| |
; |
|
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 of Lyons'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.
|
Saint Peter wearing the papal tiara
with a trple crown, suggesting an apostolic succession
of popes
from Peter himself. In fact the triple crown was invented
over a millennium after Peter's death.
Statue of Saint Peter in Saint Peter's Basilica, Rome
|
|
|
|
Christ wearing a papal tiara, further bolstering the apparent
significance of the tripple crown
Van Eyck, detail from the The Ghent Altarpiece, painted
1432.
|
|
|
|
God the Father shown wearing the papal tiara with a trple
crown,
suggesting a quasi-divine status for the popes
This example is from a painting of the Annunciation dated
1562 by an artist of the Bruge school
purchased by the National Gallery of Ireland in 1951 (NGI
1223)
|
|
|
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.
Mary Kneeling before Gabriel,
depicted in the first half of the fifteenth century,
before the Cult of Mary became popular and when
Gabriel had a higher status than Mary.
Fra Angelico. Annunciation. c. 1441.
Fresco, 176 x 148. Museo di San Marco,
Cell 3, Florence, Italy
|
|
|
|
|
Vol II, Fig 9. Gabriel Kneeling
before Mary,
depicted in the second half of the fifteenth
century ,
after the Cult of Mary became popular
and Mary gained a higher status than Gabriel.
Sandro Botticelli, 1489-1490, Annunciation,
Tempera on panel 150 × 156 cm
Uffizi, Florence
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Buy the Book from Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
Buy the Book from Amazon.co.uk
|
|
|
|
