Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
Saturday, 01 April 2006

Inspiration

The Bible comprises a Hebrew portion—the Old Testament, called by the Jews, the scriptures—and a Christian portion—the New Testament—both of which are accepted by Christians as inspired, it being popularly supposed that the New Testament contains the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old.

The most important theme of the Old Testament is that of the creation and the fall of man, and the leading topic of the New is the career of the Christian saviour. In the creation stories of the Old Testament, the first man, Adam, disobeyed God, who cursed him and his offspring in His anger, introducing sin into the world—called original sin. To lift the curse, that He Himself placed on mankind, God had to manifest himself on earth in His aspect of the Son and be sacrificed, thereby propitiating the sin committed at the beginning of human history—though not everyone’s but only those who believe unquestioningly the fancies of the Christians. Christians have to hang on to these interesting but primitive Jewish legends to justify their God’s sacrifice, which otherwise is inexplicable. To do so they assert that the whole of the bible is the infallible or, at least, the inspired word of God.

Yet, the idea that the bible is inspired by an almighty god does not bear examination. How can any writing claim to be the infallible word of God and yet contain false statements and be self-contradictory, yet the bible suffers both these errors of fallibility. When errors occur in any one particular, they cannot be discounted elsewhere and everything must be verified. Then our confidence has evaporated and the whole theory of inspiration is vitiated. The bible not only makes mistakes in matters of Nature but it puts forward, in the first and second chapters of Genesis, two contradictory accounts of the creation which disagree in nearly every detail. The more one reads the bible critically, the more convinced one is of its lack of authority and educational value. To be divinely inspired, the reader had a right to be sure it was unimpeachable in history and logic, so that no doubt could have arisen.

Every sane person today accepts the theory of Copernicus that the sun is the centre of our planetary system. But until only a few hundred years ago Christianity taught that the earth was the centre of our system of planets, and that the sun rose and set daily over it. The Catholic Church, by order of its “Congregation of the Holy Office” (Inquisition), burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for supporting the Copernican theory, the reason being that it was “contrary to the bible” and for suggesting that the bible did not contain the whole of science. In 1616, Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition, and silenced by threats. At the age of seventy, he wrote a book in which he proved the truth of the Copernican theory. Clerics made him kneel and swear with his hands on the gospels that the earth did not move round the sun, and that he would never again spread this “damnable heresy”. The church made the mistake of condemning and even murdering men who proposed what is now known to be true. In so doing it asserted that the Copernican theory ran counter to the science of the bible. In short the bible is wrong! Plainly, in this instant, it was not inspired.

If we are born tainted with original sin and it is removable, any just god would have given us all unequivocal instructions on its removal, instructions so clear that defiance of them would be the wilful act of those who chose a sinful life. Instead, we have stories of miracles performed where they were not needed and not performed where they would have helped. If a miracle was worked for the trifle of providing wine for a wedding, surely we could expect a miracle which would clearly delineate the path of salvation for people innocent of the sin of Adam. We do not get one, and are returned to the arbitrary salvation offered by Paul—those are saved who believe! Thus we are left to gamble on the mode of our redemption from a sin which we did not commit, but might yet incur the penalty for.

Books once included in the sacred collections of the early churches are now cast into outer darkness. Is this God’s doing? The divine message has been inscribed on old skins from which Pagan writings had been partly erased so that the “Word of God” could be written on them by Christian pens. If Paganism was wrong, did God allow mankind to be misled? If it was all that wrong, why is much of it adapted for use in Christianity and not treated with disgust? None of this reflects divine behaviour, unless God is as indecisive and sadistic as men. All of it cries out that one set of priests seeking power over people’s destinies have succeeded in ousting an earlier group.

Look at the attitude which God adopts towards the human race which he created! On the day of vengeance Jesus would return on clouds of glory and supervise the judgement of God. Judgement! Vengeance! A revengeful God will administer justice upon the hapless creatures because of the guilt of Adam and Eve. Why? God could have mercifully prevented the birth of any of us, we are told, to save us this punishment. It is just as well that His watch is not too accurate because Jesus promised the day of vengeance would dawn before some of his followers tasted death. Two thousand years later we still wait, but two billion Christians seem happy that God has a faulty timepiece.

Origin

Pre-“exilic” Jews did not have their bibles as Christians now have. In the reign of Josiah, about 100 years before the captivity, the bible suggests there was only one copy of the Law of Moses in the whole of Judah. It was neither read nor even consulted by them, for when Hilkiah the priest accidentally found a copy in a the builder’s rubbish of the temple (2 Kings 22:8), it was announced as a wonderful discovery, but it was afterwards destroyed by fire. All that the Jews knew about Moses and his religion they learnt from hearsay, just as the Greeks and Romans knew about their mythology.

It was a system practised by their priests. Ezra, in the apocryphal 2 Esdras 14, was the only man who knew the books of the law by heart. After the mythical “return from captivity” in Babylon, he had to retire to a field for forty days to dictate the five books of Moses and other books totalling over 200, aided by five scribes and by drinking a cup of some strong liquor, of the substance of water and the colour of fire! Sounds like whiskey. Moses and Joshua could not have been the authors of the books attributed to them, for they describe their own deaths. Here it is being admitted that the books of the scriptures were re-written by the Persian colonists sent from Babylon, Ezra being the head of a priestly school, or even a Persian ministry.

When the literate class of Jews were taken away by the Babylonian conquerors, the reamining Jews must have lost much of any tradition they had peculiar to themselves, as opposed to Canaanites generally. The ones left behind were poor and illiterate and were called the Am ha Eretz and the Samarians by the sophisticated colonists. Ezra must have been born in in Babylon or Persia and he supervised the setting up of a “restored” Judaism meant to suit the Persian rulers. The colonists had the duty of setting up a temple as significant for the nations of Syria and the Levant as the Tower of Babel was to the Eastern Semites, a Persian Fort Knox, and a sinecure for themselves and their descendants that would last for millennia, far longer than the Persians who set it all in place. They therefore wrote the stories emphasizing God’s messiah, the Persian king, and his priesthood in Jerusalem.

The Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, like modern Hebrew, written from right to left, on rough skins in ink. It was glossed in different inks and languages and eventually became almost obliterated by age. The writing consisted of badly formed capital letters only, with no vowels, stops or division into words by spaces. There were originally about 150 books like this, supposed to have been inspired by the spirit of God. Fifty-three, including the Pentateuch or five books of Moses, were formerly considered by the Christian church as canonical. In 1380 AD, fourteen were deemed as uncanonical and classed as “apocryphal” by Wycliffe—the Reformer and bible translator. These fourteen books were omitted from the Protestant bibles, though considered useful “for example of life and instruction of manners”. Many of the other old writings are now lost.

The books of the New Testament were written on papyrus in Greek, also in capital letters with no divisions between words, though the original Matthew was possibly written in Aramaic. Twenty-seven books are now considered to be canonical, but there were sixty-one others now classed as apocryphal. Twelve were excluded at first, but afterwards received as canonical.

Out of 182 works accepted for centuries as the genuine writings of Christians during the first 180 years of the present era, only twelve are now accepted by theologians as genuine. The other 170 books were not noticed as forgeries by the Holy Ghost, and yet were believed by poor, undiscerning Christians. The manufacture of some of these manuscripts probably took place at the great monastery at Mount Athos, in Salonica, where about 60,000 monks were employed in religious composition. Christians today are even more prolific, writing vast numbers of tomes all professing to clarify something, but most of it tosh.

The first that we know of the four Christian gospels is in the time of Irenaeus, who, in the second century, intimates that he has “received four gospels as authentic scriptures”. Irenaeus was himself a pious forger and possibly the editor of John. Three accounts are given of how the books which now appear in the New Testament were chosen.

1. That by Popius, in his Synodicon to the Council of Nicaea, says that 200 versions of the gospel were placed under a communion table and, while the council prayed, the inspired books jumped on the slab but the rest remained under it.
2. That by Irenaeus says the church selected the four most popular of the gospels.
3. That by the Council of Laodicea (366 AD) says that each book was decided by ballot. Luke escaped by one vote, while the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation, the apocalypse, were rejected as forgeries.

Scriptural Mistranslation

The Jewish scriptures have been manipulated to induce the reader to believe that the Jews were always monotheists or worshippers of one God only and Christians have naturally, as monotheists, carried on the tradition. The Jews came to call their god Yehouah, usually written YHWH, which does not convey any idea of the Hebrew pronunciation, though Jews were not allowed to say the ineffable name and used other words instead. Christian bibles consider no name necessary for God because they have no need to distinguish Him from any other god and prefer to translate YHWH as the Lord or simply God.

Other Semites worshipped Yehouah pronouncing it as Yahu, or Yeho, but Yehouah held only a subordinate position in the general mythology of the Semites and is famous only because he was the father god of the Children of Israel and therefore of the Christians.

In the reign of the Assyrian King Sargon II. the throne of Hamath was occupied by Yahou-Behdi, which name literally means the “Servant of Yehouah”. The Phœnicians venerated this deity also, for in the inscriptions of Assurbanipal, another Assyrian King, the name of the crown-prince of Tyrenus is given as Yahu-melek—“Yehouah is my King”. On a coin from Gaza of the fourth century BC is a figure of a deity in a chariot of fire, over whose head is written Yho in old Phœnician characters.

Any honest translation makes it glaringly plain that Jews were not always monotheistic—if they actually are now since they, and Christians believe in Angels and Demons and what are they if not gods? Indeed the “two angels”, who appeared to Lot in the city of Sodom, are, in the original text, gods. Elohim, literally the gods, is deliberately mistranslated “God”, and YHWH Elohim is given as “Lord God” when “Yehouah of the gods” would be more precise. Adam’s demon-wife, Lilith, has been suppressed in Isaiah 34:14, where she is reduced to “the night monster”. Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter because she came to greet him, confirms that the Israelites accepted the existence of other gods, arguing with the Amorites in Judges 11:24 that every nation is entitled to what its national God bestows upon it.

Psalms 68 is positively a song to the Sun-God! It begins, “Let the Mighty One arise” (misleadingly rendered “Let God arise”), and bids all inferior creatures “cast up a highway for him that rideth through the heavens (not deserts) by his name Jah”. The frequent references to sun gods under various names are all disguised by the bible. Names used for the Hebrew sun god are Shaddai, sometimes preceded with the prefix El, Bel, the Babylonian sun god and Baal, the Syrian sun god. The title Adonai, the Phœnician name for the sun god, when it occurs singly, is translated “the Lord” but, when it is met with in conjunction with YHWH or Elohim, it is given as “the Lord God”. Psalms 110:1 says, “YHWH said to Adonai”—which should be translated, “Yehouah said to our Lord (the Sun-God)—Sit at my right hand”. The popular deity of Thebes, Amun-Ra (or Ammon, Amen, the hidden sun), is met frequently. It is often translated as “The God of Truth” as in Isaiah 65:16 or as “Amen” (Truly) as in Psalms 89:46. In Revelation written, of course, in Greek the word is written with Ho prefixed, yielding “The Amen”, a senseless expression if “truly” is meant, but not if the meaning is “by the God Amun”. In Revelation 3:14 we ought to read, “These things, saith Amun, the true and faithful witness”.

The translators of the revised bible admit the word Ashera or Asherah to be consistently wrongly rendered “grove” in the Authorized Version. Why? Because the Ashera was an upright stone used as a phallic symbol in some fertility rite. The idea connected with the word Jesus in its Semitic original, as in the Arabian fertility god Isa, was phallic vigour.

Of course sensible people will see that in ancient times the Jews worshipped the sun god and other gods and then later used various of their names for their adopted single God. But that is accepting that earlier Jews did not have this monotheistic God as their god and so the long history of His plan for His chosen people is shown to be false.

Forgery

Almost all of the stories of saints and martyrs which are treasured in the Roman Church are forgeries. Even some Roman Catholic scholars concur. Most non-Catholic historians agree that the documents on which the power of Rome is based are forgeries. Christians and Jews say these martyrs were religious men and the charge insults them. But even Protestant preachers accuse, not merely religious men, but ministers of the Christian gospel of hundreds of forgeries. From the sixth to the twelfth century Roman priests poured upon Europe a flood of forgeries, much to their own profit.

The Jewish priests had done the same thing a thousand years before. The “Word of God” a forgery? God cannot forge books. Men forged a book in God’s name. Many books of the Jewish scriptures pretend to be written by men who did not write them. Many books were deliberately written as history when the writers knew that they were not history. The present Old Testament as a whole is a deliberate attempt to convey an historical belief which the writers knew to be false. A Christian professor diplomatically admitted that the writers of the Old Testament displayed “the workings of a primitive nature” in their “mode of regarding the facts.” He means they were lying. Consequently the historian has a hard job “to remove the materials of his story out of the false light in which he finds them”. He means it is hard to separate any truth in it from the fiction. He must “constantly bear in mind the peculiarities of the narrative, their legendary character, their conformity to a scheme, and their didactic purpose”. He means that these polite paraphrases must serve to excuse what plain men call forgery or lies.

Another Christian says that “the imaginative element in the story of David is but the vesture which half conceals, half discloses, certain facts treasured in popular tradition”. He means the history of David is a myth. A similar circumlocution by a Christian dignitary regarding the story of Abraham is that the biblical history of the patriarch is a tissue of “legends purified both by abridgement and expansion”.

Another Christian excuse for the scriptural lies is that the early historical writers of the Old Testament were honest collectors of stories, but that later books were put together by the “mere literary process of conflation and contamination”. The “scribes combined different copies according to their own judgement and interests”, to give us “a different religious point of view”—a view which is false—but the scribes merely acted “in a prophetic spirit”.

In the end, another set of writers recast the whole of these honest legends and dishonest “contaminations”, and added a vast amount of new matter, expressly ascribing it to Moses, for which they probably had no sources except their imagination and “interests”. The result is our Old Testament.

A Cambridge professor writing about Jews says, “Written by Oriental people, clothed in an Oriental dress, the Old Testament does not contain objective records,” but “subjective history for specific purposes”. Would a court accept that a witness’s statements were sound “subjective history for a specific purpose” as a defence against perjury? He assures us, “Scholars are now almost unanimously agreed” on these manipulations.

The higher criticism has brought into relief certain essentials. The Old Testament did not slowly evolve from Moses to Ben Sirach but was started towards the end of the fifth century and had a turbulent history of rewiting and additions until the second century. In its present form it was mainly composed in the third century and re-assembled after partial destruction in the second century by the Maccabees. After a hundred and fifty years of highrer criticism the scholars have yet to get the facts straight.

The Book of Daniel claims throughout that it was written by Daniel himself. “I Daniel” occurs in every chapter. The Protestant Reverend Professor Sayce, a vigorous opponent of higher criticism, declared that Daniel is “not historical in the modern sense of the word history!” The only sense of the word history he could mean is that it is myth. The Persians had adopted the Babylonian custom of writing on clay, then baking the brick or tablet, and such documents last forever. Recovered tablets of the great Persian king Cyrus can be compared with the words of Daniel:

In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain, and Darius the Median took the kingdom.

The tablets of Cyrus describe the taking of Babylon and show:

1. That Belshazzar was not king of Babylon.
2. That the name of the last king was Nabonidas.
3. That the city was taken peacefully, by guile, not by bloodshed.
4. That it was Cyrus, not Darius the Median, who took it.
5. That Darius, who is said (11:1) by Daniel to have been the son of Ahasuerus (Xerxes), was really his father.
6. That all the Babylonian names in Daniel are absurdly misspelled and quite strange to the writer.
7. That the writer describes the Chaldeans in a way that no writer could have done before the time of Alexander the Great.

The man who wrote Daniel, and pretended to be alive in 539 BC when Babylon fell, did not live until three or four centuries later. The book is full of errors, as we find by authentic documents and by reading the real Babylonian names on the tablets.

Now why did the writer do it, and what was his object? Quite clearly he wanted to convince the Jews that Yehouah would miraculously protect any Jews who refused to obey a sacrilegious king. And this gives us the clue to the date. It was in the second century BC, when the Greek king, Antiochus Epiphanes, tried to compel the Jews to break their law. A pious Jew, probably a priest, then wrote this book, clumsily, for in the course of three centuries the facts and names had been forgotten. Now we have recovered the real contemporary documents, and there is no room for dispute.

Christians say those who talk of forgery do not know the oriental mind which is different from ours today. It was “a work of edification”, one of the “hagiographs” or “holy writings”. The Oriental loves stories, but has as keen a sense as any of the difference between stories and sacred history. Tell an Oriental Moslem that the things said about the Prophet in the Quran were “subjective history with a specific purpose”, he would be insulted. Moslems believe it to be Allah’s exact word. The same is true here. Daniel pretended to be history. Otherwise it would have had no effect. It is a forgery.

Esther, Tobit and Judith are the same.

The decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions has finally destroyed all claim on the part of the Books of Tobit and Judith to be considered as history.

They too are ancient Jewish forgeries. Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are also the same. Sayce also decisively proved that Genesis is a compilation of Babylonian legends ascribed to Moses, an Egyptian!

There are two chief ways of detecting these forgeries—the style of the documents and the testimony of other and undisputed documents. The first method has been much ridiculed by pious people. On the orthodox theory, the Old Testament was written at different periods over more than a thousand years. Yet there is no language that does not change in the course of centuries. People today find it almost impossible to read the earliest English literature and most can see that English as late as the eighteenth century is different from the way in which we write it today. Literary experts have learnt how to date books easily from their style.

So we can with Hebrew. The writing of the Old Testament is believed by Christians and Jews to cover at least seven hundred years. And this is the simple method of the higher critics, which preachers who do not know a word of Hebrew and could not even themselves read the English of Chaucer, ridicule. This method shows us fragments of different ages in the Old Testament put together at a far later date. Further, we find inconsistencies, contradictions, and duplications which cannot otherwise be explained. Now, in addition, we have a very great deal of history and archaeology by which we can check the Old Testament.

The Priestly Forgers

Whole books of the Old Testament like Daniel are in modern terms forgeries. Jews twenty centuries ago believed the events they described had actually happened—they believed they were historical! If they had known they were not written by the prophets they revered, they also would have called them forgeries. Why should anyone, oriental or otherwise, be impressed that a god could do wonderful things in a work of fiction. Fiction was represented as fact—as a pseudepigraph.

The orthodox believe the Old Testament to be, and it professes to be, a set of books which appeared at intervals, with divine inspiration, over a thousand years of Jewish history. Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Judges, Kings, Psalms and Chronicles go back to the times they describe. The Prophets were added from the ninth century onward. Yet no part of the Old Testament, as we have it, is older than the fifth century except for odd lines and verses of possibly older poems and blessings. After the arrival of the Ezra school in the fifth century, Assyrian and Babylonian annals were combined together into a sacred history, now called by Christians their Old Testament. Drastically re-written in the time of the Egyptian Ptolemies and the Maccabees it yielded a Jewish “history” which is mainly untrue.

The Jewish priests did it. Their aim was to represent the Jewish priesthood and its rights and customs to have been established in the days of Moses. Few scholars dissent. So the priests were forgers.

A priestly group now free of Persian control in Jerusalem and keen to line their own pockets and curry favour with the scholarly Greek kings of Egypt, using the law given by Darius, added new clauses, made a priestly code, and perverted the entire history of the cult and the priesthood to link the people with their allies, and so ascribed it to Moses, a semi-Egyptian. Is that forgery? The standard opinion is that the Septuagint published by the Ptolemies for the library of Alexandria was written by Jerusalem priests in collaboration with Egyptians. What they composed and published was most of the Pentateuch as we have it now.

The Mistake Of Moses

Now let us examine the Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses with which the Old Testament opens. The belief that Moses wrote them is a statement in Kings, Chronicles and Ezra—all very late books—that Moses indeed wrote them.

The first page of the bible is in flat contradiction to what every educated person now knows, and even Christian scholars admit that the early chapters of Genesis are modifications of Babylonian legends. No one sensible now attempts to reconcile Genesis and science. The Hebrew text is poetic in an anciently ritual sense, but not accurate.

There is first a dark chaos, created by God. Apologists tell us that science has come to a similar conclusion—everything in the universe began as chaos. It is not so, but whether Genesis reflects science or not, to a non-believer it is a puzzle why God should have created matter in a chaotic state, and then, in six days, put it in order. The creative Word could have made the universe orderly in the first place. The Hebrew for the chaos is “tohu wah tohu”, which is a primitive people’s corruption of the Babylonian “tiamat”, the original chaos. To the learned Babylonian, the first state of things was a watery waste, land and water mixed up together, and the gods had first to separate them. The Hebrew follows the Babylonian legend in all that it says.

In fact science is not in harmony with Genesis. The order of creation: (1) light, (2) division of water from the sky or firmament, (3) division of land from water and creation of plants (including fruit trees), (4) appearance of the sun and moon, (5) production of birds from the water and (6) production of reptiles (after birds) and mammals and man is quite silly. The second chapter of Genesis is worse, contradicting the first by creating man, then trees, then mammals, and finally woman. The only agreement with science, and this is undone by the second chapter, is that the grass was created before the cattle, which eat it, and the cattle before the man, who eats them. Does one need inspiration to guess that?

The bible puts creation about 4000 BC. Some Christians admit that, as science claims, the universe is more than ten billion years old. Why then are they contradicting God’s word? Go through the bible noting the age of each patriarch and trace through the generations—the bible does date creation about 6000 years ago!

There is the lovely Garden of Eden—the Babylonian “edin” or plain—and the madly unjust story of the curse of the whole human race for the sin of two people. It is a Babylonian story, but the Hindus, Egyptians, and others had essentially the same story. As to Noah and the flood, every theologian in the world has thrown up the sponge on this early idea of divine justice. It is all in the Babylonian tablets, even down to such details as the sending out of the dove and the raven, and the resting of the ark on a high mountain.

The story of Babel also is a legend of which we have traces in Babylonia. God gets jealous of man’s progress in civilization. Man has built a city, which is clearly Babylon, as Christians admit, and a tower which means one of the stepped temples of Babylonia—the ziggurats. The story is a primitive attempt to explain how men came to speak different languages.

No scholar questions the Babylonian origin of the Genesis legends. The Persian colonists into Yehud probably brought these legends from their homelands in the upper reaches of the Euphrates river. No one can read the Babylonian originals and doubt the source of the early chapters of Genesis.

Clergymen say that their inspiration is the change from polytheism to monotheism. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, is said to rise high above all ancient literature. Yet in the Babylonian legend, one god also puts chaos in order and creates the world—Marduk. Moreover, monotheism was established in Egypt centuries before a line of the Old Testament was written. And ethical monotheism was effectively invented by Zoroaster somewhere in Afghanistan hundreds of years before the Persian colonists ever got to Judah.

The Mythical History Of The Jews

The story of Abraham is very simple. His original name was Abram and he lived in “Ur of the Chaldees” but God called him and changed his name to Ab-ra-ham, which is the Hebrew for “Father of many peoples”. In fact, no Hebrew scholar can make Abraham mean anything, except with difficulty. It has no meaning in Hebrew. It therefore does not mean “Father of many peoples”. Abram may have come from Ur but it was not a city of the Chaldees until about 1000 BC which proves that the legend was written at a later date by the priests.

If Abram means anything it is something like “great father”. Late in Jewish history, he began to be regarded as the ancestor of the people, but Christians say this grew out of genuine tradition about him. This is proved, they say, by archaeological discoveries which have confirmed the names of certain kings in the story of Abraham.

This illustrates why critics of the clergy call them dishonest. Of the entire story of Abram, only the fact that three or four kings mentioned are now known to have really existed is confirmed. It would follow only that there was an ancient legend about Abram, but of the whole supernatural story about him there is not a tittle of confirmation. A few names of kings, or alliances, or battles in many centuries are confirmed, a vast amount is disproved. In honesty, only the view of the Old Testament as a fabrication in the fifth century which included some older writings based on tribal traditions is confirmed.

One of the royal names discovered is King Hammurabi of Babylon. Christians tell us Amraphel in the Abram story is obviously the same person! Well, actually, it is not obvious. It is an ancient northern Canaanitish or Syrian narrative which shows us Abram as a valiant chieftain, perhaps originally a god. The Jews, who came later to Canaan, probably brought the legend with them from Beth Eden where they had previously lived. This Abram was possibly an ancestor of their race, and the priests incorporated this scanty story into the sacred history of the mixed people of Abarnahara, the Persian satrapy that had Jerusalem as its temple.

Joseph is the next outstanding historical character in the Jewish scriptures. Joseph retires with the Khabiri chieftain into the very dim mists of ancient legend. In Genesis 41:43, Joseph was set high and the Egyptian people called before him, “Bow the knee”. This is a fanciful rendering of a word which the translators did not understand. Sayce tells us the word is a Babylonian title of honour! Strange, isn’t it, to find an Egyptian crowd talking Babylonian?

It takes a long time for discoveries to reach the faithful. The story of Potiphar’s wife has so close a parallel in an Egyptian story that it is, according to Sayce, writing a century ago, “impossible not to see the connexion”. Scholars found the Orbiney Papyrus, now in the British Museum at London, in 1852 AD. In it two brothers lived together. They were working together in the field one day, and the elder, who was married, sent the younger back to the house for some seed. The elder’s wife, had had her eye on the younger for some time, said, “Come let us lie together for an hour. That will be pleasant for you, and I will make fine clothes for you.” The blushing youth indignantly refused, and fled, saying much for the morals of ancient Egyptian youth. So the wife, to protect herself, told people he had tried to seduce her, and when her husband came home, she accused the younger brother of saying to her, “Let down thy hair, and let us lie together for an hour.” And the elder slew the younger brother. Compare Genesis 39 with this. Joseph went to his master’s house to do his business, and, as there was no one else there but the wife, she caught him by his garment, saying, “Lie with me”. He refused, and she turned the tables on him, as in the Egyptian tale.

The Pentateuch is supposed to have been written by Moses, before the Israelites had entered Canaan. Yet it contains phrases like “the Canaanite dwelled then in the land” (Gen 12:6;13:7), and “before there reigned any king over the children of Israel” (Gen 36:31), which must have been written after Moses’s death when the land had been entered, the Canaanites had been evicted, and there were even kings in Israel. Moreover, nearly every occurrence from the creation of the world to the death of Moses is related to us twice, and in some cases three times.

The writer of Joshua, who never pretends to be Joshua, often says that a thing goes on “unto this day” (Josh 9:27;15:63). In Joshua 24:31, the author intimates that he is writing at least after the death of the eldest person who had known Joshua. There are the same doubles and contradictions. The Samaritans did not accept the book, so it is a priestly third century forgery.

Judges, Samuel and Kings have all the same faults. The plain truth is that we cannot by independent authority prove a single statement of any importance in the history of the Jews until their history is no longer miraculous. Even the latest historical works are a series of forgeries including, in a changed form, ancient otherwise lost traditions.

In 1 Chronicles 24:7, money is paid or valued in darics, coins of the Persian Darius. It must have been written after 520 BC, the first year of Darius I. In 1 Chronicles 3:19, six generations had elapsed since Zerubbabel, so the book must have been written about 400 BC. In Nehemiah 12:1-26 is a list of names to the time of Alexander the Great (d 323 BC). Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah must be forgeries of the fourth century, possibly using older Assyrian and Babylonian royal annals but giving a revised version of the events.

Even the most contemporary prophets of the setting up of the temple state, Haggai and Zechariah, Ezra and Nehemiah are full of purposive misstatements. Their editors' contributions are agreed to be often inventions, especially what they say about the “return of the Jews” from Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple. Zechariah says the exiles were still in Babylonia when the temple was rebuilt, yet the author of Ezra gives us a glowing description of 42,360 Jews, with 7,337 servants, two hundred singing men and women, and great troops of horses and treasures of gold returning. Only about 4,000 men had been deported.

We are asked to believe that in two generations they grew, on the fertile plains of Babylon, to 42,360 plus the thousands more who never returned. In those days a population took several centuries to double! In fact, the total population of Yehud, after the colonization, was only about two myriads, and that includes the native Am ha Eretz who never left. This extended list is centuries older, probably from the time of the Maccabees, and was written to give certain families kudos. The value of the history of Ezra, was bringing out the real author of the law of Moses. No serious scholar doubts that it was written in Babylon by Persian ministers.

Experts assure us that much of the Old Testament history has been discredited. The books are a tissue of inventions, expansions, conflations, or recensions dating centuries after the events.

The Truth About The Prophets

A prophet in those olden days was not a man who in particular predicted events, but, in the Greek and Hebrew understanding of the word (respectively, “prophetes”, “nabi”), was a man who was believed to speak for and interpret the words of the gods. In the Jewish scriptures, they were men who spoke out, as Jeremiah did about Hilkiah’s pious fraud. They called a whore a whore. The modern interest in the prophets is the supposition that they made remarkable predictions. These supposed predictions are quite simply false, unless you are a Christian.

In reality, prophets were the messengers of the king, but the king spoke for the gods, or God. They were also propagandists for enemies of the king, or even for foreign kings wanting to interfere in the affairs of foreign countries. By claiming to be speaking for God, and usually having a king's authority to do so, they had a certain amount of security. Even so, it must have been a dangerous job sometimes, though most of them were more like the medieval town criers, simply spreading news that the king wanted to be spread.

The works of the original prophets, if they existed in written form, were edited like all the other scriptural literature, but most of the biblical prophecies were written long after the events they described, so, they were easy to get right. Sometimes the “prophecy” was in any case a reference to past events as when Isaiah wrote descriptions of the “Servant of God”, regarded as predictions about Christ, and are really of Moses, or are a personification of Israel.

Only occasionally are the predictions shrewd forecasts, and they have been emphasized, while failed ones have been ignored. Correct ones are when the fulfilment of some dire warning from the prophet of a foreign king comes true because it was meant to intimidate the local people. The king then followed up with an invasion, and the people were meant to expect it and willingly surrender. Sometimes supposed biblical prophecies of Jesus are wrongly translated, as in the famous “Behold a virgin will conceive”, a prophecy that came true even though it is wrongly expressed. The Hebrew word means not “virgin” but a pre-menstrual girl, and conception by such a girl was not miraculous, even in ancient Judaea.

Biblical prophets regarded themselves as superior people because often they spoke for very superior people. They wanted to be striking in appearance so that people would hear them, and, apparently, dressed in a sort of uniform of a mantle of goat’s hair. They also like to have mystic marks on their foreheads, possibly official tattoos to show their authority. Some had schools of prophets, again suggesting their official role. Such was Elijah. There is, the experts say probably a basis of fact in the story of Elijah and Elisha, but we can’t disentangle it, as “the interests of prophetic orders led to unhistoric fictions and exaggerations” besides valid warnings.

They were not forgeries, though! Amos and Hosea were supposed to be the first and, naturally enough, they are the crudest and most poetic. Memory is assisted by poetry, and so messages will have been committed to memory in poetic form. But Amos and Hosea are morally crude. Amos, whose story makes him active about 750 BC, was a sheep trader. The great sin is what the translators honestly call whoredom. Judaea was full of whores, in spite of polygamy and concubinage. And, figuratively, the great collective sin of the nation was whoredom—a courting of false gods, whose existence is not denied.

Hosea, who purports to have been active in the northern kingdom about the same time, or about 750 to 725, is a shade worse. The call of Yehouah to him was, “Take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom, for the land doth commit great whoredom”. He literally obeyed the divine command, and learned to love the girl, a metaphor for Israel and her sins. For centuries Christians have taken it that all ancient people were thoroughly immoral, even God’s own people needing stern lessons from time to time. Yet Egypt was then as moral as the bible belt is today, and, in Babylon, they drowned people for adultery.

However, the Book of Isaiah is, apart from later manipulations, the work of several totally different writers, separated from each other by two centuries. The real Isaiah seems to have been a man of good social position and education, and keenly interested in politics. He was pro-Assyrian—though Assyria in these pseudepigraphs probably stands for Persia—and he was opposed by the pro-Egyptians at court. His opponents won, and Judaea cast off its allegiance to Assyria and turned to Egypt. Isaiah gave a reasonable forecast of the punishment of Judaea by the Assyrians. These “prophecies” made after the event are really warnings that it will happen again unless the people co-operate with the conqueror.

When the Persian colonists came from Babylonia, some other prophet or prophets gave other warnings that also were incorporated into Isaiah. The colonists had been told they were being returned to Yehud from a previous exile, whether this exile had actually happened or not. So, this “prophet” “predicted” “the exile”, and it was attributed to Isaiah. He also predicts a terrible destruction of Babylon, which the Persians actually took peacefully, and he says it was taken by the Medes, though they did not. It shows that the prophecy was false , and that it was actually written sufficiently later that the truth had been forgotten. Babylon, in the time Isaiah pretends to be writing, was not the enemy of Judaea, and the city was actually destroyed by Xerxes in a much later punitive action after an act of rebellion. So, the prophecy was added after the time of Xerxes. The later Isaiah's language and religious ideas are quite different from those of the earlier one, but the two have been pieced together in one book together with a third one. The scholars call them Second Isaiah, amd Third Isaiah. Why would God want to do this sort of thing?

The second major prophet is Jeremiah. He is described as one “of the gentlest of men” though he told Hilkiah in very good Hebrew, and us also, that his new book was a lie. Judaea was so wicked and perverse, according to these propagandists, and the pessimism of the prophets reaches its deepest in Jeremiah. The prophecies took the same general shape. The Jews were going to be fearfully punished—rebels generally were in those days—but the Lord would some day rehabilitate them. Jeremiah was the son of a priest, and was called in the year 626 BC in his pseudepigraph, but probably lived in the fifth century in fact.

Micah is supposed to have been a contemporary of Isaiah but his work is hopelessly adulterated. Ezekiel was a priest, of the sterner type, and was shown as deported to Babylonia, but the whole book has been massively edited in Hellenistic times, perhaps by the Hasids. Joel, Malachi and Obadiah are Persian forgeries of the fourth century.

The Psalms are called The Psalms of David and Christians believe or pretend they really were written by king David, as in the close of Psalms 72. There is not a scholar in the world who now believes that any of them were composed by David. Internal evidence and the language itself show that they are a collection of songs or chants composed mainly seven hundred or more years after the mythical David is supposed to have lived. In the second century BC, it was a much disputed question amongst the Jews whether David was really the author. Now every fundamentalist Christian in the USA is sure that he was. He was not.

The psaltery was a Jewish stringed instrument and a song or hymn sung played on it was a psalm. So, Psalms is an anthology of Jewish religious songs and poetry. Some psalms are written word for word in Samuel. Others (such as 20, 21, 61, 63, etc.) are actually addressed to the king, and it was always quite absurd to suggest that the author of these was David or Solomon. Psalms 104, taken bodily from the Egyptian liturgy, is one that could possibly go back in parts to the tenth century BC. Songs composed for wedding feasts were sung to the psaltery and some of the psalms (such as 45) were poems to be sung at a marriage festival, supposed to have been royal, but actually divine. It was the “hierogamos”, the popular festival of marriage in the ancient near east.

Some of the psalms are so crude and bloody in their sentiments that the Church of England has debated in solemn conferences whether it ought not to omit them from its services.

Pious Fiction

Ecclesiastes is a strange book to include in a Jewish sacred collection. The author is an Epicurean philosopher. He believes in God, but is an agnostic about a future life. Over and over again he expresses his skepticism, so that the one verse which does profess belief in a future life is palpably part of the retouching which the book suffered later at orthodox hands. The writer disdains the temple sacrifices (5:1) and constantly urges his readers to eat and drink and be merry while the sun shines. He was probably a Jew living in the new Greco-Egyptian city of Alexandria about 200 BC.

Proverbs is much earlier, probably going back to the fourth century, but the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus, are written in Greek in the first century before Christ. They had nothing to do with Solomon.

The Song of Solomon, full of thighs, breasts and bellies, is openly erotic. It was used as a symbol of the union of Christ and his Church, or the union of Yehouah and the synagogue. As a whole it is a collection of marriage songs. There might be a mythological element in parts of it, which seem to celebrate the union of the sun god and a goddess (Shelamith) in the hierogamos. In the east, a marriage festival lasts a week, and songs about the charms of the bride and the bridegroom’s particular interest in her are features of the celebration. Some of these songs may be quite old, but others include Persian, and even Greek, words, so that the collection must belong to about the fourth century. By that time the forged historical works had made Solomon and all his glory and his wives very popular amongst the Jews, and an aspiring author could not do better than borrow his name.

Solomon was at best a petty king living in a third-rate oriental mansion who did not build the first temple even. The builder was probably Ahab. Solomon was not wealthy, as in the legend, but Ahab was. Indeed, Solomon most probably never existed.

God and Man?

Imagine the mighty creator of the universe lying in a crib wailing to be fed or to have his bottom wiped. Now has this god really come to earth as an infant, or is he a god just giving the illusion of it? Does it really like being tickled with a straw or is he really looking on from another dimension, pretending. The idea of the creator of the universe experiencing the role of a human baby, genuinely, while still looking upon his works from beyond is manifestly impossible. If the god is a baby then he has left his heavenly throne for a tadge while he grows up as a human. Omnipotence shorn of all power but to breathe, and cry, and smile! Why then did the devil not use these few years of God’s weakness to take control of the universe? How do Christians know he didn’t? Or, if God is simultaneously looking after everything whilst being a human baby, how can he truly experience what it is to be human?

Then again if God (Ex 33:20) was not kidding that “no man can see me and live”, how could it be that God could live as a human on earth for some thirty years meeting many people plainly, all of whom did not immediately shrivel up. Knowing their scripture, could they be expected to believe this man to be God? And if Jesus’s companions could not be expected to believe it, why should God expect other people who never saw him in this spectacular incarnation to believe it on the say so of men who might be devils in disguise for all anyone knows?

Can an infinite being, absolutely and eternally unchangeable, hunger and thirst as did Jesus? Can an unceasingly watchful omnipotent God, whose eye “never slumbers”, sink into unconscious sleep night after night for thirty years, unconscious of the world around him? Truly? Anyone can play an arcade game and finish up being killed by the aliens. Is that what it is like for God pretending to be human? He can die on the machine but if he lost his temper he could take up an axe and smash it into smithereens. He could suffer a blow from an insulting priest but if he’d got annoyed could have squashed him like a greenfly.

Can anyone believe that God could have been really tempted by demons, devils and crawling serpents? When God who owns “the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Psalms 1:10) said he had not “where to lay his head”, was he just kidding? Why bother suffering as he supposedly had to when other, more effective, means must have been open to him? If he had “power to lay down his life, and take it up again” (John 10:17), how could he have suffered like a man on the cross knowing that his end was not final? Why could he not cause that all of these Chosen People of his should love him as the saviour, instead of hating him? It is all totally incomprehensible and the only way it can be accepted is by suspending the faculties that the Creator gave us.

We have a bleeding god, an infant god and a vengeful god appeased by murder and streams of blood.

Christians tell us that the human and the divine were united in Christ Jesus. Human foibles were mingled with divine perfection. Mortal weakness was wedded to omnipotent power. Impossible. The incarnation of an infinite god is a shocking absurdity, and an infinite impossibility.

The supposed omnipotence and omnipresence of God is based on the idea that he is everywhere and can act everywhere in the universe. His extent is infinite. If the description infinite means that every cranny of the universe, whatever its nature and throughout time, is taken up by an infinite being, it follows that there can be only one such being. The word infinite comprehends all; it covers the whole ground; it fills the immensity of the universe, and fills it to repletion, so that there is no room left for any other being to exist. And whoever and whatever does exist must constitute a part of this infinite whole.

For Christians the Father is God and is all we can conceive of as constituting God and was such from all eternity, before Jesus Christ was born into the world. Paul cuts through the sophistry of Christendom (1 Cor 8:6) by declaring: “To us there is but one God, the Father”.

The Father alone is God. But we saw above that only the father therefore can be God. All other beings in the universe are cut off from any participation in the Godhead with the Father. The moment you try to make Christ God, or any part of the Godhead, you declare God not to be infinite or you are dishonest in elevating another to join him in his place. You cannot introduce another being as God in the infinite sense until the first-named infinite God is dethroned and put out of existence. Otherwise we should have two Gods, both absolute and infinite.

If Christ was a mewling helpless infant with a dirty bottom, then how could he have been an infinite god? As an infinite being God must necessarily constitute the child, and not just the infant Jesus but every child, but God is not being a real human child because no human child has the powers of a god and God must be simultaneously retaining his powers. The omnipresence of the Father does and must exclude that of the Son, or any other being, and thus exclude the possibility of his apotheosis or incarnated deityship.

An axiom in philosophy is that the less cannot contain the greater. How then can a finite body contain an infinite body? If Jesus Christ is only a part of the infinite God, then it is evident that he is not God! No philosopher does or can believe in the absolute divinity of Jesus Christ.

If God has appeared on earth in the form of a man, how can He expect other men to be able to distinguish men from God? How is anyone to know that a certain man, who acts peculiarly, is not a God? If everyone knew that God never appeared as a man then there would be no confusion and one source of error would have been removed from human behaviour. Now we only know from professional Christians, all human, that God took the form of a man. Only professional Christians who get a living—often a substantial one—from persuading people of the truth of the story, tell people that God appeared on earth as a man. Common sense tells you that God was inviting trouble among his flocks by doing this. It is easier to believe that Christian ministers are frauds than to believe that God is a fool.

The New Testament itself illustrates the difficulties created by God appearing as a man. Twice, the author of Revelation, supposedly John the beloved disciple, (Rev 19:10; 22:9) fell down to worship a man whom he mistook for God.

If Christ’s own disciples could be betrayed into the sin of idolatry by the abolition of the distinction between the divine and the human, we surely have a strong argument against such a doctrine. Nothing could favour false worship better than to obliterate the demarcation between God and man. Isn’t this the origin of idolatry in pagan countries? They failed to maintain a distinction between a God of infinite attributes, and a being wrapped in human form.

Since they have accepted it, how can Christians condemn any people for worshipping a fellow human as a god? Anyone who could believe that God was Jesus, cannot criticise those who believe that the Emperor of Japan or the Grand Lama of Tibet is God. Only the name differs. Substitute the Grand Lama for that of Jesus Christ, and the thing is done.

Such is Christian logic.

New Testament Mistranslation

The current translations of the bible are marred by many faulty readings, and interpolations known by the translators are allowed to remain. An example is the whole of the end of Mark’s gospel from Mark 16:9 to the end. A few recent bibles have a note that it is a false ending but older ones and most modern ones do not. Since it contains the earliest gospel account of the appearances, its absence is more than slightly important. Christianity depends upon the appearances as historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, something that only a god could do. Another is the word “repent” which has been in the Douay version wrongly rendered through the Latin “do penance”, which suits the Catholic priesthood.

Let us look now at some of the many renderings of the Hebrew word “ruach”, and shall see how they illustrate ecclesiastical ingenuity in building up a system of ghosts, and even a theory of apostolic succession!

The word rendered Ghost, Holy Ghost, and Spirit in the New Testament is the Greek word “pneuma”, which is the equivalent of “ruach” in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Both words mean “air in motion” or “breath”. “Ruach” is rendered in Genesis 3:8 as “the cool” of the evening where “breeze” would be better and, in Genesis 8:1, appropriately as wind. In Genesis 1:2, “ruach Elohim” is translated “the spirit” of God, but it should be “the breath” of the gods. In the Latin Vulgate, “pneuma” is rendered “spiritus”, from “spiro” meaning “I breathe”. Translated into Anglo-Saxon, “spiritus” became “gast”, whence “ghost”. The Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost really means “the breath of God”.

“Jesus gave up the Ghost”, “the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee”, and “receive ye the Holy Ghost”, are all mistranslations. In Luke 4:1, the same word “pneuma” is translated in two different ways:

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost (“pneuma”) returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit (“pneuma”) into the wilderness.

In Luke 8:55, when Jair’s daughter is brought back to life, we read:

And her spirit (“pneuma”) came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat.

The translation implies that a supernatural spirit or soul re-entered the girl when it simply means she began to breathe after seeming to be dead.

These are only a few of the inaccuracies to be found. Translations of the bible maintain a disgraceful and dishonest bias to the views preferred by the theologians rather than the truth. It is known in the narrow circles of Christian and Jewish scholars, and some—a very small circle—are honest enough to reject all of this nonsense when they find it out. The rest realize that, if it were accepted by worshippers, they would be out of a comfortable job and probably out of the tied cottage as well. They keep it quiet.

Moral Lessons of Religious History

The fault with any religious or sacred text, as Paul Carus has pointed out, is that eventually it looks less and less divine, and more and more fallible. Sacred texts are fixed, but the world moves on leaving them behind. What do the faithful do then? They have to claim there is more to the sacred text than meets the eye. It has within it arcane mysteries, and these are said to be encoded in the text, present in it as allegories or otherwise present as enigmas. It then permits a whole industry among those with time to waste “deciphering” the mysteries, and selling worthless books about their endeavours. Actually to reveal the mystery is to put an end to the mystery business, but all the mystery floggers know that will never happen, and they will always be in business for the credulous types who pay for it. It never ends, just as the interpretation of prophecy goes on, undaunted, from failure to failure, always commanding an audience of those willing to ignore the long history of false prophets and readings in the certain knowledge that this latest one is right! Followers of the prophets always have to claim they have the extra hidden elements of the teaching, known only to an inner circle, but just those elements that make an obviously flawed teaching into a one of divine perfection. Ho hum!

Bibles are considered the words of God himself and therefore forever true, not the admirable but faulty attempts of primitive people to account for their world. As bibles represent only the morals and state of society in the age in which they are written, and are not allowed to be altered or transcended, they hold their disciples back in all coming time, and compel them to teach and practice the morals of the age found in their bibles. Bibles prevent the moral growth of the people just as the growth of the feet of Chinese girls were prevented by their being permanently bound into wooden shoes. Morals can be taught without spiritual bindings on the mind.

No advancement has often been made in morals or civilization in any country by the introduction of the Christian bible or the Christian religion. India became corrupted and economically sunk in morals largely after the introduction of the Christian bible. Christian gentlemen tried to make the Chinese into a nation of opium eaters. It evolved from Confucianism into atheistic communism, as spotless Christians like to call it, and now is growing faster than the US ever did, all without the assistance of the bible. Nations without bibles advance faster than those well supplied with them. Japan has advanced into one of the most advanced civilisations in only a century without any Christian bible. Even now, imbued with the cultural imperialism of the USA, it is still a refined and orderly country, relatively free of the crimes and vulgarity that plague middle America.

Ethiopia is Christian, despite the recent interlude of communism. Bibles and churches are numerous. Preaching and praying are heard every day, and crimes of all kinds are commonplace. The people are abject and starving. The daily practice of reading their bible has not benefited these poor people. Where then are its practical and spiritual benefits in the instances of these quite different people? Christians claims to defend the world against excessive materialism and instead to be defending spiritual things. Yet modern Christians are thoroughly materialistic and reject every teaching of their god, especially those advocating the spiritual benefits of poverty. Christians are and have always been hypocrites.

All religious conceptions, whether doctrine, precept, prophecy, prayer, religious devotion, or a belief in miracles, are an outgrowth of the moral and religious elements of the human mind. They have no supernatural origin. Common features can be seen in all religious systems, explicable by the common features of human psychology. There is no basis in these hypotheses for any claim to a divine origin of anything in any religion.

Many stories regarded by Christians as miraculous were distortions of real events which could not be told by Christian converts within the Roman Empire. They are not supernatural violations of nature or feats of God in violation of his own laws. Other miraculous stories, easily identified, are the supernatural acts of pagan gods attached to the Jewish martyr to make him also into a god. Various heathen gods had, long before Christ’s advent, filled the same chapter in history reserved for saviours now granted to him in the Christian New Testament. This type of story related of Jesus Christ have no other foundation than that of heathen tradition.

The Christian bible does not approve of the words “science” and “arts”. Paul uses the word “science” only once, and then to condemn it, and Jesus omits any allusion to science, philosophy, or natural law. The early disciples of the Christian faith were so thoroughly convinced that the teachings of their bible were inimical to the arts and sciences that they destroyed works of art wherever they could find them, and regularly opposed every new discovery in social science and the sciences.

In the early days of the USA, reports were published of the judgement of God manifest as showers of blood. Subsequently science proved the blood was the ordure of butterflies migrating in vast swarms. Yet, Christian children continued to hear that these bloody showers came from God out of heaven to show his displeasure at the sins of the people. The Christian has always had a faith which was proof against science and reason and would not give up the story of falls of blood. How long will Christians continue to tell their children lies like this when the true explanation is known? Facts, proofs, demonstrations the reasoning of science can rarely eradicate dogma from the stubbornness of the religious mind once it is instilled in early life. Ignorance is the business of the bible, and the US creationists continue to prove it.

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