New Testament

Contents Updated: Thursday, April 29, 1999

• Manipulation
• The Resurrection and Ascension
• The Descent into Hell
• Miracles
• The Darkness at the Crucifixion
• The Virgin Birth
• Jesus in History

Manipulation

In contrast to the great antiquity of the sacred books and theologies of paganism, the New Testament were written many years after the lifetime of the reputed writers, and rendered almost undecipherable by numerous additions and erasures. The gospels were not written by the persons whose names they bear. They are worse than anonymous, Bishop Faustus admitting:

It is certain that the New Testament was not written either by Christ or his Apostles, but a long time after them, by some unknown persons … Besides these gospels, there were many more which were subsequently deemed apocryphal.

Yet he is satisfied to take just four of these writings as inspired. Astonishing!

On examining the New Testament carefully, we find many contradictions concerning the details of the life of Jesus. The discrepancies between the gospels especially between the fourth gospel and the first three, Synoptic gospels, are numerous. If Jesus was the Jew of the Synoptics, he was not the Jew hater of the fourth gospel; if his method of teaching was that of the Synoptics, it was not that of the fourth; if he was the man of the Synoptics, he was not the mysterious being of the fourth;

His birth is said, in the Matthew’s gospel, to have occurred during the reign of Herod, who was made Governor of Judaea, part of the Roman province of Syria, in 40 BC under Anthony, and later puppet king. Herod died at Jericho in 4 BC after a period of absence on account of illness from Jerusalem. In Luke the birth is said to have taken place when Quirinus (Cyrenius) was Governor of Judaea in 6 AD, and when Augustus was Emperor, a decade after the death of Herod.

He was allegedly born of a virgin. The pure virginity of the Queen of heaven, the Great Goddess, the Mother of God—the Virgin— was an almost universal tenet of faith for 2,000 before the birth of Jesus. According to Gross in his Heathen Religions, in an alcove on the altars of the Chinese temples, with tapers constantly burning before her, was an image of Sheng-mu (Shin-moo, Kuan-yin), the “Holy Mother”, sitting on a lotus with a child in her arms with rays of glory around her head. Other virgin mother goddesses were: Maya, the mother of Buddha; Devaki, the mother of Krishna; Isis, of Egypt and Italy, mother of Horus; Neith, the mother of Osiris; Mylitta, of Babylon, and later of Greece, mother of Tammuz; Nutria, of Etrusca and Italy; Myrrha, mother of Bacchus.; Cybele, to whom Lady Day was formerly dedicated; Juno, shown like Isis and Mary standing on the crescent moon; Diana, shown also like Isis and Mary with stars surrounding her head.

From the Council of Ephesus in 1431 AD, which declared Mary, “Mother of God”, adoration of the virgin is again a grand feature of the Christian religion. Her Assumption had already been declared in 813 AD and her Immaculate Conception was accepted as dogma in 1851 AD. The most ancient pictures and statues of the virgin and child in Italy and other parts of Europe are black. The Bambino at Rome and the Virgin and Child at Loretto are black as are other similar images in Rome. They are pagan images of the Goddess.

The death of Jesus is said, in three of the gospels, to have taken place after the Passover feast, in one, before that feast, In the number of women who came to the tomb after the Resurrection, the gospel of John gives one, Mark, three, and Luke, a large number. The angels at the tomb are described in Mark as a young man clothed in white, in Luke, as three men in shining garments while in John an entirely different account appears.

Eusebius relates the absurd story of King Abgarus writing a letter to Jesus, and of Jesus’s answer. And Socrates relates how the Empress Helena, Constantine’s mother, went to Jerusalem to find the cross of Christ. She is said not only to have found the cross, but the nails with which Christ was attached. Besides forging, lying, and deceiving for the cause of Jesus, the Christian Fathers destroyed all evidence against themselves and their theology, which they came across. Eusebius says, according to Gibbon, “that he has related what might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion”. Such an admission of the violation of our fundamental laws of history speaks for itself. Translation of Eusebius’s History often omit whole chunks. Why?

The Gospel of Peter, which, according to early Christian writers, was in common use in the second century, and received as inspired with the rest of the New Testament writings, directly contradicts most important details in the accounts given of the alleged appearances of Jesus after his death in the canonical gospels, Acts, and the Pauline epistles. The presence of John and others at the foot of the cross, the appearances to Mary Magdalene and other women, the walk to Emmaus, the apparition to the eleven of a material body through closed doors, the second apparition to remove Thomas’s doubts, the appearances at Jerusalem during forty days by many living proofs and those mentioned in the epistles to the Corinthians all fail to appear. The gospel was later dropped, probably because it favoured the heresy of the Docetae, who held that the body of the Christ was a spectre or illusion, for the gospel says, relating to the Crucifixion: “They brought two malefactors, and crucified him between them but he kept silence, as feeling no pain”,” and this silence is maintained until he died.

When he died he cried: “My power, my power, thou hast left me”, in the Gospel of Peter. This contradicts no less than eight utterances from the cross recorded in the canonical gospels:

• My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?;
• Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do
• Verily, this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise;
• Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit;
• Woman, behold thy son;
• Behold thy mother;
• I thirst;
• It is finished.

Still more startling is the account given of the Resurrection and Ascension, which differs in essential points from the already contradictory accounts given in the canonical gospels.

The Resurrection and Ascension

The narrators, of the gospels differ considerably in their accounts of the Resurrection, which can only be explained if the later ones had to correct and reconcile with common sense, the mistakes, and absurdities of the earlier ones.

It is astonishing that 5,000 years ago people regarded Osiris as people now regard Jesus, as a risen saviour and confidently hoped to rise from the grave as he did. Osiris, after being put to death, rose from the dead, and bore the title of the Resurrected One. Æsculapius, the son of god—the saviour, rose from the dead. The saviour, Adonis, after being put to death, rose from the dead, and the Syrians celebrated the festival of the Resurrection of Adonis in the early spring. The festival was observed in 363 AD during the reign of the Emperor Julian, at Antioch, the ancient capital of the Greek Kings of Syria, where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians, and in 412 AD, in Alexandria, the cradle of Christianity, in the time of Bishop Cyril. The celebration in honour of the Resurrection of Adonis came at last to be known as a Christian festival, and the ceremonies held in Catholic countries on Good Friday and Easter Sunday are nothing more than the festival of the death and resurrection of Adonis. This god is propitiated as “O Adonai” in one of the Greater Antiphons of the Roman Catholic church.

The Phrygian saviour, Attis and the Persian saviour and mediator between god and man, Mithras, died and rose again. Tammuz, the Babylonian saviour, son of the virgin Mylitta, Bacchus, son of the virgin Semele, Hercules, son of Zeus, Memnon, whose mother Eos wept tears at his death, like Mary is said to have done for Jesus, Baldur, the Scandinavian lord and saviour and the Greek Amphiarius all rose again after death.

The gospels of Matthew and John do not mention the Ascension. Mark says that Jesus was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God, but the twelve verses in which the account appears are admitted in the revised edition to be spurious. Luke is the only gospel that gives the story: “He was carried up into heaven”. Acts says: “He was taken up, and a cloud received him out of sight”. Both Luke and Acts were written by the same man, so we really have the testimony of only one man, with no corroborating evidence, to this astonishing spectacle.

Yet Krishna rose from the dead, and ascended bodily into heaven all men saw him. Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu, ascended into heaven. The coverings of the body of Buddha, son of the virgin Maya, unrolled themselves, and the lid of his coffin was opened by superhuman agency, when he ascended bodily into heaven. Lao-Kiun or Lao-Tse—the virgin born—ascended bodily into heaven, since which he has been worshipped as a god, and splendid temples erected to his memory. Zoroaster, the Persian saviour, ascended to heaven.

People in this world instinctively like to keep on living. They want to meet their friends again, and all of that. They cling to life. Schopenhauer called it the will to live. What evidence is there that we are alive after we are dead?

Of course, in a sense, nobody dies. Everything that is in the body and in the man goes into something else, turns into the crucible of nature, goes to make trees and grass and weeds and fruit, and is eaten by all kinds of life, and in that way goes on and on. The matter that is in me will exist in another form when I am dead. The force that is in me will live in some other kind of force when I am dead. But I will be gone. That isn't the kind of immortality people want. They want to know that they can recognize Mary Jane in heaven. Don't they? They want to see their brothers and their sisters and their friends in heaven. It isn't possible. We know where our life began; we know where it ends.

We know where every individual life on earth began. It began in a single cell, in the body of our mother, who had some 10,000 of those cells. It was fertilized by a spermatozoon from the body of our father, who had a million of them, any one of which, under certain circumstances, would fertilize a cell. They multiplied and divided until a child was born. And in old age or accident or disease, they fall apart and the man is done.

As a rule, the less a person knows, the surer he is, and he gets it by instinct, and it can't be disputed, for I don't know what is going on in another man’s mind. I have no such instinct.

The Descent into Hell

Though there is nothing in the canonical gospels describing Jesus’s descent into Hell, there is an account in the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus. Jesus descends into hell, where Satan and the Prince of Hell try to close the gates of hell against him. But a voice of thunder, accompanied by the rushing of winds, booms: “Lift up ye gates, O ye Princes, and be ye lifted up, O ye everlasting gates, and the King of Glory shall come in”. He rises again on the third day and ascends in company with Adam and numerous saints into heaven.

The Christ Jesus has to descend into hell because it, and even the three days' sojourn, is in the universal myth. He could do no less than other saviours of mankind. It is a reflexion of the sun declining to its lowest altitude at the winter solstice where it seemed to remain for three days before beginning to rise again when it began its annual ascension. Many gods descended into hell, and remained there for the space of three days and three nights—Krishna, the Hindu saviour, Zoroaster, the Persian saviour, Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Adonis, Bacchus, Hercules, Mercury, Baldur and Quetzalcoatl.

The descent into hell was not added to the Apostles' Creed until after the sixth century. Even the Apostles' Creed was not framed by the apostles and did not exist as a creed in their time. It was an invention of a much later period.

Miracles

Miracles are imaginary deviations from the known laws of Nature—proved by experience to be firm and unalterable—by the power of a god. Faith in miracles is the result of ignorance or the confusion of belief with knowledge. The people who lived contemporary with Jesus tended to believe in anything—it was a credulous age. Leaders of religion, even today, recommend themselves to the public by working miracles, often simple conjuring tricks. To stand any chance of success, in the stories told of him even of not in reality, the expected messiah had to work miracles.

The biographers of Jesus in the New Testament, not wishing their master to be outdone in his legendary history, made him a performer of miracles. Without them Christianity could not have prospered. The Hindu sacred books represent Krishna, their saviour and redeemer, as in constant strife against the evil spirit, surmounting extraordinary dangers, strewing his way with miracles, raising the dead, healing the sick, restoring the maimed, the deaf, and the blind. Everywhere he supports the weak against the strong and the oppressed against the powerful. The people crowded his way and adored him as a god, and these pretended miracles were the evidences of his divinity for centuries before the time of Jesus.

Buddha performed what appeared to be great miracles for the good of mankind, and the legends concerning him are full of the most extravagant prodigies and wonders. It was by belief in these that the religion of Buddha was established. Innumerable miracles are ascribed to Buddhist saints. Their garments and staffs were supposed to imbibe some mysterious power, and blessed were they who were allowed to touch them. A Buddhist saint, who attained the power called “perfection”, was able to rise and float along through the air, his body becoming imponderous. Buddhist annals give accounts of miraculous suspensions in the air. We are also told that in 217 BC nineteen Buddhist missionary priests entered China to propagate their faith, and were imprisoned by the emperor; but that an angel came and opened the prison door and liberated them. The Hindu sage, Vasudeva (Krishna), was liberated from prison in like manner.

Zoroaster, the founder of the religion of the Persians, opposed his persecutors by performing miracles in order to confirm his divine mission. Bochia, of the Persians, also performed miracles, the places where they occurred being consecrated, and people flocked in crowds to visit them. Horus and Serapis, Egyptian saviours, performed great miracles, among which was that of raising the dead to life. Osiris and Isis also performed miracles, and pilgrimages were made to the temples of Isis by the sick. Marduk, the Assyrian god (the Logos)—he who made heaven and earth—the merciful one, the life giver, performed great miracles and raised the dead to life. Bacchus, son of Zeus by the virgin goddess Seniele, was a great performer of miracles, among which may be mentioned his changing water into wine, as is recorded of Jesus. Aesculapius, son of Apollo, the Greek god, was also a great performer of miracles, and cured, the sick and raised the dead. Apollonius, of Tyana, in Cappadocia, born about four years before Jesus, among other miracles restored a dead maiden to life.

Simon, the Samaritan, who appears in Acts of the Apostles, was called “the Magician” and “Magus”, allegedly for his proficiency in performing miracles. He travelled about and made many converts, professed to be “the Wisdom of God”, “the Word of God”, the “Paraclete” or “Comforter”, “the image of the eternal father manifested in the flesh”, and his followers claimed that he was “the first born of the Supreme”. All these were titles in after years applied to Jesus. They also had a gospel called The Four Corners of the World, from which Irenaeus might have borrowed his reason for the choice and number of the four gospels.

Menander, the wonder-worker of Samaria and disciple of Simon Magus, was another great performer of miracles. Eusebius says of him: He revelled in still more arrogant pretensions to miracles … than his master… saying that he was in truth the Saviour. Justin is quoted by Eusebius as having said of Menander—He deceived many by his magic arts … and there are now some of his followers who can testify the same. The Emperor Vespasian, a contemporary of Jesus, performed wonderful miracles. Tacitus says that he cured a blind man in Alexandria by means of his spittle, and a lame man by the mere touch of his foot.

Miracles were not uncommon among the Jews before and during the time of Jesus. Casting out devils was an everyday occurrence, and miracles were frequently wrought to confirm the sayings of the Rabbis. One is said to have Cried out, when his opinions were disputed: “May this tree prove that I am right”! and the tree is said to have been torn up by the roots and hurled to a distance. And when his opponents declared that a tree could prove nothing, he said, “May this stream then witness for me”, and at once it flowed the opposite way. No one custom of antiquity is so frequently mentioned by ancient historians as the practice which was so common of making votive offerings to their deities, and hanging them up in their temples—images of metal, stone, and clay; arms, legs, and other parts of the body, in testimony of some divine cure effected.

A popular adage among the Greeks was “Miracles for fools”. The shrewder Romans said: “The common people like to be deceived: deceived let them be”. Celsus, in common with most Greeks, looked upon Christianity as a “blind faith” that “shunned the light of reason”. He said, Origen tells us, that Christians are forever repeating, “Do not examine, only believe and thy faith will make thee blessed. Wisdom is a bad thing in life, foolishness is to be preferred”.

Jesus was accused of being a “necromancer, and a magician, and a deceiver of the people”, says Justin Martyr. He was said to have been initiated in magical art in the heathen temples of Egypt. Both Jesus and Horus, the Egyptian saviour, are represented on monuments with wands, in the received guise of necromancers, while raising the dead to life.

The miracles of the primitive church were mere fictions, which the pious and zealous Fathers, partly from a weak credulity and partly from reasons of policy, were induced to espouse and propagate for the support of a righteous cause. The primitive Christians were perpetually reproached for their credulity; and Julian says that “the sum of all their wisdom was comprised in the single precept—believe”.

According to the very books which record the miracles of Jesus, he never claimed to perform such deeds, and Paul declares that the great reason why Israel did not believe Jesus to be the Messiah was that the Jews required a sign. John, in the second century, makes Jesus reproach his fellow-countrymen with “Unless you see signs and wonders you do not believe”. Had he performed the miracles that his followers said he did, the Jews would have accepted him as their Messiah, and since he was not accepted by them, we may conclude that he performed no miracles. His miracles were evidently concocted and recorded for him. When told that, if he wanted people to believe in him, he must first prove his claim by a miracle, he said: “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign, and no sign shall be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah”. This answer not satisfying the questioners, they came to him again, and asked: “If the kingdom of God is, as you say, close at hand, show us at least some one of the signs in the heavens which are to precede the coming of the Messiah?” It was generally understood then that the end of the present age was at hand, and was to be heralded by signs from heaven. The light of the sun was to be put out, the moon turned to blood, the stars robbed of their brightness.

Historians of that period, curiously enough, have recorded miracles and wonders alleged to have been performed by other persons, but not a word is said by them about the miracles claimed by Christians to have been performed by Jesus. Justus of Tiberias, who was born about five years after the time assigned for the crucifixion of Jesus, wrote a Jewish History, but it contained no mention of the coming of Jesus, nor of the events concerning him, nor of the prodigies he is supposed to have wrought.

If they could have been present at one of Uri Geller’s shows, these credulous ancients would have certainly wanted to worship him as a god. But no intelligent person today could accept such miracles as other than tricks. All accounts of miracles should be banished altogether to their proper region—that of fiction or legend. Nature does not allow her laws to be fooled with.

The Darkness of the Crucifixion

The myth of the messiah or saviour demanded that something miraculous should happen at his death—prodigies attended the death of nearly all legendary heroes—it would not have been complete without it. The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that the births and deaths of great men were announced by celestial signs.

At the crucifixion Luke writes that “there was darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour”. Those who say the darkness was a solar eclipse do not understand the motions of the celestial bodies. The Passover moon was full. Furthermore a solar eclipse lasts only about six minutes.

On the death of Romulus, founder of Rome, the sun was darkened for six hours. When Julius Caesar was murdered, there was darkness for six hours. When Æsculapius, “the saviour”, was put to death, the sun shone dimly from the heavens, birds were silent and trees bowed their heads in sorrow. When Hercules died, darkness was on the face of the earth, thunder crashed through the earth. When Alexander the Great died, the same occurred. When Atreus, of Mycenae, murdered his nephews, the sun, unable to endure a sight so horrible, turned his course backwards and withdrew his light. When the Mexican crucified saviour, Quetzalcoatle, died, the sun was darkened. When Prometheus was crucified by chains on Mount Caucasus, the whole frame of Nature became convulsed—the earth quaked, thunder roared, lightning flashed, winds blew and the sea rose.

At the death of the Hindu saviour, Krishna, a black circle surrounded the moon, and the sun was darkened at noon-day; the sky rained fire and ashes; flames burned dusky and livid; demons committed depredations on earth. At sunrise and sunset thousands of figures were seen skirmishing in the air; and spirits were to be seen on all sides. At the conflict between Buddha, the Saviour of the world, and the Prince of Evil, a thousand appalling meteors fell, darkness prevailed, the earth quaked, the ocean rose, rivers flowed back, peaks of lofty mountains rolled down, a fierce storm howled around and a host of headless spirits filled the air.

Matthew recorded that the earth quaked, the rocks we're rent, and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints, which slept, arose and came out of their graves and went into the holy city and appeared to many. If such extraordinary events had really happened, wouldn't somebody have obtained from the resurrected saints some account of their experiences in the other world? History records nothing. Could such peculiar events have occurred and yet no notice be taken of them?

Belief in the influence of the stars over life and death, and in special portents at the death of great men, survived even to recent times. In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes:

When beggars die there are no comets seen. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

The Virgin Birth

1. Most scholars and some theologians agree that the gospel story of the birth of Jesus is not true. Yet it is such an attractive story, especially to children, that belief in it has become the first test of the Christian. When an honest bishop admits that it is not literally true, and this is reported in the press, there is always outrage from offended Christians. Angels, wandering stars and virgin births simply do not occur in Nature and the legends can be explained straightforwardly by reference to the times, yet Christians, especially unscholarly ones, cannot believe otherwise.

The original evidence for the virgin birth is not in the gospels of Mark and John. It is found only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and both contradict it when they trace the descent of Jesus from David through Joseph. (Matt. 1; Luke 3) Mark, Luke and John do not mention the slaughter of the children by Herod, in fear of Jesus as a rival and Josephus, who dwelt on the crimes of Herod, knew nothing of it because. it never took place. Luke says Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem openly soon after the supposed decree. [Luke 2:22.] Matthew took it from the Old Testament.

The gospels are not clear whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth, and the date of his birth has been placed from 4 BC to 7 AD. Matthew says that Jesus was born in the days of Herod, while Luke says it was when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. Herod died in 4 BC, while Cyrenius did not become governor of Syria until 7 AD. Jesus must have been modest about his miraculous birth. He never mentioned it.

Jesus in History

If all the wonderful things said about Jesus were true, we should naturally expect to hear something about him in the writings of the period. Not one of the classic writers in the first century, writers of the Augustan Age of Letters, writers in Satire, History, Natural History, Medicine, Astronomy, Miracles, Fables, not one unequivocally mentions Jesus or his apostles or his miracles.

Such extraordinary events as feeding thousands of people with a few small loaves and fishes, raising the dead to life again, ghosts walking in the streets, miraculous darkness covering all the land for several hours, earthquakes at the death of a god, disembodied voices from the clouds, rising through the air into the heavens, must have formed topics of general conversation and must have found a place in the literature of the day. Nothing. Cures being wrought must have interested the writers on medicine. Nothing. It is incredible that no one except the four interested partisans, who are supposed to have written the gospels, should ever have referred to them.

Josephus was a Jew, and lived in the country where all these things are said to have occurred, and wrote a history of the period; yet he makes no mention of even the existence of Jesus. In book 18:3:3 of his Antiquities an unknown hand has inserted between the account of the sedition of the Jews against Pontius Pilate and that of Anubis and Pauline in the Temple of Isis, a purple patch relating to Jesus, which is clearly a forgery. Josephus, a Jew, is made to say:

Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.

It is not likely that a Jew writing under the patronage of the Romans would show such a respect towards Jesus, who was known among both nations as seditious, and talk about his teaching the truth. Further on he is made to say:

He was the Christ, and when Pilate… had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.

These are expressions, not of a Jew, but of a Christian, and the writer could hardly have remained a Jew after making these declarations. Forgeries were easy in those days, when all books were written on skins, to which fresh pieces could easily be fastened. Once the Christians took power they controlled the production of books and expurgated them or improved them at will.

Christians say that Suetonius preserved evidence of Jesus in his book Lives of the Caesars, also known as The Twelve Caesars. Suetonius lived from about 75 to 150 AD and his book was published about 120 AD. In the section on Claudius, he mentions that the emperor expelled the Jews from Rome (about 49 AD) because they caused continual disturbances at the instigation of a certain Chrestus. If Chrestus is Jesus, then what was Jesus doing in Rome in 49 AD when he was supposed have been crucified under the Prefecture of Pontius Pilate between 26 and 36 AD? Chrestus is the Greek Chrestos meaning “good one” and it is not the same as Christus which is derived from the Greek Christos meaning “anointed one” or Messiah.

Pagans often called their gods Chrestos in an affectionate way and many of the easterners in Rome were called “Jews”. These were often Hellenised people of the Levant whose beliefs were a mixture of paganism and sectarian Judaism. Suetonius might be referring to jealousies among these Jews over some pagan god called Chrestos. More likely is that Suetonius has confused the word he knew, Chrestus, for the word he did not know, Christus, and the troubles were fights between messianic Jews and those who preferred not to invite close inspection by Romans over ambitious Jewish princes. The Messiah being argued about need not have been in Rome, but some claimant in Judaea. A few years before, Theudas had been crucified after leading his failed uprising and might have been the one inflaming Jewish passions, but it could possible have been Jesus—Jews fighting with the proto-Christians. Christians identify the expulsion of the Jews with the expulsion from Rome of Apollos ans Priscilla in Acts. All that can be concluded is that it is possible.

Christians claim that one of the younger Pliny’s letters to the emperor Trajan,written before Pliny’s death in 114 AD but after he was sent to Bithynia in 111 AD, probably in the year 112 AD, is evidence of an historical Jesus (Letters 10:96), but it simply says that Christians had cursed Christ to avoid being punished, and does not show this Christ ever existed.

Non-gospel evidence is slight indeed for Jesus. Neither Philo, nor the two Plinys, nor any other writer of the age, mention the name of Jesus, much less the ten thousand other wonderful things mentioned by the interpolator of Josephus. The only significant evidence for Jesus is in the New Testament and that is unreliable and overlaid with mythology or obfuscation whatever Christians might believe in the efficiency and honesty of the Holy Ghost in preserving the truth.

Any historical Jesus has been deliberately disguised to hide him from the historians, then he has been overlaid with mythology taken from contemporary religious belief, notably the sun gods, and finally any historical evidence of the original Jesus that existed anywhere was destroyed by Christians to hide the truth when they were able. Other writers on Jesus, from Justin Martyr in the second century AD to the propagators of God’s Truth today, use the limited sources outlined here or make up whatever they like about Jesus believing it is perfectly acceptable to do so to trick people into believing! Though they do not recognise it, that is just what happened at first. It has never ceased. Christians even deliberately forged writings.

Tacitus wrote a History, and made no mention of Jesus. But an Introduction was found in a Benedictine monastery at Hirschfelde, in Saxony, in 514 AD. Entitled The Annals of Tacitus by Beatus Rhenanus in 1533, these Annals were not found in any other copy of the History of Tacitus, and not one writer from the time of Tacitus to the above date had mentioned the existence of the work. It was a forgery.

In the time of Wycliffe people began inquiring into the origin of Christianity. For the church, Christendom was seriously menaced and it instituted the Inquisition. Large sums of money were offered for the discovery of ancient manuscripts, which would bear testimony to the divine authority of the church. Supply meets the demand and poor monks saw a source of income—they started to manufacture manuscripts. Among these were the Annals of Tacitus, composed by a Papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, at the price of 500 gold sequins, and re-written by a monk at Hirschfelde, in imitation of a very old copy of the History of Tacitus.

In this (Annals 15:44) Tacitus describes how Nero blamed the Christians for the fire of Rome in 64 AD. Tacitus is represented as saying that the name “Christians” originated from “one Christus” who was “put to death under Pontius Pilate, and had left behind him a sect called after him”.

Even if this book is authentic, this tells us nothing except that some people believed in the death of a man they revered called Christ. Tacitus merely asserts what he knew from the members of the Christian sect, the claims being made by the Christians themselves and appearing in the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke which had been written before the Annals. The Annals were published after 115  AD and were certainly not written before 110 AD. Tacitus was not a great historian in modern terms, being prejudiced and partial. He accused Christians of abominations.

Bracciolini sent the forged writings to his friend and employer, Niccoli, with a letter in which the following occurs:

Everything is now complete with respect to the little work, concerning which I will, on some future opportunity, write to you; and, at the same time, send it to you to read in order to get your opinion on it.

After its discovery it was deposited in the Library at Florence.

The mendacious writings of anonymous monks have been exposed even by Catholic historians. Cardinal Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, says:

Most of our Latin classics are forgeries of the monks of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Father Hardouin, who was a learned scholar and a writer of high position in the Jesuit College in Paris, exposed the worthlessness and lying legends of the Patristic Fathers. He says that the ecclesiastical history of the first twelve centuries is fable. The lists of Popes are fictitious. Gregory the Great, elected in 1227, is the first of whom we have any historic notice. There are no tombs or sepulchres of any of the Popes prior to this date, nor coins except those acknowledged as spurious. That leaves a fraudulent list of some 180 Popes who never had an existence other than in the imagination of the compilers.

The general idea of offering prayer in order to obtain various needs presents the difficulty of reconciling the conception of an omnipotent, all-foreseeing God with the contradictory theory of a Father who requires prayer before caring for his children, an almighty God who will be turned from his course by human petitions. Man can do wonders in the war of conquering nature, but he has not been able to alter natural laws, nor is there any evidence that such laws have been changed at any time in answer to prayer.

© AskWhy! Publications 1997. All Rights Reserved. Comments by mail or e-mail are welcomed.

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