| |
; |
An honest man"s the noblest work of God.
An honest God"s the noblest work of man. |
Alexander Pope (1688-1744), An Essay on Man
Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Further Extracts |
Even by carefully selecting appropriate texts and destroying inconvenient ones, it was still not possible to create a comprehensive body of writing to support Christian orthodoxy. The answer was to fabricate suitable material, which was not difficult for an organisation that exercised a strict monopoly over reading and writing. These texts could then be miraculously discovered. This technique has a venerable history, even a among the Jews. For example the book of Deuteronomy had been discovered hidden in the Temple at Jerusalem by King Josiah. This discovery confirmed the King"s views during a major doctrinal controversy. It is not now generally regarded as being as miraculous as his supporters thought
As we have already seen, the early Christians were accused of continuously tampering with their gospels, and the surviving early texts that we have confirm that they did. No two early manuscripts are identical, and scribes felt free to "improve" the text by deleting, moving or amending chunks of it, or by adding their own. Sects accused each other of tampering, and with good cause. Was Jesus an ordinary man, or was he God incarnate? The gospels could be altered to suit the editor"s own views. As one early sect said of another "…they laid hands unblushingly on the Holy Scriptures, claiming to have corrected them"*. It is probably true that not all of the Christians who tampered in this way regarded themselves as dishonest. Perhaps some of them really did think that they were "correcting" the texts, because it was so obvious to them that the texts should have said what they themselves believed.
Throughout the Christian era scholars have known that the scriptures were extensively tampered with. Here for example is Jean Meslier (1664-1729), a French priest who was also an atheist (sic), discussing this point around the year 1700:
It is no use saying that the Gospel stories have always been regarded as holy and sacred, and that they have been faithfully preserved without any tampering. It was common practice among the writers who copied these stories to add, delete or alter the text as seemed good to them. The Christians themselves cannot deny this; for St. Jerome said explicitly in many places in his Prologues that the text had been corrupted and falsified, having already been through the hands of many people who added and cut out what they pleased; with the result, as he said, that there were as many different readings as there were different texts*.
Some unlikely documents were put into circulation, such as correspondence between Jesus and King Abgar V of Edessa*. In some versions Jesus promised that the city of Edessa would enjoy freedom from conquest. There were bogus records of Jesus" trial, and several forged versions of a letter supposedly sent by Pilate to the Emperor Tiberius concerning the crucifixion. There was also a host of forged letters from the apostles, from the various Marys, and from other gospel characters. Testimonial letters appeared, purportedly from those miraculously healed by Jesus, for example from a blind man whose sight had been restored.
In the sixth century someone, probably a Monophysite Christian, fabricated theological writings that purported to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite, who is mentioned in Acts 17:34. These writings were accepted as genuine and had a great influence on both Eastern and Western Churches. They were for many centuries the best "proof" of Mary"s bodily Assumption into Heaven. Another key document justifying the same doctrine is the Cogitis me, a document purportedly written by St Jerome but almost certainly fabricated by Paschasius Radbert, a ninth century Abbot of Corbie (near Soissons in modern France)*. Claims made by this forgery are still repeated during masses in the Roman Church*.
Letters appeared from St Paul to Aristotle. Paul also supposedly wrote six letters to Seneca, and received eight back. All were Christian forgeries. A second century Christian acting "out of love of Paul" forged a book, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, purporting to describe his activities*. Paul himself had been aware of the danger of forgery. He warned his readers against teachings contained in some letter purporting to be from him and made a point of writing the final passages of his letters in his own hand to prove their authenticity (2 Thessalonians 3:17). The Apostolic Constitutions are another fabrication. They purport to be written in the name of Jesus" apostles and warn about books falsely claiming to be written in the name of Jesus" apostles. A document called 3 Corinthians is another known forgery, a fabrication by the same priest who forged the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Yet another "orthodox" forgery was the Epistula apostolorum, supposedly written by the eleven disciples remaining after Judas"s betrayal.
Bogus lists of bishops were produced to bolster the fiction of apostolic succession for important bishoprics. Bogus accounts of martyrdoms were circulated to bolster the fictions that Christians had been badly persecuted and that they had reacted with great bravery. Given the poor state of Christian scholarship many impositions succeeded for a long time. A popular and influential work concerning the Virgin Mary claimed that she was elected Queen of the Temple Virgins as a young girl, and that bishops came to venerate her*. Apparently it did not occur to the author or his readers that there could not have been any bishops at that time. Letters from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus discovered as late as the nineteenth century fooled many Church scholars, despite the fact that they were written in French. A work falsely ascribed to Albertus Magnus (c.1193-1280), who became St Albert, was regarded with such awe on account of its supposed authorship that no one noticed until 1952 that it contradicted his known views*.
Many of these forgeries should have been easy to detect, even those not written in French. They included anachronisms and other simple mistakes. For example, early Jewish Christians were known as Ebionites from the Hebrew term meaning the poor, but Tertullian assumed that they were named after a man called Ebion. Soon, Christians were quoting from the writings of the odious Ebion, in order to refute his followers*. Letters were exchanged between people who were not contemporaries, or else discussed people who were not yet born, or mentioned cities that were not yet founded. There were letters too from characters such as Prester John, a fictitious Christian ruler in the distant Orient. Since standards of Church scholarship were not high, almost any imposture was likely to succeed.
Not only were new works fabricated, genuine ones were doctored. Passages were inserted into non-Christian works in order to suggest that even non-Christians were impressed by Jesus or by Christianity. A sympathetic reference to Jesus was for example inserted into the writings of the historian Josephus*. Writings of other Church Fathers were doctored to suit current tastes. When Irenaeus"s tract against heresies was translated into Latin in the early fifth century, the opportunity was taken to omit those parts that by then had themselves come to smack of heresy. When Rufinus of Aquileia translated Origen"s On First Principles he openly admitted that he had altered the text to make it conform to current orthodox thought. Origen himself had held that it was acceptable to lie to less intelligent Christians, as long as it bolstered belief. Generally it seems that many Christians felt free to manipulate facts in favour of what they perceived as divine truth. Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth (c.170), protested that other Christians were changing and forging his letters, just as they had tampered with the scriptures*:
When my fellow Christians invited me to write letters to them I did so. These the devil"s apostles have filled with tares, taking away some things and adding others. For them the woe is reserved. Small wonder then if some of them have dared to tamper even with the word of the Lord Himself, when they have conspired to mutilate my own humble efforts.
Cyprian, a Bishop of Carthage (c.250) also revealed that Christians had been forging letters in his name*. As one authority has pointed out, in the 200 years from around AD 400, false letters were added to the collections of almost every early Christian letter writer*. In fact it is impossible to be sure that any single surviving Christian document was written by its purported author and is free from amendment.
Christians practised all manner of fabrication. They even tampered with written records of oracles. Seven volumes of Apolline oracles were edited by a Christian hand around the beginning of the sixth century, and a further four bogus volumes were added to produce the collection called On True Belief. They also fabricated verses of the Sibylline Oracles, complete with chunks of gospel history supposedly seen in visions by sibyls long before New Testament times. By the Middle Ages, 12 of the old pagan sibyls were agreed to have predicted the coming of Christ, and indeed the whole Christian story. The fiction of the sibyls" prescience is still upheld in the Roman Catholic Missal:
Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla*
|
That day, the day of wrath
Will turn the universe to ashes
As David foretells, and the Sibyl too
|
Frauds continued throughout the Middle Ages. A forged Appeal of the Eastern Emperor for help in saving the Holy Land was circulated in a successful attempt to whip up enthusiasm for the First Crusade. Material concerning controversial opinions was particularly vulnerable. Thus for example the whole edifice of the Immaculate Conception is built on forgeries and documents wrongly attributed to prestigious authors. According to taste one could follow (pseudo)Jerome or (pseudo)Augustine, or any one of numberless other documents by pseudo-authors. At least one of the sermons of St Bonaventure (d. 1274) – the one dealing with Mary"s Assumption – is spurious*.
Sometimes the fraud was false attribution. The works of unknown authors were passed off as the work of more prestigious figures. The work of the little known Saxon Eadmer was passed off as that of his more prestigious master, Anselm. Often the fraud was much greater and more obvious. As we have seen, claims to Church authority were bolstered by a series of major forgeries including the Symmachan Forgeries, the Donation of Constantine, and the False (Pseudo-Isidorian) Decretals. The papal chancery poured out a stream of forgeries for many centuries, and schools of forgers flourished under a long series of popes. One notable culprit was Pope Gregory VII, who in the eleventh century used old and new forgeries to justify his every whim. Under his direction, pliant clerics amended ancient documents, changing their meaning, sometimes to make them say the opposite of what they had originally said. Churchmen created new documents purporting to be old ones and bolstered all manner of papal claims. A huge fabricated superstructure of falsehood was raised, buttressed by earlier forgeries and founded on yet earlier ones.
To any scholars who looked into the matter it would have been clear that many of these authoritative Church documents were crude forgeries. Instead, they were cited in infallible papal bulls by men in personal daily contact with God and incorporated into the Concordia discordantium canonum, more popularly known as the Decretum gratiani. This Decretum was an authoritative code of canon law compiled in the middle of the twelfth century by a Benedictine monk called Gratian, who compiled bogus documents in addition to genuine ones. It was through this document that torture was formally justified by the Church as a way of obtaining confessions. Much later theology was based on the Decretum, including the work of Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica in turn forms the basis for modern Roman Catholic doctrine. Thus, the authority for this doctrine is compromised, if not completely invalidated.
Pope Gregory I used the False Decretals to justify his expanding claims to temporal power. From the fifteenth century, at least, these decretals were widely known to be fake, and yet the Church insisted that they were not*. The Italian humanist and educator Lorenzo Valla demonstrated conclusively that the Donation of Constantine was also a forgery, as was the famous letter from Jesus to King Abgar – and so too letters from St Paul to Seneca and many other important documents that had been regarded as genuine for centuries. Valla"s scholarship was impeccable, but the Church continued to maintain that the forgeries were genuine. It took more than 300 years for the Roman Church to accept, in a roundabout way, that it had been wrong. Some Roman Catholic writers still seem to be unaware that the Donation of Constantine is known to be a forgery, repeating its claim that a Roman Emperor ceded his temporal authority to the Church.
Nothing was too sacred to be tampered with. The creeds were amended to make them conform to the requirements of the Western Church, to the anger and bewilderment of the Eastern Churches. The records of ecumenical councils were tampered with too, when it suited. Thus records of the Council of Nicæa were doctored to confirm the primacy of the Roman Church. Whenever Eastern scholars brought out a copy of an ancient text to prove a point, Rome would attempt to refute it with a forgery. For centuries the Orthodox Church knew Rome as the home of forgeries. The role of women in the early Church was also something of a problem in later times when the priesthood became a male monopoly. Inconvenient evidence about the role (or even the existence) of women in the early Church was suppressed, so that it became possible to justify women"s exclusion from the priesthood by reference to the (fictitious) practices of the early Church. At least partly on the strength of other forged documents women were prevented from serving at the altar in any capacity*.
Most people were illiterate in the Middle Ages, but Church art could be used to sustain convenient fictions. Art confirmed the theologians" favourite theories, papering over the fact that these theories had no biblical support. For example, the four evangelists (the purported writers of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) were shown taking dictation from the Holy Ghost, sometimes with an angel guiding their hands. This suggested that the gospels were divinely inspired and authoritative, simultaneously avoiding the uncomfortable facts that they were inconsistent and that their writers had never even met the historical Jesus. When the Bible mentions a messenger (Greek angelos), the word was often translated as angel. With no effort at all a human messenger was converted into a semi-divine one. In the Bible they had no wings and were likely to be mistaken for ordinary people , but in art they could sprout wings and fly, which looked much more impressive.
It was safer to show fictions in the form of pictures. St Jerome wearing a cardinal"s hat suggested that cardinals had existed since early times, which they had not. Joseph was conventionally shown as an extremely old man, which seemed to confirm the story, otherwise unsupported, that he had never engaged in sexual intercourse with Mary. A pope baptising the Emperor Constantine invited all manner of false conclusions : that a pope had existed at that time, that popes were in a position to baptise emperors, that emperors were subordinate to popes, and so on. In fact Constantine was hardly aware of the Bishop of Rome and was known to have been baptised on his deathbed by a heretic. The Donation of Constantine was also a popular subject in Christian art, ostensibly confirming the fiction that Constantine had handed over his temporal power to Pope Sylvester.
The Pope"s triple crown served many purposes. On St Peter"s head it confirmed that the papacy dated from apostolic times. On Christ"s head it confirmed the Pope as Christ"s vicar on Earth. On Aaron"s head it confirmed the continuity of the Christian priesthood from Old Testament times. Such pictures smoothed over all manner of difficulties and confirmed a wide variety of fictions concerning priests and popes.
Figure 5
Aaron wearing a papal tiara
Figure 6
Jesus wearing a papal tiara
Figure 7
Peter wearing a papal tiara
In the gospels the Virgin Mary is a peripheral character, worthy of little respect, and spoken to rather sharply by her own eldest son. But as her cult grew, this could easily be ignored. In art she became more imposing, more important, more queenly, more divine. She started wearing heavenly crowns and acquired a halo. In time, her status was raised above that of angels. In early medieval art Mary had knelt in front of Gabriel when he appeared to her. In later art, when Mary had developed a more important role, Gabriel knelt in front of her.
Figure 8
Mary kneeling to Gabriel
Figure 9
Gabriel kneeling to Mary
Events in the Old Testament were frequently paired with those of the New, with details added to reinforce the supposed prefiguration of the New Testament by the Old. For example Abraham"s sacrifice of his son Isaac was shown as prefiguring God"s sacrifice of his son Jesus. Isaac was shown carrying the wood to make an altar on which he is to die, just as Jesus was shown carrying the wooden cross on which he is to die. By painting similar pictures flimsy parallels were converted into accurate predictions.
For the select few who were allowed to learn to read and write in the Middle Ages, the most popular books were accounts of the lives of Christian saints and especially their miraculous powers. These stories purported to be straight historical accounts and were known as legends. The word legend (from the Latin legere. to read) did not then imply that the accounts were fictitious. Rather, the sheer improbability of these accounts resulted in the word acquiring its present suggestion of untruth. Reading works like the Golden Legend, by Jacobus de Voragine, it is easy to see why even the most credulous should regard them as works of fiction. They were patently made-up stories designed to impress. No one now defends them as factual accounts, but they were originally presented as literal accounts, invested with ecclesiastical authority. The author, a Dominican, became an archbishop, and is now regarded as a saint by his follow Dominicans. Many of the saints whose lives were detailed had never existed at all; others had been pagan gods. Some had existed but were represented as participating in events that seemed impressive at the time but appear preposterous now.
Histories were invented retrospectively to explain all manner of things. For example, after the use of rosaries had been adopted, it became expedient to rationalise their origin. According to Dominican historians, Christian rosaries derive from a chaplet of beads "Our Lady"s Crown of Roses" given to St Dominic (1170-1221) by the Virgin Mary in a vision. In fact Alain de la Roche in the fifteenth century was the first to connect rosaries with St Dominic, and as a prominent Roman Catholic authority concedes, he "based his revelations on the imaginary testimony of writers that never existed"*. He was far from being an isolated or exceptional case. Rosaries, incidentally, were copied from Muslims, who had picked them up from Buddhists and Hindus.
In pre-Christian times educated people had seen the need for objective histories. Thucydides (c.460-c.401 BC) had aimed at a rational and impartial account of history. Cicero (106-43 BC) said that a historian should not write what is false, nor conceal what is true, nor entertain the least suspicion of favouritism or prejudice. The Church abandoned true impartial history in favour of propaganda. Christian chroniclers saw no need for objective truth because their version of the truth was the only truth. Since they enjoyed an enforced monopoly over reading and writing, we have only their side of the story: we hear of virtuous bishops and holy emperors overcoming all obstacles with the visible assistance of God. We hear less about frauds, failures, crimes and disagreements. Histories were fabricated to suit the Church. Chronicles are consistently partisan and otherwise unreliable, and it is possible to get near the truth only when there is another side of the story. The history of the Crusades, for example, is as well known as it is because of rival chroniclers whose partisan works (though often tampered with) can be compared to each other and to Byzantine, Muslim and other records.
In almost all areas, the truth according to impartial modern historians is less flattering than the traditional accounts taught in schools. In the traditional versions, Christians were on the right side. Deliberate distortions continue. Modern histories of the Church often give the impression that the Churches supported the abolition of capital punishment, penal reform, democracy, human rights and a host of freedoms, when in fact they opposed all of these things. The American Civil War has become a war in which Christianity vanquished a number of un-Christian practices like slavery and established wholesome traditional Christian ideas like liberty, equality and democracy. The truth is exactly the opposite, since it was the South that was supporting the traditional Christian practice of slavery, and the North pursuing the secular principles of the founders of the Constitution. Texts are still being tampered with to make the facts fit the fictions. For example Lincoln"s address at Gettysburg made no mention of God, yet when it is cited now the words "under God" are often added after the words "this nation".
If we had to rely on Church historians we would hear that Christians were almost solid in their opposition to Nazism, which as we shall see later is far from the truth. Almost no textbook will give estimates of the numbers of people killed by Christian Churches or at Christian Churches" behest: pagans, Jews, Muslims, Cathars, supposed witches, heretics, schismatics, rationalists, disabled children, or any other group. Many books confirm the fiction that various reforms were carried out by Christians in the face of fierce opposition from unspecified quarters. Few mention that reform was in almost all cases driven through by popular opinion, led by people outside mainstream Christianity. Key names such as those of Thomas Paine, George Holyoake and Annie Besant are simply omitted from school history books. Other names are omitted too, such as those of the numerous professors who lost their Chairs for accepting scientific facts or for bringing biblical analysis to public attention.
Recent history is adjusted to put the Churches on what is now regarded as the right side. Thus hardly any child leaves school knowing that the Nazi treatment of the Jews was copied point for point from traditional Christian techniques, even from Church statutes. Neither will they have any clue that there had been many Nazi priests and bishops during World War II, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. No criticism of the Church will have been heard. However well established the truth, it simply will not appear in popular books. No school child learns that the Christian Church consistently supported slavery and torture, corporal and capital punishment, and mass killings, or that it opposed almost all social reform. One could visit 1,000 church bookshops without ever finding a single book that betrayed a hint of any of this.
Evidence is being gently massaged as tastes change. One can visit cities such as Rome, Madrid, Avignon, and Toledo and enjoy guided tours of religious buildings without hearing the least hint that they housed ecclesiastical torture chambers. These torture chambers were seen by numerous reliable witnesses (like the prison reformer John Howard ) up to the nineteenth century, but now they have apparently vanished. Perhaps they have been destroyed; perhaps they are merely no longer open to visitors. Little by little, all evidence of the uncomfortable past is being eliminated. Coats of arms have been sanitised, to make them more religious and less bellicose. Coronets, swords and crests have been removed from clerical arms. Similarly, hymnals are updated to reflect current tastes. Politically incorrect hymns or verses of hymns have disappeared without trace. In England alone, many hundreds of millions of hymnals were printed with hymns condoning the oppression of women, the acceptance of poverty and the acceptability of racist ideas, yet it is now difficult to find one even in a second-hand bookshop. At the time of writing traditionalist Christians are complaining about the trend for Christmas Carols to be sanitised by removing terms with a feudal and male resonance like Lord and King. It is already difficult to find copies of traditional prayer books containing old services, for example for the expulsion of lepers, formal cursings, and the special Anglican anti-Roman Catholic service for 5 th November. How many people have ever seen the text of a service of excommunication, once so popular?
There is also great selectivity in what children and television watchers are told about the beliefs of well-known people. Every Sunday the public media feature television cooks, footballers, singers, and popular entertainers who all avow their deep Christian faith. Unsympathetic philosophers and scientists, and even liberal theologians, are almost never given similar opportunities to express their ideas. The beliefs of well-known people are suppressed and frequently distorted. Few children ever learn that writers such as Shelley, George Eliot, Mark Twain and H. G. Wells were non-believers, nor that intellectual giants like Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Russell all became atheists*. Neither are they told that Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Pétain and Mussolini were all Christian believers, most of them benefiting from particularly devout families*. Again, reformers like Lord Shaftesbury, Florence Nightingale, and William Wilberforce are falsely portrayed as orthodox Christians, while the most dedicated true reformers, who were non-Christians, such as Thomas Paine, John Stewart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, are almost totally ignored in school history books. It is arguable that the Christian Churches have carried out one of the most successful whitewash jobs in history.
|
|
