan horse was
made, at Metapontum; the scepter of Pelops, at Chaeronea; the spear
of Achilles, at Pharselis; the sword of Memnon, at Nicomedia; the
hide of the Chalcydonian boar, among the Tegeates; the stone
bearing the authentic marks of the trident of Neptune, at Athens;
the Cretans exhibited the tomb of Zeus, which earned for them their
reputation as Liars. But Mohammedans show the tomb of Adam and
Christians that of Peter! There were endless shrines and
sanctuaries at which miracle-cures could be performed: oracular


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temples full of caverns, and secret passages, -- that of the
Cumaean Sibyl has recently been explored, and its fraudulent
devices exposed. The gods themselves came down regularly and ate
the fine feasts spread before their statues. In the apocryphal
History of Bel and the Dragon, interpolated in the True Church's
Book of Daniel (Chapter xiv), the Holy Ghost tells how this hero
trapped the priests who stole at night through secret passages into
the throne-room of the god and ate the good things furnished by the
pious King and people. The gods came frequently to earth, too, and
with the connivance of the priests kept amorous tryst in the
temples with unsuspecting pious ladies, edifying instances of which
are related by Herodotus and Josephus, among other chroniclers of
the wiles of priestcraft.

Pagan prodigies of every conceivable kind were articles of
popular credulity, affectitig the commonalty as well as many of the
highest category. The great Emperor Augustus, obedient to dreams,
went begging money through the streets of Rome, and used to wear
the skin of a sea-calf to protect himself against lightning.
Tiberius placed greater faith in the efficacy of laurel leaves;
both remedies are highly praised by Pliny. Caligula would crawl
under the bed in thunder storms; the augurs had listed eleven kinds
of lightning with different significations. Comets and dreanis
portended the gravest crises. Cicero and Valerius Alaximus cite
numerous instances of dreams being verified by the event. Livy
relates with perfect faith innumerable prodigies, though he acutely
observed, that "the more prodigies are believed, the more they are
announced." The Emperors made numerous enactments against sorcery,
divination, and all kinds of magic; the "Christian" Emperor,
Constantine, prohibited all forms of magic, but specially excepted
and authorized "that which was intended to avert hail and
lightning," one of the specialties of the Christian priests. Such
puerilities of the prevalent superstitions might be multiplied to
fill volumes. (See case, Experiences with the Supernatural, etc.)

APOLLONIUS OF TYANA

Apollonius of Tyana was one of the most notable of these
wonder-working Christs. So extremely moral and pure were his
doctrines and his conduct, and so mighty the works he wrought, that
the Pagans insisted that Apollonius was the actual personage whom
the Christians called Jesus Christ. By all reports, implicitly
credited, Apollonius had raised the dead, healed the sick, cast out
devils, freed a young man from a lamia or vampire with whom he was
enamored, prophesied, seen in one country events which were
occurring in another, as from Ephesus the assassination of Domitian
at Rome, and had filled the world with the fame of his miracles and
of his sanctity, just as did Jesus Christ. Apollonius was born
about the same time as Jesus of Nazareth; the legends of their
lives and deeds were very similar; the former, at least, has been
justly described as "among that least obnoxious class of impostors,
who pretend to be divinely gifted, with a view to secure attention
and obedience to precepts, which, delivered in the usual way, would
be generally neglected." (Anthon, Clairsical Dictintiary, p. 165;
see generally, Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, i, 372, passim; any
good Encyclopedia.) Recall the current histories of Mohammed, the
Mormon Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy -- Jesus Christ -- for instances
of analogous pretensions.

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This customary pretense of wonder-workers is confirmed by the
great Church Fathers Lactantius, in his Divine Institutes,
dedicated to the "Christian" Emperor Constantine, in which he
combated the Pagan imputation that Jesus was a magician, like
Apollonius and Aputeius, whose wonder-workings he admits. Like all
the Fathers, as we shall see, Lactantius, an ex-Pagan, had firm
faith in magic, and believed all the magical wonders of the Pagan
magicians as veritable miracles wrought by the divine power of
demons or devils. He says that the Pagans "endeavored to overthrow
his [Jesus'] wonderful deeds [by showing] that Appllonius performed
equal or even greater deeds." But, "It is strange," he argues,
"that he omitted to mention Apuleius, of whom many and wonderful
things are accustomed to be related. ... If Christ is a magician
because He performed wonderful deeds, it is plain that Apollonius,
who, according to your description, when Domitian wished to punish
him, suddenly disappeared on his trial, was more skilful than He
who was both arrested and crucified. ... It was evident, therefore,
that he [Apollonius] was both a man and a magician; and for this
reason he affected divinity under the title of a name belonging to
another [Hercules], for in his own name he was unable to attain
it." (Lact. Div. Inst. Bk. V, ch. iii; ANP. vii, 138, 139,)

SIMON MAGUS

Most notorious and important, from the viewpoint of the rising Christianity, was the Samaritan impostor, Simon Magus, the "great
power of God," vouched for by divine inspiration as having "used
sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria," he having "of a long
time bewitched them with sorceries," as the Holy Ghost of God
ridiculously assures us in Acts viii. Not content with his own
"great power of God," Simon, heaving seen some of the apostles at
work bestowing the holy Ghost on the peasants, offered money for
the gift of like power to himself, but was curtly rebuked and
refused by Peter. The especial importance of Simon Magus is his
legendary Scriptural contact with the fisherman Peter, which
developed, under the early Christian propensity for expansive
mendacity, into a veritable literature of pious lies and prodigies
associated with Simon and Peter, which was the chiefest if not sole
basis, be it remembered for the false pretense, later developed, as
we shall duly see, of the "sojourn" of Peter at Rome as Bishop and
Pope. As legends of the Samaritan impostor are wholly Christian
impostures, the Catholic Encyclopedia will be called upon for an
account of the Patristic canards. "By his magic arts," says our
exponent of "Catholic Truth," Simon was called Magus, or the
Magician, the account just given from Acts is "the sole
authoritative [?] report that we have about him": and it confesses
the chronic mendadacity of the Fathers by the remark, "The
statements of the [clerical] writers of the second century
concerning him are largely legendary, and it is difficult or rather
impossible to extract from them any historical fact the details of
which are established with certainty." Let us remember this
characterization of these same Fatherly writers, who, lying about
Simon and Peter together, in Rome, yet tell unvarnished truth about
Peter alone, or Peter and Paul together, in Rome.





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I may remark, that serious argument is made, that Paul himself
is maliciously intended by some of the Fathers under the name of
Simon, the constant conflict between Paul and Peter being disguised
under the accounts of the inveterate struggles of Simon and Peter,
(See Ency. Bib. vol. iv, Art, Simon Magus.) The childish and
fabulous histories of the Fathers regarding Simon and Peter and
Paul in Rome and their contests of magic powers, are thus related:

"St. Justin of Rome ('First Apolog.' xxvi, lvi; 'Dialog. c.
Tryphonem, cxx), describes Simon as a man who, at the instigation
of demons, claimed to be a god. Justin says further that Simon came
to Rome during the reign of the Emperor Claudius and by his magic
arts won many followers so that these erected on an island in the
Tiber a statue to him as a divinity with the inscription 'Simon the
Holy God.' The statue, however, that Justin took for one dedicated
to Simon was undoubtedly one to the old Sabine divinity Semo Sancus
(797) ... The later anti-heretical writers who report Simon's
residence at Rome, take Justin and the apocryphal Acts of Peter as
their authority, so that their testimony is of no value. [p. 798.]

"Simon plays an important part in the 'Pseudo-
Clementines.' He appears here as the chief antagonist of the
Apostle Peter, by whom he is everywhere followed and opposed.
The alleged magical arts of the magician and Peter's efforts
against him are described in a way that is absolutely
imaginary. The entire account lacks all historical basis
[citing several WORKS] ... The apocryphal Acts of St. Peter
give an entirely different account of Simon's condition at
Rome and of his death. In this work also great stress is laid
upon the straggle between Simon and the Apostles Peter and
Paul at Rome. By his magic arts Simon had also sought to win
the Emperor Nero for himself, an attempt in which he had been
thwarted by the apostles. As proof of the truth of his
doctrines Simon offered to ascend into the heavens before the
eyes of Nero and the Roman populace; by magic did he rise in
the air in the Roman Forum, but the prayers of the Apostles
Peter and Paul caused him to fall, so that he was severely
injured and shortly afterwards died miserably. ... This legend
led later to the erection of a church dedicated to the
apostles on the alleged spot of Simon's fall near the Via
Sacra above the Forum. The stones of the pavement on which the
apostles knelt in prayer and which are said to contain the
impression of their knees, are now in the wall of the Church
of Santa Francesca Romana." (CE. xiii, 797, 798.)

With respect to that statue erected in the Tiber to "Simon the
Holy Hod," the account, above mentioned, does not do justice to
Father Justin's invention; it is thus explicit: he says that Simon
"performed feats of magic by demonic arts in Rome during the reign
of Claudius, was held to be a god, and was honored by Senate and
people with a statue in the middle of the Tiber, between the two
bridges, bearing the inscription in Latin: 'Simoni, Deo sancto ...
To Simon the holy God.' The base of the pillar refereed to was dug
up on the island in the Tiber, at the place indicated by Justin, in
1574; the inscription, which was deciphered, runs: 'Semoni Sanco
deo fidio sacrum ... Sex. Pompeius ... donum dedit.' Thus the
pillar was dedicated to the Sabine god Semo Sancus, and not by the
Senate and people, but by the piety of a private individual." (EB.

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iv, 4538-9; cf. CE. xiii, 797-8.) The same authority, referring to
the clerical fabrications above mentioned, says: "The Pseudo-
Clementine Homilies and Recognitions contain yet another element of
the very greatest importance. In them Simon displays features which
are unquestionably derived from Paul, and plainly show him to be a
caricature of that apostle drawn by an unfriendly hand." (EB. iv,
4540, with citations in proof.) Simon proclaimed as his doctrine --
"asserting that none could possibly have salvation without being
baptized in his name" (Tert., adv. Haereyes, c.i; ANF. iii, 649);
which group plagiarized the sentiment from the other, Christians,
or Simoneans, I cannot verify.

SUPERSTITIONS AND REVELATIONS

The Pagans would appear almost to have been good Christians:
they had their gods, (whom they fondly called Savior and Messiah)
the death and resurrections of gods; devils, angels, and spirits
good, bad and indifferent; their heavens, hells and purgatories;
they believed in immortality of the soul, -- witness the Pyramids
and the tombs of the Kings, as of Tut-ankh-Amen in Egypt, and of
the Queen Shub-Ad, just unearthed in Ur of the Chaldees; their
elaborate sacrifices, animal and human, even of their dear little
children to appease their gods, as in Carthage and Canaan, -- a
chronic Hebrew practice. Virgin-births of demigods by the
intervention of gods and human maids were common-places of Pagan
faith, as were Virgin-mothers and god-child: the Christians
imported theirs from Egypt -- the Madonna statues of Isis and the
Child Horus -- of universal vogue at the beginning of this era of
the Christ -- may be seen in almost any first-class Museum, as the
Metropolitan in New York and the University in Philadelphia. This
popular Pagan device, the "Mother of God" and her God-baby-in-arms,
was taken over as a Christian sop to the crowds of Pagans who were
being enticed and forced into the Church; it was violently opposed
by many of the more intelligent Churchmen: "Nestorius [Bishop of
Constantinople about 404] had declared against the new and, as he
asserted, idolatrous expression 'Mother of God' (Theotokos),
thereby opposing the sentiments and wishes of the humbler people"
(CE. iii, 101); and in protest Nestorius left the Catholic Church
and founded one of the most wide-spread and powerful "heresies,"
which exists in the East to the present time. The Pagans had their
holy mysteries and sacraments, baptisms of water and of blood,
communions with the gods at their sacred altars, partaking of
sacred meals to ingest the divine spirit and become godlike. they
believed in the resurrection of the dead, and in final judgments
meting rewards and punishments according to the deeds done in the
flesh, -- the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 3000 years B.C., giving
priestly prescriptions for use before the judgment seat of Osiris,
is found in almost every tomb of those able to pay for the
hieroglyphic papyrus rolls. The Pagans had their holy days (from
which the Christians plagiarized their Christmas, Easter, Rogation
Days, etc.); their monks, nuns, religious processions carrying
images of idols (like those of saints today); incense, holy water,
holy oil, chants, hymns, liturgies, confessions of sins to priests,
forgiveness of sins by priests, revelations by gods to priests,
prophecies, sacred writings of "holy bibles," Pontiffs, Holy
Fathers, holy crafty priesthood. All these sacrosanct things of
Christian "Revealed Religion," were age-old pre-Christian Pagan
myths and superstitions.

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I puzzle myself to understand how there could be "divine
revelations," to Jews and Christians, of things which for ages had
been identically ancient Pagan delusions and the inventions and
common holy stock in trade of all Pagan priestcrafts. Indeed and in
truth, there can be no divine revelation of miraculous "facts" and
"heavenly dogmas" which for centuries had been, and in the early
Christian ages were, the current mythology of credulous Pagandom.
this I shall make exceeding clear.

CHRISTIAN "REVELATION" DEFINED AND DISPROVED

This paragraph is one of the most important in this book, and
to it I invite Specially serious attention and thought. It will
disclose the substantial identity of Christianity with the most
popular and wide-spread "Pagan" religion of the times, Mithraism,
or the Persian Zoroastrian religion, the closest and all but
successful rival of Christianity in the Roman world, and which
might indeed have been successful, but that, soon after Constantine
prostituted the Empire to the Church, -- "with the triumph of
Christianity Mythraism came to a sudden end. The laws of Theodosius
signed its death warrant." (CE. x, 402.) That there may be no
suspicion that the recital of these remarkable identities of
Christian "revelation" with Pagan inventions is fanciful or
exaggerated, the tale shall be told in the quoted words of the
Catholic Encyclopedia, which naively makes so many extraordinary
admissions without seeming to be aware of their fatal Implications.

"The essence of Revelation lies in the fact that it is the
direct speech of God to man," says the Holy Ghost speaking through
the Vatican Council (1870), thus confirming what I have above said,
that "divine revelation" cannot be of Pagan myths already current
and long known to everyone. The same Heavenly Instructor tells us
what Revelation is: "Revelation may be defined as the communication
of some truth by God to a rational creature through means which are
beyond the ordinary course of nature. The truths thus revealed may
be such as are otherwise inaccessible to the human mind --
mysteries, which even when revealed, the intellect of man is
incapable of fully penetrating. ... The Decree 'Lamentabili' (3
July, 1907) declares that the dogmas which the Church proposes as
revealed are 'truths which have come down to us from heaven' and
not 'an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has
acquired by its own strenuous efforts.'" (Vatican Decrees, 1870;
CE. xiii, 1.) And, asserts CE.: "The existence of revelation is as
reasonably established as any historical fact"! (CE. xiii, 607.)
Isn't CE. funny!

Divine Revelation is thus of things not previously known and
which the revelationless mind of man is incapable of acquiring or
inventing by its own efforts. Divine Revelation rests thus upon the
same principle as the Law of Patents and Copyright, A book
published, that is made known and given to the world cannot be the
subject of subsequent copyright even by its author. When an
application for a patent is presented, the first act is to search
the records to ascertain whether a similar art or article has ever
previously been known and in use: if so, no patent can be obtained:
the thing lacks novelty. So exactly with "revelation": if some
impostor or deluded person (e.g. Mohammed or Joseph Smith) claims


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that hie has received a personal -- and therefore necessarily
private -- "revelation" from some god, the only way whereby he can
get a valid patent of authenticity and credibility for his
"revelation," is to prove that its subject-matter has never before
been known and in credulous circulation, the moment that from the
search of the records -- of other, or comparative religions, -- it
is shown that the same proposition has been previously known and
current, in use and practice among some other priestcraft and its
votaries -- the thing is no revelation: the claim is a fraud. Let
us see how this indisputable rule works to the destruction and
proof of fraudulence of the "divine revelations" of Christian
credulity.

MITHRAISM -- AND CHRISTIAN MYTH

The religion of Zoroaster, known as Mithraism, is confessed by
CE. to be a divinely revealed Monotheism, or worship of a One God,
and having a divinely revealed Moral Code comparable to the
Christian, -- a sacred system claimed by Christians to be a
monopoly of the Hebrew-Christian religion to the exclusion of all
heathen systems. This notable confession reads: "The Avesta system
may be best defined as MONOTHEISM, modified by a physical and moral
dualism, with an ethical system based on a Divinely revealed moral
code and human free will." (CE. ii, 156.) Though it quotes a Jesuit
as saying: "Mithraism is the highest religious result to which
human reason unaided by Revelation, can attain." (Id.) Revealed or
invented, it is virtually identical with Christianity; but as the
mythic Mithraic god could not "reveal" anything, the human reason
which devised Mithraism was quite equal to the Christian God so far
as devising mythology and ethics is an attribute of godhead.

Mithraism is one of the oldest religious systems on earth, as
it dates from the dawn of history before the primitive Iranian race
divided into the sections which became Persian and Indian, as this
same religion is contained both in the Persian Avesta and Indian
Vedas. This its "revealed" or invented Monotheism by ages outdates
the "revelation" of Yahweh to Moses; and it is yet a living faith
to some thousands of surviving Parsees: "The religious cult is
[yet] scrupulously maintained as of old. The ancient traditional
and nationally characteristic national virtues of truth and
open-handed generosity flourish exceedingly in the small, but
highly intelligent community" of Parsees in India. (CE. ii, 156.)

The religion of Mithra anciently dominated Persia and the vast
regions of the Orient; it entered Europe following the conquests of
Alexander the Great. When in 65-63 B.C. the conquering armies of
Pompey were largely converted by its high precepts, they brought it
with them into the Roman Empire. Mithraism spread with great
rapidity throughout the Empire, and was adopted patronized and
protected by a number of the Emperors up to the time of
Constantine; it was only overthrown by the prescriptive laws and
sword of Constantine and Theodosius, who "signed its death warrant"
at the behest of the triumphant and intolerant Christians, who
absorbed virtually the entire system of Mithraism. But let CE,
proceed with the story. The reader is asked to cheek mentally each
of the uninspired details of Pagan invention with the "divinely
revealed" identities of the Christian Faith.


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"MITHRAISM" -- PRE-CHRISTIAN CHRISTIANITY

"Mithraism is a pagan religion consisting mainly of the cult
of the ancient Indo-Iranian Sun-God Mithra. It entered Europe from
Asia Minor after Alexander's conquest, spread rapidly over the
whole Roman Empire at the beginning of our era, reached its zenith
during the third century, and vanished under the repressive
regulations of Theodosius at the end of the fourth, [Of late it has
been] brought into prominence mainly because of its supposed [?]
similarity to Christianity.

"The origin of the cult of Mithra dates from the time that
Hindus and Persians still formed one people, for the god Mithra
occurs in the religion and sacred books of both races, i.e. in the
Vedas and in the Avesta. ... After the conquest of Babylon (538
B.C.) this Persian cult came into contact with Chaldean astrology
and with the national worship of Marduk. For a time the two
priesthood of Mithra and Marduk coexisted in the capital and
Mithraism borrowed much from this intercourse. ... This religion,
in which the Iranian element remained predominant, came, after
Alexander's conquest, in touch with the Western world. When finally
the Romans took possession of the Kingdom of Pergamum (in 133
B.C.), occupied Asia Minor, and stationed two legions of soldiers
on the Euphrates, the success of Mithraism was secured. It spread
rapidly from the Bosphorus to the Atlantic, from Illyria to
Britain. Its foremost apostles were the legionaries; hence it
spread first to the frontier stations of the Roman army.

"Mithraism was emphatically a soldier religion; Mithra, its
hero, was especially a divinity of fidelity, manliness, and
bravery; the stress it laid on good-fellowship and brotherliness,
its exclusion of women, and the secret bond among its members have
suggested the idea that Mithraism was Masonry among the Roman
soldiery." Several of the Roman Emperors, down to Licinius,
colleague of Constantine, built temples to Mithra, and issued coins
with his symbols. "But with the triumph of Christianity [after
Constantine] Mithraism came to a sudden end. The laws of Theodosius [proscribing it under penalty of death, to please the Christians]
signed its death warrant. Though he was still worshiped a thousand
years later by the Manichees (p. 402). ...

"Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. -- This incarnate evil (Ahriman)
rose; with the army of darkness to attack and depose Oromasdes
(Ahura Mazda) They were however thrown back into hell, whence they
escape, wander over the face of the earth and afflict man. ... As
evil spirits ever lie in wait for hapless man, he needs a friend
and savior, who is Mithra. ... Mithra is the Mediator between God
and Man. The Mithraists... battled on Mithra's side against all
impurity, against all evil within and without. They believed in the
immortality of the soul; sinners after death were dragged down to
hell; the just passed through the seven spheres of the planets,
leaving at each planet a part of their lower humanity until, as
pure spirits, they stood before God. At the end of the world Mithra
will desectid to earth, ... and will make all drink the beverage of immortality. He will thus have proved himself Nabarses, 'the never
conquered.' ...



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"The fathers conducted the worship. The chief of the fathers,
a sort of pope, who always lived at Rome, was called 'Pater
Patratus' ... The members below the grade of pater called one
another 'brother,' and social distinctions were forgotten in
Mithraic unity. ... A sacred meal was celebrated of bread and haoma
juce for which in the West wine was substituted. This meal was
supposed to give the participants supernatural virtue. ...

"Three times a day prayer was offered the sun towards east,
south, or west according to the hour. SUNDAY was kept holy in honor
of Mithra, and the sixteenth of each month was sacred to him as
Mediator. The 25 December was observed as his birthday, the Natalis
Invictis, the rebirth of the winter-sun, unconquered by the rigors
of the season." (pp. 403-104.) It may be noted that Sunday was made
a Pagan holiday by edict of Constantine, In the fifth Tablet of the
Babylonian (Chaldean) Epic of Creation, by the great God Marduk, we
read, lines 17 and 18: "On the seventh day he appointed a holy day,
And to cease from all work he commanded." (Records of the Past,
vol. ix; quoted, Clarke, Ten Great Religions, ii, p. 383.)

To resume with CE.: "No proof of immorality or obscene
practices has ever been established against Mithraism; and as far
as can be ascertained, or rixther conjectured, it had an elevating
and invigorating effect on its followers. [So different from
Christianity!] ...

"Relation to Christianity. -- A similarity between Mithra and
Christ struck even early observers, such as Justin, Tertullian, and
other Fathers, and in recent times has been urged to prove that
Christianity is but an adaptation of Mithraism, or at least the
outcome of the same religious ideas and aspirations. Some apparent
[they are very apparent] similarities exist; but in a number of
details -- [it is substance that is identical] -- it is quite as
probable that Mithraism was the borrower from Christianity. -- [But
these essential identities are found in the Vedas and Avesta, of
maybe two thousand years before Christianity; Zoroaster, who, gave
final form to the creed, lived some 600 years before the Christ!]
-- It is not unnatural to suppose that a religion which swept the
whole world, should have been copied at least in some details by
another religion which was quite popular daring the third century
-- [and for nine, Or twenty centuries before!] Similarity in words
and names means nothing; it is the sense that matters. [To be sure;
we proceed to see more of the sense, -- the essence -- to be
identical] ...

"Mithra is called a mediator; and so is Christ ... And so in
similar instances. Mithraism had a Eucharist, but the idea of the
sacred banquet is as old as the human race and existed at all ages
and amongst all peoples. -- [Not much "divine revelation" in this
greatest of Christian mysteries!]. Mithra saved the world by
sacrificing a bull -- [just as the Jews saved themselves] Christ by
sacrificing himself. ... Mithraism was all comprehensive and
tolerant of every other cult; Christianity was essentially
exclusive, condemning every other religion in the world, alone and
unique in its majesty." (CE. x, 402-404.)




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But this "unique majesty" was hidden away in the catacombs of
Rome for quite three centuries; coming out, it condemned and
persecuted to death every other religion because rivals for the
rich perquisites of priestcraft and dominion.

The above striking analogies, or identities, between the ages-
old Mithraism and the "newer Paganism called Christianity,"
compelling as they are of the certainty of "borrowing" by
Christianity, are dwarfed by the evidences now to be presented in
the confessions of CE., that the Jews first, then the Christians,
took over bodily from the Babylonians and the Persians, not only
the entire celestial and infernal systems of those two closely
related religions, but virtually that high ethic, or moral code --
"the highest religious result to which human reason, unaided by
revelation, can attain'" -- which Christians so loudly pretend is,
by "divine revelation" of their God -- theirs alone, while all
other peoples "sat in darkness and in the shadow of death" without
its saving light. Christianity looks with disdain on the Mithraic
religion because it is a "dualism"; that is, the Evil Spirit was
separately created apart from the Good God; while it is a
fundamental tenet of the Christian Faith, that its God himself
created the Christian Devil and all evil -- and is therefore
morally responsible for all his deviltry,

Speaking particularly of Angiology, -- though the admission
will be found to apply to all the other features to be noticed, --
CE. shows that all this is an importation into Judaism from the
Persians and Babylonians: "That the Persian domination and the
Babylonian Captivity exercised a large influence upon the Hebrew
conception -- [not, therefore, a revelation] -- of the angels is
acknowledge in the Talmud of Jerusalem (Rosh Haschanna, 56) where
it is said that [even] the names of the angels were introduced from
Babylon. ... Stress has been laid upon the similarity of the 'seven
who stand before God' and the seven Amesha-Spentas of the Zend-
Avesta. ... it is easy for the student to trace the influence of
surrounding nations and of other religions in the Biblical account
of angels" (CE. i, 481); -- which seriously cripples the notion of
divine revelation regarding these celestial messengers of God.
Again it indicates the "connection between the angels of the Bible,
and the greatt archangels' or 'Amesha-Spentas' of the Zend-Avesta";
also "we find an interesting parallel to the 'angel of the Lord' in
Nebo, 'the minister of Merodach.' ... The Babylonian sukalli
corresponded to the spirit-messengers of the Bible; they declared
their Lord's will and executed his behests." ... "The belief in
guardian angels ... was also the belief of the Babylonians and
Assyrians"; the origin of the Bible "cherubim" was the same, as
also of guardian angels, "as their monuments testify, for a figure
now in the British Museum might well serv for a modern
representation." For detailed accounts, see the articles "Angels"
and Guardian Angels." in CE. And so of Demons and Demonology, and
Demoniac possession: "In many ways one of the most remarkable
demonologies is that presented in the Avesta"; Ahriman being their
chief devil, or Daeva; "the original meaning of the word is
'shinning one,' and it comes from a primitive Aryan root 'div,'
which is likewise the source of the Greek Zeus and the Latin Deus.
But while these words, like the Sanskrit 'deva,' retain the good
meaning, 'daeva' has come to mean 'an evil spirit.' There is at


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least a coincidence, if no deeper significance, in the fact that,
while the word in its original sense was synonymous with 'Lucifer,'
it has now come to mean much the same as devil" (CE iv, 714-15,
pasism; 764). Lucifer, in the Bible, having also been originally "a
shinning one" in Heaven, was cast out into Hell and is now the
Devil.

With these preliminaries of identity between the invention of
angels and devils of Mathraic Paganism and Hebrew-Christian
"revelation," we will now let CE. confess further identities, both
of "revelation" and of the "divinely revealed moral codes," --
summarized from the Mithraic Zend-Avesta. We seem to be reading the
Catechism or a tract on "Christian Evidences."

"The name of the Supreme God of the Avestic system is Ahura
Mazda, which probably signifies the All-Wise Lord. ... Ahura Mazda
is a pure Spirit; his chief attributes are eternity, wisdom, truth,
goodness, majesty, power. He is the creator of all good creatures
-- not, however, of Evil, of evil being, -- [as is the Christian
God]. He is the supreme Lawgiver, the Rewarder of moral good, and
the Punisher of moral evil. He dwells in Eternal Light, ... a kind
of manifestation of His presence, like the Old Testament Shekinah.
... We find frequent enumerations of the attributes of Ahura Mazda;
thus these are said to be 'omniscience, all-sovereignty, all
goodness.' Again He is styled 'Supreme Sovereign, Wise Creator,
Supporter, Protector, Giver of good things, Virtuous in acts,
Merciful, Pure Lawgiver, Lord of the Good Creations.' ...

"Opposed to Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd, is His rival, Anro
Mainyus, (later Ahriman), the Evil Spirit. He is conceived as
existing quite independently of Ahura Mazda, apparently from
eternity, but destined to destruction at the end of time. Evil by
nature and in every detail the exact opposite of Ahura Mazda, he is
the creator of all both moral and physical. -- [But of the
Christian God: "I Jehovah create evil"; Isa. xlv, 7]. ...

"The specific name of Ahura Mazda in opposition to the Evil
Spirit is Spento Mainyus, THE HOLY SPIRIT: and Ahura Mazda and
Spento Mainyus are synonymous throughout the Avesta. [p. 154] ...

"Around Ahura Mazda is a whole hierarchy of spirits,
corresponding very closely to our 'angels.' ... Of the good spirits
who surround Ahura, the most important are the Amesha Spentas
('Holy Immortals' or 'Holy Saints'), generally reckoned as six in
number (but seven when Ahura Mazda is included). ... Most of all
Vohu Manah rises to a position of unique importance. ... Vohu Manah
is conceived as the 'SON OF THE CREATOR,' and identified with the
Alexandrian LOGOS [of John i, 1]. Asha, also, is the Divine Law,
Right, Sanctity (cf. Psalm 118), and occupies a most conspicuous
place throughout the Avesta. ... With him are associated in a trio
[TRINITY], Rashnu (Right, Justice), and MITHRA. -- [These Aryan
names sound unfamiliar; but as CE. has assured, "names mean
nothing; it is the sense that matters"; -- and here we have the
whole Jewish-Christian hierarchies of Heaven and Hell a thousand
years before Jewish-Christian "revelation" identities!l ...




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"Face to face with the hierarchy of celestial spirits is a
diabolical one, that of the daevas (Pers. div or dev) and druj's of
the Evil Spirit. They fill exactly the places of the devils in
Christian and Jewish theology. ... perhaps the most frequently
mentioned of all is Aesmma, the Demon of Wrath or Violence, whose
name has come down to us in the Asmodeus (Aeshmo daeva) of the Book
of Tobias [Tobit]...

"In the midst of the secular warfare that has gone on from the
beginning between the two hosts of good and Evil stands Man. Man is
the creature of the Good Spirit, but endowed with a free will and
power of choice, able to place himself on the side of Ahura Mazda
or on that of Anro Mainyus. The former has given him, through His
Prophet Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) His Divine Revelation and law.
According as man obeys or disobeys this Divine Law his future lot
will be decided; by it he will be judged at his death. The whole
ethical system is built upon this great principle, as in the
Christian theology -- ["revelation"?]. Moral good, righteousness,
sanctity (asha) is according to the Divine will and decrees; Man by
his free will conforms to, or transgresses, these. The Evil Spirit
and his innumerable hosts tempt Man to deny or transgress the
Divine Law, as he tempted Zoroaster himself, promising him as a
reward the sovereignty of the whole world. -- [Exactly Jesus and
the Devil.] -- 'No,' replied the Prophet, 'I will not renounce it,
even if body and soul and life should be severed!' (Vendidad, xix,
25, 26). -- ["Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, for it is
written," -- way sound more Godlike but maybe little more heroic.]
...

"The moral teaching is closely akin to our own. Stress is
constantly laid on the necessity of goodness in thought, word, and
deed. -- ["Through the Three Steps, the good thought, the good
word, and the good deed, I enter Paradise."] -- Note the emphatic
recognition of sin in thought. Virtues and vices are enumerated and
estimated much as in Christian ethics. Special value is attributed
to the virtues of religion, truthfulness, purity, and generosity to
the poor (p. 155). Heresy, untruthfulness perjury, sexual sins,
violence, tyranny, are especially reprobated. ...

"The soul of the just passes over the bridge into a happy
eternity, into heaven, the abode of Ahura and His blessed angels.
The wicked soul falls from the fatal bridge and is precipitated
into hell. Of this abode of misery a lively description occurs in
the later Pahlavi 'Vision of Arda Viraf,' whose visit to the
Inferno, with realistic description of the torments, vividly
recalls that of Dante. ...

"At the end of time, the approach of which is described in the
Pahlavi literature in terms strikingly like those of our
Apocalypse, will come Saoshyant (SAVIOR) under whom will occur the
Resurrection of the dead, the General Judgment, the renewal of the
whole world -- ["a new heaven and a new earth"] -- by a general
conflagration and terrible flood of burning matter ["the heavens
being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with
fervent heat"]. This terrible flood will purify all creatures; even
the wicked will be purified from all stains, and even hell will be
cleansed and added to the 'new heavens and new earth.' Meanwhile a


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mighty combat takes place between Soashyant [the "Savior"] and his
followers and the demon hosts of the Evil Spirit, who are utterly
routed and destroyed forever. ...

"The highest religious result to which human reason unaided by
Revelation can attain"! (CE. ii, 154-156, passim.)

Thus "human reason unaided by revelation" had attained, ages
before Moses, the Prophets, and Jesus Christ, a system of religious
beliefs and a moral code in substantial identity with the "divine
revelations" of God to Moses, the Prophets, and his Son Jesus
Christ. At the time of the Advent of the Latter, and for three
hundred years later, throughout the Roman Empire, that is,
throughout the then known world, this wonderful Pagan invention,
with its "Pope" and Scat in Imperial Rome, and patronized by the
Emperors, lived along side with and mightily rivalled the
struggling Faith hid in the catacombs, -- until its rival
Christians got hold of the sword under Constantine, and
"triumphed," its "death warrant was signed" in blood by the laws of
the persecuting Christians. Did any God wondrously "reveal" to the
Christians these holy Pagan dreams and myths? What a waste of while
for a God to mysteriously "reveal" these "heathen deceits"
thousands of years old, and that everybody in the world already
knew!

BUDDHISM IN CHRISTIANITY

The account given by CE. of the Lord Buddha and of Buddhism,
by the simple substitution of the names Christ -- [the Savior of
Buddhism is Crishna, the 'incarnation" of the supreme god Vishnu]
-- and Christianity, might well be mistaken for a homily on our own
holy faith and its Founder -- who would no more recognize present-
day Christianity than would Buddha the crass superstition which is
today tagged with his holy name. Says CE.:

"It is note worthy that Buddha was a contemporary of two other
famous religious philosophers, Pythagoras and Confucius. In the
sacred books of later times Buddha is depicted as a character
without a flaw, adorned with every grace of mind and heart. There
may be some hesitation in taking the highly colored portrait of
Buddhist tradition as an exact representation of the original, but
Buddha may be credited with the qualities of a great and good man.
... In all pagan antiquity no character has been depicted as so
noble and attractive. ...

"Buddha's order was composed only of those who renounced the
world to live a life of contemplation as monks and nuns. ... [In
the time of King Asoka, 3rd century B.C.) Buddhism was in a most
flourishing condition; it had become a formidable rival of the
older religion [Brahmanism), while a tolerant and kindly spirit --
[unknown to Christianity] -- was displayed towards other forms of
religion. ... [By the seventh century A.D. -- here it parallels
Christianity again] an excessive devotion to statues and relies,
the employment of magic arts to keep off evil spirits, and the
observance of many gross superstitions, complete the picture of
Buddhism, a sorry representation of what Buddha made known to men.
... The vast majority of the adherents of Buddhism cling to forms


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of creed and worship that Buddha, if alive, would reprobate -- [as
would Christ in the case of Christianity]. Northern Buddhism became
the very opposite of what Buddha taught to men, and in spreading to
foreign lands accommodated itself to the degrading superstition of
the people it Sought to win -- [precisely as we shall see that
Christianity did to inveigle the Pagans). ...

"Between Buddhism and Christianity there are a number of
resemblances, at first sight striking. The Buddhist order of monks
and nuns offers points of similarity with Christian monastic
systems, particularly the mendicant orders. There are moral
aphorisms ascribed to Buddha that are not unlike some of the
sayings of Christ. Most of all, in the legendary life of Buddha ...
there are many parallelisms, some more, some less striking, to the
Gospel stories of Christ. A few third rate scholars [contend that
these are borrowings from Buddhism. Why not, as everything else is
"borrowed" or filched?]. ...

"One of its most attractive features was its practice of
benevolence towards the sick and needy. Between Buddhists and
Brahmins there was a commendable rivalry in maintaining
dispensaries of food and medicine" -- long claimed as a holy
monopoly of "Christian charity." (CE. iii, 28-34, passim.)

As elsewhere recounted, the Holy Ghost made a curious mistake
in inspiring the certification of sundry Saints, and the lord
Buddha was himself canonized by Holy Church, as St. Josaphat, and
the "Life" of this holy Saint was highly edifying to the Faithful
as well as effective in spreading the Christian truth: "During the
Middle Ages the 'life of Barlaam and Josaphat' had been translated
into some twenty languages, English included, so that in reality
the story of Buddha became the vehicle of Christian truth in many
nations"' (CE. i, 713.)

It is now evident, and will further so appear, that there is
no single novel feature nor "revealed truth" in all the Christian
religion: our Holy Faith is all a hodgepodge or pot pourri of the
credulitles of every superstition from Afric Voodooism to the
latest one anywhere in holy vogue among the credulous. Even our
"idea" of God with its superlatives of "revealed" high attributes
is very primitive: "The idea of a Being higher than man, invisible, inaccessible, master of life and death, orderer of all things,
seems to exist everywhere, among the Negritos, the Hottentots, the
Bantu, the Nigritians, the Hamites; for everywhere this Being has
a name. He is the 'Great,' the 'Ancient One,' the 'Heavenly One,'
the 'Bright one,' the 'Master,' sometimes the 'Author' or
'Creator'. ... Nowhere is He represented under any image, for He is
incapable of representation." (CE. i, 183, 184.)

Cardinal Newman, commenting on Dean Milman's "History of the
Jews," groups a number of these Paganisms in Christianity, and says
that Milman arrays facts "admitted on all hands," to wit: "that the
doctrine of the Logos is Platonic; that of the Incarnation Indian;
that of a divine Kingdom Judaic; that of angels and demons (and a
Mediator) Persian; that, the connection of sin with the body is
Gnostic; the idea of a new birth Chinese and Eleusinian; that of
sacramental virtue Pythagorian; that of Trinity common to East and


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West; and that of the rites of baptism and sacrifice equally
ubiquitous"! (Newman, Essays, Critical and Historical, 7th ed., p.
231; as summarized by the Rt. Hon. J.M. Robertson in A History of
Freethought in the XIXth Century, p. 145-6. London, 1929.)

Such is our holy Christian "Faith which was once delivered
unto the saints," which "superstition, drunk in with their mother's
milk," yet persists with the ignorant and those who do not or will
not know the truth.

That Christianity is indeed but a "new form of Paganism," and
especially after it became the official or State religion,
consciously and purposely, in furtherance of the Imperial policy of
"One State, one Religion," perfected the amalgamation of the
salient features of all the fluxing religions of the Empire so as
to bring all Pagans within the one State-Church, is accredited by
secular and Church history; and is quite ingenuously revealed by
CE., treating of the influence of Constantine on Christianity:

"Long before this, belief in the old polytheism had been
shaken. The world was fully ripe for monotheism or its
modified form, henotheism; but this monotheism offered itself
in varied guises, under the forms of Oriental religions; in
the worship of the Sun, in the veneration of Mithras, in
Judaism, and in Christianity. Whoever wished to make a violent
break with the past and his surroundings sought out some,
Oriental form of worship which did not demand from him too
great a sacrifice. Some ... believed that they could
appropriate [the truth contained in Judaism and Christianity]
without being obliged on that account to renounce the beauty
of other worships. Such a man was the Emperor Alexander
Severus (222-235); another so minded was Aurelian (270-275),
whose opinions were confirmed by Christians like Paul of
Samosata. Not only Gnostics and other heretics, but Christians
who considered themselves faithful, held in a measure to the
worship of the Sun. Leo the Great in his day (440-461) says
that it was the custom of many Christians to stand on the
steps of the Church of St. Peter and pay homage to the Sun by
obeisance and prayers.

"When such conditions prevailed it is easy to understand
that many of the emperors yielded to the delusion that they
could unite all their subjects in the adoration of the one
San-god who combined in himself the Father-God of the
Christians and the much-worshipped Mithras; thus the empire
could be founded anew on the unity of religion. It looks
almost as though the last persecution of the Christians were
directed more against all irreconcilable and extremists than
against the great body of Christians. ...

"It was especially in the West that the veneration of
Mithras predominated -- [after centuries of Christianity!].
Would it not be possible to gather all the different
nationalities around his altars? Could not Sol Deus Invictus,
to whom even Constantine dedicated his coins for a long time,
or Sol Mithras Deus Invictus, venerated by Diocletian and
Galerius, become the supreme god of the empire? Constantine


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... had not absolutely rejected the thought even after a miraculous
event [!] had strongly influenced him in favor of the God of the
Christians, -- (who, however, worshipped the Sun!).

"For a time it seemed as if merely tolerance and equality
were to prevail. Constaintine showed equal favor to both
religions. As pontifex maximus he watched over the heathen
worship and protected its rights. ... In the dedication of
Constantinople in 330 a ceremonial half pagan, half Christian
was used, The chariot of the Sun-god was set in the market-
place, and over its head was placed the Cross of Christ --
[not the original, which his mother had not yet been reputed
by the priests to have discovered -- i.e. "invented," -- of
which more anon], while the Kyrie Eleison was sung. Shortly
before his death Constantine confirmed the privileges of the
priests of the ancient gods. ...

"In the same way religious freedom and tolerance could
not continue as a form of equality; the age was not ready for
such a conception; [with more of the like, p. 299; -- which is
untrue, as Constantine himself had proclaimed religious
freedom in the Edict of Milan of 313 and we have just seen it
admitted in Buddhism, and it prevailed at all tunes in the
Roman Empire, until the "Christian Emperors" gave the Church
the sword, as in Chapter VII exemplified]. ... Without
realizing the full import of his actions, Constantine granted
the Church one privilege, after another. As early as 313 the
Church obtained immunity for its ecclesiastics, including
freedom from taxation. ... Constantine moreover placed Sunday
under the protection of the State [as a Pagan holiday, as
cited. post]. It is true that the believers in Mithras also
observed Sunday as well as Christmas. Consequently Constantine
speaks not of the day of the lord, but of the everlasting day
of the Sun. ...

"Of Constantine's sons the eldest, Constantine II, showed
decided leanings to heathenism, and his coins bear many pagan
emblems; the second and favorite son, Constantius, was a more
pronounced Christian, but it was Arian -- [anti-Divinity of
Christ] -- Christianity to which he adhered. Constantius was
an unwavering opponent of paganism; he closed all the temples
and forbade, sacrifices under pain of death. His maxim was:
'Cesset superstitio; sacrificiorum aboleatur insania' -- ('Let
superstition cease; let the folly of sacrifices be
abolished'). Their successors had recourse to persecution
against heretics and pagans. Their laws (Cod. Theod. XVI v;
[post, Chapter VII]) had an unfavorable influence on the
Middle Ages and were the basis of the much-abused[!]
Inquisition." (CE. iv, 297-301, passim.)

Thus was the ultimate merger and total identity of Paganism
with "the new Paganism called Christianity" finally established by
law and by Imperial policy of "One State and One Religion," to
which conformity was enforced by laws of confiscation and death;
all the other religions of the Empire were fused by fire and sword
into a bastard Christianity; and the mental and moral benightedness
known as the Dark Ages of Faith fell as a pall over Christendom for
a thousand years until the renaissance of Pagan culture and freedom

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of thought darkly dawned over the world, and has fearfully
struggled into a brightening day, whose motto of Hope is again
"Cesset Superstitio"! when Constantine's funest "League with Death
and Covenant with Hell" of State and Church will soon in reality be
a forgotten Scrap of Paper!

ALL DEVILISH IMITATIONS!

The pious Christian Fathers were themselves sorely puzzled and
scandalized by these same things; their books are replete with
naive attempts to explain the mystery of it, -- which they
attributed to the blasphemous wiles of the Devil, -- that "the
Devil had blasphemously imitated the Christian rites and
doctrines"; -- "always seeing in pagan analogies the trickery of
devils." (CE. 393.) "It having reached the Devil's ears," says the
devout Father Justin Martyr, "that the prophets had foretold the
coming of Christ, the Son of God, he set the heathen Poets to bring
forward a great many who should be called the sons of Jove. The
Devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that, the
true history of Christ was of the same character as the prodigious
fables related of the sons of Jove." (I Apology, ch. 54; INF. i,
181-182.)

Not only the Fathers, but the Bible, Hebrew and Christian,
recognized and affirmed the actuality and ever-living reality of
the Pagan gods, though the late post-exilic writer of the 95th
Psalm maliciously dubs them devils: "All the gods [Heb. elohim] of
the nations are devils" (Heb. elilim -- not much difference between
them -- in Hebrew; Ps. xevi, 5); and this view the Christian forger
of the Epistle under the name of Paul to the Corinthians confirms:
"The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils"
(I Cor. x, 20). Though these malevolent flings at the venerable
divinities of Pagandom are in direct violation of the Siniatic Law
of God -- "Thou shalt not revile the gods" (Ex. xxii, 28); -- the
Hebrew Yahvah being, according to divine revelation, simply one of
many gods -- "a God above all gods," even "God of gods and Lord of
lords," who "judgeth among the [other] gods."

Father Justin, Tertullian, and many another, says the CE.,
could "see in all the gods, Moses"; the error and folly of which
notions argues our authority, is demonstrated by reference to
Middleton's letter from Rome, in which he, with Calvin, "saw an
exact conformity between popery and paganism." (CE. xii, 393.)
Whether Middleton and Calvin were so far in error and folly in this
opinion, our researches will reveal. Collins, too, in his
Discourse, supports with good authorities the opinions of Middleton
and Calvin. He cites Father Origen as "so far from disowning an
agreement between [Pagan] Plutonism and Christianity, that a great
part of his book Contra Celsum consists in showing the conformity
between them." Likewise, he says, Amelius, a heathen Platonist, who
flourished in the third century, upon reading the first verses of
St. John the Evangelist, exclaimed: "Per Jovem, barbarous iste cum
nostro Platone sentit -- By Jove, this barbarian agrees with
Plato"; and he quotes the celebrated saying of Cardinal Palavicino
-- "Senza Aristotele noi mancavamo di molti Articoli di Fede --
Without, Aristotle we should be without many Articles of Faith"
(Colins, Discourse of Free Thinking, p. 127.)


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Not only did the Fathers and the Church admit with implicit
faith the living reality of the gods of heathendom, their powers,
oracles, miracles and other "analogies" to the Christian faith,
they even made of such anthologies their strongest apologies, or
arguments, in defense of the truth of the Christian tenets. In his
Apologia addressed to the Emperor Hadrian, Father Justin reasons
from analogy thus:

"By declaring the Logos, the first-begotten of God, our
Master, Jesus Christ, to be born of a Virgin, without any human
mixture, we [Christians] may no more in this than what you [Pagans]
say of those whom you style the Sons of Jove. For you need not be
told what a parcel of sons the writers most in vogue among you
assign to Jove. ...

"As to the Son of God, called Jesus, should we allow him to be
nothing more than man, yet the title of 'the Son of God' is very
justifiable, upon the account of his wisdom, considering that you
[Pagans] have your Mercury in worship under the title of The Word,
a messenger of God. ...

"As to his [Jesus] being born of a Virgin, you have your
Perseus to balance that." (Justin, Apologia, I. ch. xxii; ANF. i,
170.)

The good Fathers carried their argument by analogy into proof
of all sorts of holy Christian mysteries; the Pagan Oracles and
miracles were undeniably valid and true, why not therefore their
new Christian counterparts? "Without a single exception," says the
historian of European Mortals, "the Fathers maintained the reality
of the Pagan miracles as fully as their own. The oracles had been
ridiculed and rejected by numbers of the philosophers, but the
Christians unanimously admitted their reality. They appealed to a
long series of Oracles as predictions of their faith; not until
1696 was there a denial of their supernatural character, when a
Dutch Anabaptist minister, Van Dale, in a remarkable book, De
Origine Progressu Idolatriae, asserted in opposition to the
unanimous voice of ecclesiastical authority, that they were simple
impostures." (Lecky, History of European Morals, i, 374-375, et
seq.; see pp. 378-381, et seq.) The Christian Fathers and their
followers made themselves so ridiculous by their fatuous faith in
the Sibyls that they were derisively called "Sibyllists" by the
Pagans.

THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES

The most curious in all respects, and for our purposes the
most instructive of the ancient Pagan religious frauds, are the
Sibtlline Oracles, which, extensively reinforced by Jewish and
Christian forgeries, were perhaps the most potent and popular
"proofs" of the early Church for the divinity of Jesus Christ and
the truth of the Christian religion; thus they derive special
notice here. All will remember, from their school histories of
ancient Rome, the well-known legend of one of the Sibyls who came
to King Tarquin the Second with nine volumes of Oracles, which she
offered to sell to him for a very high price; being refused, she
went away and burned three of the books, and returning offered the


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remaining six at the same price; again the King refused to buy, and
she departed, burned three more of the books, and returned with the
last three for which she demanded the original price. Astonished at
this conduct and greatly impressed, the King consulted his augurs
and was advised to secure the remaining treasures of prophecy
before it was too late; he did So, and immediately the Seeress
disappeared and was never seen again. The precious tomes were
deposited with great care and jealously guarded in the Temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus; a college of priests was instituted to have
charge of them; and the divine Oracles were consulted with great
solemnity only in times of the greatest crises of the State. The
books were finally destroyed when the Capitol was burned during the
wars of Sylla, but many ethers continued in existence.

The oracles were composed in Alexandrine verse, and claimed to
be the work of inspired Pagan prophetesses called Sibyls; they
enjoyed the greatest vogue and were believed with the most implicit
faith by Pagans and Christians alike. There were a number of these
Sibyls, and the number of the volumes of oracles is differently
estimated as a dozen or more; those with which we are chiefly
concerned are the Roman Cumaean and Greek Erythraean Sibyls and the
Oracles going under their names. The inveterate bent of the
priestly mind for forgery in furtherance of its holy mission of
imposture, led to the prompt adoption and corruption of these Pagan
frauds, for the propagation first of the Jewish, then of the
Christian Faith. "Because of the vogue enjoyed by these heathen
oracles," says the Catholic Encyclopedia, "and because of the
influence they had in, shaping the religious views of the period,
the Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria, during the second century b.c,.
composed [i.e. forged] verses in the same form, and circulated them
among the Pagans as a means of diffusing Judaistic doctrines and
teaching. This custom was continued down into Christian times, and
was borrowed by some Christians, so that in the second or third
century, a new class of Oracles emanating from Christian sources
came into being, Hence the Sibylline Oracles can be classed as
Paggan, Jewish, or Christian. In many cases, however, the
Christians merely revised or interpolated the Jewish documents, and
thus we have two classes of Christian oracles, those adopted from
Jewish sources and those entirely written by Christians. ... It
seems clear, however, that the Christian Oracles and those revised
from Jewish sources all emanated from the same circle [or band of
Christian forgers] and were intended to aid in the diffusion of
Christianity.

"The Sibyls are quoted frequently by the early Fathers and
Christian writers, Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement of
Alexandria, etc. ... They were known and used during the Middle
Ages in both the East and the West. ... They all purport to be the
work of the Sibyls." (CE. v. xiii, p. 770.)

Most notable of these forged Christian addenda to the Pagan-
Jewish forged Oracles, 'Is found in Book VIII, a lengthy composite
of Jewish and Christian fraud, consisting of some 500 hexameter
verses. The first 216 verses, says the CE., "are most likely the
work of a second century Jew, while the latter part (verses 217-
500), beginning with an acrostic on the symbolical Christian word
Ichthus is undoubtedly Christian, and dates most probably from the


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third century." (CE. xiii, 770.) Ichthus is the Greek word for
fish, and the fish was the fitting and universal symbol of the
early Christians as typical of the "catch" of the Apostolic fishers
of men. This cabalistic word Ichthus, worked into the professedly
Pagan Oracle in the form of an acrostic, is composed of the initial
letters of the popular name and title of the Son of the Christian
God, in the Greek: "Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter -- Jesus
Christ, Son of God, Savior" This fish anagram was an ancient Pagan
symbol of fecundity, of great vogue and veneration throughout
Pagandom, and was adopted by Christendom for the double reason that
the initials acrostically formed the name and title of its new
deity, and that in the ancient science fish were supposed to be
generated in the water without carnal copulation, and were thus
peculiarly symbolic of the Virgin-born Christ. Says Tertuilian:
"We, little fishes, after the example of our Ichthus, are born in
water." (On Baptism, ch. i; ANP. iii, 669.)

The Church historian, Bishop Eusebius, preserves the Acrostic,
taken from the Erythraean Sibyl, but says: "Many people, though
they allowed the Erythrian Sibyl to have been a prophetess, yet
reject this Acrostic, suspecting it to have been forged by the
Christians"; which suspicion the good Bishop refutes by an appeal
to Cicero, who, he assures, had read and translated it into Latin.
(Eusebius, Oration on Const., chs. 18-19; I, 274-5.) Father St.
Augustine quotes the verses and says: "The Erythraean Sibyl has
indeed written some things clearly and manifestly relating to
Christ. ... There are some, who suspected all these prophecies
which relate to Christ and passed under the name of the Sibyl, to
have been forged by the Christians." (Aug., De Civ. Dei, xviii, 23;
N,&PNF. ii, 3723.) Father Clement of Alexandria attributes to the
Sibyls the same inspiration as the Old Testament, and cites Peter
and Paul as appealing to them for a prediction of the life and
character of Jesus Christ, Peter and Paul speaking thus: "Take the
Greek books in your hand, and look into the Sibyl. How clearly she
speaks of one God, and of the things to come; then take Hystaspes
also and read, and you will find the Son of God much more clearly
and evidently described." (Strom. I, 6, p. 761, Ed. Oxon.; also
Lact., De ver. sap., I, 4, 15; Free Inquiry, p. 34.)

The importance of the Sibylline Oracles, speaking through
countless "interpolations" forged by Christian pens, for not only
the propagation of the faith among the Pagans, but as actual proofs
of the truth of the fictitious "facts" of Christianity, cannot be overestimated; this justifies the following extracts from the
Divine Institutes of Lactantius. The greater part, I dare say, of
the seven Books of that notable work, addressed to the "mighty
Emperor Constantine," is devoted to arguments and proofs of Jesus
Christ and the principal events of his recorded life and acts,
drawn copiously from the heathen gods and the forged Oracles of the
Sibyls. These proofs, to the minds of Father Lactantius and of all
the Fathers, as to the Pagans generally, were "more strong than
proofs of Holy Writ"; for, he says, "perhaps the sacred writings
[in the Old Testament] speak falsely when they teach [such and so
about Jesus); ... the Sibyls before taught the same things in their
verses." Citing scores of Sibylline "prophecies" forged by the
Christians for the belief and persuasion of the Pagans, who were
effectively "refuted by these testimonies" and thus "brought to


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Christ," some of them, says Lactantius, urge that these prophetic
verses "were not by the Sibyls, but made up and composed by our own
writers," as the fact is above confessed by CE.; but not so, argues
the great Apologist; "do not Cicero and other Pagan authors, dead
long before Jesus, testify to the Sibyls?" -- Yes, to the Sibyls
and their utterances then extant; not to the later Christian
forgeries in their names. Moreover, these Christian
"interpolations" imputed to the Sibyls, exactly as the muddled,
ambiguous, meaningless "prophecies" of the Old Testament writings,
meant nothing and were not understood to mean anything, until Jesus
Christ came along, and these Jewish and Pagan mummeries were seized
upon by the avid forging Christians to make up and pad out the
pretended life and wondrous acts of the Christ. Even a cursory
examination and the marginal cross-references will demonstrate,
that virtually every act imputed in the New Testament Gospels to
the Nazarene, was cut to fit of some scrap of mummery or pretended
"prophecy" of Hebrew Scriptures and Sibylline Oracles. Of
numberless instances of the latter quoted in the, Divine
Institutes, a few typical ones only can be here cited, but they are illuminating of the Christ-tales.

In Book I, chapter vi is entitled, "Of Divine Testimonies, and
of the Sibyls and their Predictions." Appealing for faith to
Constantine, the chapter begins: "Now let us pass to divine
testimonies?; and he cites and quotes, in numerous chapters, the
Pagan gods Mercury, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollo, and other mystic
deities and personages, all testifying to the One Christian God and
to his Son Jesus. After infinite such appeals for proofs, we come
to Book IV, a veritable arsenal of manufactured "divine
testimonies"; and we pause to con with wonder chapter xv, "Of the
life and Miracles of Jesus, and Testimonies concerning Him." Jesus,
after his baptism, says Lactantius, "began to perform the greatest
miracles, not by magical powers, but by heavenly strength and
power. ... His powers were those which Apollo called wonderful. ...
And he performed all these things not by His hands, or the
application of any remedy, but by His word and command, as the
Sibyl had foretold: 'Doing all things by His word, and healing
every disease.'"

Many chapters are replete with instances of the miracles of
Jesus, alleged each of them to have been foretold by one or another
of the Sibyls, and quoting the Christian-forged prophetic verses in
proof. The Christ came to fulfill the Law; "and the Sibyl shows
that it would come to pass that this law would be destroyed by the
Son of God: 'But when all these things which I told you shall be
accomplished, then all the law is fulfilled with respect to Him.'"
(c. xvii.) Of a few others, and the arguments above sketched, I
quote the text:

"What can be more wonderful, either in narration or in
action? But the Sibyl had before foretold that it would take
place, whose verses are related to this effect.

"With five loaves at the same time, and with two fishes,
He shall satisfy five thousand men in the wilderness;
And Afterwards taking all the fragments that remain,
He shall fill twelve baskets to the hope of many.'


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"But perhaps the sacred writings speak falsely when they teach
that there was such power in Him, that by His command He compelled
the winds to obey Him, the seas to serve Him, disease to depart,
the dead to be submissive. Why should I say that the Sibyls before
had taught the same things in their one verses? One of whom,
already mentioned, thus speaks:

"But shall still the winds by His word, and calm the sea
As it rages, treading with feet of peace and in faith.'

"And again another which says:

'He shall walk on the waves, He shall release men from
disease.
He shall raise the dead, and drive away many pains;
And from the bread of one wallet there shall be a satisfying
[of men].'

"Some, refuted by these testimonies, are accustomed to
have recourse to the assertion that these poems were not by
the Sibyls, but made up and composed by our own writers. But
he, will assuredly not think this who has read Cicero [De
Natura Deorum, ii], and Varro, and other ancient writers, who
make mention of the Erythraean and other Sibyls from whose
books we bring forth these examples; And these authors died
before the birth of Christ according to the flesh. But I do
not doubt that these poems were in former times regarded as
ravings, since no one understood them. For they announced some
marvelous wonders, of which neither the manner, nor the time,
nor the author was signified. Lastly the Erythraean Sibyl says
that it would come to pass that she would be called mad and
deceitful. But assuredly

'They will say that the Sibyl
is mad, and deceitful: but when all things shall come to pass,
Then ye will remember me; and no one will any longer
Say that I, the prophetess of the great God, am mad.'

"Therefore they were neglected for many ages; but they
received attention after the nativity and passion of Christ
had revealed secret things. Thus it was also with the
utterances of the prophets, which were read by the people of
the Jews for fifteen hundred [!] years and more, but yet were
not understood until after Christ had explained them by His
word and by His works. For the prophets spoke of Him; nor
could the things which they said have been in any way
understood, unless they had been altogether fulfilled."
(Lact., Div. Inst., Bk. IV, chap. xv; ANF. vii, 115, 116.)

In view of these "divine testimonies" of Pagan Oracles forged
by pious Christians in proof of their Christ, need one wonder that
the like testimonies in the Gospels themselves may be under
suspicion of like forgery? We shall have the proofs in their due
order. Father Justin Martyr treats these Pagan books of Christian
evidences, as prophetic Scriptures and divine, and speaking of
their prohibition by the Roman Emperors, says: "By the contrivance



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of Demons it was made a capital crime to read them, in order to
deter men from coming to a knowledge of what is good." (Apologia,
I, ch. 77; ANF. i, 178.)

That heathens and even devils may be specially endued with the
gift of prophecy by God for his glory, and God may make use of the Devil-in-Chief for this purpose, is expressly asserted by Pope
Benedict XIV" (Heroic Virtue, III, 144, 150). And "the Angelic
Doctor," St. Thomas Aquinas, "in order to prove that the heathens
were capable of prophecy, refers to the instance of the Sibyls, who
make clear mention of the mysteries of the Trinity, of the
Incarnation of the Word, of the Life, Passion, and Resurrection of
Christ. It is true that the Sibylline poems now extant became in
course of time interpolated; but as Benedict XIV (1740-1758)
remarks, this does not hinder much of them, especially what the
early Fathers referred to, from being genuine and in no wise
apocryphal"! (CE. xii, 474.)

Thus the Holy Ghost of God, speaking through its official
mouthpiece, its Vive-God on earth, infallibly guarded by the Spirit
against the possibility of error, in the year 1742 of our Era of
Christ, sings the Doxology of these admitted frauds of paganish and
forging Christianity, and canonizes them as the God-inspired origin
of the holiest mysteries of Christian revelation. The inference is
inevitable, that Pagan Sibyls, Christian Church Fathers, and Vicars
of God, are strongly characterized by Ignorance and Imposture.

A noted classical and critical authority, Anthon,
contemplating the shifts of the new Christianity rising from the
debacle of Paganism, falls into a philosophical reflection,
pertinent alike to the old and the new systems of priestcraft:

"When a religion has fallen and been succeeded by
another, the more zealous advocates of the new belief
sometimes find themselves in a curious state of embarrassment.
So it is with regard to the heathen system and the Christian
code. Among the numerous oracles given to the world in former
days, some have chanced to find a remarkable accomplishment;
and the pious but ill-judging Christian, unable to ascribe
them to deities in whom men no longer believes, is driven to
create for them a different origin. 'God,' says Rollin, 'in
order to punish the blindness of the heathen, sometimes
permits evil spirits to give responses conformable to the
truth.' (Rollin, Histoire Ancienne, I, 887.) The only evil
spirit which had an agency in the oracular responses of
antiquity was that spirit of craft imposture which finds so
congenial a home among an artful and cunning priesthood."
(Anthon, Classical Dictionary, 4th ed., p. 929; Art. Orv
alum.)

The historian of European Morals, in his amazing review of the
infinite variety and number of superstitions, frauds, forgeries,
false miracles and lying oracles of Pagandom, which were taken over
almost 'in masse' by the Christians, and implicitly and with
childlike credulity accepted and believed, taught and preached by
every Christian Father of the Church, by the infallible popes, and
the millions of their ignorant and superstitious ex-Pagan lay


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dupes, makes this very pertinent and just remark apropos the value
of their pious opinions, testimonies and "traditions" of the
origins of the Christian faith:

"To suppose that men who held these opinions were
capable, in the second and third centuries, of ascertaining
with any degree of just confidence whether miracles had taken
place in Judaea in the first century, is grossly absurd; nor
would the conviction of their reality have made any great
impression on their minds at a time when miracles were
supposed to be so abundantly diffused." (Lecky, Hist. Europ.
Morals, i, 375.)

The confession that the vast mass of Christian miracles were
Pagan frauds and lies taken 'en bloc' over into Christianity to
make a good showing as against the Pagans and to dupe the
superstitious new converts, is made by CE., with the notable
further admission that the only alteration made was that the Pagan
gods were made over into Christian saints: "This transference was
promoted by the numerous cases in which Christian saints became the
successors of local deities, and Christian worship supplanted the
ancient local worship. This explains the great number of
similarities between gods and saints. For the often maintained
metamorphosis of gods into saints no proof is to be found." This
immense confession of Christian fraudulence and imposture, in
conjuring fictitious Pagan gods -- which according to Christian
faith were all actual devils -- into canonized Saints of God and
Holy Church, is several times reported by CE., of which this
instance is before me: "It has indeed been said that the 'Saints
are the successors to the Gods.' Instances have been cited ... of
statues of pagan Gods baptized and transformed into Christian
Saints"! (CE. xv. 710; cf. Is It God's Word? 5, 7-9.) This truly
wonderful psycho-religious miracle is thereupon wrought: The
idolatrous Pagan who just before the "baptism" actually worshipped
these "statues of the Pagan gods," immediately afterwards simply
venerated or adored the same gods "baptized and transformed into
Christian saints" -- fully comprehending the non-understandable
hair-splitting theological distinction between pious "dulia" and
idolatrous "latria," as defined by Holy Church and droned by CE. in
its article on Idolatry. And vast hoards of utterly illiterate and
stupid Faithful go into the True Churches every day, kneel before
and pray to these same Pagan gods conjured into Christian saints --
with countless other counterfeit near-divinities of their near-
Idolatry -- and appreciate the difference to a split-second of
devotion and true faith. Tis passing strange.

A very remarkable confession of purposeful fraud, with the
mechanics of the fraud, and the vast extent of it in faking Pagan
miracle-lies into Christian truth of the most driveling nonsense,
reads:

"Manifold as the varieties of [miracle] legends now seem
to be, there are fundamentally not so very many different
notions utilized. The legend considers the saint as a kind of
lord of the elements, who commands the water, rain, fire,
mountain, and rock; he changes, enlarges, or diminishes
objects; flies through the air; delivers from dungeons --
(examples, Peter, Paul) -- and gallows; takes part in battles,

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and even in martyrdom is invulnerable; animals, the wildest
and the most timid, serve him (e.g., the stories of the bear
as a beast of burden; the ring in the fish; the frogs becoming
silent, etc.); his birth is glorified by a miracle; a voice,
or letters, from Heaven proclaim his identity -- [all these
score for Jesus the Christ]; bells ring of themselves; the
heavenly ones enter into personal intercourse with him
(betrothal of Mary); he speaks with the dead and beholds
heaven, hell, and purgatory; forces the devil to release
people from compacts; he is victorious over dragons; etc. Of
all this the authentic [?] Christian narratives know nothing
-- [a confession that every saint-tale of Bible and Church is
a lie].

"But whence does this world of fantastic concepts arise? A
glance at the pre-christian religious narratives will dispel every
doubt. All these stories are anticipated by the Greek chroniclers,
writers of myths, collectors of strange tales, neo-Plutonism, and neo-Pythagorism. One need only refer to the 'Ellados Periegesis' of
Pausanius, or glance through the codices collected by Photius in
his 'Bibliotheca,' to recognize what great importance was attached
to the reports of miracles in antiquity by both the educated and
uneducated." ...

Reversing only the order of the sentences, and CE. reversing
the truth of the answer it gives to its own question, the
confession of shame continues:

"But how was the transference of [these miracle] legends
to Christianity consummated? ... Hellenism had already
recognized this [fraudulent] characteristic of the religious
fable, and would thus have been obliged to free itself from it
in the coarse of time, had not the competition with
Christianity forced the champions of the ancient polytheism to
seek again in the ancient fables incidents to set against the
miraculous power of Christ. [!] In this way popular illusions
found their way from Hellenism to Christianity." (CE. ix,
129-30.)

And in 1900 years no priest, bishop, pope, depositaries and
guardians of divine truth, has ever said a word to prevent or put
end to this shameful prostitution of mind of their poor grovelling
dupes, but to this day perpetuate them in it. Far from ending the
shameful thing, many bishops and popes have won the title Mendax
Maximus by peddling these Pagan lies as God's truth; as witness
this one instance from the article we are quoting: "St. Augustine
(De Cura, xii) and also [Pope] St. Gregory the Great (Dialogues,
IV, xxxvi) -- [the greatest book of Lies outside the Bible] --
relate of a man, who died by an error of the Angel of Death and was
again restored to life, the same story which is already given by
Lucian in his 'Philopseudes.'" (Ib. p. 130.) Such, verily for
shame, is "that new Paganism later called Christianity."

Mythology has well been called the Theology of dead religions.
The world is a vast cemetery of deceased gods and teeming scrap-
heap of decayed and discarded priest-imposed religious beliefs -- superstitions. All the dead gods and religions of Paganism, all the


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yet surviving but fast moribund deities and faiths of the XXth
Century world, all -- (except -- the Jews and Christians say, their
own), -- all were admittedly the fraudulent handiwork of priests
and professional god-and-myth makers. In a word, short and ugly,
but true -- every priest of every god and religion (saving, for the
nonce, the Jewish-Christian ones) -- was a conscious and
unconscionable falsifier and impostor, -- a common liar for his
god. All plied their artful, unholy priestcraft in the name of
gods; for power and pelf, those grafting Pagan priests. No
Christian will, or truthfully can, deny their portentous fact, The
verdict of lying guilt of Pagan Priestcraft is unanimous.

No one can now doubt that Lecky, after voluminous review of
pre-Christian frauds and impostures, spoke the precise historical
truth: "Christianity floated into the Roman Empire on the wave of
credulity that brought with it this long train of Oriental
superstitions and legends." (Hist. of European Morals, i, 373-4.)

The mainstream of Oriental superstition and priestly imposture
will now be seen to swell with the turgid flood of Hebrew fables
and forgery, before pouring the mingled flood of myth and fraud
into the pure tide of Christian Truth; -- where, Presto! change! it
is beheld transformed -- "baptized" -- into the "revealed
mysteries" and "Catholic Truth" of God!

**** ****

FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY

Abbreviations for most often used sources:

The libraries of the Union Theological Seminary and of
Columbia University, in New York City, were the places of the finds
here recorded. Cited so often, space will be saved for more
valuable uses by citing by their initials, -- which will become
very familiar -- my chief ecclesiastical authorities, towit:

The Ante-Nicene Fathers, cited as ANF.; A Collection of the
extant Writings of all the Founders of Christianity down to the
Council of Nicaea, or Nice, in 325 A.D. American Reprint, eight
volumes. The Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, N.Y.,
1885. [xxx]

The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, cited as N&PNF.; First and
Second Series; many volumes; same publishers.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, cited as CE.; fifteen volumes and
index, published under the Imprimatur of Archbishop Farley; New
York, Robert Appleton Co., 1907-9.

The Encyclopedia Biblica, cited as EB., four volumes; Adam &
Charles Black, London, 1899; American Reprint, The Macmillan Co.,
New York, 1914.


**** ****

Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.

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þ Synchronet þ Rick's BBS - telnet:ricksbbs.synchro.net:23

35 page printout, pages 56 to 88 of 322
CHAPTER II

HEBREW HOLY FORGERIES

"Hinneh lash-sheqer asah et sheqer sepharim -- Behold, the
lying pen of the scribes hath wrought lies." Jeremiah, viii. 8.


SUNDRY HOLY HEBREW men of old, we are told on the authority of
the name of the pseudo-first Jewish-Christian Pope, "spake as they
were moved by the Holy Ghost" (2 Peter, i, 21). These literary
movings of the Spirit were sometime reduced to writing in "Sacred
Scriptures"; and again later Christian authority assures: "All
scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Tim. iii, 16), --
though this is a falsified rendition: the true reading is: "Every
scripture suitable for edification is divinely inspired," as the
original Greek text is quoted by Father Tertullian. (ANF. iv, 16.)

It is the popular supposition that the 66 -- (Catholic Bible
73) -- "little books" which comprise the Bible as we know it, are
the whole sum of Hebrew and Christian "sacred writings," which have
claimed and have been accorded the sanction of Divine inspiration
and "treated by the Church as canonical." The term "canonical" in ecclesiastical parlance means Books accepted as divinely inspired;
books which "were definitely canonized, or adjudged to have a
uniquely Divine or authoritative quality," as is the authorative
definition. (CE. iii, 267.) "Canonicity depends on inspiration."
(EB. i, 653.) The holy Hebrew "canon" was closed, or the last
inspired Book of the Old Testament written, according to Jewish
"Tradition," by Ezra, about 444 B.C. (Ib. i, 658, 662.) In truth,
however, several of the Books of the Old Testament were written
much later, and were never heard of by Ezra; and "some found their
way in, others not, on grounds of taste -- the taste of the
period," says Wellhausen. (Einleitung, p. 652, 6th Ed.)

The popular idea is that when the "moving" of the above
inspired 66 sacred writings was ended, the moving Spirit retired
from the field of Hebrew, and later of Christian literature, and
thus closed the "sacred canon" of the respective Hebrew and
Christian Testaments. This will be seen to be a mistake, in the
judgment of the True Christian Church, according to which the Jews
evidently did not know their own inspired writings, and curiously
omitted from their "canon" a number of divinely "moved" books and
scraps of books, which the better-instructed Christian Church has
adopted as full of inspiration into its own present official Bible,
as we shall notice in its place. There is also a much greater
number of such books, of both Hebrew and Christian origin, which
the inspired Church formerly and for ages regarded as inspired and
"canonical," but which it now repudiates as "apocryphal" and
acknowledges as forgeries; as we shall also duly note.

There is, indeed, an eminence mass of religious writings, the
work of Jewish or Christian priests or professional religious
persons, or composite productions of both sets of forgers, which
are generally known as "apocrypha" or pious forgeries; but which
each and all have been held by the Church through many ages of
faith as of the highest inspired sanctity and accredited with the
full rank of "canonical" truth of God.



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The term apocryphal or forged "takes in those compositions
which profess to have been written either by Biblical personages or
men in intimate relation with them." (CE. i, 601.) "Since these
[apocryphal] books were forgeries, the epithet in common parlance
today denotes any story or document which is false or spurious, ...
apocryphal in the disparaging sense of bearing names to which they
have no right; all come under the definition above, for each of
then has at one tine or another been treated as canonical." (EB. i,
249-250.)

That the above 66 (or 73) Books of the accepted Bible of
Christianity come exactly, both as to manner of spurious origin and
matter of fictional content, within the above definition of
apocrypha or forgery, shall be made exceedingly evident. A brief
review of these acknowledged religious forgeries in the name of God
and of his inspired biographers, will afford a curious and
instructive study of the workings of the fervid, credulous and
contorted priestly mind, reckless of truth, and shed a floodlight
of understanding on the origins and incredibility of the so-called
"canonical" Books of the Bible, Hebrew and Christian alike.

While speaking here immediately of the Jewish Apocrypha or
pious forgeries, it is to be noted and borne in mind that it is the Holy-Ghost-guided True Christian Church which alone has accepted
and cherished these spurious productions of Jewish priestcraft --
(scornfully repudiated by the Jews), has adulterated and re-forged
them to more definite deceptive purposes of Christian propaganda,
and has outdone Jewry by adding innumerable like forgeries, -- "a
whole literature" of fabrications -- to its own spurious
hagiography, or sacred writings. There will thus occur some
necessary and unavoidable over-lappings of Jewish and Christian
forgeries in the course of our treatment.

"It must be confessed," admits the Catholic Encyclopedia,
"that the early Fathers and the Church, during the first three
centuries, were more indulgent towards Jewish pseudograph [i.e.
forged writings] circulating under venerable Old Testament, names.
The Book of Henoch [Enoch] and the Assumption of Moses had been
cited by the canonical Epistle of Jude. Many Fathers admitted the
inspiration of Fourth Esdras. Not to mention the Shepherd of
Hermas, the Acts of St. Paul (at least in the Thecla portion) and
the Apocalypse of St. Peter were highly revered at this and later
periods. ... In the Middle Ages ... many pseudographic [i.e.
forged] writings enjoyed a high degree of favor among both clerics
and laity." (CE. i, 615.)

A curious and edifying side-light on the chronic clerical
flair for forgery is thrown by a sentence from the paragraph above
quoted from the Catholic Encyclopedia. The earliest papal decree
condemning certain of these pious forgeries is itself a Christian
forgery! "The so-called 'Decretum de recipiendis et non recipiendis
libris,' which contained a catalogue of some half-hundred works
condemned as apocryphal, was attributed to Pope Gelasius (495),
but, in reality is a compilation dating from the beginning of the
Sixth century." (CE,. i, 615.)




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And, be it noted, these Christian forgeries were not at all
condemned by the Church as forgeries and pious lies, but simply
because they contained some dogmatic doctrines which were regarded
by the Orthodox as "heresies" they were condemned "always, however,
with a preoccupation against heresy." And again in the same
article: "Undoubtedly it was the large use heretical Circles,
especially the Gnostics made of this insinuating literature which
first called out the animadversions of the official guardians of
doctrinal purity." (lb. p. 615.)

The same authority cautiously and clerically explains, that
"ancient literature, especially in the Orient, used methods much
more free and clastic than those permitted by our modern and
occidetital culture. Pseudographic [falsified] compositions was in
vogue among the Jews in the two centuries before Christ and for
some time later. This holds good for the so-called 'Wisdom of
Solomon,' written in and belonging to the Church's sacred cannon.
-- [This admits that this book of the Catholic Bible is spurious.]
In other cases, where the assumed name did not stand as a symbol of
a type of a certain kind of literature, the intention was not
without a degree of at least literary dishonesty." (Ib. p. 601.)

Apocryphal religious literature consists of several classes,
one of the most important subdivisions being that designated as
"apocalyptic," and which consists of "pretended prophecies and
revelations of both Jewish and Christian authorship, and dating
from about 200 B.C. to about 150 A.D.," the latter being the
approximate date of the new "canonical" Books of the New Testament,
Their general subject is the problem of the final triumph of what
is called the Kingdom of God. Speaking particularly of the
apocalypses, the best known of which are the Hebrew Book of Daniel,
written about 165 B.C., and the Jewish-Christian Book of Revelation
imputed to the Apostle John of Patmos, a recent secular authority
(corroborated at all points by clerical authorities) points out
that many if not all of the Jewish apocalypses are adulterated with "alterations and interpolations by Christian hands, making the
alleged predictions, point more definitely to Jesus," which pious
tempering "gave certain of these Jewish works a very wide
circulation in the early Church. ... The revelations and
predictions are set forth as though actually received and written
or spoken by ancient worthies, as Enoch, Moses, etc. ... They were
once widely accepted as genuine prophecies, and found a warm
reception in Jewish and early Christian circles." (The New
International, Encyclopedia, vol. i, p. 745.) This form of pious
fraud is admitted as quite the expected thing: "Naturally baaing
itself upon the Pentateuch and the Prophets, it clothed itself
fictitiously with the authority of a patriarch or prophet who was
made to reveal the transcendent future" (CE. i, 602), -- most
usually long ex post facto.

The vast and varied extent of Jewish-Christian forgery of
religious books is shown by the groupings under which the several
kinds of apocrypha forgeries are quite exhaustively considered in
the technical works treating of them, such as the Catholic
Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Biblica, as well as the more
popular Britannica and New International Encyclopedias, where the
subject is fully discussed. "Speaking broadly," says the first,


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"The Apocrypha of Jewish origin are coextensive with what are
styled of the Old Testament, and those of Christian origin the
apocrypha of the New Testament. The subject will be treated
["according to their origin"] -- as follows: (I) Apocrypha of
Jewish origin: (II) Jewish Apocrypha with Christian accretions;
(III) apocrypha of Christian origin, comprising (1) apocryphal
Gospels; (2) Pilate literature and other apocrypha concerning
Christ; (3) apocryphal Acts of Apostles; (4) apocryphal doctrinal
works; (5) apocryphal Epistles; (6) apocryphal Apocalypses, (IV)
the apocrypha and the Church." (CE. i, 601.)

What a catalogue of confessed ecclesiastical forgers, and
fraud in the name of God, Christ and his Apostles, and the Church
of God, for the propaganda of priestly frauds as "our Most Holy
Faith"!

What will probably -- In view of the foregoing and what is yet
to come -- be appreciated by many as a peculiarly rare bit of
apocrypha (in its secondary sense) is the following, uttered
apparently with the due and usual ecclesiastical solemnity, in the
celebrated Dictatus of Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), stating the
presumptuous pretenses of the Papacy:

"The Roman Church has never erred, nor will it err to all
eternity. No one may be considered a Catholic Christian who
does not agree with the Catholic Church. No book is
authoritative unless it has received the papal sanction. ...

The pope is the only person whose feet are to be kissed
by all princes"; "the Pope may depose emperors and absolve
subjects from allegiance to an unjust ruler." (Cited by
Robinson, 'The Ordeal of Civilization, pp. 126, 128; Library
of Original Sources, vol. iv, p. 126-321.)

This puts the stamp of canonical inspiration and verity on
some dozen Jewish books and parts of books of the Catholic Bible
which the Jews and the whole body of otherwise discordant sects of
Protestants hesitate not unanimously to pronounce apocryphal and
forged. These "apocrypha" are either entire rejected Jewish books,
all doubtless with Christian "interpolations," or apocryphal
chapters or parts, interpolated probably by the same industry into
the equally apocryphal books of the accepted Jewish canon. The
names of these books, original and interpolations, and which are
not included in the Hebrew Old Testament, -- but are in the True
Church Bible, -- are: Tobit, Judith, Baruch, with the Epistle of
Jeremiah, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach (or
Ecclesiastics), I and II Maccabees, Prayer of Manasseh, Additions
to Esther, and Additions to the Book of Daniel, consisting of the
Prayer of Azarias, the Song of the Three Holy Children (in the
Fiery Furnace), the History of Susannah, the History of Bel and the
Dragon, and sundry such precious fables. (See CE. iii, pp. 267,
270; iv, 624, passim.) These are all included in the Greek
Septuagint and in the Latin Vulgate, were read as Scripture in
early Christian Church, and were declared by the Council of Trent,
at its Fourth Session, in 1546, -- under the Curse of God on all
skeptical doubters, -- to be "inspired and canonical"; and they are
so held by the Roman, and some of the Greek and Oriental Catholic


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Churches, but are declared "apocrypha" and forged by Jewry and all
the rest of Christendom. To several of these extra-revelations of
Judaism included in the Christian True Bible, head-notes apologetic
for their inclusion are attached, of which that to the celebrated
Book of Tobit or Tobias is typical: "Protestants have left it out
of their modern Bibles, alleging that it is not in the canon of the
Jews. But the Church of Christ, which received the Scriptures not
from the Jews, but from the Apostles of Christ, -- [who were all
Jews, to believe the Christian record] -- by traditions from them,
has allowed this book a place in the Christian [sic] Bible from the
beginning." (See Cath. Bible, Tobit, et passim). We may admire in
synopsis the divine inspiration of

THE INSPIRED FABLE OF TOBIT

This Book of Tobit, or Tobias, scoffed both by Jews and
Protestants as a ridiculous fable, but held by all True Believers
as a precious revelation of God, to disbelieve which is to be
damned, is a veritable treasure-trove of exalted heavenly
inspiration, for the preservation of which Jew and Gentile alike
may be dubiously grateful to the pious "tradition" of the Apostles
of Christ, as above said. This Tobias was a very pious and stubborn
Israelite of the Captivity, who, before departing, had cached all
his available cash with his kinsman Gabelus, of Rages, a city of
the Medes, "taking a note of his hand" for its repayment on demand.
While captive in a strange and pagan land, Tobias wan visited by a
piteous calamity, for "as he was sleeping, hot dung out of a
swallows nest fell upon his eves, and he was made blind"; which
affliction Tobias looked reverently to the Lord as visiting upon
him as "revenge for my sins"; as a result Tobias became extremely
poor, and his wife took in work. At that time there lived in the
city of Rages another pious Israelite by name Raguel, who had a
marriageable -- or rather muchly married daughter, Sara, who was
under grave reproach and even imputation of murder, "Because she
had been given to seven husbands, and a devil named Asmodeus had
killed them, at their first going in unto her," so that she
complained that though sevenfold a widow she remained yet a virgin.

At this juncture Tobias bethought himself of the good money he
had left with Gabelus of Rages, and after much palaver decided to
send his son, Tobias, Jr., a comely youth, with the note of hand in
his pocket, and his dog (name unrevealed), on the long journey to
recoup the fortune of ten talents of silver. As Tobias, Jr. started
on the journey, a beautiful young man, who was really the Archangel
Raphael, met him and introduced himself as Azarias, son of Ananias,
-- (Ananias must have written the account) -- and offered to
accompany and guide him upon his journey, which offer was
gratefully accepted. As the two journeyed they came to the river
Tigris; Tobias waded in to wash his feet, when, lo, "a monstrous
fish came up to devour him," whereat Tobias called to his companion
for help. The Angel told him to take the monster fish by the gill
and haul him out, which Tobias seems to have had no trouble in
doing. The Angel then directed Tobias to open the yet live and
"panting" fish, "and lay up his heart, his gall, and his liver, for
thee; for these are necessary for useful medicines"; this done,
they cooked the fish and carried it all along for provisions for
the trip. As they journeyed, Tobias asked the Angel what these


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medicinal scraps were good for; "and the Angel answering said, if
thou put a little piece of its heart upon coals, the smoke thereof
driveth away all kinds of devils, either from man or from woman, so
that they come no more to them. And the gull is good for anointing
the eyes, in which there is a white speck, and they shall be
cured."

So discoursing pleasantly and instructively, the twain arrived
at Rages, and the Angel guided Tobias straight to the house of
Raguel and his daughter Sara, his sole heiress, and told Tobias to
ask for her in marriage. Tobias said that he was afraid of Sara,
for he had heard of what happened to those seven other men; but the
Angel reassured him, that he would show him how to overcome the
devil Asmodeus; that he should marry Sara and go to bed with her
for three nights, but should continently confine his activities "to
nothing else but to prayers with her", and, assured the Angel, on
the first night "lay the liver of the fish on the fire, and the
devil shall be driven away," other holy marvels happening on the
succeeding nights; "and when the third night is past, thou shalt
take the virgin with the fear of the Lord, moved rather for love of
children than for lust." The affair was arranged according to these prescriptions; with Sara and her parents; after the wedding supper,
the newlyweds were left alone in their boudoir; Tobias did nothing
but pray and put a part of the fish liver in the fire, whereupon
"the Angel Raphael took the devil, and bound him in the desert of
Upper Egypt"; then both prayed some more, the fervid prayers being
repeated verbatim. In the morning, Raguel, out of force of habit,
called his servants and ordered them to go into the garden and dig
an eighth grave for the reception of Tobias; when the maidservant
went to the room to arrange for the removal of the corpse, she to
her great surprise "found them safe and sound, sleeping both
together." The empty grave was filled up, a big banquet prepared,
and the happy bridal couple spent two weeks with the bride's
family, while the Angel took the note of hand, went to Gabelus,
collected the money, and paid it over to Tobias; Raguel gave Tobias
one-half of all his property, and executed a writing to give him
one-half of the remainder upon the death of Raguel and wife. Tobias
sent the Angel back to Gabelus, to invite him to his wedding, and
the Angel made him Come.

To proceed swiftly to the climax of marvel, Tobias; and the
Angel, leaving the hymeneal cortege to follow as best it could,
with such impedimenta of wealth, hastened back to the home of
Tobias, Sr., where blind father and the mother were in great grief
over the supposed loss of their son and the money with him. But at
the behest of the Angel, Tobias, Jr. ran into the house, though
"the dog, which had been with them in the way, ran before, and
coming as if he had brought the news, showed his joy by his fawning
and wagging his tail," an act which has since become habitual with
dogs which have enough tail to wag. After kissing his mother and
father, as the Angel had suggested, Tobias, Jr. took the remaining
fish gall out of his traveling bag, and anointed with it the eyes
of his father; "and he stayed about half an hour; and a white skin
began to come out of his eyes, like the skin of an egg. And Tobias
took hold of it, and drew it from his eyes, and immediately he
recovered his sight. And they glorified God," and Tobias, Sr.
dutifully said "I bless thee, Lord God of Israel, because thou hast


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chastised me, and thou hast saved me: and behold I see Tobias my
son." Then, "after seven days Sara his son's wife, and all the
family arrived safe, and the cattle, and the camels, and abundance
of money of his wife's, and that money also which he had received
of Gabelus"; they all feasted for seven days "and rejoiced with all
great joy"; then, when Tobias, Sr. suggested doing something
handsome for the "holy man" through whom all their good fortune had
come, the Angel introduced himself as really not Azariah, son of
Ananias, but "The Angel Raphael, one of the Seven, who stand before
the Lord"; and he explained, "I seemed indeed to eat, and to drink
with you, but I use an invisible meat and drink, which cannot be
seen by men"; thereupon in true angel style he dissipated into thin
air and they could see him no more. The whole Tobias family then,
"lying prostrate for three hours upon their face, blessed God: and
rising up they told all his wonderful works." Thus endeth happily
the reading of the lesson, dictated by the Holy Ghost to the pious
Ananias who recorded it for the edification of True Believers. Let
us pray that it is true.

THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING

Until the Council of Trent, in 1546, there was no infallibly
defined sanction of inspiration of these Jewish "apocrypha"; like
the "canon" sacred Books of the Hebrew Bible, all alike were more
or lest; eclectically accepted and used in the True Church; but, as
said: "The Tridentine decree from which the above list is extracted
was the first infallible and effectually promulgated pronouncement
on the Canon, addressed to the Church universal. Being dogmatic in
its purport, it implies that the Apostles bequeathed the same Canon
to the Church as a part of the depositum fidei. ... We should
search the pages of the New, Testament in vain for any trace of
such action. ... We affirm that such a status points to Apostolic
sanction, which in turn must have rested on revelation either by
Christ or the Holy Spirit." (CE. iii, 270.)

This is luminous clerical reasoning: a lot of anonymous Jewish
fables, derided by Jews and all the rest of the world for want of
even common plausibility of fact or truth, and as to which the
"inspired" Christian books said to emanate from Apostles, are
silent as the grave, are declared after 1500 years to have the ear-
marks of Apostolic sanction, which "must have" been founded on
divine revelation to them "either by Christ or the Holy Spirit," --
which the Church claims are one and the same person; and it is
curious that the "infallible" Council couldn't say which was which,
but vaguely and uncertainly opined it must have been one or the
other. So much for infallible cock-suredness as to "inspiration" of
holy Scriptures. Even the Old Testament itself, says our logician
of inspiration, "reveals no formal notion of inspiration," though,
again, "the later Jews must have possessed the idea." (Ib. p. 269.)
The cursory notice which we shall take of the Old Testament books
will serve to confirm that they reveal no notion at all of
inspiration; that the later Jews must have had the idea that they
were inspired, does not much help the case for them.

In addition to these rejected Jewish books admitted into full
canonical fellowship by the inerrant True Church, there are several
other Jewish apocrypha which are only semi-canonical and admitted


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into a sort of bar-sinister fellowship with the legitimates. They
have a place in the Orthodox Bible for the "edification" of the
Faithful, but are usually printed in the Appendix as suggestive to
the devout that they will not be damned for not fully believing
these particular forgeries,

Among these are two very celebrated books forged in the name
of the great Restorer of Israel, Ezra, under the titles of Third
and Fourth Esdras, as the name is written in the True Bibles.
"Third Esdras," says the Encyclopedia, "Is, one of the three
uncanonical books appended to the official edition of the Vulgate.
... It enjoyed exceptional favor in the early ages of the Church,
being quoted as Scripture with implicit faith by the leading Greek
and Latin Fathers." (CE,. i, 605.) In like errant faith was
regarded its companion forgery, Fourth Esdras, of which the same
ecclesiastical authority says: "The personage serving as the screen
of the author of this book is Esdras (Ezra). ... Both Greek and
Latin Fathers cite it as prophetical. ... Notwithstanding this
widespread reverence for it, in early times, it is a REMARKABLE
FACT that the book never got a foothold in the Canon or liturgy of
the Church ... and even after the Council of Trent, together with
Third Esdras. it was placed in the appendix to the official edition
of the Vulgate. ... The dominant critical dating assigns it to a
Jew writing in the reign of Domitian, A.D. 81-98," -- the "screen"
Ezra being gathered to his fathers since about 444 B.C. (Ib. p.
603-604; v, 537-8; EB. i, 653, 1393.) It is curious that it is
regarded as "remarkable" that the Holy Ghost did not "fall" for
this particular forgery, when it did for so many others!

EZRA "RESTORES" THE LAW

A remarkable apocryphal tale relating to the Hebrew Scriptures
is enshrined by pseudo-inspiration in chapter 14 of this Fourth of
Esdras, regarding the miraculous restoration of Hebrew Holy Writ
after its total perishment. In the calamity of the capture and
destruction of the Holy City by Nebuchadnezzar, 586 B.C., the
Temple of Solomon was destroyed, together with the entire
collection of the sacred Rolls of Scriptures, so that not a scratch
of inspired pen remained to tell the tale of theocratic Hebrew
history and its "revealed" religion. This inconsolable and
apparently irreparable loss affected the holy People all the time
of the of the Babylonian captivity. But upon their return to the
restored City of God, and over a century after their loss, God, we
are told in Fourth Esdras, inspired Ezra and commissioned him to
reproduce the sacred lost Books, which, judging from the result, of
his inspired labors, were many more than the supposed twenty and
two of the supposed old Hebrew canon. Accordingly Ezra, employing
five scribes, dictated to them (from inspired memory) the textual
contents of the lost sacred books, and in just forty days and
nights reproduced a total of 94 sacred books, of which he
designated 24 as the sacred canon, the remaining 70 being termed
esoteric and reserved fir the use of only the wisest. This inspired
fable was eagerly accepted for truth by the early Church Fathers,
many of whom, from Irenaeus on, "admitted its inspiration"; and it
was frequently quoted and commented on as canonical by such Church
luminaries as Tertullian, St. Ambrose, Clement Alexandrensis,



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Origen, Eusebius, St. Jerome, et als., and was prevalently accepted
as Scripture throughout the scholastic period. (EB. i, 654, 139 2-
94; CE. i 537-8, 601-615.)

This legend, however, had, through a better understanding of
"the powers of ordinary human memory," quite faded out by the time
of the Reformation, but only to make way for a more modern and
rationalistic one, invented by the Jew Levita, who died in 1549.
According to his new fable Ezra and the Talmudic "Men of Great
Synagogue" simply united into one volume the 24 books which until
that time had circulated separately, and divided them into the
three great divisions yet recognized, of the Law the Prophets, and
the Hagiography or holy writings. This fabulous statement of Levita
"became the authoritative doctrine of the orthodoxy of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." (EB. i, 654.) This new
legend is cited simply to show how prone is the credulous clerical
mind to accept as truth the most baseless fables; and how, when one
of their precious bubbles of faith is pricked by tardy exposure or
common sense, they eagerly catch at the next which comes floating
by.

THE "FINDING OF THE LAW"

Another ancient priestly fiction, which to this day passes
current among the credulous as inspired truth of God, is the fabled
"finding of the Law" as recorded in the Word of God. We are all
familiar with the notable "finding" by the late lamented Prophet.
Joseph Smith -- thereto led by the Angel Moroni -- of the golden
plates containing the hieroglyphic text of Book of Mormon, near
Palmyra N.Y. in 1823-1827. (Book of Mormon, Introd.) History
repeated itself. A like remarkable discovery was made in the year
621 B.C., this time by a priest, with the help of a witch or lady fortune-teller. As related in 2 Kings xxii, corroborated by 2
Chronicles xxxiv, in the eighteenth year of the "good king" Josiah
of Judah, while some repair work was being done in the Temple,
Hilkiah the priest of a sudden "found the book of the law of Yahweh
given by Moses," over 800 years before, and never heard of since.
Hilkiah called in Shaphan the scribe, and they took the great
"find" to Josiah the King. To verify the veracity of the high-
priest, Huldah the lady prophet was consulted; being intimately
familiar with the sentiments of God, she at once declared that
Yahweh was very angry about it, "because," as the King said, "our
fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do after
all that is written in this book"; and the King at once set about
to carry into effect the laws prescribed in Deuteronomy, -- just
then for the first time in the history of Israel ever heard of or
acted upon. This "book of the law given to Moses" 800 years before
was doubtless the priestly work of Hilkiah, palmed off under the
potent name of Moses to force its very reluctant observance and
belief on the superstitious Jews. That this is the fact is the
consensus of the scholars, as summarized in the Encyclopedia
Biblies, and any modern work of O.T. criticism. An examination of
the Bible texts themselves, as made in my previous work,
demonstrates that this holy "law of Mosses" was totally unknown and
unobserved through all the History of Israel from its beginnings
until Josiah, and was composed by his priests and enlarged into the
present Pentateuch during and after the captivity in Babylon.


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THE "SEPTUAGINT" TRANSLATION INTO GREEK

As priestly forged tales were fabricated to account for the
origin and preservation of the sacred Hebrew Books, so like pious
fraud was adopted to account for their very notable translation
into Greek, in what is known as the Sepuagint, Version. After the
conquests by Alexander the Great and his establishment of the city
of Alexandria in Egypt, immense numbers of Jews were settled in the
new city, which quickly became the commercial and intellectual
center of the ancient world, with Greek the universal language. The
holy Hebrew language had became a dead language to the Jews of the "Dispersion"; their synagogue services could not be conducted in
the mother tongue. The Alexandrian Jews were accordingly under
necessity to render the "Law" into Greek for their public use; and
this was gradually done by such of them as thought themselves able
to do such work. But this common-place mode of rendering the sacred
Hebrew into a Gentile speech did not satisfy the pious wonder-
craving Jewish mind. Accordingly, somewhere about 200 B.C., an
anonymous Jew invented a more satisfactory tale, which has had
incalculable influence on the Christian faith and dogmas. This
pious Israelite had the customary recourse to religions forgery; he
forged a letter in the name of one Aristeas, an official of Ptolemy
II, Philadelphus, the Greek king of Egypt, 285-247 B.C., purporting
to be addressed to his brother, Philocrates, and giving a marvelous
history of the Translation.

Here, in substance, is what we read of the first origin of the
Version, limited therein to the "law" of Moses, as first related by
Josephus. Ptolemy had recently established a library at Alexandria,
which he purposed should contain a copy of every obtainable
literary work extant. 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. CE. xiv, 625.) At the
suggestion of Demetrius, his Librarian, fables the pseudo-Aristeas
through Josephus, that he should enrich the Library with a copy of
the sacred law of the Jews Ptolemy wrote to Eleazar the chief
priest at Jerusalem, sending the letter and magnificent presents
"to God" by the hand of a delegation including Aristeas, requesting
a copy of the Law and a number of learned Jews competent to
translate it into Greek. The embassy was successful; a richly
ornamented copy of the holy law, written in letters of gold, was
sent to the King, together with seventy-two Doctors of Israel,
deputed to deliver the Book and to carry out the wishes of the
King. They were received with great honor, says pseudo-Aristeas,
and duly feted for several days; they were then conducted across
the long causeway to the Island of Pharos to the place which was
prepared for them, "which was a house that was built near the
shore, and was a quiet place, and fit for their discoursing
together about their work, ... Accordingly they made an accurate interpretation, with great zeal and great pains," working until the
ninth hour each day, and visiting Ptolemy every morning. "Now when
the Law was transcribed, and the labor of interpretation was over,
which came to its conclusion in seventy-two days," the work was
read over to the assembled Jews, who rejoiced that "the


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interpretation was happily finished"; they were enjoined to report
any errors or emissions which they might discover, to the
"Seventy," who would make the necessary corrections in their work.
(Josephus, Antiq. Jews, Bk. XII, chap. 2; CE. xiii, 722.) Thus the
translation wag only of "The Law," the Five Books of Moses; and it
was open team-work, all the Seventy-two working together, comparing
and discussing as they proceeded, and expressly enjoining the Jews
to note and report for correction all errors of omission or
commission which they might discover.

Thus the pseudo-Aristeas, as cited by Josephus; though, as a
matter of fact, this Septuagint Version, so-called because of the
legendary Seventy-(two), was in the grossest manner inaccurate, and
imported innumerable errors into the Christian religion which was
based upon and propagated for several centuries only through the
Septuagint texts. Indeed, "the text of the Septuagint was regarded
as so unreliable, because of its freedom in rendering, and of the
alterations which had been introduced into it, etc., that, during
the second century of our era it was discarded by the Church." (CE.
iv, 625.) We shall notice the fearful error of Isaiah's "virgin-
birth" text; for other well-known instances, it makes out Creation
1195 years earlier than the Hebrew and Vulgate, 4004 B.C., and the
venerable Methuselah is made to survive the Flood by fourteen
years.

Despite, however, its patently legendary character, the
pseudo-Aristeas' account, the forged letter and the story, were
eagerly accepted as genuine and authentic by Fathers, Popes and
ecclesiastic writers until the sixteenth century, when their
spurious character was revealed by the nascent modern criticism.
"The authenticity of the letter, called in question first by Louis
Vives (1492-1540), professor at Louvain, is now universally
denied." (CE. xiii, 722.)

The Fathers, however, could not rest content with this
unvarnished original fabrication in the name of Aristeas, of an
ordinary human and errant translation of the "Law"; they avidly set
about embellishing it in the accepted clerical style, adding
fanciful and lying details to emphasize the miraculous and inspired
origin of the Version. As this notable instance serves admirably to
illustrate the childish and uncritical credulity of the Fathers,
their reckless disregard of truth, their chronic zest for any
untruth or fable quotable to pander to the glory of God and enhance
the pious superstition of the Faithful, let us here watch the
growth of this simple human yarn of the Jewish aristeas-forger into
the wonderful and ever more embellished miracle as it passes from
Father to Father, -- exactly as the Gospel-fables grew from "Mark"
to "John." According to Fathers Tertullian, St. Augustine, St.
Jerome, et als., the 72 were inspired by God each severally for the
entire work; in translating they did not consult with one another;
they had been shut up incomunicados in separate cells on Pharos,
either singly or in pairs, and their several translations, when
finished and compared, were found to agree entirely both as to
sense and the expressions employed, with the original Hebrew text
and with each other (St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Irenaeus,
Justin Martyr). Finally, the 72 translated not only the Law, but
the entire Old Testament, -- several of whose Books were not yet at
the time written.

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Father Justin Martyr adds near-eye-witness verification to the
false and already embroidered history, saying that the "Seventy"
were, by order of the King, "shut up in as many separate cells, and
were obliged by him, each to translate the whole Bible apart, and
without any communication with each other, yet all their several
translations were found to agree verbatim from the beginning to the
end, and were by that means demonstrated to be of divine
inspiration"; and he adds, for confirmation of faith! -- like Paul,
protesting he is not lying in anticipation of the accusation:
"These things, ye men of Greece, are no fable, nor do we narrate
fictions; but we ourselves having been in Alexandria, saw the
remains of the little [cells] at the Pharos still preserved." (Ad
Graec. ch. xiii; ANF. i, 278-9.) But in repeating the tale to the
Roman Emperor, Father Justin makes the unhappy blunder of saying,
that Ptolemy "sent to Herod, who was at that time king of the Jews,
requesting that the books of the prophets [pseudo-Aristeas said the
"Law"] be sent to him; and the king did indeed send them" (I Apol.
ch. xxxi; ANF. i, 173); whereas Herod lived some 300 years after
Ptolemy died. This forged fable is time and again repeated as sober
truth. Bishop Saint Irenaeus emphasizes the miraculous nature of
the translation of all the Books, saying that when the 72 identical translations were compared, "God was indeed glorified, and the
Scriptures were acknowledged an truly divine; ... even the Gentiles
present perceived that the Scriptures had been interpreted by the
inspiration of God. And there was nothing astonishing in God having
done this. ... He inspired Esdras the priest (after the return from
captivity) to recast all the words of the former prophets, and to
reestablish with the people of God the Mosaic legislation." (Adv.
Haer. III, xxi, 2; ANF. i, 451-2.)

In the course of a century or two before the Christian Era,
the other Hebrew sacred books were likewise translated into Greek
for the use of the Greek-speaking Jews of "the Dispersion,"
together with numbers of the forged Jewish apocrypha, and all these
were added to the rolls of "Scriptures." This final and adulterated
form of the Septuagint "was the vehicle which conveyed these
additional Scriptures [i.e. the apocryphal Tobias, etc.] into the
Catholic Church." (CE. iii, 271.) This vagary of the Holy Ghost in
certifying the ill-translated and tempered Septuagint for the
foundations of Christian Faith, was very disastrous, as CE. points
out: "The Church had adopted the Septuagint as its own; this
differed from the Hebrew not only by the addition of several books
and passages but also by innumerable variations of text, due partly
to the ordinary process of corruption in the transcription of
ancient books, partly to the culpable temerity, as Origen called
it, of correctors who used not a little freedom in making
'corrections,' additions, and suppressions, partly to mistakes in
translation, and finally in great part to the fact that the
original Septuagint had been made from a Hebrew text quite
different from that fixed at Jamnia as the one standard by the
Jewish Rabbis." (CE. vii, 316.) So Yahveh only knows what he
actually said and did in the 4004 years up to the time his Son came
to try to "redeem" his people from some of the tangles of his Holy
Law.

Matters grew worse as time progressed: the ex-Pagan Greek
Fathers who founded Christianity, propagated the new Faith for
several centuries only from the tortuous texts of this falsified

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Septuagint, which was the only Old Testament "Scriptures" known to
and used by them as the source of the "prophecies fulfilled by
Jesus Christ" and the holy mysteries of the Jewish-Christian Faith.
"Copies of the Septuagint." says CE., "were multiplied, and, as
might be expected, many changes, deliberate as well as involuntary,
crept in." (CE. xiii, 723.) Indeed, the itch for Scripture-
scribbling was so rife among such ex-Pagan Christians as could
write and get hold of a copy, that St. Augustine complains: "It is
possible to enumerate those who have translated the Scriptures from
Hebrew into Greek, but not those who have translated them into
Latin. In sooth, in the curly days of the faith whoso possessed a
Greek manuscript and thought he had some knowledge of both tongues
was daring enough to undertake a translation." (De Doct. Christ.
II, xi; CE. ix, 20.) So the Faith was founded on befuddlement of
the Blessed Word of God as any nondescript scribbler palmed it off
to be.

We shall more than abundantly see that Holy Church never
possessed or used a single book of "Scripture" or other document of
importance, to the glory of God and the glorification of the
Church, which was not a rank original forgery and bristled besides
with "many deliberate changes" or forged interpolations.

THE SEPTUAGINT AND THE "VIRGIN-BIRTH" FRAUD

The most colossal of the blunders of the Septuagint
translators, supplemented by the most insidious, persistent and
purposeful falsification of text, is instanced in the false
translation of the notoriously false pretended "prophecy" of Isaiah
vii, 14, -- frauds which have had the most disastrous and fatal
consequences for Christianity, and to humanity under its blight;
the present exposure of which should instanter destroy the false
Faith built on these frauds.

The Greek priest who forged the "Gospel according to St.
Matthew," having before him the false Septuagint translation of
Isaiah, fables the Jewish Mary yielding to the embraces of the
Angel Gabriel to engender Jesus, and backs it up by appeal to the
Septuagint translation of Isaiah vii, 14:

"Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth
a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel." (Matt. i, 23.)

Isaiah's original Hebrew, with the mistranslated words
underscored, reads: "Hinneh ha-almah harah ve-yeldeth ben ve-karath
shem-o immanuel"; -- which, falsely translated by the false pen of
the pious translators, runs thus in the English: "Behold, a virgin
shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel"
(Isa. vii, 14.) The Hebrew words ha-almah mean simply the young
woman; and harah is the Hebrew past or perfect tense, "conceived,"
which in Hebrew, as in English, represents past and completed
action. Honestly translated, the verse reads: "Behold, the young
woman has conceived -- [is with child) -- and beareth a son and
calleth his name Immanuel."

Almah means simply a young woman, of marriageable age, whether
married or not, or a virgin or not; in a broad general sense
exactly like girl or maid in English, when we say shop-girl,

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parlor-maid, bar-maid, without reference to or vouching for her
technical virginity, which, in Hebrew, is always expressed by the
word bethulah. But in the Septuagint translation into Greek, the
Hebrew almah was erroneously rendered into the Greek parthenos,
virgin, with the definite article 'ha' in Hebrew, and e in Greek,
(the), rendered into the indefinite "a" by later falsifying
translators. (See Is It God's Word? pp. 277-279; EB. ii, 2162; New
Commentary on the Holy Scripture, Pt. I, p. 439.) And St. Jerome
falsely used the Latin word virgo.

"As early as the second century B.C.," says the distinguished
Hebrew scholar and critic, Salomon Reinach, "the Jews perceived the
error and pointed it out to the Greeks; but the Church knowingly
persisted in the false reading, and for over fifteen centuries she
has clung to her error." (Orpheus, p, 197.) The truth of this
accusation of conscious persistence in known error through the
centuries is proved by confession of St. Jerome, who made the
celebrated Vulgate translation from the Hebrew into Latin, and
intentionally "clung to the error," though Jerome well knew that it
was an error and false; and thus he perpetuated through fifteen
hundred years the myth of the "prophetic virgin birth" of Jesus
called Christ.

Being criticized by many for this falsification, St. Jerome
thus replies to one of his critics, Juvianus: "I know that the Jews
are accustomed to meet us with the objection that in Hebrew the
word Almah does not mean a virgin, but a young woman. And, to speak
truth, a virgin is properly called Bethulah, but a young woman, or
a girl, is not Almah, but Naarah"! (Jerome, Adv. Javianum I, 32;
N&PNF, vi, 370.) So insistent was the criticism, that he was driven
to write a book on the subject, in which he makes a very notable
confession of the inherent incredibility of the Holy Ghost
paternity-story "For who at that time would have believed the
Virgin's word that she had conceived of the Holy Ghost, and that
the angel Gabriel had come and announced the purpose of God? and
would not all have given their opinion against her as an
adulteress, like Susanna? For at the present day, now that the
whole world has embraced the faith, the Jews argue, that when
Isaiah says, 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,' the
Hebrew the Hebrew word denotes a young woman, not a virgin, that is
to say, the word is ALMAH, not BETHULAH"! (Jerome, The Perpetual
Virginity of Blessed Mary, N&PNF, vi, 336.)

So the Greek Father or priest who forged the false "virgin-
birth" interpolation into the manuscript of "Matthew," drags in
maybe ignorantly the false Septuagint translation of Isaiah vii,
14, which the Latin Father St. Jerome purposely perpetuated as a
pious "lie to the glory of God." The Catholic and King James
Versions purposely retain this false translation; the Revised
Version keeps it in, but with a gesture of honesty, which is itself
a fraud, sticks into the margin in fine type, after the words "a
virgin" and "shall conceive," the words, "Or, the maiden is with
child and beareth," -- which not one in thousands would ever see or
understand the significance of. So it is not some indefinite "a
virgin" who 750 years in the future "shall conceive" and "shall
bear" a son whose name she "shall call" Immanuel, Jesus; but it was
some known and definite young female, married or un-married -- but


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not a "virgin" -- who had already conceived and was already
pregnant, and who beareth a son and calleth his name Immanuel, ...
who should be the "sign" which "my lord" should give to Ahaz of the
truth of Isaiah's false prophecy regarding the pending war with
Israel and Syria, as related in Isaiah vii, and of which the total
falsity is proven in 2 Chronicles xxviii, as all may read.

Although Papal Infallibility has declared that "it will never
be lawful to grant ... that the sacred writers could have made a
mistake" (Leo XIII, Eneyc. Provid. Deus; CE. ii, 543), yet, the
fraud being notorious and exposed to the scorn of the world, and
being driven by force of modern criticism, CE. definitely and
positively -- though with the usual clerical soft-soaping,
confesses this age-long clerical fraud and falsification of Holy
Writ, and relegates it to the junk-heap of discredited -- but not
discarded -- dogmatic myth:

"Modern theology does not grant that Isaiah vii, 14, contains
a real prophecy fulfilled in the virgin birth of Christ; it must
maintain, therefore, that St. Matthew misunderstood the passage
when he said: 'Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled
which the Lord spoke by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall
be with child, and bring forth a son, etc."! (CE. xv, 451.)

Thus is apparent, and confessed, the dishonesty of "Matthew"
and of the Church of Christ in perverting this idle, false and
falsified text of Isaiah into a "prophecy of the virgin birth of
Jesus Christ," and in persisting in retaining this falsity in their
dishonest Bibles as the basis of their own bogus theology unto this
day of the Twentieth Century. The Church, full knowing its falsity,
yet, clings to this precious lie of Virgin Birth and all the
concatenated consequences. Thus it declares its own condemnation as
false. Some other viciously false translations of sacred Scripture
will be duly noticed in their place.

As Thomas Jefferson prophetically wrote, -- as is being
verified:

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by
the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be
classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of
Jupiter"!

OTHER HEBREW SACRED FORGERIES

The marvels of the canonical apocrypha of the Hebrew sacred
Books, or of the whole 94 miraculously "restored" by Ezra, could
not slake the thirst of the Jewish intellect for such edifying
histories, and their priests were very industrious in supplying the
demands of piety and marvel-craving. Making use, as above admitted,
of the most "venerable Old Testament names," they forged a
voluminous literature of fanciful and fantastic fairy-tales in the
guise of sacred history, revelations, oracles or predictions, all
solemnly "set forth as thought actually received, and written or
spoken by ancient worthies, as Enoch, Moses, etc., which were
widely accepted as genuine, and found a warm reception in Jewish
and early Christian circles." Scarcely is there a Biblical notable


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of Israel in whose name these pious false writings were not forged,
including Adam and Eve and most of the ante- and post-Diuvian
Patriarchs. It is impossible here to much more than mention the
names of some of the principal ones of these extra-canonical
apocrypha and forgeries of the Jews, as listed in the Catholic
Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Biblica, most of them worked over
with surcharge of added Christian forgeries, to adapt them to their
pious propaganda.

The names of these "intriguing" volumes of forgotten lore,
listed somewhat after the order of their distinguished pretended
authors and times, are: Life of Adam and Eve; Testament of Adam;
The Book of Creation; the Books of Seth (son of Adam); Book of
Enoch (grandson of Adam); Secrets of Enoch; Parables of Enoch; Book
of Lamech; Book of Noah; Book of Zoroaster (identified with Ham,
son of Noah); Apocalypse of Noah; Apocalypse of Abraham; Testament
of Abraham; Testament of Isaac; Testament of Jacob; The Testaments
of the Twelve Patriarchs; Testament of the Three Patriarchs;
Testament of Naphthali; The Prayer of Menassch; The Prayer of
Joseph; The Story of Asenath (wife of Joseph); Prayer of Asenath;
The Marriage of Asenath; The Assumption of Moses; The Testament of
Moses; Book of Jannes and Mambres (the Egyptian magicians with whom
Moses contended); Penitence of Jannes and Mambres; The Magical
Books of Moses; The Book of Jubilees. or Little Genesis; Book of Og
the Giant, Treatise of the Giants, Josippon; Book of Jasher; The
Liber Antiquitatem Bibliarum, ascribed to Philo; The Chronicles of
Jerameel; Testament of Job; Psalm CLI of David, "when he fought
with Goliath"; Testament of Solomon; The Contradictio Salomonis (a
contest in wisdom between Solomon and Hiram); The Psalms of
Solomon; Apocalypse of Elijah; Apocalypse of Baruch; The Rest of
the Words of Baruch; History of Daniel; Apocalypse of Daniel;
Visions of Daniel; Additions to Daniel, viz.: The History of
Susanne (Chap. 13), the Song of the Three Children, Story of Bel
and the Dragon (Chap. 14); Tobit; Judith; Additions to Esther; The
Martyrdom of Isaiah; The Ascension of Isaiah; III and IV Esdras;
Apocalypse of Esdras; Story of the Three Pagans, in I Esdras; I,
II, III, and IV Mitceabee"; The Prophecy of Eldad and Medad;
Apocalypse of Zephaniah, Stories of Artaphanus; Eupolemus; Story of
Aphikia, wife of Jesus Sirach; The Letter of Aristeas to
Philocrates; The Sibylline Oracles.

Quite half of the above Jewish false-writings, separately
listed under the grouping of "Jewish with Christian Accretions,"
the Catholic Encyclopedia describes with comments such as "recast
or freely interpolated by Christians," "many Christian
interpolations," etc., "presenting in their ensemble a fairly full
Christology" (CE. i, 606). If the pious Christians, confessedly,
committed so many and so extensive forgeries and frauds to adapt
these popular Jewish fairy-tales of their God and holy Worthies to
the new Christian Jesus and his Apostles, we need feel no surprise
when we discover these same Christians forging outright new wonder-
tales of their Christ under the fiction of the most noted Christian
names and in the guise of inspired Gospels, Epistles, Acts and
Apocalypses.





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THE "INSPIRED" HEBREW SCRIPTURES

The processes of the formation of the Hebrew Old Testament
Scriptures are, however, interesting and intriguing, if sacred
tradition is true. According to priestly lore, the man Moses,
"learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians" (another Christian
assurance; Acts vii, 22), sat down in the Wilderness of Sinai and
under divine inspiration wrote his Five Books of prehistorical
history, codes of post-exilic divine Law, and chronicles of
contemporary and future notable events, including four different
names of his father-in-law -- (Wz.: Jethro, Ex. iii, 1; Reuel, Ex.
ii, 18; Jether, Ex. iv, 18, and Raguel, Num. x, 29, while a fifth
name, Hobab, is awarded him in Judges iv, II), together with a
graphic account of his own death and burial, and of the whole month
afterwards spent by all Israel mourning his death. He also records
the death of his brother Aaron at Mt. Hor (Num. xx, 28; xxxiii,
38), just six months before his own death; though, in amazing
contradiction, he elsewhere records Aaron as having died at Mosera,
just after leaving Sinai (Deut. x, 6), thirty-nine years previously
-- and thus nullifies the entire history of the wonderful career
and deeds of Aaron as high priest during the whole 40 years of
wandering in the Wilderness, of which the Books of Exodus,
Leviticus and Numbers are largely filled; as also many other
matters and things occurring for some centuries after his death,
and known as "post-Mosaica" to the scholars.

Joshua, the successor of Moses, next wrote the history of his
life and times, working in, too, a sketch of his own death and
funeral obsequies (Josh. xxiv, 29-30), and quoting the celebrated
miracle of the nun standing still, of which he says, "Is it not
written in the Book of Jasher?" -- which Book of Jasher was not
itself written until several hundred years later, at least in or
after the time of David; for it is recorded: "And he [David] bade
them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow; behold, it is
written in the Book of Jasher." (2 Sam. i, 18.)

The Book of Judges was written by nobody knows whom, nor when,
except that it was long "post-exilic." It relates that, "Now the
children of Judah had fought against Jerusalem, and had taken it"
(Jud. i, 18); whereas it was not until David had reigned seven
years and six months in Hebron, that "the King and his men went to
Jerusalem" and failed to capture it, "nevertheless, David took the
stronghold of Zion, and called it the City of David." (2 Sam. v,
5-9.) It is further recorded in Judges that the tribe of Dan made
a silver idol of the Hebrew God and hired a grandson of Moses to
serve it, and "he and his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan
until the captivity of the land" (Jud. xviii, 30) -- about a
thousand years later.

The gifted Samuel. Prophet of the heathen High Places of Baal
worship, gives his name and inspiration to two books of mythical
history written piecemeal until the "return from captivity," as
above indicated, and early in his work he records the historic
episode of the calling up of his own ghost from the dead by the
famous Witch of En-dor. (I Sam. xviii, 1, 7-19.)




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The ex-bandit David, "man after God's own heart" -- after
murdering a man to get his adulterous wife, and engendering of her
his all-wise son and hero, Solomon, wrote the 150 songs of the
Hebrew Hymn Book, many of his psalms singing of the long posthumous
Babylonian Captivity.

Solomon himself, who was son-in-law to nearly everybody in the
heathen nations round about who had eligible daughters, wrote the
wisdom of the ages into his Book of Proverbs, though not one of
them is by Solomon, and in his lighter (headed or hearted) spells
penned his erotic Canticles, which for realistic lubricity quite
outdo Boccaccio, and would be really unmailable under the Postal
laws if they weren't in the Holy Bible and clerically captioned
"The Church's Love unto Christ." These are indeed but one
collection out of the great many pornographic stories of The Holy
Ghost's Decameron, enshrined in God's Holy Word for delectation of
the Puritans of Faith.

Other divinely inspired and anonymous writers, falsely
entitling their effusions under the names of this or that Prophet
or other wholly fictitious personage, as Job, Esther, Ruth, Daniel,
gave forth yet other inspired histories, books of oracles or
prophecies, apocalypses or high powered visions into Futurity, and
a miscellany of sacred novels, love-stories and nondescript musings
or ravings known collectively as the hagiographa or holy writings
of the Jews. All these together, now thirty-nine in number,
comprise the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. It being out of
question to review each of these here, it may be stated with
assurance that not one of them bears the name of its true author;
that every one of them is a composite work of many hands
"interpolating" the most anachronistic and contradictory matters
into the original writings, and often reciting as accomplished
facts things which occurred many centuries after the time of the
supposed writer, as Psalms, isaiah, Daniel, and the so-called
"historical" books. For scientific detailed demonstration of this
the Encyclopedia Biblica digests the most competent authorities; my
own Is It God's Word? makes the proofs from the sacred texts
themselves. See the recent "Religions Book of the Month Club's"
notable Unraveling the Book of Books, by Trattner. (1929.)

But as the Christian religion depends more vitally on Genesis
and Moses than on all the other sacred writings and writers, we may
appeal to the admissions of CE., thereto driven by force of modern
criticism, for the destruction and abandonment of the Moses Myths.

"It is true that the Pentateuch, so long attributed to Moses,
is now held by the vast majority of non-Catholic, and by an
increasing number of Catholic, scholars to be a compilation of four
independent sources put together in final shape soon after the
Captivity." (CE. i, 622.)

This scores strongly for Hebrew-Christian forgery and fraud in
attributing this primitive system of Bible "science" and barbarous
law to a god as a pretext for priestly domination of the
superstitious people. That God-given forged law thus prescribes for priestcraft: "The man that will do presumptuously, and will not
hearken unto the priest, ... even that man shall die." (Deut. xvii,


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12.) The whole Five Books of Moses are thus a confessed forgery in
the names of Moses and of God; every one of the Thus saith the Lord
a thousand times repeated, with speeches and laws put into the
mouth of the God, are false and forged. Speaking of the
"difficulty, in the present condition of Old Testament criticism,
of recognizing more than a small portion of the Peritateuch as
documentary evidence contemporary with Moses," -- who, if he ever
lived, which may be confidently denied, -- never wrote a line of
it, CE. further confesses to the natural evolution -- not the
"divine revelation" -- of the Hebrew mythology into a (no less
mythological) monotheistic religion: "The Hegelian principle of
evolution ... applied to religion, has powerfully helped to beget
a tendency to regard the religion of Israel as evolved by processes
not transcending nature, from a polytheistic worship of the
elements to a spiritual and ethical monotheism." (CE. i, 493.) But
this finally and very late evolved monotheism is neither a tardy
divine revelation to the Jews, nor a novel invention by them; it
was a thousand years antedated by Amenhotep IV and Tut-ankh-amen in
Egypt, -- nor were even they the pioneers. We have seen the
admission that the Zoroastrian Mithra religion was "a divinely
revealed Monotheism" (CE., ii, 156). But the Hebrews were confessed
and notorious idolaters and polytheists until after the Captivity;
that fact is a thousand times alleged throughout the Scriptures as
the sole reason for their troubles and captivity. As above
suggested, and as thoroughly demonstrated by the texts in my other
book, the Hebrew God Yahveh was but one of the many gods worshipped
by the Hebrews; and Yahveh never claimed more than to be a "God
above all gods," to be preferred before them all; -- as at Sinai he
enacted: "Thou shalt have no other gods before [in preference to]
me," -- thus admitting the other gods.

FORGERY BY CONTRADICTIONS

Contradictions throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments
alike, abound by the many thousands, and in virtually every book of
both Testaments, -- as every one knows who has read the Bible even
casually. See some thousand and more of the most notorious and
vital ones as cited in "deadly parallel" in my Is It God's Word? as
one of the most conclusive proofs of uninspired human origin and of
confusion worse confounded of tinkering, "interpolation" and
forgery outright, by the pious priests of Israel and Judah, and the
Ezra "school" of forgers of the "Law and the Prophets."

OUR "PHONY" CHRISTIAN ERA

"It was a monk of the 6th century, named Dionysiug Exiguus
(Dennis the Little), who fixed our present Christian era, laying
down that Jesus Christ was born on the 25th of December, A.U.C.
753, and commencing the new era from the following year, 754. That
date, as we shall see, cannot be correct and, instead of being an
improvement on, is farther from the truth than the dates assigned
by the early Fathers, St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, who fixed the
date of the Nativity in the 41st year of Augustus, that is to say,
3 years B.C., or A.U.C, 751 ... All this points to the fact that
Herod died in the year 4 B.C., and that our Savior must have been
born before that date ... Our Savior was born some time before
Herod's death, probably two years or more. So that, if Herod died


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in the year 4 B.C., we should be taken to 6 or 7 B.C. as the year
of the Nativity" (CE. 735-6).

This, of course, discredits the date given by the inspiration
of [71] Luke, and demonstrates that both he and Matthew merely
alleged fictitious dates for what in all human probability was a
purely fictitious event. The new Era of Christ was, however, very
slow in gaining recognition; the first official secular document
dating by it was a charter of Charlemagne, after 800 A.D., and it
did not come into general use until about 1000 A.D. I may mention
a fiery sermon I once heard, in which the expounder of truth
vindicated the glory of God by declaiming that every Jew and
Infidel confessed to Jesus Christ every time he dated a letter or
mentioned the year of an event. Being simply a hearer of the Word,
I could not rise to suggest, that by the same token we confess more
to the Pagan gods than to the Christian, -- for more than half the
months and every day of the week are named for Pagan deities, and
we name them much more often than we do the years of grace and
salvation of Christ. After this bad start from Gospel error and
contradiction, we now turn to further evidences of "Gospel truth"
in contradictions and forgery.

Among the most signal of these incessant contradictions and
scientific impossibilities of Divine Inspiration, are those
relating to the capital matter, -- for the credit of the Christian
Religion, of the time and manner of Creation of earth and Man,
based on Holy Writ and on the "chronology" worked out, with several
hundred disparate results, from the inspired pedigrees of the ante-
Diluvian Patriarchs. So fatally important is this to Christianity,
that the 'True Church -- "which never deceived anyone" and "has
never erred," -- speaking through CE., thus admits that
Christianity stands or falls with -- "the literal, historical sense
of the first three chapters of Genesis in as far as they bear on
the facts touching the foundations of the Christian religion, e.g.,
the creation of all things by God at the beginning of time, the
especial creation of man, the formation of the first woman from the
first man, the unity of the human race"! (Papal Biblical
Commission, June 30, 1909; CE. vii, 313). Thus: No Adam and Eve, no
Garden of Eden and Talking Snake, no "Fall" and Curse -- therefore:
No Savior Jesus Christ, no Plan of Salvation, no truth in the
Christian Religion! The fatal point is elucidated with inexorable
logic and dogmatic truth by the "Reformed" ex-Father Peter Martyr:
"So important is it to comprehend the work of creation that we see
the creed of the Church take this as its starting point. Were this
Article taken away, there would be no original sin; the promise of
Christ would become void, and all the vital force of our religion
would be destroyed"! Father Luther inherited the same faith and
bequeathed it to his dissident following: "Moses spoke properly and
plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively; and therefore
the world with all creatures was created in six days." Calvin, in
his "Commentary on Genesis," argues that the Genesis account of
Creation is literally true, and warns those who dare to believe
otherwise, and thus "basely insult the Creator, to expect a Judge
who will annihilate them." Again he says: "We know on the authority
of Moses, that longer ago than 6000 years the world did not exist."
So too, the Westminster Confession of Faith, in full Protestant
force and effect today -- specially lays it down as "necessary to


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salvation to believe that all things visible and invisible were
created not only out of nothing but exactly in six days." And the
Churches have murdered countless thousands to impress this
beautiful impossible truth.

Notwithstanding the crushing disproofs of those primitive
forged "Fables of Moses," by every fact of astronomy, geology,
anthropology, biology, and kindred sciences, known to schoolboys
today, Faith clings fatuously to its fetches: Arkansas ("Now
laugh!"), Mississippi, Tennessee, three States of the Twentieth
Century United States, have made it crime by Law to teach the
sciences which discredit the Genesis Myths, upon which Christian
Superstition utterly depends;, and like medieval laws are sought to
be imposed in all our States. The True Church, like all the others,
still founds its "Faith and Morals" upon these old Hebrew forgeries
of Genesis and peddles them to its Faithful; but it knows better.
Thus the whole True Faith is shipwrecked by these heretical
confessions of CE., forced from it by the truths of heretical
Modernism, in full face of the fierce inspired fulminations of the
Syllabus of Errors: "In an article on Bible chronology it is hardly
necessary in these days to discuss the date of the Creation. At
least two hundred dates have been suggested, varying from 3483 to
6934 year B.C. all based on the supposition that the Bible enables
us to settle the point. But it does nothing of the kind. ... The
literal interpretation has now been entirely abandoned; and the
world is admitted to be of immense antiquity"! (CE. iii, 731.)
Again the "sacred science" of Genesis and of Christianity is
further admitted to be false, and the fabulous "Septuagint" Bible
on which Christianity was founded before the era of the second
century forgeries of Gospels and Epistles, to be a holy fraud, in
these further excerpts accrediting the true revelations of modern
Science as against those of Moses:

"The church ... does not attach decisive influence to the
chronology of the Vulgate, the official version of the Western
Church, since in the Martyrology for Christmas day, the creation of
Adam is put down in the year 5199 B.C., which is the reading of the
Septuagint. It is, however, certain that we cannot confine the
years of man's sojourn on earth to that usually set down. ...
Various explanations have been given of chapter v (Genesis) to
explain the short time it seems to allow between the Creation and
the Flood. ... The total number of years in the Hebrew, Samaritan,
and Septuagint differs, in the Hebrew it being 1656, in the
Samaritan 1307, and in the Septuagint 2242. ... According to
Science the length of this period was much greater than appears
from the genealogical table. ... In any case, whether we follow the
traditional or critical view, the numbers obtained from the
genealogy of the Patriarchs in chapter xi must be greatly
augmented, in order to allow time for such a development of
civilization, language, and race type as had been reached by the
time of Abraham." (CE. iii, 731-3.)

FORGERY BY FALSE TRANSLATIONS

We have noted the capital forgery wrought by the Church in
consciously and unconscionably adopting and perpetuating the false
translation in the Septuagint, of the "virgin shall conceive"


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pretended prophecy of Isaiah vii, 14. Indisputably the whole forged
fabric of supernatural Christianity is based on, and depends upon,
this one monumental forgery falsely used to give credit to the
Christian forgery of "the Gospel according to Matthew" as to the
Divine and miraculous "Virgin birth of Jesus Christ." Out of scores
of other notoriously falsified translations of the sacred Old
Testament texts, attention is here called only to several of the
most signal ones which vitally affect and destroy the validity of
the most essential pretensions of truth of the Christian religion.
These frauds of translation and others, have been thoroughly
examined and supported by numerous texts from the original Hebrew,
and falsified verses of the English versions, in my 'Is It God's
Word?,' to which references must be made for a more complete
treatment than is here pertinent. Those now cited in summary are
all of them deliberate falsifications and forgeries in translation
which go to the vitals of the Hebrao-Christian system of holy
imposture.

If the Hebrew originals had been truthfully translated, we
should have no such false pretenses for faith as the Hebrew One God
anciently revealed to Adam, and to Moses, no Adam, no man "but
little lower than the angels" because of his immortal soul, no
unique "revelation' of the "Ineffable Name" Jehovah to Moses; all
that we would have, -- all that the Hebrew texts reveal -- is a
primitive polytheistic idolatry of the crudest and most
superstitious order. Let us see.

(a) The "God" Forgery

The first sentence of the translated Bibles is a falsification
and forgery of the highest importance. We read with awed solemnity
of faith: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"
(Gen. i, 1). The Hebrew word for God is el; the plural is elohim,
gods. The Hebrew text of Genesis i, 1, reads: "Bereshith bara
elohim," etc., -- "In-beginning created gods the-heavens and-the-
earth." And, in the same chapter we read in Hebrew honestly
translated, -- thirty times the word "elohim" gods, to whom are
attributed all the works of creation in the six peculiar "days" of
Genesis. This is plainly evident from the Hebrew texts of Genesis
i, which even false intention could not hide in the translation,
"And-said elohim (gods), let-US-make man (adam) in-image-OUR, after-likeness-OUR" (i, 26). And when "adam" had eaten of the
forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, "the Lord God" said,
"Behold, the-man has become like one of US, to know good and evil"
(iii, 27). And when the Tower of Babel was abuilding, "The Lord
[Heb. Yahveh] said ... Come, let US go down," etc. And thus, some
2570 times the plural, elohim, gods, is used in the Hebrew texts,
but is always falsely translated "God" in the false singular, when
speaking of the Hebrew deity, Yahveh.

In the three Genesis verses above quoted, we have three
different designations of the Hebrew deity or deities: elohim,
gods, falsely translated "God"; "Lord God" (Heb. Yahveh-elohim);
and "Lord" (Heb. Yahveh). Yahveh is the proper name of the Hebrew
God, in English rendered Jehovah: Yahveh-elohim is a Hebrew
"construct-form" honestly meaning "Yahveh-of-the-gods." Invariably
(with rare exceptions to be noted), these personal names are


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falsely rendered "Lord" and "Lord God," respectively, for purposes
of pious fraud which we shall now expose to the shame of a theology
of imposture. We will return to this after noting a pair of others.

(b) The "Adam" Forgery

There was no first man "Adam," according to the Hebrew texts
of the story. The word adam in Hebrew is a common noun, meaning man
in a generic sense; in Genesis i, 26, we have read: "And elohim
(gods) said, Let us make adam (man)"; and so "elohim created ha-
adam (the-man); ... male and female created he them" (i. 27). And
in the second story, where man is first made alone: "Yahveh formed
ha-adan (the-man) out of the dust of ha-adamah-the ground" (ii, 7).
Man is called in Hebrew adam because formed out of adamah, the
ground; just as in Latin man is called homo because formed from
humus, the ground, -- homo ex humo, in the epigram of Father
Lactantius. (Lact., Divine Institutes, ii, 58; ANF. vii, 58.) The
forging by the common noun adam into a mythical proper name Adam,
was a post-exilic fraud in the forging of fictitious genealogies
from "in the beginning" to Father Abraham.

(c) The "Soul" Forgery

In Genesis i is the account of the creation of elohim -- gods
-- on the fifth day, of "nephesh hayyah -- the moving creature that
hath life," and of "nephesh hayyah -- every living creature" -- out
of the waters (i, 20, 21); and on the sixth day of "nephesh hayyah
-- the living creature" out of the ground (i, 24); and he gave to
ha-adam -- the-man dominion over "kol nephesh hagyah, -- everything
wherein there is life," (i, 30.) So reads the Hebrew text -- all
these dumb animal living creatures are by God called "nephesh
hayyah," "literally "living soul," as will be found stuck into the
margins of the Authorized Version. In chapter ii we have the
history of ha-adam made from ha-adamah; and, in wonderful contrast
to these lowly "living creatures" (nephesh hayyah), Yahveh-clohim
"breathed into his nostrils nishmath hayyim -- (living breaths),
and ha-adam became nephesh hayyah -- a living soul"! (ii, 7.) In
Hebrew nephesh everywhere and simply means soul, and hayyah
(living) is the feminine singular adjective from hai, life. Man,
therefore, was created exactly the same as the other animals; all
had or were nephesh hayyah -- living souls, indistinctly. The
"false pen of the scribes," who in translation made the dumb
animals merely living creatures, and "Creation's micro-cosmical
masterpiece, Man," a "living soul," falsely altered these plain
words so as to deceive into a belief of a special God-breathed soul
in man, far different from the brute animal that perisheth.

(d) The "Mosaic Revelation" Forgery

When Yahveh appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush, and
announced himself as "the God of thy fathers," he was a total
stranger to Moses; Moses did not at all know him, had never heard
of him; so that he asked, "What is thy name?" -- so that he could
report it to the people back home in Egypt, who had never heard it.
After some intermission, the God came directly to the point, and
declared -- l quote the exact words -- one of the most notorious
falsities in Holy Writ:


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"And elohim spake unto Moses, and said unto him., anoki Yahveh
-- I am the Lord!

"And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by
the name of el-shaddai, but by my name Yahvch (JEHOVAH) was I not
known to them." (Ex. vi, 2, 8.)

Here we have the positive averment of the Hebrew God himself
to the effect that here, for the first time since the world began,
is "revealed" to mankind the "ineffable name" of Yahveh, here first
appearing in the Bible translations, and there printed as JEHOVAH
in capital letters; for more vivid and awe-inspiring impression.
But this is a capital Lie of the Lord, or of his biographer who
imputed it to him. In verse 4 of Genesis ii, the name YAHVEH first
appears; "in the day that Yahveh-elohim made the earth and the
heavens." Its first recorded use in the mouth of a mystical
personage, was when Mother Eve "conceived, and bare Cain, and said,
I have gotten a man from Yahveh -- the Lord." (Gen. iv, 1.) One
hundred and fifty-six times the personal name YAHVEH occurs in the
Book of Genesis alone; and scores of times in the mouths of
Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, as any one may read in Genesis,
with the assurance that every single time that the title "the Lord"
and "the Lord God" appears, it is a false translation by the
priests for the Hebrew personal name YAHVEH. Throughout the Hebrew
"Scriptures" the Divine Name thousands of times occurs: "The sacred
name occurs in Genesis about 156 times; ... in round numbers it is
found in the Old Testament 6000 times, either alone or in
conjunction with another Divine name." (CE. viii, 829, 331.) More
exactly, "What is called the Tetragrammaton, YHVH, appears in the
Old Testament 6823 times as the proper name of God as the God of
Israel. As such it serves to distinguish him from the gods of the
other nations." (EB. iii, 3320.) Thus was the Hebrew tribal god
YAHVEH distinguished from Bel, and Chemosh, and Dagon, and Shamash,
and the scores of "gods of the nations"; just as Bill distinguishes
its bearer from Tom, Dick, and Harry. This was precisely the Hebrew
usage -- to distinguish one heathen god from another. And this the
false translators sought to hide, giving names to all the "other
gods," but suppressing a name for the Hebrew deity, who as "the
Lord," or "the Lord God," was high and unique, "a god above all
gods," -- the one and only true God.

But yet more malicious and evil-intentioned of deception: 6828
times is the name of the Hebrew God concealed by false rendition
for the deliberate purpose of forging the whole Hebrew Bible, as
translated, into semblance of harmony with the false avowal of
Exodus vi, 3, that "by my name YAHVEH was I not know unto them."
Search as one may, outside Exodus vi, 3, the god-name YAHVEH
(Jehovah) is never to be found in the translations in a single
instance, except in Psalm lxxxiii, 18, and Isaiah xii, 2 and xxvi,
4. The false translations thus "make truth to be a liar," the lie
of Exodus vi, 3 to seem the truth; and a barbarous heathen tribal
god among a hundred neighbor and competitive gods to be the
nameless One Lord God of the Universe. The Hebrew-Christian One God
is a patent Forgery and Myth; a mycological Father-god can have no
"only begotten Son"; Jesus Christ is a myths even before he is
mythically born in the fancies of the Church Fathers, as we shall
soon have ample evidence to prove.


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With respect to the mythical Hebrew-Christian God or gods, we
may safely say, as says Father Justin Martyr apropos of the other
mythic Pagan gods: "And we confess that we are atheists, so far as
gods of this sort are concerned." (First Apology, ch. vi; ANF. i,
169.)

THE ANCIENT IDEA OF "HISTORY"

We may pause a moment to catch a vitutable view which will be
of great aid to understanding the mental processes of the ancient
writers in their portrayal of events, real or fanciful, which they
set about to record as "history." These pioneers of historical
literature lived in an age of simple-minded credulity, and
everything which they saw recorded or heard related, however
extravagant and seemingly incredible or impossible, passed all as
perfectly good history in their receptive and uncritical minds.
Speaking of the legendary, the traditional, the supernatural
stories, myths, folk-lore and fables, -- "in short, everything
which seemed to testify to the past," -- which formed the raw
material of the early historians, the Encyclopedia Biblica gives a
graphic picture of primitive history-writing, not only Hebraic but
Gentilic:

"Their sources, like those of the Greek logographers with whom
it is natural to compare them, were poems, genealogies, often
representing clan-groupings, tribal and local traditions of diverse
kinds, such as furnish the materials for most of the Book of
Judges; the historical traditions of sanctuaries; the sacred
legends of holy places, relating theophanies and other revelations,
the erection of the altar or sacred stone, the. origin of popular
usages -- e.g. Bethel; laws; myths of foreign or native origin;
folk-lore and fable, -- in short, everything which seemed to
testify of the past.

"To us the greater part of this material is not in any proper
sense historical at all; but for the early Israelite as for the
early Greek historian it was otherwise; our distinctions between
authentic history, legendary history, pure legend, and myth, he
made as little as he recognized our distinction of natural and
supernatural. It was all history to him; and if one part of it had
a better attestation than another, it was certainly the sacred
history as it was told at the ancient sanctuaries of the land.

The early Hebrew historians did not affix their names to their
works; they had, indeed, no idea of authorship. The traditions and
legends which they collected were common property, and did not
cease to be so when they were committed to writing; the written
book was in every sense the property of the scribe or the possessor
of the roll. Only a part of the great volume of tradition was
included in the first books. Transcribers freely added new matter
from the same sources on which the original authors had drawn, the
traditions of their own locality or sanctuary, variants of
historical traditions or legend. Every new copy was thus in some
measure a fresh rescension. ... Scribes compared different copies,
and combined their contents according to their own judgment or
interests. ... Of records or monuments there are but a few traces,
and these for the most part doubtful." (EB. ii, 2075-76.)


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To say nothing now of the Old or New Testament "canonical" and "apocryphal" literature, countless examples of this imaginative
method of history-writing abound in all the ancient writers, as all
who are familiar with such classics as Herodotus, Thucydides,
Xenophon, Josephus, Livy, will readily recall. One of the most
inveterate forms of imaginative creation on the part of the old historiographers was the invention of sayings and whole speeches
which, just as do the fiction-writers of today, they put entire
into the mouths of the personages of whom they were writing, which
discourses they not only invented whole, but always wrought them in
the style and manner of the writer and his epoch, and not in those
of their ancient subjects. All are familiar with such instances in
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, and which we all known are
pure inventions of those writers. Naming several of the ancient
historians above mentioned, and others, a distinguished philosopher
of history thus describes the art:

"Such speeches as we find in Thucydides (for example), of
which we can positively assert that they are not bona-fide
records. ... Thus Livy puts into the mouths of the old Roman
Kings, Consuls, and generals, such orations as would be
delivered by an accomplished advocate of the Livian era... In
the same way he gives us descriptions of battles, as if he had
been an actual spectator; but whose features would serve well
enough for battles in any period." (Hegel, The Philosophy of
History, i). 2.)

Speaking of much later times, and of a different class, but
like type, of writers, Hegel again says: "In the Middle Ages, we
except the Bishops, who were placed in the very center of the
political world, the Monks monopolized this category as maine
chroniclers." (Ib. p. 3.)

As typical illustration of the principles and practices above
described of the best of the ancient writers, but more especially
as an example of the kind of "history" written by the most learned
and illustrious historian of Jewry, fellow-countryman and
contemporary of the supposed Apostolic writers of the New Testament
books, it is of the highest significance to cite some of the solemn
historical recordation of Josephus, from two of his most famous
works; they will make more appreciated at their real value some of
the inspired historical recitals of contemporaneous sacred
history.'

In his Antiquities of the Jews Josephus follows closely the
subject matter and order of narration of the early Old Testament,
books, beginning with the Creation, giving the full substance of
those histories, and adding quaint comments all his own and
expansions and embellishments unknown to or unrecorded by Moses. In
Eden, not only the Talking Snake could speak, but all the now dumb
animals: "All living creatures had one language, at that time" (I,
i, 4). After our parents had eaten of the Fruit of Knowledge and,
discovering themselves naked, hid themselves from the Creator,
"This behavior surprised God," who delivers a lengthy speech of
reprieval not recorded by Moses (Ib.); and such orations are
plentiful and detailed between God and all the other notables who
came into personal contact with him; a gem is his oration to Noah.


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He relates the wars waged by the wicked posterity of Cain, to the
great distress of Adam, who predicted the two-fold destruction of
the earth, once by water and again by fire. As the Sethites were
good people and intelligent, and had made great discoveries in
astronomy, which they wished preserved for such posterity as might
survive the yet future Flood, "they made two pillars, the one of
brick, the other of stone; they inscribed their discoveries on them
both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the
Flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit these
discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another
pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of
Siriad to this day." (lb., I, ii, 2.) He relates with naive and
realistic garnishment the tale of Sodom, and Lot and his daughters,
and of Lot's wife turned to a pillar of salt, which is Gospel
truth, "for I have seen it, and it remains at this day"! (Ib. 1,
xi, 4.) These historical drolleries might be quoted ad infinitum
from Jewry's greatest historian.

The name of Solomon was most potent conjure in the Orient
through all the succeeding centuries; the spells and charms,
amulets and fetishes inscribed with his mystic symbol and
pronounced in his name, were the terror of all the devils who so
populated the Jewish mind, and the Christian. A noted instance of
the potency of this Name, exhibited before the Roman Emperor
Vespasian and his court and army, and witnessed by Josephus
himself, so circumstantial, so faith-compelling, so artless and
childishly fabling, that I am constrained to quote it for the
lightit sheds on the "historical" methods of the "age of apocryphal literature":

"God also enabled him [Solomon] to learn that skill which
expels demons, which is a science useful and sensitive to men.
He composed such incantations also by which distempers are
alleviated. And he left behind him the manner of using
exorcisms, by which they drive away demons, so that they never
return, and this method of cure is of great force unto this
day; for I have seen a certain man of my own country, whose
name was Eleazar, relieving people that were demoniacs in the
presence of Vespasian, and his sons, and his captains, and the
whole multitude of his soldiers. The manner of the cure was
this: he put a ring, that had a root of one of the sorts
mentioned by Solomon, to the nostrils of the demoniac, after
which he drew out the demon through his nostrils; and when the
man fell down immediately, he abjured him to return into him
no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the
incantation which he composed. And when Eleazar would persuade
and demonstrate to the spectators that he had such a power, he
set a little way off a cup or basin full of water, and
commanded the demon, as he went out of the man, to overturn
it, and thereby to let the spectators know that he had left
the man; and when this was done, the skill and wisdom of
Solomon was shown very manifestly; for which reason it is,
that all men may know the vastness of Solomon's abilities, and
how he was beloved of God, and that the extraordinary virtues
of every kind with which this king was endowed, may not be
unknown to any people under the sun; for this reason, I say,
it is that we have proceeded to speak so largely of these
matters." (Josephus, Antiq. Jews, Bk. VIII, Ch. ii, 5;
Whiston's trans.)
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This is followed by the full text of the autograph letters
between Solomon and Hiram regarding the building of the Temple.

Whether the same kind of root of Solomon's magical powers just
above used by Eleazar, or one of another species of like power, it
was very difficult to obtain and the quest was attended with many
dangers, which of course enhanced the value and potency of its
magic; but here is Josephus's solemn description of the plant and
account of the eerie and risky manner of securing this treasure,
known locally as Baaras root:

"Its color is like that of flame, and toward evening it
sends out a certain ray like lightning: it is not easily taken
by such as would do it, but recedes from their hands, nor will
yield itself to be taken quietly, until either the urine of a
woman, or blood, be poured upon it; nay, even then it is
certain death to those that touch it, unless anyone take and
hang the root itself down from his hand, and so carry it away.
It may also be taken another way, without danger, which is
this: they dig a trench quite round about it, till the hidden
part of the root be very small, then they tie a dog to it,
and, when the dog tries hard to follow him that tied him, this
root is easily plucked up, but the dog dies immediately, as if
it were instead of the man that would take the plant away nor
after this need anyone be afraid of taking it into their
hands. Yet, after all this pains in getting, it is only
valuable on account of one virtue it hath, that if it be only
brought to sick persons, it quickly drives away those called
demons, which are no other than the spirits of the wicked,
that enter into any men that are alive and kill them, unless
they can obtain some help against them." (Josephus, Wars of
the Jews, Book VII. Chap. iv, 3.)

Instead of artful mendacity, some readers, in view of this,
may charitably impute artless simplicity of wit to some of the
devil-exorcising fable-mongers of the New Testament, the pious
Fathers who forged its Books.

If such examples are abounding in the most brilliant of Jewish
historians, distinguished for nobility of lineage, for
statesmanship and for literary ability, what may be expected from
the admittedly "ignorant and unlearned men" such as traditionally
wrote those Gospels and Epistles of the Christians? We may now
appreciate the full significance of the admission of the Catholic
Encyclopedia, speaking of the Church Fathers and writers through
all the Ages of Faith "before the eighteenth century," of whom it
says:

The early ecclesiastical writers were unconscious of
nearly all the problems to which criticism has given rise. ...
Looking at the Divine side, they deemed as of trifling account
questions of authorship, date, composition, accepting
unreservedly for these points such traditions as the Jewish
Church had handed down. ... The Fathers saw in every sentence
of the scripture a pregnant oracle of God. Apparent
contradictions and other difficulties were solved without
taking possible human imperfections into view. Except in


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regard to the preservation of the sacred text there was
nothing to elicit a critical view of the Bible in the age of
the Fathers, and this applies also to the Scholastic period."
(CE. iv, 492.)

CHRISTIAN "REVELATIONS" IN JEWISH FORGERIES

Christians no doubt believe in simple faith that the wonderful
inspired truths of their New Testament were original pronouncements
of Jesus Christ or directly revealed by him to his holy apostles,
who in turn revealed them to the populace for the first time as the
"good news" of the new religion for the salvation of sinful man.
Even a brief glance at a few of the most, notable of the Jewish
forgeries of the "age of apocryphal literature" will dispel that
pious belief, and show the most characteristic and essential
doctrines and dogmas of Christianity to be but refurbished vagaries
of the fanciful and fabulous tpectulations of already existing
Jewish apocryphal writings of the times just preceding and within
the new Christian era. These writings were put forth falsely as the
utterances of long since dead or wholly legendary Old Testament
notables, and were neither inspired nor revealed heavenly truth,
but simply vain and forged speculations of their fantastic writers.
We shall see the cardinal tenets of "revealed" Christianity in a
glance at a few of these Jewish pseudographs, and let the Christian
apologist explain.

This literature is of the highest value today because of the
light it throws on the growth of esehatological and Messianic
doctrines among the Jewish people just previous to the rise of
Christianity, especially since these doctrines have, in a purified
form, found a permanete place in the Christian system." (New Int.
Enyc. i, 745.)

The Book of Enoch, forged in the name of the grandson of Adam,
is the fragmentary remains of a whole literature which circulated
under the pretended authorship of that mythical Patriarch. In its
present form, the work, of 104 chapters, is composed of five Books,
with the following titles, of which those of Books 3 and 4 are of
particular significance, namely: 1. The Rape of Women by Fallen
Angels, and the Giants that were Begotten of Them; 2. The Visions
of Enoch begun; 3. The Visions continued, with Views of the
essiah's Kingdom; 4. Man's Destiny revealed in Dreams from the
beginning to the End of the Messianic Kingdom; 5. The Warnings of
Enoch to his own Family and to Mankind. This work is a composite of
at least five unknown Jewish writers, and was composed during the
last two centuries B.C. The forged Book of Enoch is quoted as
genuine and inspired in the Christian Epistle of Jude (14, ef
seq.), and as "Scripture" in the near canonical Epistle of
Barnabas; with the early Church Fathers and Apologists, among whom
Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Clement of
Alexandria, Anatolius, Origen, St, Augustine, etc., "it, had all
the wright of a canonical book," but was finally condemned as a
forgery by the forged Apostolic Constitutions, -- an instance of
the very dubious divine guidance of the inspired Church against all
error. Father Tertullian devotes an entire chapter "Concerning the
Genuineness of the Prophecy of Enoch." in which he gives fantastic
patristic reasons as to how the Book survived Noah's Flood, either


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by the providence of Noah himself or by the Providence of God as in
the mythical case of Esdras. In answer to the scoffing objections
that the Jews rejected the Book, "I suppose," he seriously argues,
"that they do not think that, having been published before the
Deluge, it could have safely survived that world-wide calamity, the
abolisher of all things." But, he urges, "let them recall to their
memory that Noah, the survivor of the deluge, was the great-grand-
son of Enoch himself," and that Noah probably preserved it at the
behest of Methuselah. But, again, "If Noah had not preserved it in
this way, there would still be this consideration to warrant our
assertion of the genuineness of this Scripture: he could equally
renewed it, under the Spirit's inspiration, after it, had been
destroyed by the violence of the Deluge, as, after the destruction
of Jerusalem by the Babylonian storming of it, every document of
the Jewish literature is generally agreed to have been restored
through Ezra." But the good Father had other and equally cogent
clerical reasons for accepting the Book as inspired Scripture: "But
since Enoch in the same Scripture has preached likewise concerning
the Lord, nothing at all must be rejected by us which pertains to
us; and we read that 'every Scripture suitable for edification is
divinely inspired.' ... To these considerations is added the fact
that Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude." (On the
Apparel of Women, II, ii; ANF. iv, 15-16.) By this excerpt from the
pious Father may be judged the value of the "testimony" of Apostles
and Church Fathers as to the inspiration, truth and authenticity of
holy "Scriptures," -- which is nil.

Of the immense significance of these forged Jewish "sacred
writings" in general upon Christian "revelation," and of the
fabulous Book of Enoch in particular, with its elaborated myth of
the Messiah, CE. thus confesses: "Jewish Apocalyptic is an attempt
to supply the place of prophecy, which had been dead for centuries,
and has its roots in the sacred oracles of Israel. ... Naturally
basing itself upon the Pentateuch and the Prophets, it clothed
itself fictitiously with the authority of a patriarch or prophet
who was made to reveal the transcendent future. ... Messianism of
Course plays an important part in apocalyptic eschatology, and the
idea of the Messiahs in certain books received a very high
development. ... The parables of Henoch, with their pre-existent
Messiahs, mark the highest point of development -- (hence not
Divine Revelation) -- of the Messianic concept to be found in the
whole range of Hebrew literature." (CE. i, 601, 602.) From these
uninspired ravings of Jewish forgers came thus the "divine
revelation" of the co-eternal "Son of God" worked up instead of the
old "revealed" human King "of the seed of David."

The forged Book of Enoch, thus vouched for, is notable for
being "the earliest appearance of the Messiah in non-canonical
literature." It is of the greatest importance for its doctrine of
the Jewish Messiah, who here appears as wholly an earthly human
deliverer and King over Israel forever, and for the origin of the
exalted titles applied to the Messiah in the New Testament Books,
as well as of a number of supposedly distinctive Christian
doctrines, first "revealed" by Jesus the Christ. In this Book we
first find the lofty titles: "Christ" or "the Anointed One," "Son
of Man," "the Righteous One," "the Elect One," -- all of which were
boldly plagiarized by the later Christians and bestowed on Jesus of


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Nazareth The Messiah, just as in the New Testament of later times,
exists from the beginning (48, 2); he sits on the throne of God
(45,3); and all judgment is committed unto him (69, 27). The
acceptance of Enoch as a Messianic prophet by the Christians led to
his rejection by the Jews. Here is the earliest invention of the
Christian Hell of fire and brimstone for eternal torture: "The
wicked shall go down into the Sheol of darkness and fire and dwell
there forever"; this being "one of the earliest mentions of Sheol
as a hell of torment" (CE. i, 602-3; EB. i, 223-5). It is the
oldest piece of Jewish literature which teaches the general
resurrection of Israel, a doctrine expanded to include Gentiles in
later "interpolations" into New Testament books. It abounds in such
"Christian" doctrines as the Messianic Kingdom, Hell, the
Resurrection, and Demonology, the Seven Heavens, and the
Millennium, all of which have here their apocryphal Jewish
promulgation, after being plagiarized bodily from the Persian and
Babylonian myths superstitions, as we have seen confessed. There
are numerous quotations, phrases, clauses, or thoughts derived from
Enoch, or of closest kin with it, in several of the New Testament
Gospels and Epistles, which may be readily found and compared as
catalogued in the authorities below cited; -- Pagan-Jewish myths
and doctrines which shared in molding the analogous New Testament
"revelations" or formed the necessary link in the development of
doctrines from the Old to the New Testament. The CE. says of the
Book of Enoch:

"It had left its imprint on the New Testament and the
works of the early Fathers. ... Clement of Alexandria,
Tertullian, Origen, and even St. Augustine suppose the work to
be a genuine one of the patriarch. ... The work is a
compilation, and its component parts were written in Palestine
by Jews of the orthodox school ... in the latter part of the.
second century before Christ. (See CE. i, 602. passim; EB. v,
220-224.)

In Fourth Esdras, as in the Apocalypse of Baruch, we find for
the first time, the fatal phrase and doctrine, "all mankind sinned
with Adam" (CE. i, 604), whence Paul forged his fearful and
accursed dogma of original sin and eternal damnation. Fourth
Marcabees, erroneously ascribed by Eusebius and others to Josephus,
dates from about 4 B.C., just after the death of Harod. It is
strongly indoctrinated with the Stoic philosophy, from which the
author "derived his four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Justice,
Fortitude, Temperance; and it was through Fourth Maccabees that
this category was appropriated by early Christian ascetical
writers" (CE. i, 605-6), and later "canonized" by the Church. (CE.
xi, 391.)

The Assumption of Moses was forged in the name of that worthy
as its genuine author, about the beginning of, or early in the
Christian era, with the ostensible purpose of confirming the Mosaic
Laws in Deuteronomy. It gives the parting communications of Moses
to his successor, Joshua, and unfolds, in a series of oretended
predictions, delivered in written from, the course of Israel's
history down to Herold's time. Here is found the legend of the
dispute between Michael Archangel and Satan over the body of Moses,
which the Christian Epistle of Jude (v. 9) cites as God-inspired


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truth. (CE. i, 602-3.) The book of Jubilees, or little Geneses, is
a fabricated embellishment of the Old Testament Genesis, written in
the name of Moses somewhere between 135 B.C., or 60 A.D., and
purports to be a revelation made to Moses by the 'Angel of the
Face' of events from Adam to Moses' own day; the Patriarchs are
made the exponents of the writer's own Pharisaic views and hopes.
It is quoted as good "Scripture" by Greek and Latin Fathers down to
the twelfth century, when its forged character was discovered.

One of the most important of apocryphal forgeries is the
Apocalypse of Baruch, "a pseudograph with evident Christian
interpolations" (CE. i, 604), written by a Jewish Pharisee about
50-90 A.D., who speaks in the first person in the name of Baruch,
secretary of the Prophet Jeremiah. The book begins by declaring
that the word of the Lord came to him in the 25th year of King
Jeconiah, -- who reigned only three months, and was carried away
captive to Babylon eleven years before the fall of Jerusalem, 586
B.C., which event the forgery bewails; it is filled with the
Messianic hopes of Jewry at the time of the fall of Jerusalem in 70
A.D. The book furnishes a setting and background of many
distinctive New Testament doctrines and problems, treating of
Original Sin, which it traces to the sin of Adam, Forgiveness,
Works, Justification, Free Will, etc., and this enables us to
estimate the contributions made in this respect by Jewish forgeries
to inspired Christian thought as developed in the so-called Pauline
Epistles, -- which Paul never wrote. Some notable Fathers, such as
Athenagoras, St. Justin Martyr, and St. Irenaeus, cite Beruch as a
Prophet, and vouch for him as on the same footing as Jeremiah, just
as Irenaeus vouches for Susanna and Bel and the Dragon as the
inspired work of Daniel. (CE. i, 604; iii, 271; EB. i 220.)

Father Justin, in several chapters, accuse the Jews of having
"removed from Esdras and Jeremiah passages clearly mentioning the
Savior," as also from Psalms; he says: "they have altogether taken
away many Scriptures from the translation affected by those Seventy
elders who were with Ptolemy, and by which this very man was
crucified is proved to have been set forth expressly as God, and
man, and as having been crucified, and as dying." (Dial. Trypho,
chs. lxxi-lxxiv; ANF. i, 234-235.) But these passages, says
Middleton, were never in the Hebrew Scriptures; "they were not
erased by the Jews, but added [to their copies] by the Christians,
or forged by Justin." (Op. cit., 41, 42.)

To which extent these pious Jewish forgeries formed the
background and basis of the Christian doctrines and dogmas of
pretended direct "revelation," and informed the thought and
utterance of Jesus Christ -- the raw material and working tools of
the Christian propagandist, may be realized from this
acknowledgement:

"The most important and valuable of the extant Jewish
apocrypha are those which contain the visions and revelations of
the unseen world and the Messianic future. Jewish apocryphal
literature is a theme which deserves the attention of all
interested in the development of the religion of Israel, that body
of concepts and tendencies in which are fixed the roots of the
great doctrinal principles of Christianity itself, just as its
Divine Founder took his temporal generation from the stock of
orthodox Judaism.
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The Jewish apocryphas furnish the completing links in the
progress of Jewish theology and fill what would otherwise be a gap,
though a small one, between the advanced stage marked by the
deutero-canonical -- [i.e. long doubted but finally accepted] --
books and its full maturity so relatively perfect that Jesus could
suppose as existing in the popular consciousness, without teaching
de novo, the doctrines of Future Retribution, the Resurrection of
the body, and the existence, nature and office of angels." (CE. i,
601.)

All these divine and "revealed" doctrines of Christian faith
we have seen to be originally heathen Zoroastrian mythology, taken
over first by the Jews, then boldly plagiarized by the ex-Pagan
Christians. Dean Milman, of St. Paul's, thus describes the
universality of these notions among the heathens and the borrowing
by the Jews and Christians of what were originally Pagan
superstitions -- now become articles of Christian revelation:

"Satan, angels, immortality, resurrection -- all Persian
and Zoroastrian doctrines imbibed by the Jews. ... During the
whole life of Christ, and the early propagation of the
religion, it must be borne in mind, that they took place in an
age, and among a people, which superstition had made so
familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events,
that the wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily
superseded by some new demand on the every-ready belief."
(Milman, History of Christianity, I, 93.)

Thus, again, the most precious Christian truths, of supposed
divine "revelation" through God, Christ and apostles -- were
plagiarizations from forged Jewish pseudo-Scriptures, taken over
into them from long contact with the Zoroastrian Pensions. These
myths and superstitions Jesus the Son of God found ready at hand
"in the popular consciousness" of the ignorant wonder-craving
Jewish peasantry; and, Lo, our "revealed" Christian religion! We
may begin to suspect the later "inspired" books of the "Apostles"
as not beyond the taint of Pagan superstition and of the suspicion
of Christian forgery.


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24 page printout, pages 89 to 111 of 322
CHAPTER III

CHRISTIAN "SCRIPTITRE" FORGERIES

"Nothing stands in need of Lying but a LIE."

To such an extent are the origins of the Christian Religion
wrapped in obscurity, due to the labyrinthine confusions and
contradictions and forgeries of its early records, that it is quite
impossible to extricate, with any degree of confidence, a thread of
historic truth from the tangle.

The 27 New Testament booklets, attributed to eight individual
"Apostolic" writers, and culled from some 200 admitted forgeries
called Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, constitute the presient
"Canonical" or acceptedly inspired compendium of the primitive
history of Christianity. The only available method to extract from
them approximately just judgments as to the risie and progress of
the new system of beliefs, must be by a series of tentative
assumptions of reletive truth of sundry details of the narratives.
By relative truth of any tentatively assumed "fact," I mean such
"fact" with relation always to its contradictory, -- one or the
other must necessarily be false -- while both may be -- and
probably are. For, as virtually every alleged "fact" recorded in
Gospels, Acts and Epistles is off-set by a contradictory recital,
rendering one or the other untrue, neather can be assumed with
assurance; the actuality of either, and of all, is thus made
doubtful, and is subject to total rejection as our study of the
booklets develops.

On such provisional assumption that sundry of the things
recorded possibly may have happened as in one manner or the other
related, we are able to reach several obvious conclusions as to the
order and approximate times of those dubiously-assumed happenings.
In view, however, of what we have seen, and shall soon more
abundantly see, of the shifty and fraudulent methods of
ecclesiatitical "history"-writing and propaganda, we may be
prepared for some rude upsettings of our inherited traditions of
Christian fact and faith.

The central character of the Christian faith, Jesus, to assume
him as a historical personage, was a Jew, as were, by tradition,
his disciples and entourage. As is, of course, well known:
"Christianity took its rise in Judaism; its Founder and His
disciples were orthodox Jews, and the latter maintained their
Jewish practices, at least for a time, after the day of Pentecost.
The Jews themselves looked upon the followers of Christ as a mere
Israelitish sect, ... 'the sect of the Nazarenes' (Acts xxiv, 15),"
-- the believers in the Promised Messiah. (CE. iii, 713.) In this
they were grievously deceived and disappointed, as, too the world
knows; "Christ's humble and obscure life, ending in the ignominious
death on the cross, was the very opposite of what the Jews expected
of their Christ." (CE. i, 620.)

Jesus was a native of Galilee, "his own country" (Mt. ii, 23;
xiii, 54-55), or of Judaea, "his own country" (.John iv, 43-44). He
was born "in the days of Herod the King" (Mt. ii, 1), about 6 B.C.,
or "when Cyrenius was governor of Syria" (Luke ii, 1-7), about 7
A.D., or some 13 years later. (CE. viii, 377; EB. i, 307-8.) The
destructive contradictions as to his lineage and parentage, and

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other essential particulars, are reserved for opportune notice.
Jesus became a Jewish sectarian religious teacher of the zealot
reformer type; so zealous that his own family thought him insane
and sent out to apprehend him (Mark iii, 31); many of the people
said of him, "He hath a devil, and is mad" (John x, 20); his own
disciples, seeing his raid into the Temple after the money-
changers, shook their heads and muttered the proverb: "The zeal of
thine house hath eaten me up" (John ii, 17).

His ministry, of about one year, according to the first three
Gospels, of some three yeurs according to the fourth, was, by his
own repeated assertion, limited exclusively to his own Jewish
people: "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of
Israel" (Mt. xv, 24; ef. Acts iii, 25-26; xiii, 46; Rom. xv, 8);
and he straitly enjoined on his Twelve Aposties: "Go not into the
way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye
not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Mt.
X, 5-6); to the woman of Canaan who pleaded with him to have mercy
on her daughter, "grievously vexed with a devil," he retorted: "It
is not meet to take the children's bread, and cast it to dogs" (Mt.
xv, 22-28; vii, 6). His own announcement, and his command to the
Twelve, was "Preach, saying, The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand" (Mt.
x, 7), -- the exclusively Hebraic Kingdom of the Baptist (Mt. iii,
2), as of the Jewish Messianic apocrypha which we have noticed.
Jesus lived at the height of the "age of apocryphal literature,"
and in due time got into it, voluminously.

Before his death, time and again he made and repeated the
assurance -- the most positive and iterated of all the sayings
attributed to him -- of the immediate end of the world, and of his
quick triumphant return to establish the Kingdom of God in the new
earth and reign on the reestablished throne of David forever. Time
and again he said and repeated: "Verily I say unto you, There be
some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see
the Son of man coming in his Kingdom" (Mt. xvi, 28; Mk. ix, I; Lk.
ix, 27); "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be
done" Mk. xiii, 30). -- So quickly would this "second coming" be,
that when the Twelve were sent out on their first preaching tour in
little Palestine, their Master assured them: "Ye shall not have
gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of man be come" (Mt. x,
23). Caiaphag, the high priert before whom Jesus was led after his
capture in the Garden, solemnly conjured him "By the living God"
for the truth; and Jesus replied: "Nevertheless I say unto you,
Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man ... coming in the clouds of
heaven." (Mt. xxvi, 63, 64; Mk. xiv, 61, 62.) Some people are
expecting him yet. Of course, there were, could be, none but Jews
in heaven, or in this new Kingdom of Heaven on the new earth:
"Salvation is of the Jews." (John iv, 22.) It was 144,000 Jews, the
"scaled" saints, who alone constituted the original Jewish "Kingdom
of God" (Rev. vii).

With these explicit data we arrive at the first obvious and
positive conclusion: With the expectation of a quick and sudden end
of the world and of all things human, no books were written on the
subject in that generation or, for a little leeway, the next or so,
after the death of the expected returning King. The scant, number
of credulous Jews who accepted this preachment as "Gospel truth"


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and lived in this expectation, were nourished with neighborhood
gossip and oral traditions of the "good news," and needed and had
no written books of inspired record of these things. Thus many
years passed. Only as the dread consummation was delayed, and the
hope deferred sickened the hearts of the expectant Jews and they
waned in faith, and as aecused by Paul and Barnabas, "put it from
you," did the defeated propagandists of the "Faith that failed at
the Cross," give the shoulder to the Jews and "turn to the
Gentiles" (Acts xiii, 46), and begin to expand the failing new
Jewish faith among the superstitious Pagans of the countries round
about. But this was still by the spoken word; on all the
supposititious "missionary tours" the Word was spread by word of
mouth written gospel books were not yet. When at last, the "coming"
being still unrealized -- these books began to be written, we can
accurately determine something of the order of their writing, and
finally, though negatively, the approximate times when they were
written, by ascertaining when they were not yet written.

We have seen that for a century and more the only "Scriptures"
used by the Jewish propagandists of the Christ were the Greek
Septuagint translations of the old hebrew sacred writings, "the Law
and the Prophets" (CE. v, 702; i, 635); supplemented by sundry
Jewish apocrypha and the Pagan Sibylline Oracles; these were the
only "authorities" appealed to by the early "Fathers" for the
propaganda of the new faith. Indubitably, if the wonderful
"histories" of their Christ and the inspired pretended writings of
his first, Apostles, forming noew the New Testament, had then
existed, even in scraps of writing, they would have been the most
precious and potent documents of propaganda, would have been
snatched at and quoted and appealed to with infinate zeal and
ardor, as they have been through the centuries since. But, for some
150 years, as we shall see, little or nothing besides Old Testament
and Pagan Oracles were known or quoted. As said by the great
critic, Solomon Reinach, "With the exception of Papias, who speaks
of a narrative by Mark, and a collection of sayings of Jesus, no
Christian writer of the first half of the second century (i.e., up
to 150 A.D.) quotes the Gospels or their reputed authors."
(Reinach, Orpheus, p. 218.) So, patently, as yet no "Gospels" and
but few if any "Epistles" of our "canon" had as yet been written.
Again, we read the 23 booklets from and including Acts to
Revelation: there is not a solitary referance to a word of
quotation from, any of our four Gospels; scarce a trace of the
wonderful career and miracles of Jesus the Christ; not a word of
his "gospel" or teachings mentioned or quoted. These Epistles,
indeed, "preach Christ Crucified" (from oral tradition), as the
basis of the propagandists' own "gospel." But the written "Gospel
of Jesus Christ" (his life and words and deeds), was unknown:
indeed, jealous of the so-called Petrine preaching which "perverts
the gospel of Christ" as preached by him, the soi-disant Apostle
Paul fulminates: "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach
any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached, let,
him be accursed" (Gal. i, 7, 8); -- so early did priestly
intolerance and priestly curses on opponents come into holy vogue.
Therefore the conclusion is inevitable that when those 23 Acts and
Epistles were written, none of the four "Gospel" biographies of
Jesus the Christ had yet seen the light. "Written Gospels are
neither mentioned nor implied in the NT epistles, nor in that, of


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Clemens Romanus, nor, probably, in that of Barnabas, nor in the
Didache. luke (i, 1-4) implies that 'many gospels' were current"
(EB. ii, 1809), at the time that Gospel was written.

The Acts and Epistles, therefore, with Revelation, were
written before any of the Gospel biographies. If these Christ-
histories had existed, how eagerly would they have been seized upon
to garnish and glorify the preachment of the early propagandists of
the Faith that failed at the Cross, -- and would have perished
wholly but. for the allbelieving Pagan Gentiles, who, when they
heard it, "were glad, and glorified the word of the lord" (Acts
xiii, 48), as orally delivered.

"THE AGE OF APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE"

As the long years passed and one generation of disappointed
"Messiah" Jews was gathered unto its fathers and was followed by
another, the believers in the promised "second coming" for the
establishment of the Jewish Kingdom grew restles, and made
pertinent complaint, "Saying, Where is the promise of his coming?
for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were
from the beginning of the creation" (2 Peter ii, 4), -- and as they
yet continue. Dubbing these reasonable but disturbing inquirers
"scoffers," the crafty Peter tried in typical priestly form to
squirm out of the embarrassing situation created by the positive
promises of the Christ and the inspired preachments of himself and
his apostolic confreres, by the shifty rejoinder: "But, beloved
["scoffers"], be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is
with the Lord as a thousand yearn, and a thousand years as one day"
(2 Peter ii, 8) -- which doesn't mean anything for an honest
answer; and time and again they cajole the impatient eredtilous:
"Ye have need of patience; ... for yet a little while, and he that
shall come, will come." (Heb. x, 36, 37; cf. 1 Thess. iv, l6-18; 2
Thess. iii, 5; James v, 7, 8; et passim.) But he isn't come yet,
these 2000 years.

It was at this critical juncture, to revive and stimulate the
jaded hope of the Jewish believers and to spread the propaganda
amongst the all-believing Pagaiis, that the written Christ-tales
began to be worked up by the Christian propagandists. Before their
admiring eyes they had for models the "whole literature" of Jewish
apocryphal or forged writings, plus the Pagan Oracles: with immense
zeal and industry they set about to imitate the example before
them, and to reforge these Jewish and heathen forgeries to more
definite Chriiitian uses, and to forge anew another whole
literature of distinctively Christian forgeries and fabulous
histories of the Christ. "In this form of propaganda the Christians
proved themselves to be apt pupils of the Jews. So common, indeed,
had become in early Christian times, the invention of such oracles
that Celsus terms Christians Sibyllistai, believers in sibyls, or sibyl-mongerrs" (EB. i, 246), that is, peddlers of Christian
forgeries in Pagan form (Ib. p. 261). How great was this pious
fabrication we can only judge from the two hundred, more or less,
of false histories, gospels, epistles and revelations which have
survived, entire or fragmentary, or by title only, through the long
intervening centuries of faith, and of which 27 are yet cherished
as of Divine inspiration.


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"THE IDEA OF INSPIRATION"

Before sketching the welter of these lying works of Christian
hands and childish minds, we may define, by high priestly
authority, the status of the problem of divine inspiration, and
just how the notion of "canonicity" or official inspiration, came
to be, now attributed to, now withdrawn from, this heterogeneous
mass or mess of pious scribblings, and finally clung to only 27 of
yet asserted sanctity. These admissions are very illuminating.

We have aeen that the Hebrew Old Testament itself "reveals no
formal notion of inspiration," though, we are assured, "the later
Jews must have possessed the idea" (CE. iii, 269); -- thus only an
idea or notion somehow acquired, but not through divine
illumination, for as we read, of all the mass of Jewish holy
forgeries "each of them has at one tune or another been treated as
canonical" or divinely inspired. (EB. i, 250.) Whether the
Christian notion or idea as to the divine inspiration of their own
new forgeries was of any better quality may now appear.

The New Testament and the inspired Apostles are silent on the
subject and left the matter to serious doubts and disputations for
many centuries: "There are no indications in the New Testament ...
of a definite new Canon bequeathed by the Apostles to the Church,
or of a strong self-witness to Divine inspiration," admits the CE,.
(iii, 274); that is, there is nothing in the 27 booklets which
would lead to the suspicion of their "inspiration" or truth. There
was then no Church for them to bequeath to, nor was the Canon
settled, as we shall see: "It was not until about the middle of the
second century -- [when we shall see the books were really written]
-- that under the rubric of Scripture the New Testament writings
were assimilated to the Old. ... But it should be remembered that
the inspired character of the New Testament in a Catholic dogma,
and must therefore in some way have been revealed to, and taught
by, Apostles"! (Ib. p. 275.) This is a strikingly queer bit of
clerical dialectic, and leaves the question of the "some way" of
revelation to the Apostles and of their transmission of the "dogma"
to posterity, in a nebulously unsatisfying state.

Further, the dubious and disputed status of the sacred
writings through centuries, and the ultimate settlement of the
controversies by the 'ipse dixit' of a numerical majority of the
Council of Trent, in 1546, -- after the Reformation had forced the
issue, is thus admitted: "The idea of a complete and clear-cut
canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is,
from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The cannon of
the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a
development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with
doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by
certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not
reach its final term until the dogmatic defination of the
Tridentine Council. ... And this want of a organized distribution,
secondarily to the absence of an early fixation of the Canonm, left
room for variations and doubts which lasted far into the
centuries." (CE., iii, 274.) The 'modus operandi' of the Holy
Council in ultimately "canonizing" Jerome's old Vulgate Version,
and its motive for doing so, are thus exposed by the keen pen of
the author of the Rise and Fall:

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"When the Council of Trant resolved to pronounce sentence on
the Cannon of Scripture, the opinion which prevented, after some
debate, was to declare the Latin Vulgate authentic and 'almost'
infallible; and this sentence, which was guarded by formidable
anathemas, secured all the books of the Old and New Testament which
composed that ancient version. ... When the merit of that version
was discussed, the majority of the theologians urged, with
confidence and success, that it was absoutely necessary to receive
the Vulgate as authentic and inspired, unless they wished to
abandon the victory to the Lutherans, and the honors of the Church
to the Grammarians." (Gibbon, A Vindication, v, 2; Istoria del
consiglio Tridentino, L. ii, p. 147.) A number of these books were
bitterly disputed and their authenticity and inspiration denied by
the leading Reformers, Luther, Grotius, Calvin, etc., and excluded
from their official lists, until finally the Reformed Church
followed the example of the Church hopeless of reform and swallowed
the canon whole, as we have it today, -- minus, of course, the
'Tobit,' 'Judith,' and like inspired buffooneries of the True
Bible.

Such books and the vicissitudes of their authority are thus
described: "Like the Old Testament, the New has its deutero-
canonical [i.e. doubted] books and portions of books, their
canonicity having formally been a subject of some controversy in
the Church. These are, for entire books: the Epistle to the
Hebrews, that od James, the Second and Third of John, Jude, and
Apocalypse; giving seven in all as the number of the N.T. contested
books. The formerly disputed passages are three: the closing
section of St. Mark's Gospel, xvi, 9-20, about the apparitions of
Christ after the resurrection; the verses in Luke about the bloody
sweat of Jesus, xxii, 43, 44; the Pericope Adulterae, or narrative
of the woman taken in adultery, St. John, vii, 53 to viii, 11.
Since the Council of Trent it is not permitted for a Catholic to
question the inspiration of these passages." (CE. iii, 274.)
Besides the forgery of the above and other books as a whole, we
shall see many other instances of "interpolated" or forged passages
in the Christian books.

"THE LYING PEN OF THE SCRIBES"

Speaking of the doubtful historicity of the celebrated AEsop
of the famous Fables which go under his name, a critic well states
a valid test of historicity: "We may well doubt, however, whether
he (AEsop) ever existed; we have the most varied accounts of him,
many of which are on their face pure inventions; and the fables
which passed under his name were certainly not written until long
after the period in which he is supposed to have lived." (NIE. i,
191.) We may have occasion to apply this test to the personality of
Jesus of Nazareth and sundry apostolic personages; in any event it
is peculiarly applicable to the numerous Christian stories and
fables treating of them, which on their face are pure inventions,
and which were admittedly forged in the names of Jesut; himself and
of all of his Apostles and of many of the shining lights of the new
Christian faith, just as we have seen was done in the Jewish
forgerier; in the names of the Old Testament notables from Adam on
down the catalogue.



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Leaving for the moment aside the 27 presently accepted
booklets of the N.T., and admitting the many Christian forgeries of Christ-fables, CE. thus apologetically explains: "The genuine
Gospels are silent about 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 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." (CE. i, 606.) The motive above admitted for
feeding with pious frauds the "natural craving" of the ignorant and superstitiouts Christians for marvel-mongering by the Church, is
confirmed by a distinguished historign: "A vast and ever-increasing
crowd of converts from paganism, who had become such from worldly considerations, and still hankered after wonders like those in
which their forefathers had from time immemorial believed, lent a
ready ear to assertions which, to more hesitating or better-
instructed minds, would have seemed to carry imposture on their
very face." (Draper, The Intellectaal Development of Europe, i,
309.)

This being thus frankly confessed, our clerical writer
describes the general character of these pious frauds: "The
Christian apocryphal writings in general imitate the books of the
N.T.) and therefore, with a few exceptions, fall under the
description of Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses." (CE. i,
606.) Further apologizing for these Christian forgeries, and giving
a smear of clerical whitewash to the forgers, it is speciously
pleaded, that "the term apocryphal in connection with special
gospels must be understood as bearing no more unfavorable an import
than uncanonical." They were forgeries pure and simple; and their
pious value is urged, that "the apocryphal Gospels help us to
understand the religious conditions of the second and third
centuries," -- as indeed they do, in a light very damaging to any
suspicion of truthfulness, common honesty, or anything above the
most mediocre intelligence of the pious Fathers and Faithful who
put these gross fabrications into circulation in the name and for
the sake of Christ. Their pious plea is: "Amor Christi est cui
satisfecimus." (Ib. p. 606.) Of these pious frauds it adds: "The quasi-evangelistic compositions concerning Christ ... are all of
Orthodox origin." (Ib. p. 607.)

"CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES" -- FORGED

When the new Faith went forth to conquer the Pagan world for
Christ, the pious Greek Fathers and priests of the Propaganda soon
felt the need of something of more up-to-date effectiveness than
Old Testament text and Sibylline Oracles, they needed something
concrete out of the New Dispensation to "show" to the superstitious
Pagans to win them to the Christ and his Church: something
tangible, visible; compellingly authentic proofs. Like arms of
proof for the holy warfare, the invincible weapons of truth -- "the
whole armour of God" -- they forged outright for the conquest of
the unbeliever. What more convincing and compelling proofs of Jesus

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the Christ, his holy Apostles, and their wondrous works of over a
century ago, than the following authentic and autograph documents
and records, held before doubting eyes:

A "GOSPEL" WRITTEN BY JESUS CHRIST'S OWN HAND;

LETTERS AND PORTRAITS OF JESUS CHRIST AND HIS PERSONAL
CORRESPONDENCE;

LETTERS WRITTEN BY HIS VIRGIN MOTHER;

PILATE'S OFFICIAL REPORT TO THE EMPEROR OF THE TRIAL AND
CRUCIFICTION OF JESUS, WITH PILATE'S CONFESSION OF FAITH;

THE REPLY OF TIBERIUS, AND THE TRIAL OF PILATE;

OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS OF THE ROMAN SENATE ABOUT JESUS,

GOSPELS, EPISTLES, ACTS, BY EVERY ONE OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES;

OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS; OF CHURCH LAW AND GOVERNMENT, WRITTEN IN
GREEK, BY THE APOSTLES;

RECORDS OF THE EARLIEST "POPES" AND "APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION;

SCORES OF OTHER PIOUS FORGED DOCUMENTS TO BE RELATED BELOW.

Armed with lying credentials and "proofs" of the fictitious
persons and performances for which credence must be won among the
credulous pagans, the priests and Vicars of God propagated their
stupendous "LIES to the glory of God" and the exaltation of the
Church. We shall catelogue these crude forgeries somewhat more
fully, and look into some of the more notorious.

FORGED GOSPELS, ACTS, EPISTLES

Half a hundred of false and forged Apostolic "Gospels of Jesus
Christ," together with more numerous orher "Scripture" forgeries,
was the output, so far as known now, of the lying pens of the pious
Christians of the first two centuries of the Christian "Age of
Apocryphal Literature"; all going to swell the "very large number
of apocryphal writings of distinctly Christian origin which were
produced from the second century onward, to satisfy an unhealthy
craving for the occult and marvelous or to embellish the stories of
the saints." (NIE., i, 746.) These N.T. apocryplia include
"numerous works purporting to have been written by apostles or
their associates, but not able to secure a general or permanent
recognition. These may be classified thus: (a) Gospels; (b) Acts of
Apostles; (c) Epistles; (d) Apocalypses; (e) Didactic Works; (f)
Hymns. (Ib. p. 748.) "The name Gospel," says CE. (vi, 656), "as
indicating a written account of Christ's words and deeds, has been,
and still is, applied to a large number of narratives of Christ's
life, which circulated both before and after the composition of our
Third Gospel (cf. Luke i, 1-4). The titles of some fifty such works
have come down to us. ... It is only, however, in connection with
some twenty of these 'Gospels' that some information has been
preserved. ... Most of them, as far as can be made out, are late


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productions, the apocryphal character of which is generally
admitted by contemporary [i.e., present day] scholars." Naming
first as Nos. 1-4 "The Canonical Gospels," now falsely labelled
with the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the twenty best
known ones are listed as follows; viz: The Gospels according to the
Hebrews; of Peter; According to the Egyptians; of Matthias; of
Philip; of Thomas; the Proto-Evangelium of James, Gospel of
Nicodemus (Acta Pilati); of the Twelve Apostles; of Basilides; of
Valentius; of Marcion; of Eve; of Judas; the Writing Genna Marias;
the Gospel Teleioseos. (CE. vi, 656.)

Individual Gospels were forged in the names of each of the
Twelve Apostles, severally, and a joint fabrication under the name
of "The Gospel of the Twelve," was put into the mouths of the
twelve Apostles, using the first person to give the ear-marks of
authenticity to their forged utterances; and separately, "Almost
every one of the Apostles had a Gospel fathered upon him by one
early sect or another." (EB. i, 259.) Several seem to have been
fathered upon Matthew besides the one that wrongly heads the list
of the "canonical Four," such as the Gospel of Matthias, Traditions
of Matthias, also a supposed and probably non-existent writing in
Hebrew hypothesized as the basic document of the Four; probably,
also the so-called Logia, a papyrus scrap of one sheet discovered
at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and containing alleged sayings of Jesus
which in part correspond with, in part radically differ from the
sayings attributed to him in the Four. He was also made responsible
for a so-called Gospel of St. Matthew, dating from the 4th or 5th
century, which "purports to have been written by Matthew and
translated by St. Jerome." (CE.. i, 608,)

This authority also lists the famous Protevangetium Jacobi, or
Infancy Gospel of James, the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, that of
Gamaliel, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, also According to
the Egyptians; of the Nazarenes; Gospels of St. Peter, of St.
Philip, of St. Thomas, of St. Bartholomew, of St. Andrew, of
Barnabas, of Thaddeus, even notable forged Gospels of Judas
Iscariot, and of Mother Eve; also the Gospel by Jesus Christ. We
have the Gospel of Nicodemus, the History of Joseph the Carpenter,
the Descent into Hades, the Desicent of Mary, the Ascents of James,
the Prophecy of Hystaspes, the Didache or Teachings of the
Apostles; the Gospel of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the
Transitum Mariae or Evangelium Joannin. This last named pious
Christian work, as described by CE. (i, 607-8) is forged in the
name of St. John the Apostle, and is "prefaced with a spurious
Letter of the Bishop of Sardis, Melito"; it records how "the
Apostles are preternaturally transported from different quarters of
the globe to the Virgin's deathbed, those who have died being
resurrected for the purpose"; a Jew who dares touch the sacred body
instantly loses both hands, which are restored through the
mediation of the Apostles. Christ, accompanied by a band of angels,
comes down to receive his mother's soul, "the Apostles bear the
body to Gethsemane and deposit it in a tomb, whence it is taken up
alive to heaven"; this being an extraordinary miracle, for the body
was dead and the soul carried to heaven from her home and the dead
body laid in the grave, where it comes to life again for the
Heaven-trip. This clumsy fable, says CE., considerably "influenced
the Fathers" (Ib. i, 608), who were notoriously ehildish-minded. A


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very noted and notorious forgery was the Gospel of Paul and Thecla,
of which Father Tertullian relates, that this story wag fabricated
by an Elder of Asia Minor, who, when convicted of the fraud --
[this being the only known instance of such action], -- confessed
that he had perpetrated it "for the love of St. Paul." (Reinach,
Orpheus, p. 235.) The Protevangelium Jacobi was "an Apocryphal work
by a fanciful fabulist, urhampered by knowledge of Jewish affairs,
contposed before the end of the second century with a view to
removing the glaring contradictions between Matthew and Mark,"
regarding the birth and life of Jesus CHrist. (EB. iii, 3343.) An
"Epistle on the Martyrdom of the Apostles Peter and Paul was at a
later period attributed to St. Linus. ... It is apoeryphal, and of
later date than the history of the Martyrdom of the two Apostles,
by some attributed to Marcellus, which is also apocryphal." (CE.
ix, 273; see Acta Apostolorum, Apoerypha, xiv.) Other noted
Fatherly fabrications were the celebrated Epistles I and II of
Clement to the Corinthians, and the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions
and Homilies, purporting to be written by the very doubtful Bishop
of Rome of that name; very voluminous, and written about 140 A.D.,
not a line of New Testament "scriptures" do they quote, but they
quote freely from the O.T. and from various Jewish, Christian and
Pagan works. (EB. iii, 3486.)

Besides the above complete "Gospel" forgeries, there are
several more, and fragments of others, which purport to contain
"sayings" attributed to Jesus which are not contained in the Four
Gospels; and which are known as Agrapha, that is, things not
written. Among these are the Logia of Oxyrhynchus above mentioned;
the Fayum gospel-fragment, a papyrus purporting to give words of
Christ to Peter at the Last Supper, "in a form which diverges
largely by omissions from any in the canonical gospels." (EB. i,
258.) These Agrapha "do not embrace the lenghy sections ascribed to
Jesus in the 'Didiscalin' and the 'Pistis Sophia'; these works also
contain some brief quotations of alleged words of Jesus; ... nor
the Sayings contained in religious romances, such as we find in the
apocryphal Gospels, the apocryphal Acts, or the Letter of Christ to
Abgar. ... In patristic citations ... Justin Martyr, Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, make fslse quotations," -- citing instances.
(CE. i, 225, 226.) In the class of Agrapha are also "words in the
Gospels not regarded as genuine, as Mt. vi, 13b; xvii, 21; Mk. xvi,
9-20; John vii, 53; viii, 2; also alleged quotations from the Old
Testament in the New Testament not found in the Old Testament."
(NIE. 1, 240.)

Of apocryphal Acts of Apostles we are edified by the Acts, or
Travels, (Greek, Pereodui) of Peter, (and separately) of John, of
Thomas, of Andrew, and of Paul; another Acts of Philip, Acts of
Matthew, of Bartholomew, of John, of judas Thomas. There is a whole
collection of Martyrdoms of the several Apostles. Of apocryphal
Epistles, the most famous is the Correspondence between the Abgar
of Edessa, and Jesus; between the Roman Philosopher Seneca and
Paul; apocryphal Epistles of Paul, to the Laodiceans, to the
Alexandrians, the Third Epistle to the Corinthians. Forged
Apocalypses abound, of which that of Peter, the Vision of Hermas,
the Vision of Paul, the Apocalypge of Paul, the Apocalypse of the
Virgin Mary. The didactic Preaching of Peter, the Teaching of the
Apostles, or Didache, containing warnings against Judaism and


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polytheism, and words of Jesus to the Apostles; another set
containing a lament of Peter for his denial of Jesus, and various
ethical maxims a Syriac Preaching of Simon Cephas; a collection of
Hymns or Odes of Solomon. As if these were not enough for Christian edification, "many heretical or Gnostic works of the same
apocryphal kind were changed into orthodox by expurgation of
objectionable matter or by rewriting, using the same outlines; thus
a series of Catholic Acts was produced, written from an orthodox
standpoint." (NIE. i, 748.) A very celebrated forgery was the
Shepherd of Hermas, forged by Hermas,' supposed brother of Pius,
Bishop of Rome, about 150 A.D. See the vast catalogue (CE. i,
601-615).

A whole literature of Christian forgery grew up and had
immense vogue under the designation of Acts Pilati, or Acts of
Pilate. One of the most popular of these was called the Gospel of
Nicodemus, of which CE,. says: "The alleged Hebrew orignal is
attributed to Nicodemius; the title is of medieval origin. The
apocryphon gained wide credit in the Middle Ages. ... The 'Acta'
are of orthodox composition. The book aimed at gratifying the
desire for extra-evangelical details concerning oar Lord, and at
the same time, to strengthen faith in the Resurrection of Christ,
and at general edification." (i, 3.) The Descent into Hades is an
enlargement of the reputed official acts or repots of Pilate to the
Roman Emperor. Speaking of the Pilate Literature as a whole, the
Catholic Encyclopedia. in a paragraph which pointedly admits the
falsifying frauds of three luminous liars and forgers of the Faith,
Justin Martyr, the great Bishop Eusebius, and Father Tertullian,
explains that these Acta "dwell upon the part which a reresentative
[Pilate] of the Roman Empire played in the supreme events of our
Lord's life, and to shape the testimony of Pontius Pilate, even at
the cost of exaggeration and amplification -- [hear the soft-
pedaling note], into a weapon of apologetic defense, making the
official bear witness to the miracles, Crucifixion, and
Resurrection of Jesus Christ. ... It is characterized by
exaggerating Pilate's weak defense of Jesus into a strong dympathy
and practical belief in his Divinity." (CE. i, 609.) Father
Tertullian, in his Apologia (xxi), relates the Report of Pilate to
the Emperor, sketching the miracles and death of Jesus Christ, and
says, "All these things Pilate announced to Tiberius Caesar."
Bishop Eusebius thus relates the fable as taken from the Apologia
of Father Tertullian: "The fame of Our Lord's remarkable
resurrection and ascension being now spread abroad, ... Pontius
Pilate transmits to Tiberius an account of the circumstances
concerning the resurrection of our Lord from the dead. ... In this
account, he also intimated that he had ascertained other miracies
respecting him, and that having now risen from the dead, he was
believed to be a God by the great mass of the people. Tiberius
referred the matter to the Senate, ... being obviously pleased with
the doctrine; but the Senate, as they had not proposed the matter,
[rejected it]. But he continued in his opinion, threatening death
to the accusers of the Chriatians; a divine providence infusing
this into his mind, that the Gospel having freer scope in its
commencement, might spread everywhere over the world." (Eusebius,
HE. II, 2.) Father Justin Martyr, in his Apologia, "appeals
confidently as a proof of them to the 'Acta' or records of Pilate,
existing in the imperial archives." Eusebius, relates spurious


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anti-Christian Acts of Pilate composed in the fourth century, the
Acta Pilati or Gospel of Nicodemus, Anphora Pilati, Paradoseis; a
still later fabrication is the Latin Epistola Pilati ad Tiberium,
Also the Letter of Herod to Pilate and Letter of Pilate to Herod;
the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea. The pseudo-Correspondence of
Jesus with Abgar, King of Edessa, is found in Eusebius (Hist.
Eccles., I, xiii), "who vouches that he himself translated it from
the Syriac documunis in the archives of Edessa, the metropolis, of
Eastern Syria. ... 'This,' adds Eusebius, 'happened in the year 340
of the Seleucid era, corresponding to A.D. 28-29.'" (CE. i, 609,
610.) More monumental lies to the glory of God than those of the
distinguialied Church Fathers are not "A collection of apocryphal
Acts of the Apostles was formed in the Frankish Church in the sixth
century, probably by a monk." (Ib. p. 610.) There were also "the
works accredited to Dionysius the Areopagite, who was not the
author of the works bearing his name." (lb. p. 638.)

Of highest importance because "these Acts are the chief source
for details of the martyrdom of the two great Apostles," as admits
the CE., special notice is made of the "Catholic" Acts of Sts.
Peter and Paul, of which many MSS of "the legend" existed, the
material import of which is thus not quite honestly summarized:
"The Jews have been aroused by the news of Paul's intended visit
(to Rome), and induce Nero to forbid it. Nevertheless the Apostle
secretly enters Italy; his companion is mistaken for himself at
Puteoli and beheaded. In retribution that city is swallowed up by
the sea. Peter receives Paul at Rome with joy. The preaching of the
Apostles converts multitudes and even the Empress. Simon Magus
traduces the Christian teachers, and there is a test of strength in
miracles between that magician and the Apostles, which takes place
in the presence of Nero. Simon essays a flight to heaven but falls
in the Via Sacra and is dashed to pieces, Nevertheless, Nero is
bent on the destruction of Peter and, Paul. The latter is beheaded
on the Ostian Way, and Peter is cruciffed at his request head
downward. Before his death he relates to the people the 'Quo
Vadis?' story. Three men from the East carry off the Apostles'
bodies but are overtaken. St. Peter is buried at 'the place called
the Vatican,' and Paul on the Ostian Way. These Acts are the chief
source for details of the martyrdom of the two great Apostles. They
are also noteworthy as emphasizing the close concord between the
Apostolic founders of the Roman Church." (CE. i, 611-12.)

The reader is desired to bear well in mind the foregoing
paragraph, and particularly the last two sentences, the former of
immense significance when we come to review the falsified fiction
of the foundation of the Roman Church by Peter, -- the "chief
source" of which portentous claim is confessedly founded on the
crude and fantastic "legend"' of an admittedly forged document.
Another admission of forgery by the Fathers, before introducing
them formally, may be noted:, "Such known works as the Shepherd of
Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache or Teaching of the
Twelve Apostles, and the Apostolic Canons and Constitutions, though
formally apocryphal, really belong to patristic literature" (CE. i,
601), -- that is, they are forged writings of the Fathers.





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THE FORGFD "APOSTLES' CREED"

The "Apotitles' Creed," forged by the Fathers several
centuries after the Apostles, must be added to the Patristic list.
Of this famous Creed, which every Christian presumably knows by
rote and piously recites in numberless services, CE. again
confesses it spurious: "Throughout the Middle Ages it was generally
believed that the Apostles, on the day of Pentecost, while still
under the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost, composed our
present Creed, each of the Apostles contributing one of the Twelve
articles. This legend dates back to the sixth century, and is
foreshadowed still earlier in a sermon attributed to St. Ambrose,
which takes notice that the Creed was 'pieced out by twelve
separate workmen.'" (CE. i, 629.) Indeed, "not a few works have
been falsely attributed to St. Ambrose." (CE. i, 387; cf. p. 406.)

We may smile at the peculiarly clerical way in which CE. would
"whitewash" the great Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose (e. 340-397),
from the lie direct which admittedly he told in that Sermon, --
saying that the Bishop simply "takes notice that the creed was
pieced out," etc.; the truth being that Ambrose positively affirmed
the fable as truth, and may have invented it. His poisitive words
are; "that the Twelve Apostles, as skilled artificers, assembled
together, and made a key by their common advice, that is, the
Creed; by which the darkness of the devil is disclosed, that the
light of Christ may appear." (Ambrose, Opera, tom. iii., Sermon 38,
p. 265; quoted in The New Testament Apocrypha, New York, The Truth
Seeker Co.) -- a work which I feel impelled to commend to all who
wish to know at first hand the 25 remarkable Chureh "Gospel"
forgeries there collected.

THE FORGED ATHANASIAN CREED

In likewise the celebrated Athanasian Creed of the Church,
attributed to St. Athanasius and so held by the Church "until the
seventeenth century" (CE. ii, 34), with most evil resiilts, is now
an admitter forgery. In words of Gibbon: "St. Athanasius is not the
author of the creed; it does not appear to have existed within a
century after his death; it was composed in Latin, therefore in one
of the Western provinces. Gennadius, patriarch of Constitantinoble,
was so much amazed by this extraordinary composition, that he
frankly pronounced it to be the work of a drunken man." (Petav.
Dogmat. Theologica, tom. ii, 1, vii, c. 8, p. 687; Gibbon, p. 598.)

JESUS CHRIST'S FORGED LETTERS

We may look for a moment at several of the most notorious of
the forgeries perpetrated for the glory of God and for imposture
upon the superstitious Christians to enhance Pagan credtulity in
the tales of Christ. If the Gospel tales were true, why should God
need pious lies to give them credit? Lies and forgeries are only
needed to bolster up falsebood: "Nothing stands in need of lying
but a lie." But Jesus Christ must needs be propagated by lies; upon
lies, and what better proof of his actuality than to exhibit
letters written by him in his own handwriting? The "Little Liars of
the Lord" were equal to the forgery of the signature of their God,
-- false letters in his name, as above cited from that exhaustless


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mine of clerical falsities, the Catholic Encyclopedia, which again
describes them, and proves that they 'Were forged by their great
Bisbop of Caesaria: "The historian Eusebius records [HE. I, xii],
a legend which he himself firmly believes concerning a
correspondence that took place between Our Lord and the local
potentate (Abgar) at Edessa. Three documents relate to this
correspondence: (1) the Letter of Abgar to Our Lord; (2) Our Lord's
answer; (3) a picture of Our Lord, painted from life. This legend
enjoyed a great popularity, both in the East, and in the West,
during the Middle Ages. Our Lord's Letter was copied on parchment,
marble, and metal, and used as a talisman or an amulet." (CE. i,
42.) But it is not true, as we have seen already confessed, that
Eusebius innocently believed that these forgeries were genuine --
for they were all shamelessly forged by Eusebius himself: "who
vouches that he himself translated it from the Syriac documents in
the archives of Edessa." (CE. i, 610.) Again it is said by CE.,
that these forged letters, with the portrait, were "accepted by
Eusebius without hesitation, and used by Addision in his work on
Christian Evidences as genuine" (Ib. vi, 217).

It should be mentioned, first, that Abgar was not a personal
name of a King of Edessa, but was a generic title of all the rulers
of that small state: "By this title all the toparchs of Edessa were
called, just as the Roman Emperors were called Caesars, the Kings
of Egypt Pharaohs or Ptolemies, the Kings of Syria Antiochi." (ANF.
viii, 651, note.) With this first check on the forging Bishop, here
is what he said in his Church history, Book I, chapter the
thirteenth. (p. 63 seq.) Note the false fervor of the holy Bishop
to sugar-coat his circumstantial and commodious lie and fraud:
"While the Godhead of our Saviour and Lord Jesut, Christ was
proclaimed among all men by reason of the astonishing mighty-works
which He wrought, and myriads, even from countries remote from the
land of Judaea, who were afflicted with sicknesses and diseases of
every kind, were coming to him in the hope of being healed, King
Abgar sent him a letter asking Him to come and heal him of his
disease. But our Saviour at the time he asked Him did not comply
with his request. Yet He deigned to give him a letter in reply. ...
Thou hast in writing the evidence of these things, which is taken
from the Book of Records which was at Edessa; for at that time the
Kingdom was still standing. In the documents, then, which were
there, in which was contained whatever was done by those of old
down to the time of Abgar, these things are also found preserved
down to the present hour. There is, however, nothing to prevent our
hearing the very letters themselves, which have been taken by us
from the archives, and are in words to this effect, translated from
Aramaic into Greek.

"'Copy of the letter which was written by King Abgar to Jesus,
and sent to him by the hand of Ananias -- [the Bishop was the
Ananias in this tale, and aptly named his letter-carrier], -- the
Tabularius, to Jerusalem:

'Abgar the Black, sovereign of the country, to Jesus, the good
Saviour, who has appeared in the country of Jerusalem: Peace. I
have heard about Thee, and about the healing which is wrought by
Thy hands without drugs and roots. For, as it is reported, Thou
makest the blind to see, and the lame to walk; and Thou cleansest
the lepers, and Thou castest out unclean spirits and demons, and

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Thou healest those who are tormented with lingering diseases, and
Thou raisest the dead. And when I heard all these things about
Thee, I settled in my mind one of two things: either that Thou art
God, who has come down from heaven, and doest these things; or that
Thou art the Son of God, and doest these things. On this account,
therefore, I have written to beg of Thee that Thou wouldest weary
Thyself to come to me, and heal this disease which I have. For I
have also heard that the Jews murmur against Thee, and wish to do
Thee harm. But I have a city, small and beautiful, which is
sufficient for two.'

"Copy of those things which were written by Jesus in reply by
the hand of Ananias, the Tabularius, to Abgar, sovereign of the
country: --

'Blessed is he that believeth in me, not having seen me. For
it is written concerning me, that those who see me will not believe
in me, and that those will believe who have not seen me, and will
be saved. But touching that which thou hast written to me, that I
should come to thee it is meet that I should finish here all that
for the sake of which I have been sent; and, after I have finished
it, then I shall be taken up to Him that sent me; and, when I have
been taken up, I will send to thee one of my disciples, that he may
heal thy disease, and give salvation to thee and to those who are
with thee.'

"To these letters moreover, is appended the following, also in
the Aramaic tongue", -- here following the official record of the
visit of one "Thaddaeus the apostle, one of the Seventy," and him
wonderful works in Edessa. "These things were done in the year 340.
In order, moreover that these things may not have been translated
to no purpose word for word from the Aramaic into Greek, they are
placed in their order of time here. Here endeth the first book."
(HE. i, 13; ANF. viii, 651-653.) Bishop Eusebius is thus seen to
have been a most circumstantial liar and a well-skilled forger for
God. From this episcopal lie sprouted like toadstools a whole
literature of "various books concerning Abgar the King and
Thaddaeus the Apostle," in which are preserved to posterity a
series of five letters -- very much in the style of modern patent-
medicine testimonials -- written by Abgar to Tiberius Caesar and to
neighboring potentates, endorsing Jesus and his healing powers;
with a reply from Tiberius declaring that "Pilate has officially
informed us of the miracles of Jesus.". With respect to the other
letters testimonial, it is recorded: "Abgar had not yet received
answers to these letters when he died, having reigned thirty-eight
years." (Ibid. pp. 657-741, 706.)

These crass episcopal forgeries were welcomed into the Church,
and for fifteen centuries have gone unrebuked by Pope or Church.
Even since the Reformation so strong was the belief in the Abgar-
Jesus forgeries, that notable prelates in England including
Archbishop Cave, have "strenuously contended for their admission
into the canon scripture. ... The Reverend Jeremiah Jones observes,
that common people in England have this Epistle in their houses, in
many places, fixed in a frame, with the picture of Christ before
it; and that they generally, with much honesty and devotion, regard
it as the word of God, and the genuine Epistle of Christ." (Quoted


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in editorial note to the Epistles, in The Lost Books of the Bible,
p. 62.) To such state of superstitious credulity does the Church
with its pious impostures prostitute the minds of its ignorant and
credulous votaries. The portrait of Jesus, referred to above, is
said, in other versions of the Letter, to have been sent by Jesus
to the King; this portrait is now displayed at both Rome and Genoa.
(NIE. i, 38.)

OTHER FORGERIES FOR CHRIST'S SAKE

The pious fancy of the Fathers forged another official Letter,
in the name of what CE. calls "a fictitious person," one Lentulus,
pretended predecessor of Pilate as governor of Judaea, to the Roman
Senate, giving a description of the personal appearance of Jesus
Christ, and closing with the words, "He is the most beautiful of
the sons of men." This letter, says CE. "was certainly apocryphal";
it was first printed in the Life of Christ, by Ludolph the
Christian; though it is thought to be traceable to the time of
Diocletian. (CE. ix, 154.) This notion of the personal beauty of
Jesus is not shared by the "tradition" of the Fathers; for Jesus
Christ is declared by Cyril of Alexandria to have been "the ugliest
of the sons of men"; a tradition also declared by Fathers Justin
Martyr and Tertullian; to offset which evil notion there was forged
"a beautiful Letter, purporting to have been written by Lentulus to
the Roman Senate." (Ib. vi, 235.) But St. Augustine, says CE.,
"mentions that in his time there was no authentic portrait of
Christ, and that the type of features was still undetermined, so
that we have absolutely no knowledge of His appearance." (De
Trinitate, lib. vii, ch. 4,5; CE. vi, 211, n.)

This, however, is contrary to the venerated Church fable and
artistic forgery current under the title of "St. Veronica's Veil,"
based on the tale in Luke (xxvii, 27) of the woman of Jerusalem who
offered to Jesus a linen cloth to wipe his face as he was carrying
his cross towards Calvary. On wiping his sweating face, the
supposed authentic likeness of the features of the Christ was
miraculously impressed upon the cloth. The lucky lady "went to
Rome, bringing with her this image of Christ, which was long
exposed to public veneration. To her are likewise traced several
other relies of the Blessed Virgin venerated in several Churches of
the West. To distinguish at Rome the oldest and best known of these
images it was called vera icon (true image), which ordinary
language soon made veronica ... By degrees popular Imagination
mistook this word for the name of a person" (CE. xv, 362), -- and,
Lo! Saint Veronica emerges from the canonizing Saint-mill of Holy
Church. Here we plainly see myth-in-the-making; and may appreciate
the moral splendor as well as crafty thriftiness of the Church of
God which thus supplies its Faithful ready-made with one of the
most cherished female Saints of the Calendar, -- a confessed myth
and forgery. His Holiness especially displayed and vouched for this
fake on March 19, 1930, when he preached his crusade against
Russia. But the Church also, in the Roman Martyrology, credits this
holy icon to Milan, so as to fool many other Faithful. (Ib. p.
363.) This mythical female Saint "has also been confounded with a
pious woman who, according to [Bishop] Gregory of Tours, brought to
the neighboring town of Bazas some drops of the blood of John the
Baptist, at whose beheading she was present," and CE. doesn't even
wink. (Ib.)

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JOSEPHUS FORGERY TESTIFIES OF JESUS

So many confessed Christian forgeries in Pagan and Christian
names having been wrought to testify to Jesus Christ, it was, "one
naturally expects," says CE., that a Jewish "writer so well
informed as Josephus" must know and tell about Jesus; "one
naturally expects, therefore, a notice about Jesus Christ in
Josephus." And with pride it pursues: "Antiquities, VIII, iii, 3,
seems to satisfy this expectation." It proceeds to quote the
passage, which differeth only as one translation naturally differs
from another, from that in the Whitson translation; so I follow CE.
In Chapter iii Josephus treats of "Sedition of the Jews against
Pontius Pilate"; in section 1. he relates the cause and the
suppression of the mutiny, the ensigns of the army displaying the
idolatrous Roman Eagle, brought into the Holy City; in section 2.
he tells of the action of Pilate in bringing "a current of water to
Jerusalem, and did it with the sacred money," thus again arousing
a clash with the fanatics; "there were great numbers of them slain
by this means." Passing for the moment the notorious section 3,
Josephus the Jew begins section 4: "About the same time, also,
another sad calamity put the Jews in disorder," which he proceeds
to relate, ending the long chapter. Note that these section numbers
were not put in by Josephus, but are modern editor's devices to
facilitate citation, like the chapters and verses in the Bible. And
now for the much-debated section, sandwiched, in a whole chapter on
"Seditions of the Jews," between the accounts of two massacres of
his countrymen and "another sad calamity"; and thus we read -- note
the parentheses of CE. (viii, 376): --

"About this time," quotes CE., "appeared Jesus, a wise man (if
indeed it is right to call Him a man; for He was a worker of
astonishing deeds, a teacher of such men an receive the truth with
joy), and He drew to Himself many Jews (and many also of the
Greeks. This was the Christ). And when Pilate, at the denunciation
of those that are foremost among us, had condemned Him to the
cross, those who had first loved Him did not abandon Him. (For He
appeared to them alive on the third day, the holy prophets having
foretold this and countless other marvels about Him.) The tribe of
Christians named after Him did not cease to this day." (see. 3.)

About this time, also "another sad calamity [?] put the Jews
into disorder," (sec. 4). continues Josephus. CE. devotes over
three long columns to the task of trying to prove that this section
3, or at least "the portions not in parentheses," -- is genuine,
and was written, sometime before his death in 94 A.D., by the
Jewish Pharisee, Josephus. "A testimony so important," well says
CE., "could not escape the critics," -- and it has not. We cannot
follow the lengthy and labored arguments; the simple reading or the
section, in its bizarre context, and a moment's reflection, condemn
it as a pious Christian forgery. If the Pharisee Josephus wrote
that paragraph, he must have believed that Jesus was the Prophesied
Messiah of his people -- "This was the Christ." Josephus is made to
aver, he must then needs have been of "the tribe of Christians
named after Him." But whatever Josephus may have said about Jesus
is, indeed, not "a testimony so important" -- when we remember what
he did aver that he saw with his own eyes; the pillar of salt into
which Mrs. Lot was turned; and Eleazar the magician drawing the


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devil by a ring and Solomonic incantations, through the nose of one
possessed, before Vespasian and all his army. If Josephus had
written that he knew Jesus the Christ personally, and had
personally seen him ascend into heaven through the roof of the room
in Jerusalem (Mk. xvi, 19, 20), or from the open countryside by
Bethany (Lk. xxiv, 50, 51), or "on the mount called Olivet" (Acts
i, 9, 12), -- we should remember that pillar of salt and that
devil-doctor, and smile.

But, when and how did this famous passage get into The
Antiquities of the Jews? it, is pertinent to ask. The first mention
ever made of this passage, and its text, are in the Church History
of that "very dishonest writer," Bishop Eusebius, in the fourth
century, -- he who forged the Letters between Abgar and Jesus,
falsely declaring that he had found the original documents in the
official archives, whence he had copied and translated them into
his Ecclesiastical History. CE. admits, and I have the Contra
Celsum here before me, -- that "the above cited passage was not
known to Origen and the earlier patristic writers," -- though they
copied from Josephus the forged tale of the Letter of Aristeas
about the translating of the Septuagint; and "its very place in the
Josephan text is uncertain, since Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., II, vi)
must have found it before the notices concerning Pilate, while it
now stands after them" (HE. I, ii, p. 63); and it makes the curious
argument, which implies a confession: "But the spuriousness of the
disputed Josephan passage does not imply the historian's ignorance
of the facts connected with Jesus Christ"! For a wonder, that "a
writer so well informed as Josephus" should not, perhaps, know by
hearsay, sixty years after Jesus Christ, some of the remarkable
things circulated about him in current country-side gossip -- (if,
indeed, it were then current). But the fact is, that with the
exception of this one incongruous forged passage, section 3, the wonder-mongering Josephus makes not the slightest mention of his
wonder-working fellow-countryman, Jesus the Christ, -- though some
score of other Joshuas, or Jesuses, are recorded by him, nor does
he mention any of his transcendent wonders, But, as CE. and I were
saying, none of the Fathers, before Eusebius (about 324), knew or
could find a word in the works of Josephus, of this momentous
"testimony to Jesus," over a century after Origen. That it did not
exist in the time of Origen is explicit by his own words; he cites
the supposed references by Josephus to John the Baptist and to
James, and expressly says that Josephus ought to have spoken of
Jesus instead of James; though Origen does not correctly describe
the reference to James; and the James passage, if not that also
about John, has a suspicious savor of interpolation.

For a clear understanding of this, I will quote the passage of
Origen in his work against Celsus; it completely refutes the claim
that Josephus wrote the disputed and forged section 3. Origen says:

"I would like to say to Celsus, who represents the Jew
accepting John somehow as a Baptist, who baptized Jesus, that the
existence of John the Baptist, baptizing for the remission of sins,
is related by one who lived no great time after John and Jesus. For
in the 18th book of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus bears
witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising
purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this writer,


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although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the
cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple
[said that it was 'to avenge James the Just'], whereas he ought to
have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these
calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ,
who was a prophet, says nevertheless -- being, although against his
will, not far from the truth -- that these disasters happened to
the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was
a brother of Jesus (called Christ), -- the Jews having put him to
death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice."
(Origen, Contra Celsum, I, xlvii; ANF. iv, 416.)

Josephus is thus quoted as bearing witness to John the
Baptist, not as the Heaven-sent "forerunner" of the Christ, but
simply as a Jewish religious teacher and baptizer on his own
account; and not a word by Josephus about the Christ, in whom it is
admitted that he did not believe as such, nor even mentions as the
most illustrious of those baptized by John, to the wondrous
accompaniment of a voice from Heaven and the Holy Ghost in dove-
like descent upon his head as he came up from the water. But
Origen, in his effort to get some Christian testimony from him,
misquotes Josephus and makes him say that John was baptizing "for
the remission of sins," whereas Josephus expressly says that the
efficacy of John's baptism was not for remission of sin but for the purification of the body, as any washing would be. To vindicate
Josephus against Origen, the former's words are quoted. Josephus
recounts the defeat of Herod by Aretas, king of Arabia Petrea; and
goes on to say: --

"Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of
Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a
punishment of what he did against John, that was called the
Baptist; for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded
the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness toward
one another, and piety toward God, and so to come to baptism;
for that the washing would be acceptable to him, if they made
use of it, not in order to the putting away of some sins, but
for the purification of the body: supposing still that the
soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now,
when many others came in crowds about him, for they were
greatly moved by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the
great influence John had over the people might put it into his
power and inclination to raise a rebellion, (for they seemed
ready to do anything he should advise,) thought it best, by
putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause,
and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who
might make him repent of it when it should be too late.
Accordingly, he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious
temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was
there put to death." (Josephus, Antiq. Jews, Bk. XVIII, v, 2.)

Beginning in section 4. of the same Book, and at length in
various chapters, Josephus goes into details regarding Salome; but
never a word of the famous dance-act and of the head of John the
Baptist being brought in on a charger to gratify her murderous
whim: the historical reason for the murder of John was political,
not amorous or jealous, as related by Gospel-truth.


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Father Origen again falls into error in citing Josephus, this
time in the dubious passage where Josephus, who does not believe in
the Christ, yet gives him that title in speaking of the death of
James. With typical clerical bent Father Origen imputes the fall of
Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple to the sin of the Jews
in crucifying the Christ; and says that Josephus, in seeking the
cause of the disasters which befell the Holy City and people,
attributes them to the killing of the Christ's brother. The Holy
City and temple were destroyed in 70 A.D., which was well after the
time of the supposititious James, as his demise is recorded in the
suspected passage of Josephus. He related the death of Festus,
which was in 62 A.D., the appointment by Nero of Albinus as his
successor, and the murder of James at the instigation of the high
priest Ananus, before Albinus can arrive. this sentence is to be
read in the text of Josephus:

"Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road;
so he (Ananus) assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought
before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose
name was James, and some others; and when he had formulated an
accusation against them all breakers of the law, he delivered
them to be stoned." (Jos., Antiq. Jews, Bk. XX, ix, i.)

Bishop Eusebius cannot pass over this chance to turn another
Jewish testimony for his Christ; he says that "The wiser part of
the Jews were of the opinion that this -- (the killing of James) --
was the cause of the immediate siege of Jerusalem ... Josephus also
has not hesitated to superadd his testimony in his works. "These
things,' he says, 'happened to the Jews to avenge James the Just,
who was the brother of him that is called Christ, and whom the Jews
had slain, notwithstanding his preeminent justice.'" (Euseb. Hist.
Eccles. Bk. II, ch. 23.)

The reader may judge of the integrity of these pretended
Jewish testimonies to the Baptist and to the brother of the Christ,
both suspicious per se, and both falsely cited by Father Origen,
who in all this could not find the famous section 3, first found a
century later by Bishop Eusebius; and which Origen makes it
positive Josephus had not written and could not have written. Is it
a violent suspicion, and uncharitable, to suggest that the holy
Bishop who forged the Letter of his Christ, and lied about finding
it in the Edessa archives, really "found," in the sense of
invented, or forged, the Josephus passages first heard of in his
Church History?

But Bishop Eusebius, with a sort of "stop thief" forethought,
himself imputes forgery to those who would question or discredit
his own pious inventions, while with unctuous fervor pretended
truth he appeals to the wonderful "testimonies of Josephus," which
he has just fabricated. After quoting and misquoting Josephus with
respect to John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, he thur solemnly
couches for their false witness: "When such testimony as this is
transmitted to us by an historian who sprung from the Hebrews
themselves, both respecting John the Baptist and our Savior, what
subterfuge can be left, to prevent those from being convicted
destitute of all shame, who have forged the acts against them?"
(Eusebius, HE. I, xi.) The Bishop justly pronounces his own


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condemnation. This, says Gibbon, "is an example of no vulgar
forgery." (Chap. xvi.) In view of the convicting circumstances, and
of his notoriously bad record, it, is not uncharitable to impute
this Josephus forgery to Bishop Eusebius.

THE OWL-ANGEL FORGERY

Another story of Pagan superstition related by Josephus, and
twisted by the Christian invention of Bishop Eusebius and the
sacred writers of Acts into inspired "history" and truth of God, is
the celebrated angel-owl passage relating to the tragic death of
the King, Herod Agrippa. Josephus tells that Herod went to Caesarea
to attend a celebration in honor of Caesar; that as Herod entered
the stadium, clad in a robe of silver tissue, the rays of the sun
shone upon it resplendently, making him look like a supernatural
being; whereupon the crowd cried out hailing him as more than
mortal, as a god; but his mortality was quickly made evident by his
sudden illness and death. It may be explained that the word "angel"
(Greek, angelos) means simply "messenger" or herald. Thus proceeds
Josephus:

"But" he [Herod] presently afterward looked up, he saw an
owl sitting upon a certain rope over his head, and immediately
understood that this bird was a messenger [Gr. angelos] of
ill-tidings." Herod was shortly seized with "severe pains in
his belly," and died after five days of suffering." (Jos.
Antiq. Jews, XIX, viii, 2.)

This was too Paganish and prosaic for the pious Christian
fancy of Bishop Eusebius; so while he was forging the "Jesus
passage," he proceeded to give Christian embellishment for
edification to the "owl" story, with its use of the word "angelos."
So he quotes in full the narration of Josephus, under the chapter
heading "Herod Agrippa persecuting the Apostles, immediately
experienced divine Judgment." he first relates the "martyrdom of
James" by Herod, and the imprisonment of Peter, as recorded in
Acts, and proceeds: "The consequences, however, of the king's
attempts against the apostles, were not long deferred, but the
avenging minister of divine justice soon overtook him. ... As it is
also recorded in the book of Acts, he proceeded to Caesarea, and
there on a noted festival, being clad in a splendid and royal
dress, he harangued the people. ... The whole people applauding him
for his harangue, as it were the voice of a god, and not of a man,
the Scriptures relate, 'that the angel of the Lord immediately
smote him and being consumed by worms, he gave up the ghost.' It is
wonderful to observe, likewise, in this singular event, the
coincidence of the history given by Josephus, with that of the
sacred Scriptures. In this he [Josephus] plainly adds his testimony
to the truth, in the nineteenth book of his Antiquities, where he
relates the miracles in the following words: [here quoting Josephus
in full, until he reaches the owl-story, when he thus falsifies]:
-- 'After a little While, raising himself, he saw an angel
[angelos] hanging over his head upon a rope,, and this he knew
immediately to be an omen of evil'! Thus far Josephus: in which
statement, as in others, I can but admire his agreement with the
divine Scriptures"! (Eusebius, HE. II, x.) An angel hanging on a
rope over one's head might well have been taken by a superstitious


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person as ominous of something -- maybe of a hung angel. This pious
story, with the owl piously metamorphosed into an angel, was
apparently cribbed from Josephus also by the writer of Acts, or
maybe "interpolated" into it by the fanciful Bishop. There we find
this Pagan-Jewish anecdote retold by divine inspiration thus
embellished over Josephus and Eusebius: "And immediately the angel
of the Lord [Gr. angelos Kurioul smote him, because he gave not God
the glory: and he was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost"! (Acts
xii, 20-23.) Note the almost identical words, except for the
progressive embellishments: Josephus' owl thus became first an
angel of evil omen, then the avenging minister of the wrath of God,
aided by devouring worms to give true Christian zest and spite to
the simple Pagan superstition. Herod probably died from acute
indigestion caused by the excesses of the festivities, or from an
attack of peritonitis or appendicitis. Profane history of the event
does not chronicle the devouring, avenging worms of God.

The forgery of pious documents of every imaginable character
was among the most constant and zealous activities of the holy
propagandists of the Christian Faith, from the beginning to the
critical era when forgeries were no longer possible or profitable.
A fitting close to this review is the following omnibus confession
-- the Churches cheating each other by forgeries:

"Indeed, in later times, we hear of recovered autographs
of Apostolic writings in the controversies about the Apostolic
origin of some Churches or about claims for metropolitan
dignity. So the autograph of the Gospel of St. Matthew was
said to have been found in Cyprus. ... Eusebius (Hist. Eccles.
vii, 19) relates that in his time the seat of St. James was as
yet extant in Jerusalem. Of old pictures of Apostles, see
Eusebius, ibid, vii, 18. Whether or not even the oldest of
these statements are historically true remains still a mooted
question. We regard it as useless to record what may be found
on these topirg in the vast amount of matter that makes up the
apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and other legendary
documents." (CE. 635.)

Among some of these not already mentioned are found "The
Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Canons of Pseudo-Hippolytus,
The Egyptian Church Ordinance." (CE. i, 636.) Also: "In the last
years of the fifth century a famous document attributed to Popes
Gelasius and Hormisdas adds ... a list of books disapproved, the
works of heretics, and forged Scriptural documents." (CE. vi, 4.)
A glance at the Index-volume of CE. reveals the numerous forged
works attributed to many of the Fathers of the early Church, listed
under the word Pseudo, or false, which word is to be understood as
prefixed to each of the following names: Pseudo-Alquin, Ambrosius,
Antoninus, Areopagite, Athanasius, Augustine, Barnabas,
Callisthenes, Chrysostom, Clement, Epiphanius, Gelasius, Gregory,
Nazianzen, Hegesippus, Hippolytus, Ignatius, Isidore, Jonathan,
Justin, Matthew, Prochorus, Tertullian, Zaeharius. The pious
ignorant "Christians, who for the most part are untrained and
illiterate persons," as shown in the Octavius of Minucius Felix (V,
xi), and the whole Church, were gulled by these frauds for a
thousand years.



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Before looking into the forgery of the New Testament Books, we
shall first draw, from their own words, cameo pen-sketches of those
great men of God and of Holy Church, who under the fond name of
Fathers, but with the minds and devious ways of little children,
forged the sacred documents of the Faith, and by their pious labors
of fraud and forgery founded what is credulously called the Church
of Christ and the Most Holy Christian Faith.

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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY

Abbreviations used for most often used sources:

The libraries of the Union Theological Seminary and of
Columbia University, in New York City, were the places of the finds
here recorded. Cited so often, space will be saved for more
valuable uses by citing by their initials, -- which will become
very familiar -- my chief ecclesiastical authorities, towit:

The Ante-Nicene Fathers, cited as ANF.; A Collection of the
extant Writings of all the Founders of Christianity down to the
Council of Nicaea, or Nice, in 325 A.D. American Reprint, eight
volumes. The Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, N.Y.,
1885. [xxx]

The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, cited as N&PNF.; First and
Second Series; many volumes; same publishers.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, cited as CE.; fifteen volumes and
index, published under the Imprimatur of Archbishop Farley; New
York, Robert Appleton Co., 1907-9.

The Encyclopedia Biblica, cited as EB., four volumes; Adam &
Charles Black, London, 1899; American Reprint, The Macmillan Co.,
New York, 1914.

**** ****

Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.

The UNITED STATES of America
must again become
The Free Market-Place of Ideas.

The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
us, we need to give them back to America.

**** ****
You are reading
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
by
Joseph Wheliss
1930

**** ****

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Bill Dean
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36 page printout, pages 112 to 147 of 322
CHAPTER IV

THE SAINTLY "FATHERS" OF THE FAITH

"The greater Saint, the greater Liar." Diegesis.
"The principal historians of the patristic period cannot
always be completely trusted." (CE. vi, 14.)


EMBRACED WITIFIN CE.'s confession of patristic
untrustworthines and perversion of truth is every "Father" and
Founder of the Church of Christ of the first three centuries of the
fabrication of the new Faith, -- as by their own words will now be demonstrated. Yet upon these self-same not-to-be-trusted fabulists
and forgers do the truth and validity of the Christ and the
Christian religion solely and altogether depend. They dertroy it.

The Fathers of our country, framers of our Constitution and
form of government, were men of personal honor and of public
probity; the most of them were Infidels. The "Fathers" and founders
of the Christian religion and Church of Christ were, all of them,
ex-Pagan charlatans -- "we who formerly used magical arts," as
Father Justin Martyr admits (I Apology, xiv), who took up the new
Christian superstition and continued to ply the same old magical
arts under a new veneer, upon the ignorant and superstitious pagans
and near-pagans, as the ensuing pages will demonstrate. The,
Fathtrs will show themselves to be wholly destitute of common sense
of opinion and of common honesty of statement, credulous and
mendacious to the n-th degree.

It is of capital importance to an intelligent and adequate
understanding of the Christian religion, of which these Fathers
were the originators and propagandists, to see their work in the
making, and to know the mental and moral limitations and
obliquities of these fatuous, fabling, forging Fathers of the
Church. We shall see them to be grotesquely credulous of every
fable, many of which themselves fabricated: reckless of truth to
the highest degree; fluent and unscrupulous Liars of the Lord,
whose lies, if thereby the "glory of God" were made the more to
abound, they, like Paul, counted it no sin (Rom. iii, 7), as we
have seen confessed. lake Paul, "being crafty," they made a holy
craft of catching the credulous with guile; and like Paul, they
boasted of it. (2 Cor. xii, 16.)

For the ampler appreciation of the utter incapacity of these
pious ex-Pagan and ex-Magician Fathers to comprehend truth or to
tell it, and of their childish and reckless irresponsibility in
relating as truth what they knew was not true, we need but look
briefly at their records and wonder at their moronic mentality. For
this purpose, and to watch the snow-ball-like roll and growth of
their Fatherly "traditions" and fabrications into forged Church,
Creed, and Dogma, a brief sketch is given, in chronological order
-- a veritable Roll of Dishonor -- of the chiefest of them; citing
Under each name a few -- out of innunierable -- of their
extravagant, childish-minded and tortuous precepts and practices of
Christian propaganda; together with sundry forgeries perpetrated by
them or in their sainted names.




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An admirable norm and test of trustworthiness is stated by
Middleton, one of the keenest critics of the Miracle-mongering of
the Feathers: "The authority of a writer who affirms any
questionable fact, must depend on the character of his veracity and
judgment. In many cases the want of judgment alone has all the same
effect, as the want of veracity, too, towards invalidating the
testimony of a witness; especially in cases of an extraordinary or
miraculous nature, where the weakness of men is more apt to be
imposed upon." (A Free Inquiry, P. 26.) It will give pause to
think, to that yet great and priest-taught clash of Believers who,
like the Fathers themselves, "think the credibility of a witness
sufficient evidence of the certainty of all facts indifferently,
whether natural or supernatural, probable or improbable, and
knowing no difference between faith and facts, take a facility of
believing to be the surest mark of a good Christian." (Ibid,
Preface, v.) Their faith reasons -- if at all -- in the terms of
Father Tertullian: "It is by all means to be believed, because it
is absurd; the fact is certain, because it is impossible." (De
Carne Christi, ch. v, ANF. iii, 525.)

The mental limitations of the Fathers we have seen several
times admitted and apologized for by CE.; further it confesses of
them: "It was natural that in the early days of the Church, the
Fathers, writing with little scientific knowledge, should have a
tendency" to fall into sundry comical and preposterous errors "now
entirely abandoned" (iii, 731). This is but another of its many
luminous confessions of the ignorance and uncritical credulity of
the pious Fathers, extending over fifteen hundred years of Church
history, and even yet!

The childlike mental processes of the Fathers, their all-
accepting credulity, and the utter worthlessness of their opionns
and "traditions" as to things divine and human, is oft-admitted and
will be made manifest. We shall soon see that the Four Gospels
which Christans, with childlike faith accept as the genuine
handiwork of the apostles and immediate companions of Christ, are
anonymous forgeries of a century and more after their time, and
that the other New Testament booklets, Acts and Epistles of the
alleged apostles, are so many other forgeries made long after their
times.

The forged New Testament booklets and the foolish writings of
the Fathers, are the sole "evidence" we have for the alleged facts
and doctrines of our most holy Faith, as is admited by (CE.: "Our
documentary sources of knowledge about the origins of Christianity
and its earliest development, are chiefly the New Testament
Scriptures and various sub-Apostolic writings, the authenticity of
which we must to a great extent take for granted here. (CE, iii,
712.) The Christian religion and the Church thus confessedly exist
upon data and documents the authenticity and verity of which "must
be taken for granted," -- but which are well known, and are here
easily shown, to be false and fabricated, with deceptive intent.







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PATRISTIC "TRADITION"

This word "tradition," of Fathers and Chirch, we shall
frequently meet, such "tradition" being urged as evidence of the
reality and verity of these things with easy gesture "taken for
granted" by the beneficiaries of the System based upon them. What,
then, is "tradition"? Of what value is "tradition," as evidence of
things naturally incredible and unverifiable, -- of alleged events
and miraculous happenings over a century before the "traditions" --
invariably contradictory -- which first allege them as facts for
Faith? For instance: "The famous texts of Irenaeus on Apostolic
Succession are a testimony to the faith [i.e. "traditions"] of the
second century, rather than an example of historical narrative."
(CE. vii, 341.)

Tradition is popular stories and hand-me-down reports or
gossip current in the community or passing current among any
particular class of people; it is of the same stuff as legend is
made of. One pious Father or propagator of the Faith would aver
some wonder-tale which would attract credulous interest; the next,
in repeating it, invariably embroiders it with new fancies, and so
it grows like a snowball of fables. We have seen the example of the garnishments of the Fathers to the forged Aristeas-tale regarding
the Septuagint; we shall see the Fatherly "traditions" suddenly
crop up a century or two after some alleged event, embroider and
expand -- and contradict themselves from Father to Father in the
telling, with respect to every single instance: Gospel-tales,
forged "apocrypha" narratives, false foundations of churches,
bishops, popes, apostolic successions. Thus the Fathers inflated
their originally fictitious "traditions" of this and that, and on
such bases the New Testament and the Church of Christ arose. Of
course, the credibility of any "tradition" or alleged fact depends
wholly on the credit of the first narrator of it, to all later
repeaters it is purely hearsay, and gains no further credit from
the number of those repeating the original tale. If a thing is a
lie when first told, repetaion ad infinitum cannot make it into a
truth.

In a note to one instance of patristic tradition recorded in
the bulky collection, the editors of the ANF., to which we are
indebted for most of what follows regarding these fatuous Fathers,
make fhis sententious comment: "Hearsay at second-hand, and handed
about among many, amounts to nothing as evidence." And this is the
comment of Father Bishop Eusebius, the first Church historian, on
the "traditions" of good Father Bishop Papias, firist of the sub-
Apostolic Fathers: "These sayings [of Jesus Christ and apostles]
consisted of a number of strange parables, and doctrines of our
Saviour, which the authority of so venerable a person, who had
lived with the apostles, imposed on the Church as genuine." (Mist.
Eccles. Bk. III, ch. 39.) But this is simply another fictitious
"tradition," that Papias "lived with the apostles," for he did not,
as his own words and CE. will disclose when we come to sketch that
pious fabulist of a Father. Such are patristic and ecclesiastical
"traditions," of which sufficient examples are yet to be noticed,





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THE TWELVE "TRADITIONAL" APOSTLES

There were Twelve Tribes of Israel: and Moses, coming down
from Sinai, appointed twelve young men "according to the twelve
tribes of Israel" to sacrifice at the twelve phallic pillars which
he get up to celebrate the giving of the Law. (Ex. xxiv, 4-5.) So
"tradition" has it that Jesus appointed Twelve Apostles: "The
number twelve was symbolical, corresponding to the twelve tribes of
Israel" (EB. i, 264); but the whole story is fictitious, says EB.
(iii, 2987), with the soundest Scriptural basis for its conclusion.
As this -- and many other fictional features of the Christ-
biographies -- are fully examined in my Is It God's Word? (Chaps.
XIII-XIV), I must refer to it for the confused "traditions" of the
Twelve, for the purpose of showing their wholly fictitious
character,

After the same "symbolical" fashion the legendary "Seventy
Elders of Israel," commanded by Yahveh and chosen by Moses (Num.
xi, 16, 24), had their counterpart in the equally legendary
"Seventy Disciples, whom also the lord appointed" (Luke x, 1), --
and who furnished so many zealous missionaries and early church-
founders, as their "records" pretend, and so many of which are by
CE,. declared to be fraudulent and forged. Bear in mind that the
"Gospel"' records, as we shall see, are anonymous forgeries of a
century and more after the "traditional" events recorded; and the
unreliable nature of "tradition" is further illutitrated.

The probability if not assurance will appear the stronger, as
we proceed with the Fathers and with the "sacred writings," that
the Holy Twelve had no exintence in the flesh, but their "cue"
being taken from the Old Testament legends, they were mere names --
dramatic persons, -- masks of the play, -- of "tradition," such as
Shakespeare and all playwrights and fiction-writers create for the
actors of their plays and works of admitted fiction.

A very curious and challenging admission is made by CE. in
speaking of the noted forgeries, long regarded as inspired, of the "Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagitc," who "clove unto Paul" after his
Mar's Hill harangue (Acts xvii, 34), and all whose name many
precious forgeries -- "a series of famous writings" (CE. v, 13) --
were forged by pious Christians "at the very earliest in the latter
half of the fifth century," and which were "of highest and
universully acknowledged authority, both in the Western and in the
Eastern Church, lasting until the beginning of the fifteenth
century," followed by a "period of aharp conflict Waged about their authenticity, begun by Laurentius Valla, and closing only within
recent years." (CE. v, 15.) "Those writings," says CE. -- with more far-reaching suggestion than intinded "with intent to deceive,
weave into their narrative certain fictitious personages, such as
Peter, James, John, Timothy, Carpus, and others." (CE. vii, 345.)
If these great Apostles and "pillars of the Faith" are "fictitious
personages" in the long-revered but now admitted forgeries of
Pseudo-Dionysius, by what token may they be any the less fictitious
personages in the hundreds of other equally forged Christian
writings Which we shall notice, -- as also in the to-be-
deomonstrated forgeries of Gospel, Acts and Epistles, in which the
identical personages, or dramatis personae, play their imaginary


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and self-contradictory roles, as we shall promptly see? For fifteen
hundred years, and until "only within recent years," were the
Dionysian forguries tenaciously proclaimed as genuine by the Holy-
Ghost-guided Church; may it not have been equally misguided as to
the "suthenticity" of its Gospels and other "sacred writings"? If,
in the venerated "pseudo-Areopagite," the sainted Peter, Paul,
John, et als., are admittedly "fictitious personages," how do they
acquire the flesh and blood of actual persons in Gospels and
Epistles? We shall see.

I. The Apostles

Two of them, the principal, Peter anh John, are described to
be "anthropoi agrammatoi kai idiotai -- unlearned and ignorant men"
(Acts iv, 13); all Twelve were of the same type and well matched.
They were variously picked up from among the humblest and most
superstitious of the Galilee peasants, fishermen and laborers,
"called" personally, we are told by the Son of God, the proclaimed
King-to-be of the Jews, to be his counsellors and associates in the establishment of his earthly and heavenly Kingdoms -- of Jews. As
for the King-to-be and his prospective Court, a saddening and
repellent portraiture is sketched in the inspired Biographics:
though it is true, "The chronology of the birth of Christ and the
subsequent Bibical events is most uncertain." (CE. vii, 419.) His
parents and family regarded him as insane and sought to resrtrain
him by foree. (Mark iii, 21; cf. John x, 20.) He and his Apostle-
band toured Palestine with a retinue of bare-foot and unwrshed
peasant men and women, shocking polite people by their habits of
not washing even their hands to eat when invited as guests, and by
the violence of their language. These traits ran in his peasant
family and relatives, His cousin, known as John the Baptist, was a
desert dervish, unwashed and unshorn, who wore a leather loin-strap
for clothes and whose regular diet, was wild bumble-bee honey and
raw grasshoppers. His own brother James was an unkempt and filthy
as any Saint in the calendar; of him Bishop Eusebius records:
"James, the brother of the Lord, ... a razor never came upon his
head, he never anointed with oil, and never used a bath"! (HE. II,
23.) With the Master at their hend, the Troupe wandered up and down
the little land, proclaiming the immediate end of the world,
playing havoc with the legions of devils who infested the
peasantry, and preaching Hell and Damnation for all who would not
heed their fanatical preachments.

APOSTOLIC GREED AND STRIFE.

As for the Twelve, the hope of great reward was the inspiredly
recorded motive of these peanants; who left their petty crafts for
hope of greater gain by following the lowly King-to-be. The zeal
and greed for personal aggrandizement of the Chosen Twelve is
constantly revealed throughout the inspired record. hardly had the
Holy Twelve gotten organized and into action, when the cunning and
crafty Peter, spokesman for the craft, boldly came forward and
advanced the itching palm: "Then answered Peter and said unto him,
Behold we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have
therefore?" (Matt. xix, 27.) And the Master came back splendidly
with the Promise: "And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you,
That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son


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of Man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel" (Matt. xix,
28). But even these brillant future rewards could not satisfy the
greed of the Holy Ones, and led not to gratitude, but to greater
greed and strife.

The Mother of James and John, probably inspired by them, and
zealous for their greater glory, came secretly with her two sons,
to Jesus, "worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him"
(Matt. xx, 20); and when Jesus asked her what it was, "she saith
unto him, Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy
right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom." (v. 21.)
But Mark contradicts the assurance of Matthew that it was Mrs.
Zebedee who came and made the request, and avers that "James and
John, the sons of Zebedee, come unto him, stying, Maister, we would
that thou shouldst do for us whatsoever we shall desire," and
stated their own modest demands for preferment. (Mark x, 35-37.)
But, in either contradictory event, both agree that "when the ten
heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two
brethren." (Matt. xxix, 24; Mark x, 41.)

Not during the whole one -- or three -- years of association
with their Master, did these holy Apostles abate their greed and
strife. Several times are recorded desputes among them as to "who
should be greatest among them" (Matt. xviii, 1; Mark ix, 33-34;
Luke ix, 46) -- here again the "harmony of the Gospels" assuring
the constant inharmony of the Apostles. And even at the Last
Supper, when Jesus had announced that one of them would that night
betray him to death, "there was also strife among them, which of
them should be accounted the greatest." (Luke xxii, 24.) And great
was the disgust of the Master at his miserable Apostles, and
especially at the craven and crafty Peter, Jesus had spurned him
with blasting scorn, "and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me,
Satan; thou art an offense to me" (Matt. xvi, 23); and again the
Gospels are in harmony (Mt. xvi, 23; Mk. viii, 33). Such are the
Holy Apostles of Jesus Christ, said to be painted by some of
themselves through inspiration. This "Satan" Peter, later
constituted "Saint" Peter, shall again deserve our attention.

II. The Apostolic Fathers

Under this rubric CE. lists, as those who were "converted with
the apostles," and, after them. were the first propagandists of the
Truth, the Catholic Saints Clement, Ignatiut;, Polycarp, Barnabas,
and Hermas; they fill up the first half of the second century of
the era. Tte "traditions" preserved of these saintly Fathers of the
Church are very scanty and dubious; but from what exists they were
all within the apostolic description of Peter and John, "ignorant
and unlearned men," and like Bishop Pipias, as described by Bishop
Eusebius, "men of very small minds, if we may judge from their own
words," of which we shall now read for ourselves. It will be noted
that all these Fathers, like all the sub-apostolic Fathers for the
first two centuries and more, were ex-Pagans, and (with the alleged
exception of "Pope" Clement), were Greeks, of scattered parts of
the Empire, who wrote and taught in Greek, and with the very
questionable exception of Clement, had nothing to do with "the
Church which sojourns at Rome." Each was the Bishop and hend of his


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own local, and independent, Church; and never once does one of them
(except Clement of Rome, in a forged Epistle), speak of or mention
the Church of Rome, or more than barely mention Peter (and only as
one of the Apostles), nor mention or quote a single book of the New
Testament, -- though they are profuse in quoting the Old Testament
books, canonical and apoeryphal, the Pagan gods, and the Sibylline
oracles, as inspired testimonies of Jesus Christ. The significance
of all this will appear.

1. CLEMENT OF ROME (about 30-96 A.D.). He is alleged to be the
first, second, third, or fourth, Bishop, or Pope, of Rome (CE. iv,
13); and to be the author of two Epistles to the Corinthians,
besides other bulky and important forgeries, thus confessed and
catalogued by CE:

"Many writings have been faslely attributed to Pope St.
Clement: (1) The 'Second Clementine Epistle to the Corinthians.'
Many critics have believed them genuine [they having been read in
the Churches]. ... But it is now admitted on all hands that they
cannot be by the same author as the genuine [?] Epistle to the
Corinthians. ... (2) Two Epistles to Virgins.' (3) At the head of
the Pscudo-Isidorian Decretals stand five letters attributed to St.
Clement. (4) Ascribed to Clement are the 'Apostolic Constitutions,'
'Apostolic Canons,' and the "Testament of our lord.' (5) The
'Clementines' or 'Pseudo-Clementines,' including the Recognitions
and Homilies," hereafter to be noticed. (CE. iv, 14-15; cf. 17,
39.)

The second of these alleged Epistles of Clement to the
Corinthians is thus admittedly a forgery, together with everything
else in his name but the alleged First Epistle. The case for this
First Epistle is little if any better; but as it is the very flimsy
basis of one of the proudest claims of Holy Church -- though
suppressed as "proof" of another claim which it disproves, -- it
is, as it were, plucked as a brand from the burning of all the
other Clementine forgeries, and placed at the head of all the
writings of the Fathers. Of this I Clement EB. says: "The author is
certainly not Clement of Rome, whatever may be our judgment as to
whether or not Clement was a bishop, a martyr, a disciple of the
apostles. The martyrdom, set forth in untrustworthy Acts, has for
its sole foundation the identification of Clement of Rome with
Flavius Clement the consul, who was executed by cominand of
Domitian," -- A.D. 81-96. (EB. iii, 3486.) This First Epistle is
supposed to have been written about the year 96-98, by Clement,
friend and coworker of Paul, according to the late "tradition"
first set in motion by Dionysius, A.D. 170. But "This Clement,"
says CE., after citing the Fathers, "was probably a Philippian."
(CE. iv, 13.) "Who the Clement was to whom the writings were
asscribed, cannot with absolute certainty be determined." (ANF. i,
2.)

It is notable that the pretendedly genuine "First Epistle"
does not contain or mention the name of any one as its author, nor
name Clement; its address is simply: "The Church of God which
sojourns at Rome, to the Church of God sojurning at Corinth." There
is only one MS. of it in existence, a translation into Latin from
the original Greek. This is the celebrated MS. of "Holy Scripture"


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known as Codex A, which was discovered and presented to Charles I
of England by Cyril of Alexandria, in 1628; the Fathers cited both
I and II Clement as Seripture. On this MS., at the end of I
Clement, is written, "The First Epistle of Clement to the
Corinthians": a subscription which proves itself a forgery and that
it was not written by Clement, who could not know that a later
forger would write a "Second Clement," so as to give him occasion
to call his own the First. (ANF. viii, 55-56.)

By whomever this "First Epistle" was written, by Father,
Bishop, or Pope of Rome, his zeal and his intelligence are
demonstrated by his argument, in Chapter xxv, of the truth of the
Resurrection; in proof of which he makes this powerful and faith-
compelling plea: "Let us consider that wonderful sign [of the
resurrection) which takes place in Eastern lands, that is, in
Arabia and the countries round about. There is a certain bird which
is called a phoenix. This is the only one of its kind, and lives
five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near
that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and
myrrh, and other spices, into which, when the time is fulfilled, it
enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm is
produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird,
brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it
takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and
bearing these it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the
City called Heliopolis. And, in open day, flying in the sight of
all men, it places them on the altar of the sun, and having done
this, hastens back to its former abode. The priests then inspect
the registers of the dates, and find that it has returned exactly
as the 500th year was completed." (ANF. i. p. 12. Note: "This fable
respecting the phoenix is mentioned by Herodotus (ii, 73) and by
Pliny (Nat. X, 2), and is used as above by Tertullian (De Resurr.,
see. 13), and by others of the Fathers." CF,. iv, 15.)

The occasion for the pretended writing of this Epistle, and
the very high significance of it, will be noticed when we treat of
the origin of the Church which sojourns at Roine.

2. IGNATIUS: Saint, Bishop of Antioch (born in Syria, c. 50 --
died rather latitudinously "between 98 and 117"). "More than one of
the early ecclesiastical writers has given credence, though
apparently without good reason, to the legend that Ignatius was the
child whom the Saviour took up in his armos, as described in Mark,
ix, 35." (CE. vii, 644.) "If we include St. Peter, Ignatius was the
third Bishop of Antioch," (CE, vii, 644), -- thus casting doubt on
another and a most monumental but confused Church "tradition." He
was the subject of very extensive forgeries; fifteen Epistles bear
the name of Ignatius, including one to the Virgin Mary, and her
reply; two to the apostle John, others to the Philippians,
Tarsians, Antiocheans, Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, Smyrneans, and to Polycarp, besides a forged
Martyrium; the clerical forgers were very active with the name of
Saint Ignatius. Of these, eight Epistles and the Martyrium are
confessedly forgeries; "they are by common consent set aside as
forgeries, which were at various dates and to serve special
purposes, put forth under the name of the celebrated Bil;hop of
Antioch" (ANF. i, 46; CE. vii, 645); though, says CE., "if the


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Martyrum is genuine, this work has been greatly interpolated." As
to the seven supposed by some to be genuine, "even the genuine
epistles were greatly interpolated to lend weight to the personal
views of its author. For this reason they are incapable of bearing
witness to the original form" (CE. vii, 645); and even the
authenticity of the "genuine seven" was warmly disputed for several
centuries. The dubious best that CE. can say is: "Perhaps the best
evidence for their authenticity is to be found in the letter of
Polycarp to the Philippians, which mentions each of them by name
... UNLESS, indeed, that of Polycarp itself be regarded as
interpolated or FORGED." (Ib. p. 646.)

As good proofs as may be that these "seven genuine" are late
forgeries, are: of each one of them, as printed in the ANF., there
are "two recensions, a shorter and a longer," printed in parallel
columno, thus demonstrating that the longer at least is "greatly
interpolated"; the most significant being a refercnce to Peter and
Paul, constituting the "interpolated" part of Chap. vii of the
Epistle to the Romans, hereafter noticed. That as a whole they are
late forgeries, is further proved by the fact, stated by Cardinal
Newman, that "the whole system of Catholic doctrine may be
discovered, at least in outline, not to say in parts filled up, in
the course of his seven Epistles" (CE, vii, 646); this including
the impossibilities -- for that epoch -- of the claborated
hierarchy of the Imperial Chureh as having been instituted by the
humble Nazarene, -- who was to "come again" and put an end to all
earthly things within the generation; the infallibility of the
Church, the supernatural virtue of virginity, and the primacy of
the See of Rome, -- at the supposed time of Ignatius, a little
horde of nondescripts burrowing in the Catacombs of imperial Rome!
Oh, Church of God: never a scrap of paper even touched by you but
was a loathsome forgery to the glory of your fictitious God and
Christ! So as Father Saint Ignatius did not write anything
authentic, he escapes the self-condemnation of the other Apostolic
Fathers. May his martyred remains rest in peace.

3. POLYCARP: (69 -- 155). Saint, Bishop of Smyrna, Martyr.
Only one Epistle, addressed to the Philippians, remains of
Polycarp, and of it CE. discusses the "serious qucstion" of its
genuineness, which depends upon that of the Ignatian Epistles, and
vice versa, above discussed; it says: "If the former were
forgeries, the latter, which supports -- it might almost be said
presupposes -- them, must be a forgery from the same hand." (CE.
xii, 219.) Poor Church of God, cannot you produce something of your
Saints that isn't a forgery?

But if Saint Polycarp did not write anything genuine, his
Church of Smyrna did itself proud in doing honor to his pretended
Martyrtioin, in A.D. 154-5, or 165-6 (lb.) -- so exact is Church
"tradition." In one of the earliest Encyclicals -- (not issued by
a Pope) -- the wondrous tale is told. It it; addressed: "The "The
Church of God which sojourns at Smyrna, to the Church of God
sojourning in Philomelium, and to all the congregations of the holy
and Catholic -- [first use of term] -- Church in every place"; and
proceeds in glowing words to recount the virtues, capture, trial
and condemnation to death by fire, of the holy St. Polycarp. Just
before his capture, polycarp dreamed that his pillow was afire; he


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exclaimed to those around, "prophetically, 'I am to be burned
alive.'" The forged and fabling Epistle proceeds: "Now, as Polycerp
was entering into the stadium, there came to him a voice from
heaven, saying, 'Be strong, and show thyself a man, O Polycarp.' No
one saw who it was that spoke to him; but those of our brethren who
were present heard the voice" (Ch. ix). Then the details of his
trial before the magistrates, and the verbatim report of his prayer
when led to his fate (xiv). Then (Chap. xv):

"When he had pronounced this amen, and so finished his
prayer, those who were appointed for the purpose kindled the
fire. And as the flame blazed forth in great fury, we, to whom
it was given to witness it, beheld a great miracle, and have
been preserved that we might report to others what then took
place. For the fire, shaping itself into the form of an arch.,
like the sail of a ship when filled with the wind, encompassed
as by a circle of fire the body of the martyr. And he appeared
within not like flesh which is burnt, but as bread that is
baked, or as gold and silver glowing in a furnsce. Moreover,
we prececived such a sweet odor (coming from the pile), as if
frankincene or some such precious spices had been smoking
there. (Ch. xvi.) At length, when those wicked men perceived
that his body could not be consumed by the fire, they
commanded an executioner to go near and pierce him through
with a dagger. And on his doing this, there came forth a dove,
and a great quantity of blood, so that the fire was
extinguished"! (Letter of the Church at Smyrna, ANF. i. 39-44;
CE. xii, 221.)

Even this holy Encyclical, at least as to its appended date,
is not without suspicion; for, "The possibility remains that the
subscription was tampered with by a later hand. But 155 must be
approximately correct." (CE. xii, 221.) Oh, for something saintly
above suspicion!

4. BARNABAS: (no dates given): Saint, a Jew; styled an
Apostle, and variously a Bishop, and wholly "traditional." "Though
nothing is recorded of Barnabas for some years, he evidently
acquired a high position in the Church"; for "a rather late
tradition recorded by Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius -- [over
200 years later] -- says he was one of the Seventy Disciples; but
Acts (iv, 36-37)" indicates the contrary. "Various traditions
represent him as the first Bishop of Milan, as preaching at
Alexandria and at Rome, whose fourth Bishop, St. Clement, he is
said to have converted, and as having suffered martyrdom in Cyprus.
The traditions are all late and untrustworthy. He is credited by
Tertullian (probably falsely) with the authorship of the Epistle to
the Hebrews, and the so-called Epistle attributed to him." (CE. ii,
300, 301.) Saint Barnabas, or his clerical counterfeiter, had some
queer notions of natural history. Expounding the reasons why Moses
banned certain animals as "unclean" and unfit for "Kosher" food,
the Saintly writer says: that Moses banned the hare, "Because the
hare multiplies, year by year, the places of its conception; for as
many years as it lives, so many it has"; and the hyena, "Wherefore?
Because that animal annually changes its sex, and is at one time
male, and at another female"; and the weasel, "For this animal
conceives by the mouth." (Epist. Barnabas, Ch. x,; ANF. i, 143.)


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Perhaps from this, other holy Fathers derived the analogous idea,
to save the rather imperiled virginity of "the proliferous but ever
Virgin mother of God," Mary, that she "per aurem concepit --
conceived through her ear" -- as sung in the sacred Hymn of the
Church:

"Gaude Virgo, mater Christi,
Quae per aurem concepisti,
Gabriels nuntio."
(Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, 1, p. 212.)

Thus we have, in CE. (supra) several Fathers imputed as liars,
and a suspicion suggested as to Paul's inspired Epistle to the
Hebrews (which is another forgery), and the admission of a forged
Epistle of Saint Barnabas. Poor Church of Christ!

5. HERMAS: Saint, Martyr, seems to have missed being Bishop,
"first or second century," -- though the Church Saint record is so
confused that I cannot vouch whether this one is the reputed author
of the forged Epistle of Barnabas. But "in the lists of the Seventy
Apostles by the Pseudo-Doretheus and the Pseudo-Hippolytus [two
more forgeries], Hermas figures as Bishop of Philippi. No one any
longer supposes that he was the author of the Shepherd of Hermas,
the date of which is about 40 A.D., though from Origen onwards
Church-writers have expressed this view, and accordingly have given
that allegorical work a place among the writings of the apostolic
Fathers." (EB. ii, 2021; cf. CE. vii, 268.) The latter says that
this "work had great authority in ancient times and was ranked with
Holy Scripture" and included as such in the MSS. of Holy Writ; but
it is called "apocryphal and false," -- like everything else the
Holy Church has ever had for "Scripture" or for self-
aggrandizement. The pious author quotes the quaint forged Eldad and
Medad as Scripture, and the Pagan Sibyls as inspired Oracles of
God.

III. The Sub-Apostolic Fathers

6. PAPIAS: (about 70-155 A.D.); Bishop of Hieropolis, in
Phrygia, of whose "life nothing is known" (CE. xi, 459); who, after
the Apostles and contemporary with the early Presbyters, was the
first of the sub-Apostolic Fathers. He was an ex-Pagan Greek, who
flourished as a Christian Father and Bishop during the first half
of the second Christian century; the dates of his birth and death
are unknown. He is said to have written five Books entitled
"Expositions of the Oracles of the Lord" -- that is, of the Old
Testament "prophecies"; these are now lost, "except a few precious
fragments" (CE. vi, 5), whether fortunately or otherwise may be
judged from the scanty "precious fragments" preserved in quotations
by some of the other Fathers. According to Bishop Eusebius (HE.
iii, 39), quoted by CE. (xi, 549), "Papias was a man of very small
mind, if we may judge by his own words"; -- though again he calls
him "a man well skilled in all manner of learning, and well
acquainted with the [O.T.] Scriptures." (HE. iv, 36,) As examples,
Eusebius cites "a wild and extraordinary legend about Judas
Iscariot attributed to Papias," wherein he says of Judas; "his body
having swollen to such extent that he could not pass where a
chariot could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so that


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his bowels gushed out." (ANF. i, 153.) This Papian "tradition" of
course impeaches both of the other contradictory Scriptural
traditions of Judas, towit, that "he went and hanged himself"
(Matt. xxvii, 5), and Peter's alleged statement that "falling
headlong, he burst asunder in the midst and all his bowels gushed
out." (Acts i, 15-18.) Bishop Eusebius says that Bishop Papias
states that "those who were raised to life by Christ lived on until
the age of Trajan," -- Roman Emperor from 98-117 A.D. Father Papias
falls into what would by the Orthodox be regarded as "some" error,
in disbelieving and denying the early crucifixion and resurrection
of Jesus Christ -- evidently not then a belief; for he assures us,
on the authority of what "the disciples of the Lord used to say in
the old days," that Jesus Christ lived to be an old man; and so
evidently died in peace in the bosom of his family, as we shall see
explicitly confessed by Bishop Irenaeus. Father Papias relates the
raising to life of the mother of Manaimos; also the drinking of
poison without harm by Justus Barsabas; which fables he supported
by "strange parables of the Savior and teachings of his, and other
mythical matters," says Bishop Eusebius (quoted by CE.), which the
authority of so venerable a person, who had lived with the
Apostles, imposed upon the Church as genuine." (Eusebius, Hist.
Eccles. Bk. III, ch. 39.) But Father Papias -- this is important to
remember -- is either misunderstood or misrepresented, in his claim
to have known the Apostles, or at least the Apostle John; for, says
CE., in harmony with EB. and other authorities: "It is admitted
that he could not have known many Apostles. ... Irenaeus and
Eusebius, who had the works of Papias before them, understood the
presbyters not to be Apostles, but disciples of disciples of the
Lord, or even disciples of disciples of the Apostles." (CE. xi,
458; see Euseb. HE. III, 39.) This fact Papias himself admits, that
he got his "apostolic" lore at second and third hand: "If, then,
any one who had attended on the elders came, I asked minutely after
their sayings, -- what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by
Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by
any other of the Lord's disciples: which things Aristion and the
presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I imagined that
what was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what
came from the living and abiding voice." (Papias, Frag. 4; ANF. i,
153.)

One of the "wild and mythical matters" which good Father
Papias relates of Jesus Christ, which is a first-rate measure of
the degree of his claimed intimacy with John the Evangelist, and of
the value of his pretended testimony to the "Gospels" of Matthew
and Mark, to be later noticed, is the "curious prophecy of the
miraculous vintage in the Millennium which he attributes to Jesus
Christ," as described and quoted by CE. In this, Papias assures us,
on the authority of his admirer Bishop Irenaeus, that he "had
immediately learned from the Evangelist St. John himself," that:
"the Lord taught and said, That the days shall come in which vines
shall spring up, each having 10,000 branches, and in each branch
shall be 10,000 arms, and on each arm of a branch 10,000 tendrils,
and on each tendril 10,000 bunches, and on each bunch 10,000
grapes, and each grape, on being pressed, shall yield five and
twenty gallons of wine; and when any one of the Saints shall take
hold of one of these bunches, another shall cry out, 'I am a better
bunch, take me, and bless the Lord by me.'" The same infinitely


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pious twaddle of multiplication by 10,000 is continued by Father
Papias with respect to grains of wheat, apples, fruits, flowers and
animals, precisely like the string of jingles in the nursery tale
of The House that Jack Built; even Jesus got tired of such his own
alleged inanities and concluded by saying: "And those things are
believable by all believers; but the traitor Judas, not believing,
asked him, 'But how shall these things that shall propagate thus be
brought to an end by the Lord?' And the Lord answered him and said,
'Those who shall live in those times shall see.'" "This,
indicates," explains Bishop Irenaeus, who devotes a whole chapter
to the repetition and elaboration of this Christ-yarn as "proof" of
the meaning of Jesus, that he would drink of the fruit of the vine
with his disciples in his father's Kingdom, -- "this indicates the
large size and rich quality of the fruits." (CE. xi, 458; Iren.
Adv. Haer. IV, xxxiii, 4; ANF. i, 564.) How far less wild a myth,
one may wonder, is this prolific propagation than that fabled by
this same John the Evangelist in his supposed "Revelation," wherein
he saw in heaven the River of Life proceeding out of the Throne of
God and of the Lamb, and "in the midst of the street of it, and on
either side of the River, was there the Tree of Life, which bare
twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the
leaves of the Tree were for the healing of the nations." (Rev.
xxii, 1, 2.) Verily, "out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou
hast perfected praise"! (Mt. xxi, 16.)

7. JUSTIN MARTYR: (c. 100-165): Saint, Martyr, a foremost
Christian Apologist. A Gentile ex-Pagan of Samaria, turned
Christian, and supposed to have suffered martyrdom in the reign of
Marcus Aurelius, in whose name he forged a very preposterous
rescript. His principal works, in Greek, are his two Apologies, the
first addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, whose reply he also
forged; the second to "the sacred Senate" of Rome; his Dialogue
with Trypho the Jew, and his Hortatory Address to the Greeks. He
describes himself and fellow Christian Fathers as "we who formerly
used magical arts." (I Apol. ch. xiv.) The burden of his arguments
is Pagan "analogies" of Christianity, the contents of many of his
chapters being indicated by their captions, as "The Demons Imitate
Christian Doctrine," and "Heathen Analogies to Christian Doctrine,"
in chapters xiv and xv of his First Apology, and elsewhere. His
whole faith in Christ and in Christianity, he declares, is
confirmed by these heathen precedents and analogies: "Be well
assured, then, Trypho, that I am established in the knowledge of
and faith in the Scriptures by those counterfeits which he who is
called the Devil is said to have performed among the Greeks; just
as some were wrought by the Magi in Egypt, and others by the false
prophets in Elijah's days. For when they tell that Bacchus, son of
Jupiter, was begotten by [Jupiter's) intercourse with Semele, and
that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that
being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended
to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I
not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced
by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses? ... And when he [the
devil] brings forward AEsculapius as the raiser of the dead and
healer of all diseases, may I not say in this matter likewise he
has imitated the prophecies about Christ? ... And when I hear that
Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving
serpent counterfeited this also." (Dial, with Trypho, ch. lxix;
ANF. i, 233.)
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Father Justin accepts the heathen gods as genuine divine
beings; but says they are only wicked demons who lead men astray;
and he says that these "evil demons, effecting apparitions of
themselves, both defiled women and corrupted boys." (I Apol. ch. v,
eh. liv, passim.) The devils "having heard it proclaimed through
the prophets that the Christ was to come, ... they put forward many
to be called the sons of Jupiter, under the impression that they
would be able to produce in men the idea that the things which were
said in regard to Christ were more marvelous tales, like the things
which were said by the poets. The devils, accordingly, when they
heard these prophetic words, said that Bacchus was the son of
Jupiter, and gave out that he was the discoverer of the vine"; and
so through many twaddling chapters, repeating the argument with
respect to Bellerophon and his horse Pegasus, of Perseus, of
Hercules, of AEsculapius, etc., as "analogies" prophetic of
baptism, sacraments, the eucharist, resurrection, etc., etc. The
Pagan myths and miracles are true; therefore like fables of the
Christ are worthy of belief: "And when we say also that the Word,
who is the first-born of God, was produced without sexual union,
and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified. and rose
again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from
what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.
... But as we have said above, wicked devils perpetrated these
things. And if we assert that the Word of God was born in a
peculiar manner, different from ordinary generation, let this, as
said above, be no extraordinary thing to you, who say that Mercury
is the angelic word [Logos] of God. ... And if we even affirm that
He was born of a virgin, accept this in common with what you accept
of Perseus. And in what we say that he made whole the lame, the
paralytic, and those born blind, we seem to say what is very
similar to the deeds said to have been done by AEsculapius." (I
Apol., chs. xxi, xxii; ANF. i, 170; cf. Add. ad Grace. ch. lxix;
Ib. 233.)

Father Justin also retails to the Emperor the old fable of
Simon Magus and his magical miracles at Rome, and attributes it all
to the work of the devils. For "the evil spirits, not being
satisfied with saying, before Christ's appearance, that those who
were said to be sons of Jupiter were born of him, but after he
appeared, ... and when they learned how He had been foretold by the
prophets, put forward again other men, the Samaritans Simon and
Menander, who did many mighty works by magic; ... and so greatly
astonished the sacred Senate and people of the Romans that he was
considered a god, and honored with a statue; ... which statue was
erected in the river Tiber, between the two bridges, and bore this
inscription in the language of Rome: 'Simoni Deo Sancto -- To Simon
the holy God" (I Apol. chs. xxvi, lvi; ANF. i, 171, 182; cf. Iren.
Adv. Haer. ch. xxiii; ANF. i, 347-8; Euseb. HE. II, 13.) We have
seen this much embroidered "tradition" myth exploded, and the
statue discovered and deciphered, it being a simple private pious
monument to a Pagan god!

Father Justin in many chapters cites and appeals for Christian
proofs to "The Testimony of the Sibyl," of Homer, of Sophocles, of
Pythagoras, of Plato. (Add. ad Grace. chs. 18-20; ANF. i, 279-280.)
Of the Sibyl, so often quoted: "And you may in part learn the right
religion from the ancient Sibyl, who by some kind of potent


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inspiration teaches you, through her oracular predictions, truths
which seem to be much akin to the teachings of the prophets. ... Ye
men of Greece, ... do ye henceforth give heed to the words of the
Sibyl, ... predicting, as she does in a clear and patent manner,
the advent of our Savior Jesus Christ," quoting long verses of
Christian-forged nonsense. (Ib. chs. 37-38; ANF. i, 288-289.)

8. IRENAEUS (120-c. 200) Saint, Martyr, Bishop of Lyons; ex-
Pagan of Smyrna, who emigrated to Gaul and became Bishop;
"information of his life is scarce, and [as usual] in some measure
inexact. ... Nothing is known of the date of his death, which may
have occurred at the end of the second or beginning of the third
century." (CE., vii, 130.) How then is it known that he was a
Martyr? Of him Photius, ablest early critic in the Church, warns
that in some of his works "the purity of truth, with respect to
ecclesiastical traditions, is adulterated by his false and spurious
readings" (Phot.; Bibl. ch. cxx); -- though why this invidious
distinction of Irenaeus among all the clerical corruptors of
"tradition" is not clear. The only surviving work of Irenaeus in
four prolific Books is his notable Adversus Haereses, or, as was
its full title, "A Refutation and Subversion of Knowledge falsely
so Called," -- though he succeeds in falsely subverting no little
real knowledge by his own idle fables. This work is called "one of
the most precious remains of early Christian antiquity." Bishop St.
Irenaeus quotes one apt sentiment from Homer, the precept of which
he seems to approve, but which he and his Church confreres did not
much put into practice:

"Hateful to me that man as Hades' gates,
Who one thing thinks, while he another states."
(Iliad, ix, 312, 313; Adv. Haer. III, xxxiii, 3.)

JESUS DIED OF OLD AGE!

Most remarkable of the "heresies" attacked and refuted by
Bishop Irenaeus, is one which had just gained currency in written
form in the newly published "Gospels of Jesus Christ," in the form
of the "tradition" that Jesus had been crucified to death early in
the thirties of his life, after a preaching career of only about
one year, according to three of the new Gospels, of about three
years, according to the fourth. This is rankly false and
fictitious, on the "tradition" of the real gospel and of all the
Apostles, avows Bishop Irenaeus, like Bishop Papias earlier in the
century; and he boldly combated it as "heresy." It is not true, he
asserts, that Jesus Christ died so early in life and after so brief
a career. "How is it possible," be demands, "that the Lord preached
for one year only?"; and on the quoted authority of John the
Apostle himself, of "the true Gospel," and of "all the elders," the
saintly Bishop urges the falsity and "heresy" of the Four Gospels
on this crucial point. Textually, and with quite fanciful
reasonments, he says that Jesus did not die so soon:

"For he came to save all through means of Himself -- all,
I say, who through Him are born again to God -- infants, and
children, and boys, and youths, and old men. He therefore
passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus
sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying


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those who are of this age; a youth for youths, and thus
sanctifying them for the Lord. So likewise He was an old man
for old men, that He might be a perfect Master for all, not
merely as respects the setting forth of the truth, but also as
regards age, sanctifying at the same time the aged also, and
becoming an example to them likewise. Then, at last, He came
on to death itself, that He might be 'the first-born from the
dead.'

"They, however, that they may establish their false
opinion regarding that which is written, 'to proclaim the
acceptable year of the Lord,' maintain that he preached for
one year only, and then suffered in the twelfth month. [In
speaking thus], they are forgetful to their own disadvantage,
destroying His work and robbing Him of that age which is both
more necessary and more honorable than any other; that more
advanced age, I mean, during which also, as a teacher, He
excelled all others. ...

"Now, that the first stage of early life embraces thirty
years, and that this extends onward to the fortieth year,
every one will admit; but from the fortieth and fiftieth year
a man begins to decline towards old age, which our Lord
possessed while He still fulfilled the office of a Teacher,
even as the Gospel and all the elders testify; those who were
conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord,
(affirming) that John conveyed to them that information. AND
HE REMAINED AMONG THEM UP TO THE TIMES OF TRAJAN [Roman
Emperor, A.D. 98-117]. Some of them, moreover, saw not only
John, but the other Apostles also, and heard the very same
account from them, and bear testimony as to [the validity of
] the statement. Whom then should we rather believe?" (Iren.
Adv. Haer. Bk. II, ch. xxii, secs. 3, 4, 5; ANF. I, 891-2.)

The Bishop's closing question is pertinent, and we shall come
back to it in due course.

Irenaeus also vouches his belief in magic arts, repeating as
true the fabulous stories of Simon Magus and his statue in the
Tiber and the false recital of the inscription on it; and as a
professional heresy-hunter he falls upon Simon as the Father of
Heresy: "Now this Simon of Samaria, from whom all heresies derive
their origin. ... The successor of this man was Menander, also a
Samaritan by birth; and he, too, was a perfect adept in the
practice of magic." (Adv. Haer. I, xxiii; ANF. i, 348.)

9. TERTULLIAN: Bishop of Carthage, in Africa; ex-Pagan born
about 160, died 220. He was "the first of the Latin theological
writers; ... and the first witness to the existence of a Latin
Bible ... Tertullian's canon of the O.T. included the deutero-
canonical books -- [i.e. the forged apocrypha]. ... He also cites
the Book of Henoch [Enoch] as inspired, ... also recognizes IV
Esdras and the Sibyl." (CE. xiv, 525.)

He was the most violent distribist of them all in promoting
the Christian religion, but renounced Christianity after 200 and
became equally violent in propagating the extravagant heresy of


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Montanus. In this recantation of faith he gave evidence that he was
in error in his former complete acceptance of Christianity as the
last word and irrevocable posture in revealed truth, -- and
revealed his own errant credulity. In attacking the heretics --
before he became one, of the most preposterous sect, -- he thus
formulates the assurance of the finality of Christian Faith: "One
has succeeded in finding definite truth, when he belie lies. ...
After we have believed, search should cease." (Against Heresies,
ch. xi; ANF. iii, 248.) Tertullian is noted for several
declamations regarding the assurance of faith which have become
famous, as they are fatuous: "Credo quia incredibilis est -- I
believe because it is unbelievable"; and, like Paul's "I am become
a fool in glorying," he vaunts thus his own folly: "Other matters
for shame I find none which can prove me to be shameless in a good
sense, and foolish in a happy one, by my own contempt for shame.
The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed [to believe it]
because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died;
it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was
buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is
impossible." (De Carne Christi, ch. v; ANF. iii, 525.) Reasoning
thus, -- or quite without reason -- Christians yet believe these
confessed absurdities and impossibilities.

Tertullian denounces the sin of theater-going, and in this
awful illustration he invokes his God to witness of one of his lies
to God's glory: "We have the case of the woman -- the Lord Himself
is witness -- who went to the theater, and came back possessed. In
the outcasting (exorcism), accordingly, when the unclean creature
was upbraided with having dared to attack a believer, he firmly
replied: 'And in truth I did most righteously, for I found her in
my domain.'" (De Spectaculis, ch. xxvi; ANF. iii, 90.) In one of
his sumptuary diatribes on woman's dress -- yet a favorite theme of
the Vicars of God, though nowadays the complaint is of nether
brevity -- he warns and assures: "to us the Lord has, even by
revelations, measured the space for the veil to extend over. For a
certain sister of ours was thus addressed by an angel, beating her
neck," and telling her that she had as well be "bare down to your
loins" as any elsewhere below the neck. (On the Veiling of Virgins,
ch. xvii; ANF. iv, 37.) And he expresses the clerical concept of
women, saying that "females, subjected as they are throughout to
men, bear in their front an honorable mark of their virginity."
(Ib. ch. x, p. 33.) The celibate Fathers all glorified the
suppression of sex: "Marriage replenishes the earth, virginity
fills Paradise," says St. Jerome. (Adv. Jovianum, I, 17; N&PNF. vi,
360.) The Fathers regarded Woman as did St. Chrysostom: "a
necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a
domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill!" Good
Father Tertullian, in his Exhortation to Chastity, has chapters
captioned: "Second Marriage a Species of Adultery," and "Marriage
Itself Impugned as akin to Adultery." (On Chastity, chs. ix, x;
ANF. iv, 55.)

Strongly, and upon what seems good physiological reason, he
"denies the virginity of Mary, the mother of Christ, in part,
though he affirms it [oddly] ante partum." (CE. xiv, 523.) Father
Tertullian was strong in advocacy of virginity not alone feminine,
but of the men, exclaiming, "So many men-virgins, so many voluntary


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eunuchs" (Ib.). He commends with marked approval the fanatical
incitation of the Christ to self-mutilation "for the kingdom of
heaven's sake" (Mt. xix, 11), and avers that to this same cause was
due Paul's much-complained-of "thorn in the flesh," saying: "The
Lord Himself opens the kingdoms of heaven to eunuchs, as being
Himself a virgin; to whom looking, the apostle [Paul] also -- for
this reason -- gives the preference to continence (I Cor. vii, 1,
7, 37, 40). ... 'Good,' he says, 'it is for a man not to have
contact with her, for nothing is contrary to good except evil."'
(On Monogamy, ch. iii; ANF. iv, 60.) For like reason it was, he
assures, that Noah was ordered to take two of each animal into the
ark, "for fear that even beasts should be born of adultery. ...
Even unclean birds were not allowed to enter with two females
each." (Ib. ch. iv; p. 62.) Father Tertullian shares the fantastic
notions of natural history stated by Bishop St. Barnabas; in proof
of the eternal renovation of all things, Tertullian says: "The
serpent crawls into a cave and out of his skin, and uncoils himself
in a new youth; with his scales, his years, too, are repudiated.
The hyena, if you observe, is of annual sex, alternately masculine
and feminine. ... The stag, feeding on the serpent, languishes --
from the effects of the poison -- into youth." (On the Pallium, ch.
iii; ANF. iv, 7.) Magic admirably supplements nature and medical
remedies as cure for the scorpion's sting, assures Father
Tertullian: "Among cures certain substances supplied by nature have
very great efficacy; magic also puts on some bandages." (Scorpiace,
ch. i; ANF. iii, 633.)

Like all the credulous ex-Pagan Fathers of Christianity,
Tertullian is a confirmed Sibyllist, and believes the forged Pagan
oracles as inspired truth of God. Citing several of her
"prophecies," he assures with confidence: "And the Sibyl is thus
proved no liar." (Pallium, ch. ii; ANF. iv, 6.)

Tertullian admits, in a tu quoque argument, that the
Christians are sun-worshippers: "You [Pagans] say we worship the
sun; so do you." (CE. xiv, 525; Ad. Nationes, xiii; ANF. iii, 123.)
He is in common with the Fathers in the belief in magic and
astrology, which since Christ, however, are turned into holier
channels in token of His divinity: "But Magi and astrologers came
from the East (Matt. ii). We know the mutual reliance of magic and
astrology. The interpreters of the stars, then, were the first to
announce Christ's birth, the first to present gifts. ... Astrology
now-a-days, forsooth, treats of Christ -- is the science of the
stars of Christ; not of Saturn, or of Mars. But, however, that
science has been allowed until the Gospel, in order that after
Christ's birth no one should thenceforward interpret anyone's
nativity by the heaven." (On Idolatry, ch. ix; ANF. iii, 65.)

In common with all the Fathers, Tertullian appeals to the
Phoenix as proof supreme of the resurrection of the body. It will
be noticed, that the modern false translators of our Bibles have
slipped in another bit of falsification by suppressing the word
"phoenix" in the passage quoted by Tertullian, and have substituted
the word "palm-tree" to express the flourishing state of the
righteous, as there depicted:




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"Then take a most complete and unassailable symbol of our
hope [of resurrection], subject alike to life and death. I
refer to the bird which is peculiar to the East, famous for
its singularity, marvelous from its posthumous life, which
renews its life in a voluntary death; its dying day is its
birthday, for on it it departs and returns: once more a
phoenix where just now there was none; once more himself, but
just now out of existence; another, yet the same. What can be
more express and more significant for our subject; or to what
other thing can such a phenomenon bear witness? God even in
His own Scripture says: 'The righteous shall flourish like the
phoenix' [Greek Septuagint: Dikaios os phoenix anthesei; Ps.
xcii, 12]. Must men die once for all, while birds in Arabia
are sure of a resurrection?" (Tert., On the Resurrection of
the Flesh, ch. xiii; ANF. iii, 554.)

Father Tertullian vouches, too, with the other Fathers, for
the bogus official Report of Pilate to Caesar, and for Pilate's
conversion to Christianity, saying: "All these things Pilate did to
Christ; and now in fact a Christian in his own convictions, he sent
word of Him to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time Tiberius.
Yes, and even the Caesars would have believed on Christ, if either
the Caesars had not been necessary for the world, or if Christians
could have been Caesars." (Apol. ch. xxi; ANF. iii,. 35.) Father
Tertullian gives fall credence to the fable of the Septuagint, and
assures the Emperors: "To this day, at the temple of Serapis, the
librariis of Ptolemy are to be seen, with the identical Hebrew
originals in them." (Apology, to the Rulers of the Roman Empire, I,
xviii; ANF. iii, 32.) And, as all the other Fathers, he gives full
faith and credit to the Pagan gods, as "effective witnesses for
Christ"; -- "Yes, and we shall prove that your own gods are
effective witnesses for Christ ... "Yes, and we shall prove that
your own gods are effective witnesses for Christ. ... Against the
Greeks we urge that Orpheus, at Piera, Musaeus at Athens, (etc.)
imposed religious rites. ... Numa Pompilius laid on the Romans a
heavy load of costly superstitions. Surely Christ, then, had a
right to reveal Deity." (Apol. ch. xxi; ANF. iii, 36.) Like the
other Fathers, Tertullian is also in the ranks of patristic forgers
of holy fables, being either the author or the publisher of "The
Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas," the fabulous
Martyrdom of two of the Church's most celebrated bogus Saints,
annexed to his accredited works. (ANF. iii, 699-706.)

10. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA: (c. 153-c. 215). Ex-Pagan; head of
the catechetical school of Alexandria; tutor of Origen. He wrote an
Exhortation to the Heathen, the Poedagogus, or Instructor, and
eight books called Stromata, or Miscellanies. From the latter a few
random assays are taken which fully accredit him among the simple-
minded and credulous Fathers of Christianity.

Clement devotes ample chapters to showing the 'Plagiarism by
the Greeks of the Miracles related in the Sacred Books of the
Hebrews"; he quotes as inspired the forged book "Peter's
Preaching," and the heathen Sibyls and Hystaspes; he assures us,
with his reason therefor, that "The Apostles, following the Lord,
preached the Gospel to those in Hades. For it was requisite, in my
opinion, that as here, so also there, the rest of the disciples


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should be imitators of the Master." Abraham was a great scientist:
"As thin in astronomy we have Abraham as an instance, so also in
arithmetic we have the same Abraham," the latter diploma being
founded on the feat that Abraham, "hearing that Lot had been taken
captive, numbered his own. servants, 318"; this mystic number,
expressed in Greek letters T I E, used as numerals: "the character
representing 300 (T) is the Lord's sign (Cross), and I and E
indicate the Savior's name," et cetera, of cabalistic twaddle.
(Strom. VI, xi; ANF. ii, 499.) Clement believes the heathen gods
and the Sibyls, and all the demigods and myths of Greece: "We have
also demonstrated Moses to be more ancient, not only than those
called, poets and wise men, but than most of their deities. Not
alone he, but the Sibyl, is more ancient than Orpheus. ... On her
arrival at Delphi she sang:

'O Delphians, ministers of far-darting Apollo,
I come to declare the mind of AEgis-bearing Zeus,
Enraged as I am at my own brother Apollo.'"
(Strom. ii, 325.)

11. ORIGEN: born in Alexandria, Egypt, about, 165; a wild
fanatic, he made himself "a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven's
sake"; died at Tyre or Caesarea about 254; was the first of the'
Fathers said to be born of Christian parents; he was a pupil and
protege of Clement of Alexandria. Origen was the greatest
theologian and biblical scholar of the Church up to his time; he
was the author of the famous Hexapla, or comparative edition of the
Bible in Hebrew, with Greek transliteration and the Greek texts of
the Septuagint and other versions. in six parallel columns. Origen
was badly tainted with the Arian heresy which denied the divinity
of Jesus Christ, and was deposed from the priesthood, but his
deposition was not generally recognized by all the Churches, --
which again proves that they were not then subject to Rome. For
sheer credulity and nonsense Father Origen was the peer of any of
the Pagan-born Patriarchs of "the new Paganism called,
Christianity," as is evidenced by the following extracts from his
chief works.

Accepting as living realities the heathen gods and their
miracles, he argues that the Hebrews must have had genuine miracles
because the heathens had many from their gods, which were, however,
only devils; that the Hebrews viewed. "with contempt all those who
were considered as gods by the heathen" as not being gods, but
demons, 'For all the gods of the nations are demons' (Ps, xcvi, 5).
... In the next place, miracles were performed in all countries, or
at least in many of them, as Celsus himself admits, instancing the
case, of AEsculapius, who conferred benefits on many, and who
foretold future events to entire cities," -- citing instances. If
there had been no miracles among the Hebrews "they would
immediately have gone over to the worship of those demons which
gave oracles and performed cures." (Contra Celsum, III, ch. ii-iii;
ANF. iv, 466.) The heathen oracles were indeed inspired and true,
but were due to a loathsome form of demoniac inspiration, which he
thus -- (with my own polite omissions) -- describes:





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"Let it be granted that the responses delivered by the
Pythian and other oracles were not the utterances of false men
who pretended to a divine inspiration; but let us see if,
after all, that they may be traced to wicked demons, -- to
spirits which are at enmity with the human race. ... It is
said of the Pythian priestess, that when she sat down at the
mouth of the Castalian cave, the prophetic spirit of Apollo
entered her private parts; and when she was filled with it,
she gave utterance to responses which are regarded with awe as
divine truths. Judge by this whether that spirit does not show
its profane and impure nature." (Contra Cetsum, VII, iii; ANF.
iv, 611-612). ... "It is not, then, because Christians cast
insults upon demons that they incur their revenge, but because
they drive them away out of the images, and from the bodies
and souls of men." (Ib. c. xliii, p. 655.)

Father Origen clung to the pagan superstition that comets and
new stars portend and herald great world-events, and urges that
this undoubted fact gives credibility to the fabled Star of
Bethlehem: "It has been observed that, on the occurrence of great
events, and of mighty changes in terrestrial things, such stars are
wont to appear, indicating either the removal of dynasties or the
breaking out of wars, or the happening of such circumstances as may
cause commotions upon the earth" -- why not then the Star of
Bethlehem? (Contra Celsum, I, lix; ANP. iv, 422.) All the stars and
heavenly bodies are living, rational beings, having souls, as he
curiously proves by Job and Isaiah, as well as upon clerical
reason:

"Let us see what reason itself can discover respecting sun,
moon, and stars. ... To arrive at a clearer understanding on these
matters, we ought first to inquire whether it is allowable to
suppose that they are living and rational beings; then, whether
their souls came into existence at the same time with their bodies,
or seem to be anterior to them; and also whether, after the end of
the world, we are to understand that they are to be released from
their bodies; and whether, as we cease to live, so they also will
cease from illuminating the world. ... We think, then, that they
may be designated as living beings, for this reason, that they are
said to receive commandments from God, which is ordinarily the case
only with rational beings: 'I have given commandments to all the
stars' (Isa, xiv, 12), says the Lord." (De Principiis, I, vii; ANF.
iv, 263.)

12. LACTANTIUS: (-?-330). Ex-Pagan, and eminent Christian
author and defender of the faith. On account of his great
reputation for learning, he was invited by the Emperor Constantine
to become the tutor of his son Crispus, about 312-318 A.D. Thus,
omitting two entire volumes (V and VI) of the Fathers, we are
brought to the beginning of Christianity as the official or state
religion -- accredited yet by fables and propagated by
superstitious myth. The great work of Lactantius, The Divine
Institutes, dedicated to the Emperor, was thus addressed: "We now
commence this work under the auspices of your name, O mighty
Emperor Constantine, who were the first of the Roman princes to
repudiate errors, and to acknowledge and honor the majesty of the
one and only true God." (I, i.) This work, in seven lengthy Books,
occupies over 200 double-columns of vol. VII of the Ante-Nicene
Fathers.
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Written for the purpose of confirming Constantine in his very
uncertain "Christian" faith, and to appeal for conversion of the
higher classes of the Pagans under the imperial favor, no work of
the Fathers is more positive in the recognition of the Pagan gods
as divine realities, who are rather demons of very active
malignity; and none equalled him in profuse appeals to the Pagan
gods and the Sibyls as their prophetesses, as divine "testimonies"
to Jesus Christ and virtually every natural and supernatural act
attributed to him in the romantic Gospels. In fact, his whole work
is a sort of digest of Paran mythology taken as divinely true and
inspired antecedents and evidences of the fictitious "facts" of the
new Paganism called Christianity. We have already noticed some of
his tributes to the Sibyls as prophecies of Jesus Christ; as it is
impossible to cite but a few out of exceeding many, these are
selected, demonstrating the origins of the heathen gods as actually
demons; the verity of their being, words and deeds, and that they
one and all testify of Jesus Christ and the holy mysteries of the
Christian faith. In a word, Christianity is founded on and proved
by Pagan myths. And first, of the demon-gods, for whom he thus
vouches:

"God in his forethought, lest the devil, to whom from the
beginning He had given power over the earth, should by his
subtility either corrupt or destroy men, ... sent angels for
the protection and improvement of the human race; and inasmuch
as He had given these a free will, He enjoined them above all
things not to defile themselves. ... He plainly prohibited
them from doing that which He knew that they would do, that
they might entertain no hope of pardon. Therefore, while they
abode among men, that most deceitful ruler of the earth ...
gradually enticed them to vices, and polluted them by
intercourse with women. Then, not being admitted into heaven
on account of the sins into which they had plunged themselves,
they fell to the earth. Thus from angels the devil makes them
to become his satellites and attendants.

"But they who were born from these, because they were
neither angels nor men, but bearing a kind of mixed nature,
were not admitted into hell as their fathers were not into
heaven. Thus there became two kinds of demons; one of heaven,
the other of the earth. The latter are the evil spirits, the
authors of all the evils which are done, and the same devil is
their Prince. Whence Trismegistus calls him the ruler of
demons. ... They are called demons, that is, skilled and
acquainted with matters; for they think that these are gods.

"They are acquainted, indeed, with many future events,
but not all since it is not permitted to them entirely to know
the counsel of God. These contaminated and abandoned Spirits,
as I say, wander over the whole earth, and contrive a solace
for their own perdition by the destruction of men. Therefore
they fill every place with snares, frauds and errors for they
cling to individuals, and occupy whole houses from door to
door. ... And these, since spirits are without substance and
not to be grasped, insinuate themselves into the bodies of
men; and secretly working in their inward parts, they corrupt
the health, hasten diseases, terrify their souls with dreams,


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harass their maids with frenzies, that by these means they may
compel men to have recourse to their aid." (Lact. Divine
Instit. II, xv; ANF. vii, 64.)

He assures us, in chapter headings, and much detail of text:
"That Demons have no Power over Those who are Established in the
Faith" (Ch. xvi); "That Astrology, Soothsaying, and Similar Arts
are the Inventions of Demons" (Ch. xvii). These demon-gods are the
most potent witnesses to the Christian faith, and scores of times
he cites and appeals to them. The Hermes Trismegistus so often
quoted and vouched for, is the god Mercury "Thrice Greatest," and
is the greatest of the Christian witnesses. In many chapters the
"divine testimonies" of Trismegistus, Apollo, and the other demon-
gods, are confidently appealed to and their proofs recited. He
proves the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead
by renewed appeals to Hermes, Apollo, and the Sibyl: "Of the Soul,
and the Testimonies concerning its Eternity" (Ch. xiii). "And I
will now allege the testimony of the prophets. ... Hermes,
describing the nature of man, that he might know that he was made
by God, introduced this statement. ... Let us therefore seek
greater testimony. A certain Polites asked Apollo of Miletus
whether the soul remains after death or goes to dissolution; and he
replied in these verses [quoting the response]. What do the
Sibylline poems say? Do they not declare that this is so, when they
say that the time will come when God will judge the living and the
dead? -- whose authority we will hereafter bring forward. ...
Therefore the Son of the most high and mighty God shall come to
judge the quick and the dead, as the Sibyl testifies and says
[quoting]. ... 'Dies irae, dies illa, Teste David et Sibylla.'"
(Ibid, VII, chs. xiii, xxii; ANF. vii, 210, 218.)

Malignantly powerful as these demon-gods are, the simple but
potent name of Christ, or the "immortal sign" of the Cross, on the
instant renders them impotent and puts them to flight; all the
demon-gods may be evoked by magic, only Christ cannot be thus
conjured.

As for man -- here occurring the famous epigram Homo ex humo:
"He formed man out of the dust of the ground, from which he was
called man, because he was made from the earth. Finally Plato says
that the human form was godlike; as does the Sibyl, who says, --
'Thou are my image, O man, possessed of right reason.' (Ib. II,
lviii; p. 58.) Chapter vi is entitled, "Almighty God begat His Son;
and the Testimonies of the Sibyls and of Trismegistus concerning
Him"; and he urges: "But that there is a Son of the Most High God
is shown not only by the unanimous utterances of the prophets, but
also by the declaration of Trismegistus and the predictions of the
Sibyls [quoting them at length]. The Erythrean Sibyl proclaims the
Son of God as the leader and commander of all [quoting] ... And
another Sibyl enjoins: 'Know him as your God, who is the Son of
God'; and the Sibyl calls Him 'Counsellor.'" (Ib. IV, vi; p. 105.)

THE PAGAN "LOGOS" CHRISTIANIZED

Treating at length of the prolific adoption and adaptation by
"that new Paganism later called Christianity," of the terms, rites
and ceremonies of Paganism, CE. says: "Always the Church has


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forcefully molded words, and even concepts (as Savior, Epiphany,
Baptism, Illimination, Mysteries, Logos, to suit her own Dogma and
its expression. It was thus that John could take the [Pagan]
expression 'Logos,' mould it to his Dogma, cut short all perilous
speculation among Christians, and assert once for all that the
'Word was made Flesh' and was Jesus Christ." (CE. xi, 392.) And
thus Father Lactantius, appealing to Pagan gods and Sibyls for
cogent confirmation, deals with the ancient Pagan notion of the
"Logos," converted now into a "revealed" and most holy Christian
Mystery and the Son of God:

"For though He was the Son of God from the beginning, He
was born again a second time according to the flesh: and this
two-fold birth of His has introduced great terror into the
minds of men, and overspread with darkness even those who
retained the mysteries of true religion. But we will show this
plainly and clearly. ... Unless by chance we shall profanely
imagine, as Orpheus supposed, that God is both male and
female. ... But Hermes also was of the same opinion, when he
says that He was 'His own father' and 'His own mother' [self-
father and self-mother']. ... John also thus taught: 'In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All
things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything
made.'

"But the Greeks speak of Him as the Logos, more
befittingly than we do as the word, or speech: for Logos
signifies both speech and reason inasmuch as He is both the
speech and reason of God. ... Zeno represents the Logos as the
arranger of the established order of things, and the framer of
the universe. ... For it is the spirit of God which he named
the soul of Jupiter. For Trismegistus, who by some means or
other searched into almost all truth, often describes the
excellence and majesty of the Word." (Lact. Div. Inst. IV,
viii-ix; ANF. vii, 106-7.)

As there can be no more positive and convincing proof that the
Christ was and is a Pagan Myth, -- the old Greek "Logos" of
Heraclitus and the Philosophers revamped by the Greek priest who
wrote the first chapter of the "Gospel according to St. John" and
worked up into the "Incarnate Son" of the old Hebrew God for
Christian consumption as the most sacred Article of Christian Faith
and Theology, I append to the admission of Father Lactantius the
culminating evidences of the "Gospel" and the further confession of
the Church through the Catholic Encyclopedia. The inspired
"revelation" of the Holy Ghost concerning the holy Pagan doctrine
of the "Creative, Logos" or "Word of God," made flesh in Jesus
Christ, is thus "taken and molded to his dogma" by the Holy Saint
John:

"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with
God, and the Logos was God. The same was in the beginning with
God. All things were made by him [i.e. by the Logos); and
without him was not anything made that was made." (John, i,
1-3.)



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The doctrine of the Logos was a Pagan speculation or invention
of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who lived 535-475 Before
Christ, and had never heard of Christ. From it the science of Logic
takes its name; and on it the first principle of Stoicism and the
Christian doctrine of "The Word" are based. If this startling
statement out of secular history is questioned, let CE. bear its
clerical witness to the Pagan origin of the Logos and the curious
Christian metamorphosis of it wrought by "St. John" and the Church
Fathers:

"The word Logos (Gr. Logos; Lat. Verbum) is the term by
which Christian theology in the Greek language designates the
Word of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Before
St. John had consecrated this term by adopting it, the Greeks
and the Jews had used it to express religious conceptions
which, under divers titles, have exercised a certain influence
on Christian theology. ... It was in Heraclitus that the
theory of the Logos appears for the first time, and it is
doubtless for this reason that, first among the Greek
philosophers, Heraclitus was regarded by St. Justin (Apol. I,
46) as a Christian before Christ. ... It reappears in the
writings of the Stoics, and it is especially by them that this
theory is developed. God, according to them, 'did not make the
world as an artisan does his work -- [though Genesis ii says
he did] -- but it is by wholly penetrating an matter -- [thus
a kind of ether] -- that He is the Demiurge of the universe.'
He penetrates the world 'as honey does the honeycomb'
(Tertullian, Adv. Hermogenem, 44). ... This Logos is at the
same time a force and a law -- [How, then, a Second Person
Trinitarian God?]. ... Conformably to their exegetical habit,
the Stoics made of the different gods personifications of the
Logos, e.g. of Zeus and above all of Hermes. ... In the
[apocryphal] Book of Wisdom this personification is more
directly implied, and a parallel is established between Wisdom
and the Word. in Palestinian Robbinism the Word (Memra) is
very often mentioned. ... it is the Memra of Jehovah which
lives, speaks, and acts. ... Philo's problem was of the
philosophical order; God and man are infinitely distant from
each other; and it is necessary to establish between them the
relations of action and of prayer; the Logos is here the
intermediary. ... Throughout so many diverse [Pagan and
Jewish] concepts may be recognized a fundamental doctrine: the
Logos is an intermediary between God and the world; through it
God created the world and governs it; through it also men know
God and pray to Him. ... The term Logos is found only in the
Johannine writings. ... This resemblance [to the notion in the
Book of Wisdom] suggests the way by which the doctrine of the
Logos entered into Christian theology." (CE. ix, 328-9.)

Thus confessedly is the Divine Revelation of the "Word made
flesh" a Pagan-Jewish Myth, and the very Pagan Demiurge is the
Christian Christ -- "Very God" -- and the "Second Person of the
Blessed Trinity"! Here is the evolution of a Pagan speculation into
a Christian revelation: Heraclitus first devised "the theory of the
Logos"; by the Stoics "this theory is developed" into the Demiurge
-- "at the same time a force and a law" -- which wrought the
several works of creation instead of Zeus or Hermes. In the


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admittedly forged Book of Wisdom, -- which is nevertheless part of
the inspired Canon of the Catholic Bible, -- the Pagan Demiurge
becomes Divine Wisdom and "paralleled" with "the Word" of the
Hebrew God, and "is the Memra of Jahveh which lives, speaks, acts."
The Jewish philosopher Philo evolved it into "an intermediary --
[Mediator] -- between God and the world, through which God created
the world." This Pagan notion echoes in: "There is one mediator
between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. ii, 5.) Then
comes the Christian Greek priest who wrote the first chapter of
"the Gospel according to John," and, Lo! "the Logos [Word] was God.
... All things were made by him"! The Pagan speculation is first
philosophized, then personified, then Deified into the "Second
Person" of a Blessed Trinity which was first dogmatized in 381
A.D.; and the blasphemy laws of England and a number of American
States decree imprisonment for ridiculing this Most Holy Mystery of
Christian Faith. Yet Christians decry the doctrine of Evolution and
pass laws to outlaw teaching it.

Having pursued these incontestable Pagan "proofs" through his
seven Books, and so vindicated the truth and divinity of
Christianity, the eminent Doctor Lactantius concludes with this
strange apostrophe to the near-Pagan Emperor, assuring him of the
overthrow now of all error and the triumph of Catholic Truth: "But
all fictions have now been hushed, Most Holy Emperor, since the
time when the great God raised thee up for the restoration of the
house of justice, and for the protection of the human race. ...
Since the truth now comes forth from obscurity, and is brought into
light"! (Ib. VII, xxvi; p. 131.) Father Lactantius then quite
correctly, from a clerical viewpoint, defines truth and
superstition, but oddly enough confuses and misapplies the terms so
far as respects the Christian religion: "Truly religion is the
cultivation of the truth, but superstition is that which is false.
... But because the worshippers of the gods imagine themselves to
be religious, though they are superstitious, they are neither able
to distinguish religion from superstition, nor to express the
meaning of the names." (Ib. IV, xxviii; p. 131.)

13. AUGUSTINE (354-430): Bishop of Hippo, in Africa; "Saint,
Doctor of the Church; a philosophical and theological genius of the
first order, dominating, like a pyramid, antiquity and the
succeeding ages. ... Compared with the great philosophers of past
centuries and modern times, he is the equal of them all; among
theologians he is undoubtedly the first, and such has been his
influence that none of the Fathers, Scholastics, or Reformers has
surpassed it." (CE. ii, 84.) This fulsome paean of praise sung by
the Church of its greatest Doctor, justifies a sketch of the fiery
African Bishop and a look into his monumental work, De Civitate Dei
-- "The City of God," written between the years 413-426 A.D. This
will well enough show the quality of mind of the man, a
monumentally superstitious and credulous Child of Faith; and throw
some light on the psychology of the Church which holds such a mind
as its greatest Doctor, towering like a pyramid over the puny
thinkers and philosophers of past centuries and of modern times. We
may let CE. draw the biographical sketch in its own words, simply
abbreviated at places to save space. Augustine's father, Patricius,
was a Pagan, his mother, Monica, a convert to Christianity; when
Augustine was born "she had him signed with the cross and enrolled


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among the catechumens. Once, when very ill, he asked for baptism,
but, all danger being passed, he deferred receiving the sacrament,
thus yielding to a deplorable custom of the times." when sixteen
years old he was sent to Cartage for study to become a lawyer;
"Here he formed a sinful liaison with the person who bore him a son
(372) -- [Adeodatus, "the gift of God"] -- 'the son of his sin' --
an entanglement from which he only delivered himself, at Milan,
after fifteen years of its thralldom." During this time Augustine
became an ardent heretic: "In this same year Augustine fell into
the snares of the Manichaeans. ... Once won over to this sect,
Augustine devoted himself to it with all the ardor of his
character; he read all its books, adopted and defended all its
opinions. His furious proselytism drew into error [several others
named]. it was during this Manichaean period that Augustine's
literary faculties reached their full development." ...

In 383 Augustine, at the age of twenty-nine, went to Italy,
and came to Milan, where he met and fell under the influence of
Bishop Ambrose -- [he who forged the Apostles' Creed]. "However,
before embracing the Faith, Augustine underwent a three years'
struggle. ... But it was only a dream; his passions still enslaved
him. Monica, who had joined her son at Milan, prevailed upon him
[to abandon his mistress]; and though he dismissed the mother of
Adeodatus, her place was soon filled by another. At first he
prayed, but without the sincere desire of being heard. -- [In his
"Confessions" (viii, 17) he addresses God: "Lord, make me pure and
chaste but not quite yet"! Finally he resolved to embrace
Christianity and to believe as the Church believed.] -- The grand
stroke of grace, at the age of thirty-three, smote him to the
ground in the garden at Milan, in 386. ... From 386 to 395
Augustine gradually became acquainted with the Christian doctrine,
and in his mind the fusion of Platonic philosophy with revealed
dogmas was taking place. ... So long, therefore, as his philosophy
agrees with his religious doctrines, St. Augustine is frankly neo-
Platonist; as soon as a contradiction arises, he never hesitates to
subordinate his philosophy to religion, reason to faith! (p. 86)
... He thought too easily to find Christianity in Plato, or
Platonism in the Gospel. Thus he had imagined that in Platonism he
had discovered the entire doctrine of the Word and the whole
prologue of St. John." Augustine was baptized on Easter of 387. He
did not think of entering the priesthood; but being in church one
day at prayer, the clamor of the crowd caused him to yield, despite
his tears, to the demand, and he was consecrated in 391, and
entered actively into the fray. A great controversy arose "over
these grave questions: Do the hierarchical powers depend upon the
moral worth of the priest? How can the holiness of the Church be
compatible with the unworthiness of its ministers? -- [The moral
situation must have been very acute to necessitate such a debate].
In the dogmatic debate he established the Catholic thesis that the
Church, so long as it is upon earth, can, without losing its
holiness, tolerate sinners within its pale for the sake of
converting them" [?] -- or their property.

In the City of God, which "is considered his most important
work," Augustine "answers the Pagans, who attributed the fall of
Rome (410) to the abolition of Pagan worship. In it, considering
the problem of Divine Providence with regard to the Roman Empire,


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in a burst of genius he creates the philosophy of history,
embracing as he does with a glance the destinies of the world
grouped around the Christian religion, the only one which goes back
to the beginning and leads humanity to its final term." (CE. ii,
84-89.) Let us now admire

AUGUSTINE "PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY"

-- whereof, says His present Holiness in a special Encyclical on
the great Philosopher: "The teaching of St. Augustine constitutes
a precious statement of sublime truths.", (Herald-Tribune, Apr. 22,
1930.)

The City of God, by which he intends the Christianized. World
-- City of Rome, is a ponderous tome, which cost Augustine some
thirteen years to write. Like the work of all the Fathers it is an
embellished rehash of the myths of the Old Testament, highly spiced
with "proofs" from the Pagan gods and their prophetic Sibyls, the
same style of exegesis being also used for the Gospels, all of
which he accepts as Gospel truth. He begins his philosophizing of
history by swallowing the "Sacred Science" of Genesis whole; he
entitles a chapter: "Of the Falseness of the History which allots
Many Thousand Years to the World's Past"; and thus sneeringly
dismisses those who knew better: "They are deceived, too, by those
highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of
many thousand years, though reckoning by the sacred writings, we
find that not yet 6,000 years have passed. ... There are some,
again, who are of opinion that this is not the only world, but that
there are numberless worlds." (Civ. Dei, Bk. xii, 10, 11; N&PNF.
ii, 232, 233.) Such persons are not to be argued with but to be
ridiculed: "For as it is not yet 6,000 years since the first man,
who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than
refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of
time so different from, so contrary to, the ascertained truth?"
(Ib. xviii, 40; p. 384.) To prove that "there were giants in those
days," and that the ante-Diluvians were of greater size than men of
his times, he vouches: "I myself, along with others, saw on the
shore at Utica a man's molar tooth of such a size, that if it were
cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have
been made out of it. ... Bones of almost incredible size have been
found by exposure of sepulchres." (xv, 9; p. 291.) And he shows
how, "according to the Septuagint, Methuselah survived the Flood by
fourteen years." (xv, 11; p. 292.) He accepts the earth as flat and
inhabited on the upper side only: "As to the fable that there are
Antipodes, that is to say, men who are on the opposite side of the
earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with
their feet opposite ours, is on no ground credible." (xvi, 9; p.
315.)

Augustine is credited with a scientific leaning towards the
doctrine of Evolution and as recognizing the origin of species; but
some of his species are truly singular, and withal are but
variations from the original divine norm of Father Adam, who is
father of them all. In all soberness, tinged with a breath of
skepticism with respect to some, he thus philosophizes: "It is
reported that some monstrous races of men have one eye in the
middle of the forehead; some, the feet turned backward from the


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heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left
like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth;
others are said to have no mouth. ... They tell of a race who have
two feet but only one leg, and are of marvelous swiftness, though
they do not bend the knee; they are called Skiopedes, because in
the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves
with their feet. Others are said to have no head on their
shoulders. ... What shall we say of the Cynocephali, whose doglike
head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men? But we are
not bound to believe all we hear of these monstrosities. ... But
who could enumerate all the human births that have differed widely
from their ascertained parents? No one will deny that all these
have descended from that one man, ... that one first father of all.
... Accordingly, it ought not to seem absurd to us, that as in the
individual races there are monstrous births, so in the whole race
there are monstrous races; ... if they are human, they are
descended from Adam." (xvi, 8; p. 315.)

It is not alone in the realm of the genus homo that oddities
exist, in the animal world there are some very notable
singularities, for which the Saint vouches with all confidence as
out of his personal knowledge and experience. Several times he
repeats the marvel of the peacock, "which is so favored by the
Almighty that its flesh will not decay," and "which triumphs over
that corruption from which even the flesh of Plato is not exempt."
He says: "It seems incredible, but a peacock was cooked and served
to me in Carthage; and I kept the flesh one year and it was as
fresh as ever, only a little drier." (xxi, 4, 5; pp. 455, 458.) The
now exploded doctrine of abiogenesis was strong with Augustine;
some animals are born without sexual antecedents: "Frogs are
produced from the earth, not propagated by male and female parents"
(xvi, 7; p. 314); "There are in Cappadocia mares which are
impregnated by the wind, and their foals live only three years."
(xxi, 5; p. 456.) There was much question as to the efficacy of
hell-fire in toasting lost souls through eternity. The master
philosopher of all time solves the knotty problem in two chapters,
under the titles: "2. Whether it is Possible for Bodies to last
Forever in Burning Fire," and, "4. Examples from Nature proving
that Bodies may remain Unconsumed and Alive in Fire." In the first
place, before the lamentable Fall of Adam, our own bodies were
imperishable; in Hell we will again get unconsumable bodies: "Even
this human flesh was constituted in one fashion before there was
Sin, -- was constituted, in fact, so that it could not die." (xxi,
8; p. 459.) But there are other proofs of this than theological
say-so, the skeptical may have the proofs with their own eyes in
present-day Nature: "There are animals which live in the midst of
flames. ... The salamander is well known, that it lives in fire.
Likewise, in springs of water so hot that no one can put his hand
in it with impunity, a species of worm is found, which not only
lives there, but cannot live elsewhere. ... These animals live in
that blaze of heat without pain, the element of fire being
congenial to their nature and causing it to thrive and not to
suffer," -- an argument which "does not suit our purpose" on the
point of painless existence in fire of these animals, in which
particular the wisdom of God has differentiated the souls of the
damned, that they may suffer exquisitely forever; in which argument
Augustine implies the doctrine, as feelingly expressed by another


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holy Saint, the "Angelic Doctor" Aquinas: "In order that nothing
may be wanting to the felicity of the blessed spirits in heaven, a
perfect view is granted to them of the tortures of the damned"; all
these holy ones in gleeful praise to God look down at the damned
disbelievers "tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of
the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of
their torment ascendeth for ever and ever; and they have no rest
day nor night." (Rev. xiv., 10, 11.)

In the realm of inorganic nature are many marvels, a long
catalogue of which our philosopher makes, and at several places
repeats; some of these are by hearsay and current report, for which
cautiously he does not vouch the truth; "but these I know to be
true: the case of that fountain in which burning torches are
extinguished, and extinguished torches are lit: and the apples of
Sodom, which are ripe to appearance, but are filled with dust"!
(xxi, 7; p. 458.) The diamond is the hardest known stone; so hard
indeed that it cannot be cut or worked "by anything, except goat's
blood." (p. 455.)

The greatest of Christian Doctors, pyramid of philosophers,
has abiding faith in the reality of the Pagan gods, who, however,
as held by all the Fathers, are really demons or devils; they are
very potent as wonder-workers and magicians. Some of them, however,
are evidently not of a malicious nature: "The god of Socrates. if
he had a god, cannot have belonged to this class of demons." (xiii,
27; p. 165.) Time and again he vouches for and quotes the famous
Hermes Trismegistus, who he assures us was the grandson of the
"first Mercury." (viii, 23, 24; pp. 159, 161.) And for history he
says, that "At this time, indeed, when Moses was born, Atlas is
found to have lived, that great astronomer, the brother of
Prometheus, and maternal grandson of the elder Mercury, of whom
that Mercury Trismegistus was the grandson." (xviii, 39; p. 384.)
Also that "Picus, son of Saturn, was the first king of Argos."
(xviii, 15; p. 368.) He accepts as historic truth the fabulous
founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, their virgin-birth by the
god Mars, and their nursing by the she-wolf, but attributes the
last to the provident interference of the Hebrew God. Some of his
comments might be applicable to One later Virgin-born. "Rhea, a
vestal virgin, who conceived twin sons of Mars, as they will have
it, in that way honoring or excusing her adultery, adding as a
proof that a she-wolf nursed the infants when exposed. ... Yet,
what wonder is it, if, to rebuke the king who had cruelly ordered
them to be thrown into the water, God was pleased, after divinely
delivering them from the water, to succor, by means of a wild beast
giving milk, these infants by whom so great a City was to be
founded?" (xviii, 21; p. 372.)

The great philosopher, at one with Cicero in this respect,
distinguishes between the ancient fables of the gods in an age of
ignorance and superstition, and those true histories of their later
deeds in a time, such as that of the Founding of the City, when
intelligence reigned among men. A singular reversion to the mental
state of the Homeric ages would seem to have come upon men with the
advent of the new Faith. Cicero had related the fables of Homer and
contrasted them with the true history of Romulus and his more
enlightened times, saying: "Homer had flourished long before


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Romulus, and there was now so much learning in individuals, and so
generally diffused an enlightenment, that scarcely any room was
left for fable. For antiquity admitted fables, and sometimes very
clumsy ones; but this age of Romulus was sufficiently enlightened
to reject whatever had not the air of truth"! On this the great
Saint Augustine thus philosophizes, -- accounting, indeed, for the
age-long persistence of all superstitions, as due to inheritance
and early teaching: "But who believed that Romulus was a god except
Rome, which was then small and weak? Then afterwards it was
necessary that succeeding generations should preserve the
traditions of their ancestors; that, drinking in this superstition
with their mother's milk, their nation should grow great and
dominate the world"? (xxii, 6; p. 483.) In likewise it may be
queried: Who believed that Jesus was a virgin-born god except
superstitious Pagans who already believed such things of Romulus,
Apollo, AEsculapius, et id omne genus? and the succeeding
generations, "drawing in this superstition with their mother's
milk," have passed it on through the Dark Ages of Faith even unto
our own day. Even the great St. Jerome has said, that no one would
have believed the Virgin-birth of Jesus or that his mother was not
an adulteress, "until now, that the whole world has embraced the
faith" -- and would therefore believe anything -- except the truth!

All who did not believe such things, when related by the ex-
Pagan Christians, were heretics instigated by the devil; for "the
devil, seeing the temples of the gods deserted, and the human race
running to the name of the living Mediator, has moved the heretics
under the Christian name to resist the Christian doctrine." (xviii,
51; p. 392.) Whether St. Augustine, in his earlier Pagan years,
practiced the arts of magic, as did many of the other ex-Pagan
Christian Fathers, he maintained a firm Christian faith in magic
and magicians, and explains how the gift is acquired. He gives an
account of a remarkable lamp which hung in a temple of Venus in a
great candelabra; although exposed to the open air, even the
strongest winds could not blow out the flame. But that is nothing
strange to the philosophic mind of the Saint: "For to this
[inextinguishable lamp] we add a host of marvels wrought by man, or
by magic, that is, by man under the influence of devils, or by the
devils directly, -- for such marvels we cannot deny without
impugning the truth of the sacred Scriptures we believe. ... Now,
devils are attracted to dwell in certain temples by means of the
creatures who present to them the things which suit their various
tastes. ... The devils cunningly seduce men and make of a few of
them their disciples, who then instruct others. ... Hence the
origin of magic and magicians." (xxi, 6; p. 457.) A most notable
example of magical power is that which transforms men into animals,
sometimes effected by the potent word, sometimes through material
means, as where sundry inn-keepers used to put a drug into food
which would work the transformation of their guests into wild or
domestic animals.

The philosopher Saint vouches for such magical metamorphoses
as of his own knowledge and on unimpeachable authority. At much
length he relates: "A certain man named Praestantius used to tell
that it happened to his father in his own house, that he took that
poison in a piece of cheese, ... and that he had been made a
sumpter horse, and, along with other beasts of burden, had carried


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provisions for the Rhoetian Legion. And all this was found to have
taken place just as he told. ... These things have not come to us
from persons we might deem unworthy of credit, but from informants
we could not suppose to be deceiving us. Therefore, what men say
and have committed to writing about the Arcadians being often
changed into wolves by the Arcadian gods, or demons rather, and
what is told in the song about Circe transforming the companions of
Ulysses, if they were really done, may, in my opinion, have been in
the way I have said -- [that is, by demons through the permission
of God]. ... As for Diomede's birds, that they bring water in their
beaks and sprinkle it on the temple of Diomede, and that they fawn
on men of Greek race and persecute aliens, is no wonderful thing to
be done by the inward influence of demons." (xviii, 18; p. 370.) To
the Saint and to all the Fathers, the air was full of devils: "All
diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to these demons; chiefly
do they torment fresh-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless
new-born infant." (De Divinatione Daemonorum, ch. iii), -- a whole
tome devoted to the prophetic works of the Devil, "after the
working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders," as
avouched in Holy Writ (II Thess. ii, 9); for: "The responses of the
gods are uttered by impure demons with a strong animus against the
Christians." (De Civ. Dei, xix, 23; p. 416.) And no wonder, for "by
the help of magicians, whom Scripture calls enchanters and
sorcerers, the devils could gain such power. ... The noble poet
Vergil describes a very powerful magician in these lines,"
(quoting; xxi, 6; p. 457).

Again, like all the holy Fathers and Popes down at least to
Benedict XIV, elsewhere quoted, the great philosopher and Saint is
a devoted Sibyllist, and frequently quotes and approves the
utterances of these Pagan Seeresses, inspired by the devil through
the permission of the Christian God to reveal the holy mysteries of
the Christian Faith. Augustine devotes a chapter, entitled "Of the
Erythraean Sibyl, who is known to have sung many things about
Christ more plainly than the other Sibyls," to these signal Pagan
proofs of the Christ; and he dwells with peculiar zest on the
celebrated "Fish Anagram." On this theme he enlarges: "This Sibyl
certainly wrote some things concerning Christ which are quite
manifest [citing instances]. ... A certain passage which had the
initial letters of the lines so arranged that these words could be
read in them: 'Iesous Xristos Theou Uios Soter' -- [quoting the
verses at length]. ... If you join the initial letters in these
five Greek words, they will make the word Ixthus, that is, 'fish,'
in which word Christ is mystically understood, because he was able
to live, that is, to exist, without sin, in the abyss of this
mortality as in the depths of water." (xviii, 23; p. 372-3.)

With full faith the great Doctor Augustine accepts the old
fable of the miraculous translation of the Septuagint, and to it
adds some new trimmings betraying his intimate knowledge of the
processes and purposes of God in bringing it about: "It is reported
that there was an agreement in their words so wonderful,
stupendous, and plainly divine, each one apart (for so it pleased
Ptolemy to test their fidelity), they differed from each other in
no word, or in the order of the words; but, as if the translators
had been one, so what all had translated was one, because in very
deed the one Spirit had been in them all. And they received so


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wonderful a gift of God, in order that these Scriptures might be
commended not as human but divine, for the benefit of the nations.
who should at some time believe, as we now see them doing. ... If
anything is in the Hebrew copies and not in the version of the
Seventy, the Spirit of God did not choose to say it through them,
but only through the prophets. But whatever is in the Septuagint
and not in the Hebrew copies, the same Spirit chose rather to say
it through the latter, thus showing that both were prophets."
(xviii, 42, 43; pp. 385-387.) If this latter be true, that some
divine revelation is found in the Septuagint which is not in the
Hebrew, and vice versa how then can it be true, as the Saint has
just said, and as all the Fathers say, that there was perfect
agreement between the Hebrew original and the Greek translations?
If matters in the Hebrew text were omitted in the Greek, then the
inspired truth of God was not in those parts of the original, or
else what was inspired truth in the Hebrew became now false; and if
there was new matter now in the Greek, such portions were not
translation but were interpolations or plain forgeries of the
translators, yet inspired by God. The divine origin of the Hebrew
language, as invented by God for the use of Adam and Eve and their
posterity, is thus fabled by the great Doctor: "When the other
races were divided by their own peculiar languages [at Babel],
Heber's family preserved that language which is not unreasonably
believed to have been the common language of the race, and that on
this account it was henceforth called Hebrew." (p. 122.) As for the
origin of writing, our Saint agrees with St. Chrysostom, St.
Jerome, and other erudite Saints, that "God himself showed the
model and method of all writing when he delivered the Law written
with his own finger to Moses." (White, Warfare of Science against
Theology, ii, 181.)

This greatest philosopher of all time attacks with profound
learning a problem which, he says, he had "previously mentioned,
but did not decide," and he proceeds with acutest wisdom to solve
the question: "Whether angels, inasmuch as they are spirits, could
have bodily intercourse with women?" With all the powers of his
mighty philosophico-clerical mind he reasons on the ethereal nature
of angels, and reaches the conclusion, fortified by many ancient
instances, that they can and do. There are, be points out, "many
proven instances, that Sylvans and Fauns, who are commonly called
'Incubi,' had often made wicked assaults upon women, and satisfied
their lusts upon them: and that certain devils, called Duses by the
Gauls, are constantly attempting and effecting this impurity."
(City of God, xv, 23; p. 303.) As the greatest Doctor and
Theologian of the Church, he discusses weightily what books of
Scripture are inspired and canonical, which are fables and
apocryphal: "Let us omit, then, the fables of those Scriptures
which are called apocryphal. ... We cannot deny that Enoch, the
seventh from Adam, left some divine writings, for this is asserted
by the Apostle Jude in his canonical Epistle"! (Ibid,, p. 305.)
Thus the great Doctor vindicates the potentiality of the Holy
Ghost, in the guise of the angel Gabriel, to maintain carnal
copulation with the "proliferous yet Ever Virgin" Mother of God;
and vouches for the divinity of the crude Jewish forgery of the
Book of Enoch, which is duly canonized as genuine and authentic
work of the mythical Patriarch, by the equally mythical "Apostle"



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author of the forged Epistle of Jude. So great a Doctor of the
Church looks, by now, very much like an extraordinary "quack
doctor" peddler of bogus nostrums.

Such are a few picked from numberless examples of the quasi-
divine wisdom and philosophy of this unparalleled, pyramidal Saint
and Doctor of the Church, who "never hesitated to subordinate his
reason to Faith." Most luminously and profoundly of all the Fathers
and Doctors, Augustine spoke the mind and language of the Church
and of its Pagan-born Christianity; more ably than them all he used
the same methods of propaganda of the Faith among the superstitious
ex-Pagan Christians; with greater authority and effect than all the
others, he exploited the same fables, the same falsehoods, the same absurdities, exhibited to the n-th degree the same fathomless
fatuity of faith and subjugation of reason to credulity.

A final appeal to the Pagan Sibyls and to the fabulous Phoenix
for "proofs" of the Christian mysteries, I add from the famous
forged Constitutions of the Holy Apostles, falsely through the
centuries attributed as the individual and collective inspired work
of the mythic Twelve: "If the Gentiles laugh at us, and disbelieve
our Scriptures, let at least their own prophetess Sibylla oblige
them to believe, who says thus in express words: [quoting]. If,
therefore, this prophetess confesses the Resurrection ... it is
vain for them to deny our doctrine. They say there is a bird single
in its kind which affords a copious demonstration of the
Resurrection. ... They call it a phoenix, and relate [here
repeating the old Pagan fable of the self-resurrecting phoenix].
If, therefore, as even themselves say, a resurrection is exhibited
by means of an irrational bird, wherefore do they disparage our
accounts, when we profess that He who by His power brings that into
being which was not in being before, is able to restore this body,
and raise it up again after its dissolution?" (Apost. Const. V, 1,
vii; ANF. vii, 440-441.)

CHRISTIAN PAGANISM

The whole of Paganism we have seen taken over bodily into
"that new Paganism later called Christianity," by the ex-Pagan
Fathers of the Christ's Church, and all its myths and fables urged
by them as the credible and only "evidence of things not seen" of
the new Faith. What does it all signify for proof of Christian
Truth? "Nothing stands in need of lying but a Lie"; and by that
unholy means we see the holy false new Faith established among the
ignorant and superstitious Pagans.

These sainted ex-Pagan Fathers of Christianity, one and all,
fully and explicitly accepted and believed in childlike simplicity
of faith the reality and potency of their old heathen gods,
reducing them only in immortal rank to demons or devils of
fantastic origin and powers permitted by the One True God to work
true miracles; by their inspired oracles to foretell futurity and
the most sacred mysteries of the Christian faith, and maliciously
to "imitate' -- hundreds of years in advance -- its most holy rites
and sacraments; to endow their votaries with the gift of magic and
the powers of magical practices, -- practices to this day performed
by their priestly successors under more refined euphemisms of
thaumaturgy. To the malignant works of the Devil and the hordes of

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devils the Fathers imputed, and their now-a-day successors yet
impute, the working of mighty lying wonders designed to thwart, and
often very effective in "queering" the inscrutable plans and
providences of their Almighty God. "When pious Christians,"
mordantly says Middleton, "are arrived at this pitch of Credulity,
as to believe that evil spirits or evil men can work real miracles,
in defiance and opposition to the authority of the Gospels, their
very piety will oblige them to admit as miraculous whatever is
wrought in the defense of it, and so of course make them the
implicit dupes of their wonder-workers." (A Free Inquiry, p. 71.)

This review of the ex-Pagan Fathers of Christ's True Church is
made at some length because of its capital, fatal importance to the
notion of the "authority," veracity and credibility of these the
sole witnesses and vouchers for the pretended truth and validity of
the new faith, and the "Gospel" wonders reputed as having occurred
a century and more before their times, and for the foundation of
the Church and the miraculous fundamentals of the Christian
religion. Fabling, false and fatuous in point of every single
pretended "proof" which they offer for Christianity, in every
respect fatal to their intelligence, their intellectual honesty,
their common veracity and general and particular credibility with
respect to matters both natural and supernatural -- How can they be
believed as to the miracles and miraculous and incredible basic
"truths" of Christianity? False in one thing, false and discredited
in all, must be the verdict of every one concerned to know the
truth of the new Faith sponsored and established alone through the
mongering of Pagan myths of these fatuous, childishly credulous,
unscrupulous ex-Pagan Fathers of Christianity. They knew not fable
from fact, and scrupled not to assert fable for fact, recklessly
lying to the greater glory of God and glorification of themselves
and their Paganized Church, in the name of Divinely revealed Truth
of God. But, as we have seen, there can be no "divine revelation"
of fanciful "fact" and dogma which for centuries had been, and in
the early Christian ages were, the current mythology of credulous
Pagandom. Thus the system of veneered Paganism which the ex-Pagan
Fathers revamped under the name of Christianity, cannot be true; by
a thousand tokens and tests of truth it is not true.

In the words of Macbeth is the whole mythical scheme to be
appraised, and adjudged -- and junked:

"...... It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing!"

But -- "What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!"

Our review of the fabling forging Fathers of Christianity
brings us through, the epoch of the establishment of Christianity
-- the whole of the second and third centuries of the Christ, --
the epoch (in the latter half of the second), when the forged
"Gospel" biographies of the Demiurge-Christ, and the forged
Epistles of the Apostles, were, out of hundreds of like pious
Christian forgeries, worked into shape and put into circulation by
the growing Churches zealously gathering swarms of illiterate and
superstitious ex-Pagan "converts" into the Fold of Christ. With
Eusebius and Lactantius, contemporaries and retainers of the

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"Christian" Constantine, we see the official "triumph" of
Christianity in the early fourth century; with the Sainted
Augustine, late in the fourth and early in the fifth centuries, we
see the new Faith, by dint of Christian persecuting laws and of
patristic lying, well established in the Empire, -- "the human race
running to the name of the living Mediator," but yet, at the
instigation of the Devil, disturbed and threatened with extinction
by the Christian "heretics," of whom Augustine says there were
ninety-three warring sects up to his time; and against whom this
great Doctor and Saint produced that fearful text of the Wedding
Feast, "Compel them to come in," and that other fatal bloody
precept of the Christ: "Those mine enemies, which would not that I
should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me," --
murderous slogans of the Church Persecutrix which bloodily carried
it to final triumph through a thousand years of the Dark Ages of
Faith, as we shall soon see.

Others of the noted Fathers of the epochs under review will be
noticed as the occasion arises. There are many of them; the four
"great Latin Fathers ... are undoubtedly Sts. Augustine, Jerome,
Ambrose, and Gregory the Great"; died 604. (CE. vi, 1.) Vast is
their output of puerile superstition and pettifogging dialectic, of
which we have seen but some random examples. The overwhelming
volume of patristic palaver of nonsense is evidenced by the "Migne
Collection." of their writings, which comprises 222 ponderous tomes
in Latin and 161 in Greek. (CE. vi, 16.)

In the next chapter we shall consider the "canonical" Gospels
and Epistles, and the palpable convincing and convicting evidences
of their forgery by the priests and Fathers -- original forgeries
themselves with multiplied forged "interpolations" or purpose-
serving later additions to each of the original sacred forgeries.

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You are reading
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
by
Joseph Wheliss
1930

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