Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
The Bible comprises a Hebrew portion—the Old Testament, called by the Jews, the scriptures—and a Christian portion—the New Testament—both of which are accepted by Christians as inspired, it being popularly supposed that the New Testament contains the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old.
The most important theme of the Old Testament is that of the Creation and the Fall of Man, and the leading topic of the New is the career of the Christian Saviour. In the creation stories of the Old Testament, the first man, Adam, disobeyed God who cursed him and his offspring in His anger, introducing sin into the world—called original sin. To lift the curse, that He himself placed on mankind, God had to manifest himself on earth in His aspect of the Son and be sacrificed, thereby propitiating the sin committed at the beginning of human history—though not everyone's but only those who believe unquestioningly the fancies of the Christians. Christians have to hang on to these interesting but primitive Jewish legends to justify their God's sacrifice, which otherwise is inexplicable. To do so they assert that the whole of the Bible is the infallible or, at least, the inspired word of God.
Yet, the idea that the Bible is inspired by an almighty god does not bear examination. How can any writing claim to be the infallible word of God and yet contain false statements and be self-contradictory, yet the Bible suffers both these errors of fallibility. When errors occur in any one particular, they cannot be discounted elsewhere and everything must be verified. Then our confidence has evaporated and the whole theory of inspiration is vitiated. The Bible not only makes mistakes in matters of Nature but it puts forward, in the first and second chapters of Genesis, two contradictory accounts of the Creation which disagree in nearly every detail. The more one reads the Bible critically, the more convinced one is of its lack of authority and educational value. To be divinely inspired, the reader had a right to be sure it was unimpeachable in history and logic, so that no doubt could have arisen.
Every sane person today accepts the theory of Copernicus that the sun is the centre of our planetary system. But until only a few hundred years ago Christianity taught that the earth was the centre of our system of planets, and that the sun rose and set daily over it. The Catholic church, by order of its Congregation of the Holy Office, burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for supporting the Copernican theory, the reason being that it was contrary to the Bible and for suggesting that the Bible did not contain the whole of science. In 1616 Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition, and silenced by threats. At the age of seventy he wrote a book in which he proved the truth of the Copernican theory. Clerics made him kneel and swear with his hands on the gospels that the earth did not move round the sun, and that he would never again spread this damnable heresy. The church made the mistake of condemning and even murdering men who proposed what is now known to be true. In so doing it asserted that the Copernican theory ran counter to the science of the Bible. In short the Bible is wrong! Plainly, in this instant, it was not inspired.
If we are born tainted with original sin and it is removable, any just god would have granted us all with unequivocal instructions on its removal, so clear that defiance of them would be the wilful act of those who chose a sinful life. Instead we have stories of miracles performed where they were not needed and not performed where they would have helped. If a miracle was worked for the trifle of providing wine for a wedding, surely we could expect a miracle which would clearly delineate the path of salvation for people innocent of the sin of Adam. We do not get one, and are returned to the arbitrary salvation offered by Paul—those are saved who believe! Thus we are left to gamble on the mode of our redemption from a sin which we did not commit, but might yet incur the penalty for.
Books once included in the sacred collections of the early churches are now cast into outer darkness. Is this God's doing? The divine message has been inscribed on old skins from which pagan writings had been partly erased so that the Word of God could be written on them by Christian pens. If paganism was wrong, did God allow mankind to be misled? If it was all that wrong, why is much of it adapted for use in Christianity and not treated with disgust? None of this reflects divine behaviour, unless God is as indecisive and sadistic as men. All of it cries out that one set of priests seeking power over people's destinies have succeeded in ousting an earlier group.
Look at the attitude which God adopts towards the human race which he created! On the day of vengeance Jesus would return on clouds of glory and supervise the judgement of God. Judgement! Vengeance! A revengeful God will administer justice upon the hapless creatures because of the guilt of Adam and Eve. Why? God could have mercifully prevented the birth of any of us, we are told, to save us this punishment. It is just as well that His watch is not too accurate because Jesus promised the day of vengeance would dawn before some of his followers tasted death. Two thousand years later we still wait, but two billion Christians seem happy that God has a faulty timepiece.
Pre-exilic Jews did not have their Bibles as Christians now have. In the reign of Josiah, about 100 years before the captivity, the Bible suggests there was only one copy of the Law of Moses in the whole of Judah. It was neither read nor even consulted by them, for when Hilkiah the priest accidentally found a copy in a the builders rubbish of the Temple (2 Kings 22:8), it was announced as a wonderful discovery, but it was afterwards destroyed by fire. All that the Jews knew about Moses and his religion they learnt from hearsay, just as the Greeks and Romans knew about their mythology.
It was a system practised by their priests. Ezra, in the apocryphal 2 Esdras 14, was the only man who knew the books of the law by heart. After the return from captivity in Babylon he had to retire to a field for forty days to dictate the five books of Moses and other books totalling over 200, aided by five scribes and by drinking a cup of some strong liquor of the substance of water and the colour of fire! Moses and Joshua could not have been the authors of the books attributed to them, for they describe their own deaths. Here it is being admitted that the books of the scriptures were re-written by the priests who returned from captivity, Ezra being the head of a priestly school.
During the period of captivity the Jews must have lost much of their own tradition, and taken in much of their sophisticated conquerors'. Ezra must have been born in captivity in Babylon and when he returned could not resist improving the old Jewish legends he had learnt with some of the wondrous tales they had heard in Babylon. The returning priests had the chance to set up a temple as significant for Jews as the Tower of Babel was to the Eastern Semites, and a sinecure for themselves and their descendants that would last for millennia. They therefore rewrote the old stories emphasizing God's priesthood.
The Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, like modern Hebrew, written from right to left, on rough skins in ink. It was glossed in different inks and languages and eventually became almost obliterated by age. The writing consisted of badly formed capital letters only, with no vowels, stops or division into words by spaces. There were originally about 150 books like this, supposed to have been inspired by the spirit of God. Fifty-three, including the Pentateuch or five books of Moses, were formerly considered by the Christian church as canonical. In 1380 AD fourteen were deemed as uncanonical and classed as apocryphal by Wycliffe—the Reformer and Bible translator. These fourteen books were omitted from the Protestant Bibles, though considered useful for example of life and instruction of manners. Many of the other old writings are now lost.
The books of the New Testament were written on papyrus in Greek, also in capital letters with no divisions between words, though the original Matthew was possibly written in Aramaic. Twenty-seven books are now considered to be canonical, but there were sixty-one others now classed as apocryphal. Twelve were excluded at first, but afterwards received as canonical.
Out of 182 works accepted for centuries as the genuine writings of Christians during the first 180 years of the present era, only twelve are now accepted by theologians as genuine. The other 170 books were not noticed as forgeries by the Holy Ghost and yet were believed by poor, undiscerning Christians. The manufacture of some of these manuscripts probably took place at the great monastery at Mount Athos, in Salonica, where about 60,000 monks were employed in religious composition. Christians today are even more prolific, writing vast numbers of tomes all professing to clarify something, but most of it tosh.
The first that we know of the four Christian gospels is in the time of Irenaeus, who, in the second century, intimates that he has received four gospels as authentic scriptures. Irenaeus was himself a pious forger and possibly the editor of John's Gospel. Three accounts are given of how the books which now appear in the New Testament were chosen.
The Jewish scriptures have been manipulated to induce the reader to believe that the Jews were always monotheists or worshippers of one God only and Christians have naturally, as monotheists, carried on the tradition. The Jews came to call their god Yehouah, usually written YHWH, which does not convey any idea of the Hebrew pronunciation, though Jews were not allowed to say the ineffable name and used other words instead. Christian Bibles consider no name necessary for God because they have no need to distinguish Him from any other god and prefer to translate YHWH as the Lord or simply God.
Other Semites worshipped Yehouah pronouncing it as Yahu, or Yho, but Yehouah held only a subordinate position in the general mythology of the Semites and is famous only because he was the father god of the Children of Israel and therefore of the Christians.
In the reign of the Assyrian King Sargon II. the throne of Hamath was occupied by Yahou-Behdi, which name literally means the Servant of Yehouah. The Phoenicians venerated this deity also, for in the inscriptions of Assurbanipal, another Assyrian King, the name of the crown-prince of Tyrenus is given as Yahu-melek—Yehouah is my King. On a coin from Gaza of the fourth century BC is a figure of a deity in a chariot of fire, over whose head is written Yho in old Phoenician characters.
Any honest translation makes it glaringly plain that Jews were not always monotheistic—if they actually are now since they, and Christians believe in Angels and Demons and what are they if not gods? Indeed the two angels, who appeared to Lot in the city of Sodom, are, in the original text, gods. Elohim, literally the gods, is deliberately mistranslated God, and YHWH Elohim is given as Lord God when Yehouah of the gods or the gods of Yehouah would be more precise. Adam's demon-wife, Lilith, has been suppressed in Isaiah 34:14, where she is reduced to the night monster. Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter because she came to greet him, confirms that the Israelites accepted the existence of other gods, arguing with the Amorites in Judges 11:24 that every nation is entitled to what its national God bestows upon it.
Psalm 68 is positively a song to the Sun-God! It begins: Let the Mighty One arise (misleadingly rendered Let God arise), and bids all inferior creatures cast up a highway for him that rideth through the heavens (not deserts) by his name Jah. The frequent references to sun gods under various names are all disguised by the Bible. Names used for the Hebrew sun god are Shaddai, sometimes preceded with the prefix El, Bel, the Babylonian sun god and Baal, the Syrian sun god. The title Adonai, the Phoenician name for the sun god, when it occurs singly, is translated the Lord but, when it is met with in conjunction with YHWH or Elohim, it is given as the Lord God. Psalm 110:1 says: YHWH said to Adonai—which should be translated: Yehouah said to our Sun-God—Sit at my right hand. The popular deity of Thebes, Amen-Ra (the hidden sun), is met frequently. It is often translated as The God of Truth as in Isaiah 65:16 or as Amen (Truly) as in Psalm 89:46. In Revelation written of course in Greek the word is written with Ho prefixed, yielding The Amen, a senseless expression if truly is meant but not if the meaning is The God Amun. In Rev. 3:14 we ought to read: These things, saith Amun, the true and faithful witness.
The translators of the Revised Bible admit the word Ashera or Asherah to be consistently wrongly rendered grove in the authorized version. Why? Because the Ashera was an upright stone used as a Phallic symbol in some fertility rite. The idea connected with the word Jesus in its Semitic original, as in the Arabian fertility god Is, was Phallic vigour.
Of course sensible people will see that in ancient times the Jews worshipped the sun god and other gods and then later used various of their names for their adopted single God. But that is accepting that earlier Jews did not have this monotheistic God as their god and so the long history of His plan for His chosen people is shown to be false.
Almost all of the stories of saints and martyrs which are treasured in the Roman Church are forgeries. Even some Roman Catholic scholars concur. Most non-Catholic historians agree that all the documents on which the power of Rome is based are forgeries.
Christians and Jews say they were religious men and the charge insults them. But even Protestant preachers accuse, not merely religious men, but ministers of the Christian gospel of hundreds of forgeries. From the sixth to the twelfth century Roman priests poured upon Europe a flood of forgeries, much to their own profit.
The Jewish priests had done the same thing a thousand years before. The Word of God a forgery! God cannot forge books. Men forged a book in God's name.
Many books of the Old Testament pretend to be written by men who did not write them. Many books were deliberately written as history when the writers knew that they were not history. The present Old Testament as a whole is a deliberate attempt to convey an historical belief which the writers knew to be false.
A Christian professor diplomatically admitted that the writers of the Old Testament displayed
the workings of a primitive nature
in their
mode of regarding the facts.
He means they were lying. Consequently the historian has a hard job
to remove the materials of his story out of the false light in which he finds them.
He means it is hard to accept them as being true. He must
constantly bear in mind the peculiarities of the narrative, their legendary character, their conformity to a scheme, and their didactic purpose.
He means that these polite paraphrases must serve to excuse what plain men call forgery or lies.
Another Christian says that
the imaginative element in the story of David is but the vesture which half conceals, half discloses, certain facts treasured in popular tradition.
He means the history of David is a myth. A similar circumlocution by a Christian dignitary regarding the story of Abraham is that the biblical history of the patriarch is a tissue of
legends purified both by abridgement and expansion.
Another Christian excuse for the scriptural lies is that the early historical writers of the Old Testament were honest collectors of stories, but that later books were put together by the
mere literary process of conflation and contamination.
The scribes
combined different copies according to their own judgement and interests,
to give us
a different religious point of view
—a view which is false—but the scribes merely acted
in a prophetic spirit.
In the end another set of writers recast the whole of these honest legends and dishonest contaminations, and added a vast amount of new matter, expressly ascribing it to Moses, for which they probably had no sources except their imagination and interests. The result is our Old Testament.
A Cambridge professor writing about Jews says:
Written by Oriental people, clothed in an Oriental dress, the Old Testament does not contain objective records,
but
subjective history for specific purposes.
Would a court accept that a witness's statements were sound "subjective history for a specific purpose" as a defence against perjury? He assures us:
Scholars are now almost unanimously agreed
on these manipulations.
The Higher Criticism has brought into relief the central truths which really are vital. The Old Testament gradually evolved from the tenth to the second century, and in its present form is mainly a fifth and fourth century compilation so distorting the facts that after a hundred and fifty years scholars have yet to get them straight.
The Book of Daniel claims throughout that it was written by Daniel himself. I Daniel occurs in every chapter. The Protestant Reverend Professor Sayce, a vigorous opponent of Higher Criticism, declares that Daniel is not historical in the modern sense of the word history! The only sense of the word history he could mean is that it is myth.
The Persians had adopted the Babylonian custom of writing on clay, then baking the brick or tablet, and such documents last forever. Recovered tablets of the great Persian king Cyrus can be compared with the words of Daniel,
In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain, and Darius the Median took the kingdom.
The tablets of Cyrus describe the taking of Babylon and show:
The man who wrote Daniel, and pretended to be alive in 539 BC when Babylon fell, did not live until three or four centuries later. The book is full of errors, as we find by authentic documents and by reading the real Babylonian names on the tablets.
Now why did the writer do it, and what was his object? Quite clearly he wanted to convince the Jews that Yehouah would miraculously protect any Jews who refused to obey a sacrilegious king. And this gives us the clue to the date. It was in the second century BC, when the Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to compel the Jews to break their law. A pious Jew, probably a priest, then wrote this book: very clumsily, as in the course of three centuries the facts and names had been forgotten. Now we have recovered the real contemporary documents, and there is no room for dispute.
Christians say those who talk of forgery do not know the Oriental mind which is different from ours today. It was a work of edification, one of the hagiographs or holy writings.
The Oriental loves stories, but has as keen a sense as any of the difference between stories and sacred history. Tell an Oriental Moslem that the things said about the Prophet in the Quran were subjective history with a specific purpose, he would be insulted. Moslems believe it to be Allah's exact word. The same is true here. Daniel pretended to be history. Otherwise it would have had no effect. It is a forgery.
Ezra, Tobit and Judith, the latter are in the Catholic Bible, are the same.
The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions has finally destroyed all claim on the part of the Books of Tobit and Judith to be considered as history.
They too are ancient Jewish forgeries. Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are also the same. Sayce also decisively proved that Genesis is a compilation of Babylonian legends ascribed to Moses!
There are two chief ways of detecting these forgeries: the style of the documents and the testimony of other and undisputed documents.
The first method has been much ridiculed by pious people. On the orthodox theory, the Old Testament was written at different periods during more than a thousand years. Yet there is no language that does not change in the course of centuries. People today find it almost impossible to read the earliest English literature and most can see that English as late as the eighteenth century is different from the way in which we write it today. Literary experts have learnt how to date books easily from their style.
So we can with Hebrew. The writing of the Old Testament is believed by Christians and Jews to cover at least seven hundred years. And this is the simple method of the Higher Critics, which preachers who do not know a word of Hebrew and could not even themselves read the English of Chaucer, ridicule. This method confidently shows us fragments of different ages in the Old Testament put together at a far later date. Further, we find inconsistencies, contradictions, and duplications which cannot otherwise be explained. Now, in addition, we have a very great deal of history and archeology by which we can check the Old Testament.
Whole books of the Old Testament like Daniel are in modern terms forgeries. Jews twenty centuries ago believed the events they described had actually happened—they believed they were historical! If they had known they were not written by the prophets they revered, they also would have called them forgeries. Why should anyone, Oriental or otherwise, be impressed that a god could do wonderful things in a work of fiction. Fiction was represented as fact—as a speudepigraph.
The orthodox believe the Old Testament to be, and it professes to be, a set of books which appeared at intervals, with divine inspiration, during a thousand years of Jewish history. Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Judges, Kings, Psalms and Chronicles go back to the times they describe. The Prophets were added from the ninth century onward. Yet no part of the Old Testament, as we have it, is older than the ninth century. After the return of the Ezra school from exile in the fifth century, all the older books and fragments were combined together into the Old Testament as it appears today, and were drastically re-written to yield Hebrew history which is not true.
The Jewish priests did it. Their aim was to represent the Jewish priesthood and its rights and customs to have been established in the days of Moses. Few scholars dissent. So the priests were forgers.
A priestly group in Babylon, using some old material, fabricating new, and perverting the entire history of the cult and the priesthood, made a priestly code and ascribed it to Moses. Is that forgery? The standard opinion is also that in Jerusalem they combined this code, again falsifying the historical facts, with the older existing writings and made the Pentateuch essentially as we hove it.
As to Ezra, remember that he was not only a zealous priest but
a ready scribe in the law of Moses (Ezra 7:6).
In an apocryphal work (1 Esdras 14:22), we find:
I [Ezra] shall write all that hath been done in the world since the beginning and the things that were written in thy law.
He and his school did just that. The old Hebrews, admitting that he wrote the whole Pentateuch, used to say that he had revelation to help him. Christians say he had a mysterious source of old history which he worked up and made to serve his purpose. This book made the priesthood all-powerful for the first time in Judaea.
Now let us examine the Pentateuch, or Five Books with which the Old Testament opens. The belief that Moses wrote them is a statement in Kings, Chronicles and Ezra—all very late books—in which the forgers say that Moses wrote them.
The first page of the Bible is in flat contradiction to what every educated person now knows: and even Christian scholars admit that the early chapters of Genesis are modifications of Babylonian legends.
No one now attempts to reconcile Genesis and science. The Hebrew text is neither poetic nor accurate.
There is first a dark chaos, created by God. Apologists tell us that science has come to a similar conclusion—everything in the universe began as chaos. It is not so but whether Genesis reflects science or not, to a non-believer it is a puzzle why God should have created matter in a chaotic state and then, in six days put it in order. The creative word could have made the universe orderly in the first place. The Hebrew for the chaos is tohu wah tohu, which is plainly a primitive people's corruption of the Babylonian tiamat, the original chaos. To the learned Babylonian, the first state of things was a watery waste, land and water mixed up together, and the gods had first to separate them. The Hebrew follows the Babylonian legend in all that it says.
In fact science is not in harmony with Genesis. The order of creation: (1) light, (2) division of water from the sky or firmament, (3) division of land from water and creation of plants (including fruit trees), (4) appearance of the sun and moon, (5) production of birds from the water and (6) production of reptiles (after birds) and mammals and man is quite silly. The second chapter of Genesis is worse, contradicting the first by creating of man, then trees, then mammals and finally woman.
The only agreement with science, and this is undone by the second chapter, is that the grass was created before the cattle, which eat it, and the cattle before the man, who eats them. Does one need inspiration to guess that?
The Bible puts creation about 4000 BC. Some Christians admit that, as science claims, the earth is more than a billion years old. Why then are they contradicting God's word? Go through the Bible noting the age of each patriarch and trace through the generations, and find that the Bible does date creation about 6000 years ago!
There is the lovely Garden of Eden—the Babylonian Edin or plain—and the madly unjust story of the curse of the whole human race for the sin of two people. It is a Babylonian story; and the Hindus, Egyptians, and others had the same story. As to Noah and the Flood, every theologian in the world has thrown up the sponge on this early idea of divine justice. It is all in the Babylonian tablets, even down to such details as the sending out of the dove and the raven and the resting of the ark on a high mountain.
The story of Babel also is a legend of which we have traces in Babylonia. God gets jealous of man's progress in civilization. Man has built a city, which is clearly Babylon, as Christians admit, and a tower which means one of the stepped temples of Babylonia—the ziggurats. The story is a primitive attempt to explain how men came to speak different languages.
No scholar questions the Babylonian origin of the Genesis legends. The Jews probably adopted these legends during the captivity. No one can read the Babylonian originals and doubt the source of the early chapters of Genesis.
Clergymen say that the inspiration is the change from polytheism to monotheism. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, is said to rise high above all ancient literature. Yet in the Babylonian legend, one god also puts chaos in order and creates the world—Marduk—and monotheism was established in Egypt centuries before a line of the Old Testament was written.
The story of Abraham is very simple. His original name was Abram and he lived in Ur of the Chaldees but God called him and changed his name to Ab-ra-ham, which is the Hebrew for Father of many peoples.
In fact, no Hebrew scholar can make Abraham mean anything. It has no meaning in Hebrew. It therefore does not mean Father of many peoples. Abram may have come from Ur but it was not a city of the Chaldees until about 1000 BC which proves that the legend was written at a later date by the priests.
If Abram means anything it is something like great father. Late in Jewish history he began to be regarded as the ancestor of the people, but Christians say this grew out of genuine tradition about him. This is proved, they say, by archaeological discoveries which have confirmed the names of certain kings in the story of Abraham.
This illustrates why critics of the clergy call them dishonest. Of the entire story of Abram only the fact that three or four kings mentioned are now known to have really existed is confirmed. It would follow only that there was an ancient legend about Abram, but of the whole supernatural story about him there is not a tittle of confirmation. A few names of kings, or alliances, or battles in many centuries are confirmed, a vast amount is disproved. In honesty only the view of the Old Testament as a fabrication in the fifth century which included some older writings based on tribal traditions is confirmed.
One of the royal names discovered is King Hammurabi of Babylon. Christians tell us Amraphel in the Abram story is obviously the same person! Well, actually, it is not obvious. It is an ancient Canaanitish narrative which shows us Abram as a valiant nomadic chieftain perhaps originally a god. The Hebrews, who came later to Canaan, appropriated the legend, made this valiant Bedouin adventurer an ancestor of their race, and the priests later decorated this scanty story with a supernatural halo.
Joseph is the next outstanding historical character in the Jewish scriptures. Joseph retires with the Khabiri chieftain into the very dim mists of ancient legend. In Genesis 41:43 Joseph was set high and the Egyptian people called before him, Bow the knee. This is a fanciful rendering of a word which the translators did not understand. Sayce tells us the word is a Babylonian title of honour! Strange, isn't it, to find an Egyptian crowd talking Babylonian?
It takes a long time for discoveries to reach the faithful. The story of Potiphar's wife has so close a parallel in an Egyptian story that it is, according to Sayce, impossible not to see the connexion.
Scholars found the Orbiney Papyrus, now in the British Museum at London, in 1852. In it two brothers lived together. They were working together in the field one day, and the elder, who was married, sent the younger back to the house for some seed. The elder's wife, had had her eye on the younger for some time, said: Come let us lie together for an hour. That will be pleasant for you, and I will make fine clothes for you. The blushing youth indignantly refused, and fled: which says much for the morals of ancient Egyptian youth. So the wife, to protect herself, told people he had tried to seduce her, and when her husband came home, she accused the younger brother of saying to her: Let down thy hair, and let us lie together for an hour. And the elder slew the younger brother.
Compare Genesis 39 with this. Joseph went to his master's house to do his business, and, as there was no one else there but the wife, she caught him by his garment, saying: Lie with me. He refused, and she turned the tables on him, as in the Egyptian tale.
The Pentateuch is supposed to have been written by Moses, before the Israelites had entered Canaan. Yet it contains phrases like the Canaanite dwelled then in the land (Gen 12:6;13:7) and before there reigned any king over the children of Israel (Gen 36:31) which must have been written after Moses's death when the land had been entered, the Canaanites had been evicted and there were kings in Israel. Moreover, nearly every occurrence from the creation of the world to the death of Moses is related to us twice, and in some cases three times.
The writer of Joshua, who never pretends to be Joshua, often says that a thing goes on unto this day (Josh 9:27;15:63). In 24:31 he intimates that he is writing at least after the death of the eldest person who had known Joshua. There are the same doubles and contradictions. The Samaritans did not accept the book, so it is a priestly fifth century forgery.
Judges, Samuel and Kings have all the same faults. The plain truth is that we cannot by independent authority prove a single statement of any importance in the history of the Jews until their history is no longer miraculous. Even the latest historical works are a series of forgeries including, in a changed form, ancient otherwise lost traditions .
In 1 Chronicles 24:7 money is paid or valued in darics, coins of the Persian Darius. It must have been written after 520 BC, the first year of Darius I. In 1 Chronicles 3:19 six generations had elapsed since Zerubbabel, so the book must have been written about 400 BC. In Nehemiah 12:1-26 is a list of names to the time of Alexander the Great (d 323 BC). Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah must be forgeries of the fourth century, possibly using older sources but giving a totally revised version of the events.
Checked by the statements of the really contemporary prophets Haggai and Zechariah, Ezra and Nehemiah are full of purposive misstatements. The editors own contributions are agreed to be largely inventions, especially what they say about the return of the Jews from Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple. Zechariah plainly shows that the exiles were still in Babylonia when the temple was rebuilt, yet the authorof Ezra gives us a glowing description of 42,360 Jews, with 7,337 servants, two hundred singing men and women, and great troops of horses and treasures of gold. Only about 4,000 men had been deported. We are asked to believe that in two generations they grew, on the fertile plains of Babylon, to 42,360 and the thousands more who never returned. In those days a population took several centuries to double!
The value of the history of Ezra, was bringing out the real law of Moses. No serious scholar doubts that it was written in Babylon by the priests.
Experts assure us that much of the Old Testament history has been discredited. The books are a tissue of inventions, expansions, conflations, or recensions dating centuries after the events.
A prophet in old days was not a man who predicted, but a man who refused to call a forgery a recension. They were men who spoke out, as Jeremiah did about Hilkiah's pious fraud. They called a whore a whore.
The modern interest in the prophets is the supposition that they made remarkable predictions. These supposed predictions have been thoroughly annihilated.
The works of the original prophets, if they existed in written form, were edited like all the other scriptural literature. The prophecies were mainly written after the event. Sometimes the prophecy was a reference to the past as when Isaiah wrote descriptions of the Servant of God, regarded as predictions about Christ, and are really of Moses.
Occasionally the predictions were shrewd forecasts. The correct predictions have been emphasized, and the failed ones ignored. Sometimes they are wrongly translated, as in the famous Behold a virgin will conceive. The Hebrew word is not virgin but girl, and conception by a girl was not miraculous even in ancient Judaea.
The prophets were men who spoke out, the real meaning of the word. The prophet regarded himself as a very superior person, and was very dirty. From the prophets of Arabia, apparently, he borrowed the habit of dressing in a mantle of goat's hair and having mystic marks on his forehead.
Now and again one rose to high fame and founded a school in the wild mountains. Such was Elijah. There is, the experts say probably a basis of fact in the story of Elijah and Elisha, but we can't disentangle it as
the interests of the prophetic order led to some unhistoric fictions and exaggerations.
They were not forgeries, though!
Amos and Hosea were the first and, naturally enough, they are the crudest and most poetic. But Amos and Hosea are morally crude in the same proportion. Amos, who seems to have been active about 750 BC, was a sheep trader. The great sin is what the translators honestly call whoredom. Judaea was full of whores, in spite of polygamy and concubinage. And, figuratively, the great collective sin of the nation was whoredom—a courting of false gods, whose existence is not denied. The Hebrews had to have Monotheism drilled into them.
Hosea, who was active in the northern kingdom about the same time, or about 750 to 725, is a shade worse. The call of Yehouah to him was:
Take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom, for the land doth commit great whoredom.
He literally obeyed the divine command, and learned to love the girl, a metaphor for Israel and her sins. For centuries Christians have taken it that all ancient people were thoroughly immoral, even God's own people neededing stern lessons from time to time. Yet Egypt was then as moral as the Bible belt is today, and, in Babylon, they drowned people for adultery. Hosea ends, however, with a really fine bit of poetry.
To read the Bible intelligently, you must read the books in their chronological order.Read first Amos, then Hosea, then Isaiah, who seems to have been called about 740 BC.
However, the Book of Isaiah is, apart from later manipulations, the work of two totally different writers, separated from each other by two centuries. The real Isaiah seems to have been a man of good social position and education, and keenly interested in politics. He was pro-Assyrian, and he was opposed by the pro-Egyptians at court. His opponents won, and Judaea cast off its allegiance to Assyria and turned to Egypt. Isaiah gave a reasonable forecast, touched up later, of the punishment of Judaea by the Assyrians.
Toward the close of the exile in Babylonia, some other Jew continued, or imitated, the prophecy of Isaiah. He predicted the exile. He forged a prediction in the name of Isaiah, for the text shows when he was writing. He predicts a terrible destruction of Babylon, which was taken peacefully, by the Medes, who did not actually take it. Babylon was in Isaiah's time not the enemy of Judaea. He must have written during the captivity, but before Cyrus appeared. His language and religious ideas are quite different from those of Isaiah, but the two have been pieced together in one book. The scholars call him Deutero-Isaiah, which means Second Isaiah
The second major prophet is Jeremiah. He is described as one of the gentlest of men though he told Hilkiah in very good Hebrew that his new book was a lie. Judaea was still so wicked and perverse that the pessimism of the prophets touches its deepest note in Jeremiah. These prophecies took the same general shape. The Jews were going to be fearfully punished—rebels generally were in those days—but the Lord would some day rehabilitate them. There is still time for the fulfillment of the latter part. Jeremiah was the son of a priest, and was called in the year 626 BC.
Micah is supposed to have been a contemporary of Isaiah but his work is hopelessly adulterated.
Ezekiel was a priest, of the sterner type, and was probably deported to Babylonia.
Joel, Malachi and Obadiah are fifth or fourth century forgeries. Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah are very unimportant dervishes of the seventh century. Haggai and Zechariah prove that Esra is a liar.
The Psalms are called The Psalms of David and Christians believe or pretend they really were written by King David, as in the close of Ps. 72. There is not a scholar in the world who now believes that any of them were composed by David. Internal evidence and the language itself show that they are a collection of songs or chants composed mainly five to seven hundred years after the time of David. As early as the second century BC, it was a much disputed question amongst the Jews whether David was really the author. Now every Fundamentalist in the USA is sure that he was.
The psaltery was a Jewish stringed instrument and song or hymn sung played on it was a psalm. Songs composed for wedding feasts were sung to the psaltery and some of the psalms (such as 45) were poems to be sung at a royal marriage festival. Psalms is an anthology of Jewish poetry. Some psalms are taken word for word from Samuel. Others (such as 20, 21, 61, 63, etc.) are actually addressed to the king, and it was always quite absurd to suggest that the author of these was David or Solomon. Psalm 104, taken bodily from the Egyptian liturgy, is the only one that could possibly go back in parts to the time of David.
Some of the psalms, in particular, are so crude and bloody in their sentiments that the Church of England has debated in solemn conferences whether it ought not to omit them from its services.
Ecclesiastes is one of the strangest books that was ever included in a sacred collection. The author is an Epicurean philosopher. He believes in God, but is an Agnostic as to a future life. Over and over again he expresses his skepticism, so that the one verse which does profess belief in a future life is palpably part of the retouching which the book suffered later at orthodox hands. The writer disdains the temple sacrifices (5:1) and constantly urges his readers to eat and drink and be merry while the sun shines. He was probably a Jew living in the new Greco-Egyptian city of Alexandria about 200 BC.
Proverbs is much earlier, probably going back to the fourth century when Greek influence began, but the Wisdom of Solomon, or Ecclesiasticus, is a work written in Greek in the first century before Christ by another Alexandrian Jew. It has significantly, no hope of a Messiah but it has plenty of Greek philosophy which was not born until five centuries after Solomon.
The Song of Solomon is full of thighs and breasts and bellies, and is openly erotic. It was used as a symbol of the union of Christ and his Church or the union of Yehouah and the synagogue.
There might be a mythological element in parts of it, which seem to celebrate the union of the sun god and moon goddess (Shelamith). As a whole it is a collection of Oriental marriage songs. In the east a marriage festival lasts a week, and songs about the charms of the bride and the bridegroom's particular interest in her are features of the celebration. Some of these songs may be quite old, but others include Persian, and even Greek, words, so that the collection must belong to about the fourth century. By that time the forged historical works had made Solomon and all his glory and his wives very popular amongst the Jews, and an aspiring author could not do better than borrow his name.
Solomon was a petty king living in a third-rate Oriental mansion who did not build the first temple even. The builder was probably Ahab. Solomon was not wealthy, as in the legend, but Ahab was.
The current translations of the Bible are marred by many faulty readings, and interpolations known by the translators are allowed to remain. An example is the whole of the end of Mark's gospel from verse 16:9 to the end. A few recent Bibles have a note that it is a false ending but older ones and most modern ones do not. Since it contains the earliest gospel account of the appearances, its absence is more than slightly important. Christianity depends upon the appearances as historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, something that only a god could do. Another is the word repent which has been in the Douay version wrongly rendered through the Latin do penance, which suits the Catholic priesthood.
Let us look now at some of the many renderings of the Hebrew word Ruach, and shall see how they illustrate ecclesiastical ingenuity in building up a system of ghosts, and even a theory of Apostolic succession!
The word rendered Ghost, Holy Ghost, and Spirit in the New Testament is the Greek word Pneuma, which is the equivalent of Ruach in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Both words mean air in motion or breath. Ruach is rendered in Genesis 3:8 as the cool of the evening where breeze would be better and, in Genesis 8:1, appropriately as wind. In Genesis 1:2, Ruach Elohim is translated the spirit of God but it should be the breath of the gods. In the Latin Vulgate, pneuma is rendered spiritus, from spiro meaning I breathe. Translated into Anglo-Saxon, spiritus became gast, whence ghost. The Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost really means the breathe of God.
Jesus gave up the Ghost, the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and receive ye the Holy Ghost, are all mistranslations. In Luke 4:1, the same word pneuma is translated in two different ways:
And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost (pneuma) returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit (pneuma) into the wilderness.
In Luke 8:55, when Jair's daughter is brought back to life, we read:
And her spirit (pneuma) came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat.
The translation implies that a supernatural spirit or soul re-entered the girl when it simply means she caught her breathe or gasped.
These are only a few of the inaccuracies to be found. Translations of the Bible maintain a disgraceful and dishonest bias to the views preferred by the theologians rather than the truth. It is known in the narrow circles of Christian and Jewish scholars, and some—a very small circle—are honest enough to reject all of this nonsense when they find it out. The rest realize that, if it were accepted by worshippers, they would be out of a comfortable job and probably out of the tied cottage as well. They keep it quiet.