He who seeks to acquire knowledge must first know how to doubt, for intellectual doubt helps to establish the truth.

Aristotle

The Bible 2

Forgery
The Priestly Forgers
The Mistake of Moses

Abstract

The most important theme of the Old Testament is the fall of man. That of the New Testament is the career of the Christian saviour, Jesus. In the Old Testament, the first man, Adam, disobeyed God, who cursed him and his offspring, introducing sin—original sin—into the world. To lift the curse, that He Himself placed on mankind, God had to manifest Himself on earth as the Son and be sacrificed, thus 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 need these Jewish legends to justify their God’s sacrifice, which otherwise is inexplicable. So they say the bible is the inspired or even infallible word of God.

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:

That Belshazzar was not king of Babylon.
That the name of the last king was Nabonidas.
That the city was taken peacefully, by guile, not by bloodshed.
That it was Cyrus, not Darius the Median, who took it.
That Darius, who is said (11:1) by Daniel to have been the son of Ahasuerus (Xerxes), was really his father.
That all the Babylonian names in Daniel are absurdly misspelled and quite strange to the writer.
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 speudepigraph.

The orthodox believe the Old Testament to be, and it professes to be, a set of books which appeared at intervals, with divine inspiration, 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, ded 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 hove 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 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.

Page Tags: Bible Pages, Bible, Inspiration, Origin, Mistranslation, Forgery, Priestly Forgers, Mistakes of Moses, Mythical History of the Jews, Truth about the Prophets, Pious Fiction, New Testament Mistranslation, Christian, Christians, God, History, Old, New, Testament

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.