Christianity
Christian Fraud
Abstract
Our fathers inherited only lies, vain and worthless things—can man adopt his own gods?—and they no gods!Jeremiah 16.19
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, January 12, 2000
Criticisms of the Essene Connexion
American Christians imagine ancient Judaea—apparently thinking the gospels were composed in Judaea—to have been as sober and well organized as New England. They have weird ideas of ancient history and choose not to read accurate versions of it.
In the ancient world, people became dissatisfied, and new religions and moralities arose in every country. Asia had passed through a similar stage hundreds of years earlier, when Buddha and Kong-fu-tse had rejected all religion. Philosophers in Europe urged the same, for Greece had produced schools of skeptics, but sadly the Greco-Roman world instead took up a new and more restrictive religion.
Judaism like the Hellenistic world was in turmoil. There were Pharisees, Sadducees, liberal and humanitarian Rabbis like Hillel, eclectic philosophers like Philo and ascetic rebels and purists like the Essenes and the Therapeuts. Out of the latter school dimly emerged the Nazarene, preaching the end of the world, which his modern followers disavow.
The new religion of Christianity was brought into the Roman Empire from the Jewish sect of the Essenes who believed the perfectly holy, or saints, would be rewarded by God by bodily resurrection into a heaven on earth. The Essene leader, Jesus, who had been crucified as a seditionist by the Romans, was believed by some of his converts to have been the first of the saints to have risen, the promise of this being that the kingdom of God would begin within forty years.
The gentile church began corrupt. The original Christianity was that of the Jerusalem church, that of the Ebionim or Essenes, a sect of Judaism. The Essenes were pre-Christian! Today there are protestant movements which reject Christianity and are attempting to return to the beliefs of the Ebionim.
Most of the background to Christianity was provided by the Essenes but Christianity applies to gentiles not to Jews. This has been obscured by the Christian church desperate to cover its own origins, but they are still clear enough to anyone who is not biased. Few Christians fall into this category. They are desperate to preserve something they think they know, an illusion they have been brought up with, that God and his appointed servants were all innocents and honest. Most of the gentile bishops were crooks and still are. The innocents are the simple and naive people who believe them.
Critical scholars long ago saw the relationship between the behaviour of the Essenes described by the classic authors and the behaviour of Jesus. In the two centuries before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls there was speculation that Jesus was an Essene, but Christians naturally rejected it as not compatible with Jesus being a unique being through whose life God’s plan was revealed.
Even some critics of Christianity rejected the idea on the grounds that many of Jesus’s apparent teachings were not found in Essene philosophy or contradicted it. They forgot that the first gentile Christians were rapidly changing Essene philosophy to suit themselves. They also believed that Essene simply meant healer suggesting a link, since Jesus was noted as a healer, but felt Jesus’s character and many of his actions were utterly contrary to the notion of him being a pacific Essene. Thus he was often angry and refused at first to heal the daughter of a poor Canaanitish woman, calling her a dog.
Yet his actions were entirely consistent with the correct idea that the Essenes were not pacifists but Jewish nationalists, pacific only until such time as they felt God called them to military duty on His behalf. Proof is that Jesus came only for the “lost sheep of the House of Israel”. Anyone who was not of the House of Israel were not called whether they were lost sheep or not.
Critics of Jesus being an Essene also claim, on the basis of a statement in Josephus that they accepted the Greek notion of the soul trying to escape the prison of the body, that Essenes did not believe in corporeal resurrection, nor did they believe in an incarnated messiah. But Josephus had to be circumspect and was not necessarily being honest when he described the Jewish sects. The troubles in Judaea which kept breaking out were often triggered by Jewish messianic expectations. Josephus had been an Essene initiate and might have been careful not to give the impression that they were the source of messianic ideas and ideas of resurrection. More likely though is that the Christians forged the passages in the works of Josephus to hide the truth that messiahship and resurrection could apply to anyone other than Christ.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls proved that the classic authors were not fully correct in their descriptions of the Essenes. Did anyone seriously think they were? The Qumran Essenes hid every book of the Hebrew scriptures except the Book of Esther, suggesting that in belief in religious mythology they were thoroughly Jewish. Philo, probably a member of the Egyptian Therapeutae with whom the Essenes were closely associated, said:
It is our first duty to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousnessMt 6:33; Lk 12:31
The kingdom of God to the Essenes was an earthly kingdom, but the earth itself had been purified and rendered incorruptible by God. but Jesus’s prophecy of the Judgement Day didn’t happen. And Jesus has not returned soon, as he promised. His two principal prophecies were wrong.
The Essenes were teetotalers whereas Jesus is considered a wine bibber. It is a calumny. Jesus was no wine bibber because he was Nazir. The wine of the gospels is new wine which is usually the Essene euphemism for water, except perhaps when grapes are in season when it is simply grape juice, unfermented. Nazirites were forbidden the fruit of the grape but the Essenes noted a contradiction in the scriptures because wine was served in the heavenly banquet. They deduced that either this wine was water and called it new wine, or that the wine was acceptable even to a Nazirite as long as it was not fermented. Obviously wine juice could not be kept for long without it fermenting, so in practice, new wine usually meant water anyway.
A foolish criticism is that Jesus urged his followers not to swear, taken to mean cursing when it really meant not to make vows. This is entirely Essene. Essenes took one vow only at their initiation and therefter their word was their bond. Essenes had no inhibition at all, except circumspection, about cursing their enemies, the Romans and their Jewish collaborators.
The singular difference between the followers of Jesus and the Essene communities is that Jesus’s followers were not trained Essenes. They were Hellenised converts glad to have been re-admitted into Judaism before the Day of God’s revenge but had not had the normal period of initiation. Jesus believed there was no time to put his converts through the three years of training needed to become an orthodox Essene because the kingdom of God was nigh! Instead, he was calling Jews to purify themselves spiritually and physically by repenting and being baptised in expectation of the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. Having the rules of the Essene community read to them at the Sermon on the Mount had to suffice as training.
After Jesus’s ultimate failure and crucifixion, his leading followers came to believe that he had risen from the dead on the third day as the first of the saints, heralding the kingdom according to the prophecy of Hosea. Within forty years the kingdom would arrive. That forty years was the period when Christianity was taken from Palestine into Asia and Greece and Rome, as a gentile mystery religion.
It is claimed that Qumran was not an Essene community but a road house for travellers and merchants. It has also been claimed that the military tone of some of the scrolls militate against Essene origins but indicate their source in the Jewish Zealots instead. Norman Golb of Chicago University even claims the Dead Sea Scrolls were not written by any Essene scribes but were valuable Jewish religious libraries that were hidden in caves during the war of 70 AD, and that Qumran was a fortress, not a monastery, but part of a chain of fortresses built by Herod and including Machaerus, which can be seen from Qumran, and Herodion. Finally critics say the Teacher of Righteousness found in the scrolls cannot be identified with Jesus Christ.
None of these criticisms have the least effect on the hypothesis that Jesus was an Essene. The Qumran community was certainly the headquarters of the Essenes, but that does not stop it from being a monastery and a road house for travellers. Most medieval monasteries were also road houses for travellers. There can be few sects claiming to be “righteous” who would not succour passing strangers. Indeed the Essenes, as we know from Josephus, had a duty to provide for travelling brothers.
The militant tone of several of the scrolls is because the Essenes were zealots. A “zealot” is a “zealot for the law of Moses”. Amongst the laws of Moses were laws which forbade the Jews from being ruled by foreigners. Amounting to the same thing, since God was the notional king of Israel, was the rule which forbade Jews from worshipping any other God. By accepting the Romans as rulers of Israel, the Essenes believed they had put someone, the king of the gentiles, ahead of God. They were determined to change this and eventually participated in the Jewish War against the Romans, as Josephus admits, despite his tale that the Essenes were pacific.
As for Golb’s ideas, it seems quite possible that, faced with the conquering legions, the libraries of the temple were entrusted into the care of the Essenes, who had their own libraries to hide and knew the local limestone terrain. Qumran was involved in some battle or siege, presumably during the Jewish War, but, if it was designed as a fortress, it was designed by fools. Admittedly the central tower was massively built but the rest of the walls are anything but fortifications. It was overlooked by higher land and, though protected by deep ravines on two sides was exposed to simple level attack on the other two. Its water supply was easily cut off and, though it had massive cisterns which stored a large amount of water, they were protected only by the feeble outer walls.
Its situation seemed pointless and helpless because it could easily be isolated by a small army and seiged. It seems the Romans had little difficulty in taking the “fortress” in 68 AD unlike the fortress of Masada, built on top of a mountain, where the Zealots withstood a siege by the Romans for three years before committing mass suicide to avoid slavery in 74 AD, or even Herod’s fortress at Herodion, which was substantially built.
Readers of the Dead Sea Scrolls find in them a Teacher of Righteousness who took the righteous with him into the desert in protest at the corruption of the Jerusalem temple. It is hard to see why this man could not be identified with Jesus except that most scholars believe it all happened over a century earlier. It is however not quite clear that subsequent Essene leaders did not then take the title of Righteous Teacher. Jesus is often described as a teacher and is even called Master, the title given by Essenes to their leader.
The Therapeutae or Healers were an Egyptian branch of the Essenes. The pottery vessels which contained the Dead Sea Scrolls were of an Egyptian design showing an Egyptian link. Did the gospel story exist before the invention of Christianity and was it composed by Therapeutan monks at Alexandria? Eusebius, in a moment of unusual honesty, affirmed that the Therapeutan monks were Christians before the birth of Christ. The Diegesis and Gnomologue were considered the original sacred sources of the Egyptian Essenes from which the evangelists compiled their gospels. It is said that much of the fable of Jesus Christ can be found in the Book of Enoch, a book much admired by the Dead Sea Essenes.
The Book of Enoch, a pseudepigraph of the grandson of Adam, might be the remains of a literature composed of the works of at least five unknown Jewish writers, and written in the last two centuries BC. In this book we first find the lofty titles: Messiah, the Righteous One, and the Elect One, all of which were boldly plagiarised by the later Christians and bestowed upon Jesus of Nazareth. “Son of Man” is also found frequently in the Similitudes of Enoch (En 37-71) but in the Qumran scrolls the Similitudes do not appear and instead is the Book of Giants, so the Similitudes look to be a Christian replacement for the Book of Giants. The Enoch literature abounds in Christian doctrines like the Messianic Kingdom, Hell, the Resurrection, and Demonology, the Seven Heavens, and the Millennium, all of which have been taken bodily from Persian and Babylonian myths. There are many passages derived from Enoch, or of closest of kin with it, in some of the New Testament gospels and Epistles.
Everyone except the average Christian punter admits that the expression, Jesus the Nazarene, met in the Greek gospels does not mean Jesus of Nazareth, the normal Christian interpretation which is blatantly God’s Truth! Bible translators have dishonestly taken to rendering the Nazarene as of Nazareth, a village that few knowledgeable people believe existed until over three centuries after Jesus’s birth. There is no such place as Nazareth in the Old Testament or in Josephus’s works, or on early maps of the Holy Land. In the fourth century, when Christianised Romans found Nazareth did not exist, they designated a suitable spot with that name. The title Nazarene has multiple meanings because the Essenes delighted in pious puns and Aramaic, a limited language, lent itself to them.
Christian Literature
Nicholas Carter in The Christ Myth indicts the Christians:
The Catholic Christians are guilty of committing the moral crime of appropriating the sacred writings of another people in order to validate the existence of their divine hero. They forged and otherwise fabricated the entire literature of their church in order to provide an historical foundation for their faith. Along with their fellow Christians, they have corrupted the minds of countless millions over the centuries.
Christianity made Jesus through its pious literature, rather than Jesus making Christianity. Religious writings and sermons, so eager to make us truthful and good, rarely tell the truth. No authentic literature mentions Jesus until a century after his death. The historic Jesus died in obscurity and returned to a darker obscurity than that he emerged from because it is false.
Jesus asserted that the end of the world was imminent and warned his disciples to be prepared. Then he told them to build a church from which to preach his message! If the end of the world was coming, why should he tell his friends to build a church? Most of his immediate followers returned to Judaism when it did not happen.
Only some years after the crucifixion when a clever opportunist and likely a Roman agent provocateur saw the value of moving among the Jewish communities of the empire, picking up information and stirring up dissent among the Jews did Christianity find a champion. The Jews were fomenting trouble and a spy like Paul could be immensely valuable. Paul hoped to douse the nationalist flame of the Jews by diluting it with gentiles. Several decades later some of them, generally ignorant men and women, still believed Paul’s scam and held suppers in his name in some large Greek and Roman cities.
Paul taught Christianity with no knowledge of the teachings of Jesus. There is not a single saying of Jesus in the gospels which is quoted by Paul in his many epistles. Paul never quotes from any sermons and speeches, parables and prayers, of Jesus. He does not speak of Jesus’s supernatural birth or that he fed a multitude with a few loaves and fishes. He never tells his audience he commanded the dead to rise, cast out devils, cured the faithful of leprosy and blindness and performed many other wonders works to convince the unbelieving generation of his divinity. Had such exploits and sayings been known to Paul, he must have quoted them to potential converts or in doctrinal disputes. Why did he never once refer to them? The only answer is that he knew nothing about them. That he did not means either the gospel Jesus is not historic or Paul was not teaching the religion of Jesus.
The earliest Christian documents, the epistles attributed to Paul, scarcely discuss a historical background of Jesus. They deal primarily with a spiritual being. The few historical references to an actual life of Jesus cited in the Epistles could easily be interpolations, but even if they are not they show the disdain Paul had for the earthly life of the new god. Paul makes no allusion to Pilate, the Romans, Caiaphas, the Sanhedrin, Herod, Judas, the holy women or any person in the gospel account of the Passion. Indeed he even says very little about the Passion.
For many, perhaps including Paul, Jesus was simply a new allegory of the age old myth of the dying and rising god. Though heretical, much of the older tradition with its rituals and doctrines were accepted into the church before anyone had any thoughts about defending any particular belief as orthodox.
The gospel story of Jesus is a disguised portrayal of an historical Essene master. Woven into it is an old Pagan myth in which the sun god was personified as The Christ. The Christ is a popular divine figure of Pagan origin that never lived. Once he was the Ram and afterwards the Fish. He was the image of a dozen different Pagan gods.
The church Father Tertullian (160-220 AD), an ex-Pagan and Bishop of Carthage, admits this identity of Christ by stating in refutation of his critics:
You say we worship the sun. So do you.
Later the strident believer and defender of the faith, Tertullian renounced Christianity.
From the apostolic age many Christian converts denied the incarnation of Christ as a man. The Church Fathers had to defend the story of the resurrection of Christ both against Pagans and heretical Christians. Pagans could not believe in bodily resurrection, which they considered impossible, and heretical Christians also thought resurrection irrational, denied that any such man as Jesus Christ ever existed, and assumed that the new God Jesus had appeared only as a spirit, a personification of Reason.
Jesus and most of the apostles were simple Jewish peasants or artisans. All their associates and the people with whom they came into contact were Jews and the country in which the drama of Jesus occurred was Palestine. Yet the gospels and some other New Testament books were not written by illiterate Jewish peasants but by capably educated Greek-speaking ex-Pagan bishops far from Palestine. They are all written in Greek not Aramaic and quote several Greek Pagan authors such as Aratus and Cleanthes as well as the Greek Septuagint 300 times instead of the Jewish scriptures. Furthermore, throughout the gospels, scores of times, the Jews are spoken of in a pejorative, contemptuous and racialist way, as if they were an alien people distinct from the nationality of the writers.
Scholars of Pagan schools and sects tried to keep up their arguments against the Christians intent on dressing the Jewish rebel in the clothes of an old god. The complete works of these dissenters have been lost because the Christians destroyed them, but earlier they were obliged to indulge in apologetics and preserved the contentions of their detractors in their books of Christians refutations. So inadvertently they kept parts of the Pagan argument alive in Christian works.
The four gospels were unknown to the early Christian Fathers. No writer before 150 AD makes the slightest mention of them. Solomon Reinach said:
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 quotes the gospels or their reputed authors.
Justin Martyr, the most eminent of the early Fathers, in the middle of the second century tried to prove the divinity of Christ. Yet in more than 300 quotations from the books of the Old Testament and nearly one hundred from the Apocrypha, he makes no use of the four canonical gospels. Nowhere does Justin even mention the names, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The canonical gospels are only definitely heard of over 100 years after the death of Jesus.
If Jesus really was a divine man who performed extraordinary feats, Christians have to explain convincingly why he is not mentioned by contemporaries for a hundred years. They claim that Judaea was unimportant and events there were not noticed in Rome, but that is nonsense. Judaea was vitally important to Roman communications between Asia and Africa, to the valuable trade in spices and luxuries from Arabia and the east and as a buffer state against the only empire capable of challenging Rome at that time, the Persian empire. The Romans actually bent over backwards giving concessions to Jews to try to keep them sympathetic to the empire.
To save the Christian reader, if there should be any, the trouble of thinking of an explanation, they can freely have the answer. To get rid of the truth that there is no historical basis for their theological fictions, all records of the historic Jesus were erased by the Christians themselves when they achieved state power. The Christian priesthood destroyed nearly all the history of the first two centuries of the Christian era. What little of it that has come down to us has been so altered and changed as to have little historical value.
The records referred to Jesus as an Essene rebel who led a body of armed men into Jerusalem to capture it! Now you can see why the Christians were interested in rigid censorship and absurd fictions. Christians vandalism led to the virtual illiteracy of the ancient world and ensured that the Christian skeleton would be hidden forever from the credulous, and difficult to discern even for the educated dissident.
Fraudulent Christianity
From the end of the first century onward, the new religion was nourished on spurious literature. Just as Christians today are agog for stories of miracles and wondrous appearances of angels and virgins, the simple uncritical folk who joined the new religion were predisposed to believe whatever fed their curiosity. Enterprising Christian bishops responded to this craving by deeming it a pious duty to fulfil the needs of their flocks by devising stories of their heroes, Jesus and his merry men.
The New Testament books and the writings of the apostles, written just as the new industry in Christian forgeries began, supply the evidence of the facts and doctrines of the Christian faith, and the Catholic Encyclopaedia admits to the business in lies and frauds.
With this background of undenied fact, one wonders why Christians remain so certain the canonical gospels themselves are true. 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 falsehood. Gentile Christian bishops needed them for the difficult trick of adapting stories of the erstwhile revolutionary leader of the Essenes, judicially murdered as a traitor, to stories of a new Christian god.
Fabrications, eagerly read and accepted as true, have been so common during the Church’s existence that the phrase “pious fraud” has been coined to describe the new industry which became a major source of income for monasteries in the Dark Ages. Yet, the Greek religious forgers were so ignorant or careless that they interpolated their fraudulent new matter into old manuscripts without taking care to erase or suppress the previous statements glaringly contradicted by the new interpolations. Modern Christians do their utmost to rationalize the contradictions.
Justin Martyr, Eusebius and Tertullian were among the best known of the church fathers to be considered by their own peers to be inventors of fictional accounts of what Jesus said and did during his incarnation. In one of his works, Eusebius gives the following title to a chapter:
How it may be Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as Medicine, and for the Benefit of those who Want to be Deceived.
S John Chrysostom, the famous fourth century theologian and contemporary of S Augustine, discussed Paul’s own admission of deceit:
I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.1 Cor 9:22
Chrysostom frankly agrees:
Great is the force of deceit!Diegesis
Though he feebly hedges about the intent of it, at root deceit for God is perfectly all right. More recently, Martin Luther agreed that Protestants thought the same as Catholics, that “useful” and “helpful” lies for the sake of the Christian Church would not be against God—“he would accept them”. Cardinal Newman, even more recently, also admitted it:
When there was a causa justa, an untruth need not be a lie.R Graves and J Podro, The Nazarene Gospel Restored 36
It is why Christianity is a lying religion. Both Catholics and Gnostics, motivated by this spirit of fraudulent duty, invented pious fictions. Great numbers of them were written with no other purpose than to deceive believers. Almost every one of the apostles was allocated a gospel by one early sect or another. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us the first bishops even forged Jesus’s letters, putatively in his own handwriting, and signed!
In the fourth century, the Pope was concerned about the literature circulating amongst the faithful. He drew up a list of some of the books containing a score of gospels—each of the apostles had one, besides the standard four—Epistles and Acts. The canonical four gospels are just a selection out of a muddy stream of legendary literature, and “the Church” had let all this have a free run for at least two centuries—to the time of Constantine—before it objected. Only from the fourth century did the Church suppress quaint imaginings about “the boyhood of Jesus” and picturesque accounts of “the midwife of Jesus”, and so on.
“The Church forgery mill”, as J Wheless aptly called it, did not limit itself to mere writings but for centuries made an industry of phony relics, often of bizarre kinds. Several churches claimed the foreskin of Jesus, evidently saved as a mememto by the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the splinters of the True Cross were enough, Calvin sarcastically said, to make a full load for a good ship.
The Shroud of Turin is among them. There were at least 26 authentic burial shrouds scattered throughout the abbeys of Europe, of which the Shroud of Turin is one. It is one of the relics manufactured for the profit of a local church or monastery during the Middle Ages. Shortly after the Shroud emerged it was declared a fake by the bishop who discovered the artist. This is verified by recent scientific investigations. The Shroud of Turin is also not consistent with gospel accounts of Jesus’s burial, which clearly refer to multiple cloths and a separate napkin over his face. Respectable burial then was to be wrapped in cloths like a mummy. Perhaps Jesus, as a bandit, was not so buried, but nor would he, as a bandit, have been wrapped in an expensive single cloth.
Evidence that Christ, the Christian god, is a myth is in the words of Pope Leo X, who contemptuously admits Christ was a myth when he is alleged to have said:
How profitable that fable of Christ hath been to us and our company!
It is not a surprising belief for a churchman to hold, the surprise is that he should have openly admitted it. A Christian apologist kindly supplies us with the source—Pageant of Popes by the Elizabethan clergyman and dramatist, John Bale—and some additional quotations. Bale wrote mystery plays, and was one of the precursors of Shakespeare through his semi-historical work, King John. He is noted above all as the author of the first bibliography of English literature. Bale was not at all savage to Leo, being quite kind to him, but highlighted the fact that historians do not dispute—he was no great cleric:
This Leo was of his own nature a gentle and quiet person, but often times ruled by those that were cruel and contentious men, whom he suffered to do in many matters according to their insolent will. He addicting himself to niceness, and taking ease did pamper his flesh in diverse vanities and carnal pleasures. At banqueting he delighted greatly in wine and music, but had no care of preaching the Gospel, nay was rather a cruel persecuter of those that began then, as Luther and others, to reveal the light thereof, for, on a time when a cardinal Bembus did move a question out of the Gospel, the Pope gave him a very contemptuous answer saying: “All ages can testifie enough how profitable that fable of Christ hath been to us and our company”.
More modern writers tend to be more critical of Leo. He was “not a competent ruler”, and was “not greatly interested in the advancement of the church”. He was a dilettante of letters and arts and his fame rests on being Raphael’s patron and on his literary circle including Cardinals Bembo and Bibbiena. An author in the Catholic Encyclopedia is more indulgent!
It is proper, however, to pay full credit to the good qualities of Leo. He was highly cultivated, susceptible to all that was beautiful, a polished orator and a clever writer, possessed of good memory and judgment, in manner dignified and majestic. It was generally acknowledged, even by those who were unfriendly towards him, that he was unfeignedly religious and strictly fulfilled his spiritual duties. He heard Mass and read his Breviary daily and fasted three times a week. His piety cannot truly be described as deep or spiritual, but that does not justify the continued repetition of his alleged remark: “How much we and our family have profited by the legend of Christ, is sufficiently evident to all ages”. John Bale, the apostate English Carmelite, the first to give currency to these words in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was not even a contemporary of Leo. Among the many sayings of Leo X that have come down to us, there is not one of a skeptical nature. In his private life he preserved as pope the irreproachable reputation that he had borne when a cardinal. His character shows a remarkable mingling of good and bad traits.
It is remarkable because his bad traits were utterly immoral and irresponsible, making it seem unusual that he had any good ones at all. We can hardly expect the Catholic Encyclopedia not to defend one of its own. Yet, the only point in the item from the article that might make a skeptic wonder is that Leo was “unfeignedly religious”. At the same time the author concedes that he was not deeply pious. T Craven in Men of Art describes Leo as “a smiling sybarite infected with the popular neopagan culture of his day” and adds “his pontificate was a georgeous carnival that left the Church bankrupt”. Craven also accuses Leo of working Raphael to death in a “reckless patronage of the arts”. After he had been enthroned, according to the Venetian Ambassador, he remarked, “Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it”. That sounds a saying “of a skeptical nature”, and much in line with Bale’s quotation.
The Catholic Encyclopedia does denigrate John Bale, a pious and creative man himself, by calling him “the apostate English Carmelite” when he was a protestant English bishop, a graduate of Cambridge University and a protegé of Thomas Cranmer. Bale became an apostate to the Catholic Church because he was part of that great movement in protest at its excesses called the Reformation. Since Leo and his rather large family, the Medicis, were doing all right out of the Catholic Church as it was—pope Clement VII was another Medici—he could hardly have been expected to support Martin Luther and the other protestants. But for opportunistic reasons he declared Henry VIII as “Defender of the Faith” and Bale became one of the men who defended it in England before the schism.
Leo was spending literally millions of dollars a year in present currency, and replenished his declining coffers by selling indulgences, a most profitable pastime for a man who, unlike many of his famous family, was acknowledged as being a poor businessman. The Medicis were successful businessmen because they were the Mafia of their day, with a corrupt and scheming reputation. The Catholic Encyclopedia seems to suppress this detail, presumably because the Medicis were staunch supporters of the Catholic Church that served them so well. Leo is said not to have been unusually nepotistic, but he nevertheless placed lots of his fellow Medicis into sinecures. If his “character shows a remarkable mingling of good and bad traits”, it is only because the Catholic Church was unable to suppress entirely the bad traits!
The Catholic Encyclopedia is also hardly honest to say that Bale was not a contemporary of Leo, especially as the gospels Christians regard so highly were themselves not contemporaneous with the life of Jesus but were written over half a century later. Leo was born in 1475 while Bale was born in 1495. so, the two men lived as contemporaries for 26 of Leo’s 46 years. Nowadays, at least, the clergy are mainly clever and educated men. They know the history of the Church and that the story of Christ is a legend. So they are no different from Leo X.
The disgraceful list of absurdities and frauds goes on and it has, indeed, been enormously profitable for the Church. The Church has always existed mostly to accumulate wealth for the prelates at the expense of the ignorant faithful. If the latter once realised that they cannot buy their way into heaven by paying money to the priests, they would kill the whole scam in a couple of years. But there is little likelihood of that! A good friend gives more to the Catholic Church than he gives to his wife to run the household.
Continuation of the Fraud
Persecution of Christians opened to the forgers a new opportunity. The early Christians treasured the memory and the remains of the earlier Essene martyrs and the smaller number of priests, pacifists and many simple minded maids and matrons who had died rather than deny what they had been told was the holy truth. A church grew proud of its martyrs, their lives, their miracles and even their noble birth or high position. An utterly mendacious literature grew to meet the Christian sentiment. If a church had no martyrs, it made them.
The spurious literature that existed in the fourth century is a mere trifle in comparison with the river of forgeries of the early Middle Ages but it was serious enough to bring discredit on the Church. Infidels laughed at the Christians because their stories of martyrs were full of historical errors and patent absurdities. The Pope names the accounts of S George—the British patron saint—S Quiricus, and S Julitta, and says that they were probably written by heretics. He specifies a large number of spurious works, and he gives a general caution that many others are in circulation.
Incidentally, let us notice that the Pope includes in this first “index of prohibited books” that famous forgery, the letters of “King Abgar” to Jesus and of Jesus to King Abgar. Yet, a priest of the Church of England tried to impose these spurious letters on his ignorant congregation as a modern discovery!
This list is generally called an “index of prohibited books”, but the faithful were not “prohibited”, in the modern sense, to read the books. Though false and forgeries, there were no penalties for reading them and people not only continued to read them, but the forgers got busier than ever. The Roman Empire was sinking, and with it civilization was leaving the planet, except in China, for many centuries. The literate minority in th Dark Ages were so densely ignorant that the grossest forgeries could be imposed upon them. Voluminous collection of stories of saints and martyrs, of which the Catholic is so proud, emerged into the light of the new Europe.
The divine power that sustained the early Church in its conflict with the Roman Empire, and the details on which that boast is based are spurious. A religion was imposed partly by the most extensive and audacious forgeries the world has ever known.
From the sixth century until the Reformation this mass of fraudulent literature circulated with impunity. The educated minority of the Pagan world had smiled at the legends, whereas the most learned men of the Middle Ages accepted them. They paid little attention to history. And it was not worth the fiendish tortures of the Inquisition to determine whether S George had really fought a dragon, or S Denis had carried his head in his hands.
During the Renaissance scholars again smiled at these things. So did Popes, when they happened to be scholars, which was not often. It did not matter as long as you respected one valuable set of forgeries, those on which the Temporal Power of Rome was based.
At last the Church got a few historical scholars.
The ordinary believer blames Rationalist critics for rooting from the early history of the Church these fragile blossoms of sanctity and martyrdom. The criticism of the Old and New Testaments, the detection of forgeries and interpolations, has really often been conducted by learned theologians.
Benedict XIV knew the sacred books of his Church, to say nothing of its popular literature, were full of lies that he, being an honest scholar, did not like. Benedict, against ignorant and hostile clergy, reformed the “Martyrology”, but he shelved a reform of the Breviary, with its short life of a saint for every day. So the official books of the Catholic Church, the Breviary and the Missal, which the priest reads daily, are still full of what honest Catholic scholars know to be lies and forgeries, though they chose more delicate words to describe them.
Catholics are permitted, even encouraged, to read the Catholic Encyclopedia. It is a tissue of inaccuracies, antiquities and lies but the truth about the martyrs is now so well known that even this “Encyclopedia” has to admit a good deal of it. All we know about S George, for ages the most popular saint in Christendom, is that he existed, and that he was martyred in or near Lydda some time before 300 AD.
The Genuine Persecutions
This is the church myth of the Christian martyrs.
By about forty years after the death of Christ, the new faith had spread so triumphantly through the Roman world that the Emperor Nero, in his Golden House on the Palatine Hill, marked it and trembled. With all the might of Rome he flung himself upon the followers of Jesus. The most diabolical tortures were devised for them, and in their thousands, in every province of the Roman Empire, they went smiling to their atrocious deaths.
But the blood of the martyrs was the seed of Christianity. Twenty years later Domitian saw the hated religion overrunning the Empire, and again the decree went forth that it was to be “rooted out” of the planet. Thirty years later it had grown so miraculously that crowds came up to the tribunals in a single remote province of the Empire, and Trajan renewed the bloody attempt to extirpate it.
Ten times in two hundred and fifty years the mighty forces, the fiendish tortures, the unquenchable hatred of Rome were set in motion against it, and refined maids of high birth braved the lions and the shame which is worse than death and mothers were torn from the arms of loving husbands.
Most Christians believe that ten times the scythe of the Roman power went bloodily through the whole Christian world, and ten times it raised again its proud head to heaven. Nero tried to eradicate the name of Christian and hunted the faithful “through every province of the Empire”. Domitian made the same effort to “root it out”. And so on. Motive? The inspiration of the devil, of course. Result? To enrich the world with hundreds of thousands of martyrs, whose beautiful stories still bring tears to the eye.
The cold historical truth is that we cannot admit more than two, or at the most three, “general persecutions”. More radical critics reduce the persecutions further. Decius and Diocletian, in the third and fourth centuries, set afoot general persecution. Valerian, in the third century, possibly did the same, in milder terms. The rest is fancy or local Pagan riots against Christian sacrilege.
The oldest Roman law, the Law of the Twelve Tables, forbade anyone to practice any religion not formally admitted by the state, but the state was hospitable and admitted all kinds of religions. Christianity was detested for three main reasons.
- Its meetings were secret and usually held by night, so they were put down as conspiracies, though often they were simply orgies
- Christians spoke scornfully of the beliefs of Pagans and the official gods of Rome
- Christians were disloyal to Rome, refusing military service when it was weakening, and exulting in its weakness as signifying the coming end of the world.
Modern scholars doubt that Nero persecuted Christians, the passage in Tacitus describing it half a century later, being suspected of being a Christian interpolation or alteration. It speaks, not only of Jesus being crucified under Pontius Pilate, but of the martyrdom of “an immense multitude” of Christians at Rome. There were only a few thousand two centuries later. Much evidence points to a severe persecution, but it was most likely of Jews, and Christians were caught in it, many being Jews by birth. Furthermore, any persecution did not extend beyond the city.
The first martyr of the Neronian persecution is S Paulinus and in his life there is a reference to “the Governor of Tuscany”. M Tillemont, a Catholic priest who reviewed the lives of the saints, added in a one of a series of critical endnotes:
We leave the learned to examine whether there were governors of Tuscany under Nero.
He knew there were not. The life of Paulinus, Tillemont concludes, is of unknown but late age and no authority. The life of S Torpetus is “one of the worst pieces imaginable”. The life of S Vitalis is a ninth-century production and “contains more words than facts”. S Ursicinus is under a cloud, for there has been a fatal confusion of names and the legend is valueless.
S Hermagoras martyred in Aquileia, “a town of the province of Austria” is condemned immediately as erroneous. S Thecla, which nuns still read with blushing admiration, was a “beautiful and learned” Pagan who was converted by Paul and her constant and tender companionship alleviated the burden of his apostolate. She took a life-vow of virginity and, when persecution began, the Pagans thought it a relevant punishment to remove all her clothes before she was presented to the lions. She is said in the Roman Breviary to have been ninety years old, but even the lions, Tillemont recalls with irony:
Did not dare to violate her virginity by too free a look.
The lions—impressed by her vow—veiled their eyes and licked her feet, and even the fire would not burn her. Tillemont ungallantly proves that the sources of these stories are absolutely worthless, and that, according to earlier documents, this “first lady martyr”, as the Greek church calls her, died peacefully in her bed at an advanced age—if even the earlier sources told the truth.
In the fourth century, S Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in bitter conflict with the Empress, a Christian but an Arian, decided on a plan to to inflame and sustain the zeal of the faithful. In a visions he was directed to dig in the ground and, remarkably, he found the bodies of Ss Gervasius and Protasius. Backed by the zeal of the faithful, Ambrose secured victory over the Empress.
The bodies were of a remarkable size, and Tillemont pointedly notes Ambrose’s explanation, that it proved them to be centuries old when people were bigger as the scriptures tell us. S Augustine was in Milan and he tells us that the bodies were “uncorrupted”, though Ambrose says he found only bones! Tillemont proves that Ambrose cooked up the whole story but does not impugn Ambrose, merely making innuendoes.
Ambrose, who was a Christian by career choice rather than conviction, wrote a work called De Officiis based on a work by the same name by Cicero, in which he perpetrates another subtler fraud. Christianity had no ethical system other than a few wise sayings attributed to Jesus but generally common in Judaism if not in the east as a whole. Ambrose effectively took the Stoic outlook and offered it within a Christian framework as a Christian ethic. A C Bouquet, author of a noted book on comparative religion, comments:
To this day, many educated lay people are Stoics rather than Christians, without knowing it.
Tillemont’s endnotes scratch the halos from saints and martyrs at the end of every volume. “S Denis the Areopagite”, S Domitilla, S Linus and S Clement are all spurious. In the first century of the Christian era, Tillemont cannot uphold the reputation of any martyr except Peter and Paul, whom he dare not challenge. In the second century, he throws serious doubt on the stories of four out of five of the martyrs mentioned.
Concerning S Caesarius, he concludes, “The safest way is to leave him in the number of those whose holiness we are acquainted with, but of whom we know nothing else”. The story of S Hyacinthus “looks like a fable”. S Eudocia’s life is “a sorry piece… mere fiction”.
The preposterous tale of the martyrdom of S Romulus and eleven thousand Christian soldiers was written by the Greek, Metaphrastes, the greatest writer of martyr legends, who lived in the tenth century. S Evodius did not die a martyr. S Ignacius’s story reeks with errors. S Eustachius is a “mere romance”. S Sophia is a record full of anachronisms. S Eleutherius—there is “no ground to assert that he was a martyr, or even a man”. S Babbina is “outrageous language”. S Symphorosa is spurious, full of errors. It goes on.
If Nero persecuted Christians in Rome, they were not alone. Many Pagans were murdered also by Nero. A Pagan writer wrote a book of the notable men and women who were victims of Nero’s insanity, and it is suspected that Christians used the idea, and indeed many of the names, for their earliest martyrologies.
Domitian, the next persecutor, also confined his action to Rome, and, as far as we can ascertain, only enforced the law against a number of prominent men who professed the illicit religion. And Domitian, a man of sinister and gloomy character living in an atmosphere of plots, also was a persecutor of Pagans as well as Christians. That he tried throughout his Empire to “root out” the name of Christ is entirely false.
Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, who are counted as the third and fourth persecutors, were men of different, and high character. All the Stoic Emperors detested Christianity as a mean superstition and an anti-social philosophy. A sect which cut off its members from civic and imperial life deserved no indulgence. They merely let the law stand—they did not issue persecuting decrees—and interfered little with the local Pagan anger against the Christians.
The only historical sign of any large persecution is the famous letter in which Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, asks Trajan’s permission—that is the real reason for the letter—not to enforce the law. The authenticity of the letter is seriously disputed and some of the rhetorical passages in which Pliny describes the temples as deserted, and whole regions converted to Christianity, are inconsistent with the known facts. In any case, as Tertullian afterwards said, Trajan’s reply “partly frustrated” the local passion.
Septimius Severus, the next persecutor, a hundred years after Trajan, is said to have been alarmed at the number of prominent Romans who became Christians and to have enforced the law to some extent. We have few accounts of genuine martyrs. Alexander Severus put a bust of Christ in the private chapel of his palace. He was succeeded by Maximin and the legends put thousands of martyrs under the “bloody tyrant”. Historians say there is no sign of executions.
Decius (249-251 AD), Valerian (257 AD), and Diocletian (303 AD) were the only general persecutors. In trying to suppress or check Christianity—at first in each case by the lighter penalties—they were considering the welfare of the state, which was then sinking. Before Diocletian the Church had had forty years of peace, and it had grown sufficiently to make its anti-patriotic teaching a matter of concern.
So, by this time, Christians were a powerful force, especially in the state bureaucracy, and these emperors thought they were too powerful for the good of the empire. Far from being willing to defend the Empire, Christians were inclined to welcome the Goths and Persians as avengers. The Pope insolently and openly defied Valerian at Rome, and Diocletian’s decrees were torn down by Christians in his own palace. Yet in not one of the three decrees of Diocletian is the death sentence imposed.
The Manufacture of Martyrs
The long-revered figures of martyrs have melted into the nebulosity of popular legend or priestly strategy.
The zealous Protestant wants no saints and martyrs, no relics or statues, no legends or martyrologics. Let them thank the “higher critics” in this department that they have justified the work of the Reformation. But, in slaying the martyrs, modern historians have destroyed one of the time-honoured arguments for the supernatural origin of Christianity, and in exposing this prodigious volume of untruthful literature they have given us proof of a tendency of the new religion not complimentary to its ethic.
The study of the lives or legends of saints and martyrs is now a science, hagiography (from hagios, saint).
All the legends of martyrs under the Emperor Commodus are spurious except two or three. The story of S Felicitas and her seven sons is two legends blended in the Middle Ages. S Agnes and S Cecilia and all the acts of the martyrs of the Roman church have been shown, by no less than a Jesuit scholar, as late compilations which do not even profess to quote earlier authorities.
Bernard Shaw wrote Androcles and the Lion, in which he teaches us how to write history, knowing full well that no Christian was ever exposed to the lions in the Coliseum! The “acts of the martyrs” of the Roman Church are amongst the most spurious of all. Yet Catholic writers continue to tell Catholic readers how Gelasius or Damasus warned the faithful not to read spurious books, and ask them to believe that the authorities of the Church were ever on the watch. Rome was the main center of the manufacture of spurious documents.
Pagan deities had been dressed up as Christian martyrs. Roman Popes who died comfortably in their beds, after dubious lives, have become martyrs. Even anti-Popes and their supporters, slain by Christians in the fights for the Papal throne are in the martyrology.
The Bollandists, the association of Jesuit saint describers of the Catholic Church, compiled the most monumental collection of saints ever put together. Up to the time when the French Revolution checked its pious work, it had published fifty three enormous volumes, telling the stories of more than twenty five thousand saints and martyrs. Even the Buddha was canonised as a Christian saint—twice, in fact. S Barlaam is the Buddha and S Joasaph is the Boddhisatta. The modern Bollandist says it was all innocent. They cannot go so far as to admit the truth—it was deliberate deceit and forgery.
How many accounts have survived this massacre of the martyrs, judged on reliable historical grounds. It is evaded. No Catholic dare write an honest account of the Saints with a proper respect for truthfulness.
- Less than one in one hundred of the early martyrs can be proved to have died for his religion or even existed in it
- Ninety-nine statements in one hundred, in the lives of the martyrs, are lies and scholars can prove that the writers were almost always clerics
- The Christians, when they obtained power, made more martyrs in a century than they had in three centuries. In the next one thousand years they made hundreds of times more martyrs than the Romans had made but of a different kind—Jews, witches, Albigensians, and thousands more were martyrs of the Christians.
The church persists that these lies were merely stories that accumulated innocently in the telling:
When they are written on parchment, copyists are careless, and put marginal notes into the text, and feel it is pious to improve the narrative here and there. The stories get into quite different versions in the east and the west, and legend writers of the fifth and later centuries blended versions and insert detail they found anywhere.
This polite hagiographical talk is Christian lying. Even Catholic hagiographers admit a few, of the most extravagant medieval myth-makers are liars and forgers. For the others, weasel words have to be used so as not to brand both Latin and Greek Churches as liars or happily condoning liars. Formerly, the church assured us writers like Metaphrastes always used manuscript source, but now that scholars, having searched diligently, have found no sources, the church tells us the tale was meant to be an edificatory story not a real account of a martyr! Strange that anyone who questioned them was in danger of being barbecued.
Leo X
J P Holding, a Christian Auntie for agonized believers on the web, thinks he is a bit of an intellectual and a wit. He writes a sort of who-dunnit intending to show that the citation of Leo X is spurious, but embarasses himself by getting to the exact source. Because it proves to be a Christian source, the apologist has to resort to running down an otherwise well regarded Christian. Bale was, like most sixteenth century Protestants outraged by the corruption of Catholicism, and he wrote many critical and ironical works to show the Catholic hierarchy for what they were. Particularly outrageous was the Pope’s selling of indulgences, and Holding actually gives a further extract from Bale to show this, apparently wanting to show Bale as extreme. Thus Holding tells us Bale wrote as background to the theses of Luther:
The people were persuaded that if they bought these pardons they need not to seek any further for salvation, and that no sin could be so horrible, but that by these indulgences it should be forgiven, and that the souls that lie tormented in Purgatory should fly into heaven forthwith, as soon as the money received for these pardons at the charge of their friends should be put into the Popes coffers.
And reported omens that he thought signified the downfall of the Catholic Church:
He [Pope Leo] made 31 Cardinals in one day, whereby he got great bribes and much treasure, but the same day appeared many horrible fights and great tempests arose, with vehement winds, thunders and lightnings, vehemently rushing upon the Church where the Pope and his Cardinals were with such force, and it shook down an idol made for the picture of Christ like a child in the lap of the virgin Mary: also it broke S Peter’s keys out of his hand. These things were enterpreted to prognosticate the decay of the Pope’s kingdom, and thereupon many wrote bitter verses.
Holding seems to think that Bale’s mention of bizarre prognostications, shows he is unhistorical, a strange attitude for a man to take who believes in the bizarre events readily accepted by Christians in their bible. The prognostications do not seem half as strange as those that Holding believes with no sweat at all. Only the interpretation of them as prognostications seems suspect. Holding’s apologetic ends up as:
Bale was not a historian, but he had plenty against the Catholic Church… Skeptics are posting fiction as fact, using the work of someone who thought the Catholic Church to be the whore of Babylon.
Most Protestant clerics then thought that with some justification at the time of the Medicis. Many still do. Are we to suppose that when Luther nailed up his theses against the sale of indulgences he was unfairly prejudiced against the Catholic Church? If Holding is right in making Bale into a liar, then he is illustrating Christian dishonesty. It has nothing to do with denomination. If Bale was indeed a liar and his alleged quotation of Leo X was false, then why was it remembered for so long? It could only be because Protestants believed it epitomized the Catholic Church. Either it had a sound basis and the Catholic Church was corrupt, as Luther and Bale said, or all Protestants were deluded.
Holding concludes as Christian apologists often do by asking for impossible proofs of the genuine authenticity of Bale’s allegation, when they accept no credible proof for their own beliefs. Lino Sanchez's christianism.com website has more sources for John Bale and this controversy at christianism preface and christianism supres2. A search of the website reveals more still.
