The first law is that the historian shall never dare to set down what is false; the second is that he shall never dare to conceal the truth; the third that there shall be no suspicion in his work of either favouritism or prejudice.

Cicero (106-43 BC).

In looking at the early Church and the development of the priesthood we have already found reasons to doubt its attachment to impartial history in its creation of the bible. The bible was not the only set of documents that was manipulated to conform to the requirements of evolving orthodoxy.

In this section we look at the extent to which the Christian Church has manipulated facts by selecting sources, destroying inconvenient evidence, fabricating records, and the use of other methods of hiding the truth that the Church has been accused of, and then at some case studies illustrating these techniques.

Maintaining Deceptions
Suppress Facts: thousands of documents that do not fit Christian orthodoxy mysteriously "lost" under Christian hegenomy.
Selecting Sources: giving great weight to douments that agree with the approved line and no weight to equally authorative texts that do not.
Fabricating Records: filling gaps by counterfeiting documents
Retrospective Prophesy: gaining credibility through fraudulent prophesies
Ambiguous Authorities: assigning different wieghts to different parts of the same text, according to personal preferences
Ignore Injunctions: simply fail to consider pieces of text that are inconvenient. Act as though they simply do not exist. Hope that no one will notice.
Invent, Amend and Discard: Massage ancient texts so that they agree with the currently approved line: invent and insert new pieces of text, amend non-compliant genuine texts, and destroy texts that contradict the currently approved line.
Manipulate Language: When all else fails, keep the text but claim that it means something different from everyone has always agreed that it means.

Deception Case Studies
Re-branding a Sky-God: How to present the several sky gods in the Old Testament as a single god
Making One God out of Many: How to maintain a pretence of momotheism while recognising more than one god.
How Mary keeps her Virginity: How to present Mary as a virgin when all the evidence, including the gospels, suggests that she was not.
Fabricating the Nativity Story: How to concoct a good story out of disconected and irrelevant Old Testament passages.
Managing Inconvenient Texts: How the Churches have dealt with surviving texts that demonstrate that Christian stories are unsupportable.

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