How the Bible was Invented Part 1

How the Bible was Invented.

by M. M. Mangasarian.

How the Bible Was Invented

Many good people believe that the Bible was given by inspiration of G.o.d.

The wording of my subject suggests that it is the work of men, and not always of honest men, either. Am I trying to offend people by intimating that the Bible was _invented_? On the contrary, I am exposing myself to criticism by telling these good people the truth about the Bible, which their own preachers, for some reason or other, have withheld from them.

One of the texts in the Bible, attributed to Jesus, says that, It were better for a man to have a millstone tied about his neck, and he were cast into the sea, than that he should offend, that is to say, unsettle the faith of, "one of these little ones." According to this saying of Jesus, a man must keep his questionings and his doubts to himself. He shall not talk where he is liable to upset the faith of some believing soul,--some aged mother, some Sunday-school lad or la.s.sie. The man who will go about disturbing people's religious peace, deserves to be drowned with a millstone about his neck! What is your opinion of such a suggestion?

If you approve of this sentiment, attributed to the founder of Christianity, then the work which we are doing here, every Sunday, is quite wicked; a millstone around our necks is what we deserve, and the bottom of the sea is where we belong.

Psychologists tell us that there is great power in suggestion. With all my love and reverence for whatever is sweet and sane in the Gospels, I must protest against this text, because it is a suggestion to violence and persecution. If Jesus suggests a millstone for the neck of the heretic who upsets people's illusions and makes inquirers out of believers, and intimates further that drowning is too good for them, why not take the hint and act upon it? He expresses a wish, shall we not fulfill it? Alas, we know, too well, that in less enlightened ages, the suggestion of Jesus was not only carried out, but vastly improved upon--by the Spanish Inquisition, for instance.

Let us be fair. When a man is accused, it is his privilege to defend himself. If Jesus suggests that the investigator who unsettles people's beliefs should be drowned, before the suggestion is acted upon, the disturber should be given a chance to be heard. Would that be asking too much? Let us see, then, just what it means to command a man to suppress whatever might disturb a neighbor's faith: It means that if I am announced to speak on the Bible, I must say nothing to which the weakest or the most credulous among my hearers might object. If I do, I shall deserve to be tied to a millstone and drowned! But let us turn this proposition about to see how it would work: Having discovered a truth, and yearning in my soul to express it, suppose I were to say, that if any man in this audience shall scare me into silence,--shall cheat me out of the joy and duty of imparting that truth to my world, by threatening to be offended, or to be unsettled by it,--he ought to have a millstone tied to his neck and be cast into the sea. How would that do?

Again, an ill.u.s.tration, which I have used before, can with great aptness be repeated here: A woman is given a ring with a stone in it. Not being herself a _connaisseur_ of precious stones, she is easily made to believe that her jewel is the most costly in the world. This is told her in order to make her happy, and to fancy herself as the possessor of a gem of great value. Observe, now, how much it costs to keep up this deception. All her friends have to agree to say nothing that may unsettle her faith in her imitation jewel. Indeed, they must pretend not to know the difference between the genuine and the sham stone. To preserve this woman's illusion, they must prevaricate and even openly lie, if pressed to do so, lest the poor woman's eyes should open, or her faith in her jewel be lost. Is it fair to demand so great a sacrifice to prolong the fantasy of a foolish woman?

Apply this ill.u.s.tration now to the Bible. Here are some people who have been told when they were young, that this book, which is placed in their hands, is a personal message to them from G.o.d. This makes the book, certainly, more precious than any jewel. G.o.d, the owner and disposer of everything, with his own hand has inscribed an epistle to them, and this is it! What joy! What a treasure! Now these people, not being students themselves, accepted implicitly what they were told by their teachers, just as the woman, not being an expert herself, took her jeweler's word about the value of the stone in her ring. In order not to offend this child-like faith in the Bible, word is sent out to everybody to hush.

Hush! not a word! not a whisper!--Hush! hush! is the cry of all. To uphold this conspiracy of silence, arrangements are made to dictate what may and what may not be said in public. A preacher in praying or preaching might give away the secret,--he might inadvertently say something which may p.r.i.c.k this pretty bubble of illusion. Hence, in the Catholic and Episcopal Churches, all the prayers are printed, and the preachers pray according to the book. Do you think the Church will let a man close his eyes and open his mouth and say whatever comes into his head? Indeed, not! He must pray by the book. In the protestant denominations there is the creed, to which you swear your allegiance before you can open your mouth in one of their churches, and the moment you are caught talking beyond what the creed allows, your ordination is taken from you and your mouth is shut. Dear me! all this regime is for the purpose of encouraging the conceit that man has been favored with a hand-written, personal message, from the Creator of the universe.

If this were all, we, ourselves, would not take notice of it. But we, too, are compelled to join this conspiracy of silence and suppression, and to lie in the interests of the delicate believers whose faith cannot stand the least strain. Darwin must beware how he writes about the origin of species, or the descent of man. Some believer, hugging ecstatically his Bible to his bosom, might read his books and lose his blissful conceit. Do not think, do not invent, do not announce your truth, ye philosophers, scientists and reformers! without first consulting the prejudices of the "little ones" in the faith; for if you unsettle the faith of a single believer, it were better that you were weighted down into the sea by a millstone hanging about your necks. And you, whose love and genius give us our daily victory over disease and error,--whose thought is our daily bread and beauty,--you, too, must hush, you must become sterile, or be content to speak by rote, lest you should disturb the repose of the believer who has laid himself down to sleep. The theological babe must not be awakened. It will bawl and cry if aroused, and better than cause one of these babes to cry, let there be no intellectual life in the world!

Our American author, Th.o.r.eau, was right when he said that, "The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward." That is to say, he does not wish to be disturbed. "All his prayers begin with," says Th.o.r.eau, "Now I lay me down to sleep."

_Sleep_, seems to be his quest, intellectual as well as physical, "and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his '_long_ rest.'" He looks forward to a future of inactivity. All effort, especially intellectual effort, is distasteful to him, and is apt to offend and unsettle him. Hence the intellectual life must not be real; what must be real is the _sleep_.

Those of you who support these lectures, as well as those of you who only hear them, know that our position is the very reverse of what Jesus and the Church recommend. We do not believe in persecution. We do not even suggest that anybody should be drowned; but if our human nature is so depraved that persecution and murder are inevitable, then, in our humble opinion, it will be more economical to drown the people who will not permit a Darwin to give his thought to the world, than to drown a Darwin. The man who is offended at freedom of speech, can be dispensed with more safely than the man who avails himself of this divine privilege. If my freedom of speech offends my neighbor, his fear of freedom is a greater offense to me. Which of us deserves most to be drowned?

But in the next place the suggestion that people who rob their weaker fellows of their illusions should be drowned, even when it does not lead to persecution, is an encouragement to _hypocrisy_ and _imposture_, as the story of the composition of the Bible which will now be told, shows.

You have to listen as closely as you can, if you do not wish to do me the injustice of misrepresenting me. I have traveled extensively in the Orient, and have conversed with and read the works of eminent scholars who have enjoyed a first-hand acquaintance with eastern people, and the unanimous testimony is that one of the besetting sins of Oriental races, is lying. It is not because the Asiatics are wickeder than European nations, for in other respects they are as good, if not better, than ourselves. The average of morality is perhaps about the same in all countries. But the notorious vice of all Asiatic peoples is lying. They lie with a freedom and a fluency,--with such plausibility and so straight a face,--that one can hardly distinguish their lie from their truth. Curious though it may seem, people who are given to lying are often the first to be deceived by their own lies. They

"Keep on till their own lies deceive them.

And oft' repeating, at length believed 'em."

Now, then, I am going to look this audience in the face, and then I am going to say just this:

_The Bible is an Oriental book._

When, in reading the Bible, I find in it exaggeration, invention, and even unscrupulous misrepresentation, I am not astonished, because I know that it is an Oriental book. But the orthodox believer, in order to excuse or explain away, for instance, these violations of the law of veracity, resorts frequently to sophistry, subterfuge, and even, alas, to lies more unscrupulous than any found in the Bible. This is as sad as it is true. But to defend one lie, or to make it look like the truth, more lying becomes necessary.

There are numerous instances of the Oriental practice of lying in the Bible. Abraham suppressed the truth about his wife, and declared she was his sister. Jacob deceived his father, Isaac, and made him believe he was Esau, and stole his blessing. The same patriarch deceived his father-in-law, and stole his G.o.ds. G.o.d himself instructs Samuel to tell a falsehood to Saul, to whom he is sent on a mission. "I will send them a lying spirit," threatens Jehovah, when he is out of temper. And, in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul is Oriental enough, though in many respects a great soul, to resort to "craft and guile," and to be "all things to all men," and even to lie for the glory of G.o.d. Aside from this being his own policy, he imagined that it was also the policy of G.o.d. "And for this cause," he says in his Epistle to the Thessalonians, "G.o.d shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe in a lie." Reflect upon that. To send a delusion to people means to trip or trap them,--to catch them in a snare. People tell a falsehood, either to protect themselves, or to hurt others. G.o.d needed not to resort to this means to protect himself. Paul tells us he does this to hurt others.

"G.o.d shall send them strong delusion, that they might believe a lie that _they all might be d.a.m.ned_." How could Paul, an exceptionally intelligent man, be guilty of such blasphemy? How could he so damage the character of the G.o.d he loved? My answer is that he was an Asiatic, and he did not look upon lying in the same light that Europeans do. The Asiatic conscience for veracity has never enjoyed a very high reputation. The Apostle Paul even boasts that, "being crafty, I caught you with guile."

A very curious controversy took place some years ago, between Herbert Spencer and a religious Weekly. Quoting the words of Paul to the Romans, where he says, "For if the truth of G.o.d hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory, etc.," Spencer condemned Paul for this; the religious Weekly objected that Paul was only speaking ironically. And Mr. Spencer generously admitted that such a supposition was quite possible. We are ourselves willing to give Paul every opportunity to exonerate himself, and will not press the charge too vehemently against him. But whatever Paul may have meant in his argument with the Romans, what shall we say about his defense of "guile and craft," in his Epistle to the Thessalonians? And what about his general policy, to be all things to all men,--that is to say, to trim and compromise?

Moreover, the practice of the Church during the early centuries, confirms the criticism of such representative writers as Mosheim, Ellicott, Warburton, Lecky, Gibbon, Jortin, Gieseler, and other equally reliable authorities, that "The pernicious maxim that those who make it their business to deceive with a view of promoting the cause of truth, were deserving rather of commendation than of censure."

"History forces upon us," writes Bishop Ellicott, "the recognition of pious fraud as a principle which was by no means inoperative in the earliest ages of Christianity." It reflects credit upon this Bishop,--this European,--to admit that the early Christians cultivated the Oriental practice of "lying for the glory of G.o.d." Eusebius, the saint who invented Constantine's vision of the cross, boasted that "_he had written what redounded to the glory_ and suppressed whatever tended to the disgrace of religion."

"No faith with the heretics," was the cry of the Christian church for centuries.

My object in speaking of this is to show that even as our Oriental-born religion, brought over into Europe the germ of monasticism, religious intolerance, the practise of burning men and women alive,--absolutism in matters of faith, determining by authority of councils what shall and what shall not be the truth,--not one of which inst.i.tutions previously existed in Europe; it also brought over, the Oriental practice of pious lying, and gave it a vogue which it had never before enjoyed in Europe.

It is universally admitted that beside the four Gospels which the churches believe to be genuine, there were, in the early centuries, hundreds of Gospels which have been rejected as spurious. Pause for a moment, and think of what that means. Why were there so many lying Gospels? The very fact that our four Gospels were chosen from a pile of ma.n.u.scripts, everyone of which claimed to be genuine, is a sad commentary upon the morality of the early churchmen. I trust you duly appreciate the significance of this. What was it that gave an impetus to the industry of imposture? How explain the vogue which lying for religion enjoyed after the conversion of the Roman Empire? Was it so profitable to manufacture Gospels that everybody tried his hand at it? I cannot get away from the tremendous fact that by the admission of the churches themselves, there were a great number of apocryphal Gospels thrown upon the religious market as soon as Christianity became well established in Europe. What made lying so popular and profitable all at once? If it is true, and it is, that our four Gospels had to be voted upon from among a heap of other ma.n.u.scripts; and if it is true, as one Church father reports, that a great number of ma.n.u.scripts were placed under a table, and that prayers were then offered to induce the genuine Gospels to jump upon the table, and that four of them did so, while the rest, failing to jump upon the table, were disowned; and if it is also true, and we know it is, that some of the Christian fathers claimed that only four Gospels could be genuine because the earth has four corners, and four winds. If all this is true--then, speaking as a student of history, whether it unsettles you or not, I am constrained to say that this Oriental religion, as soon as it set foot in Europe, lifted both superst.i.tion and lying to the dignity of a vocation.

But when we come to the four Gospels themselves, p.r.o.nounced to be canonical, do you know, my hearers, that there are upwards of 150,000 different readings of these same Gospels? That is to say, the same pa.s.sages read one way in one ma.n.u.script, and another, in another, while they may be absent altogether from a third, etc. In view of all these facts, reflect upon the intelligence of the man who, Sunday after Sunday, holds up the Gospels as the infallible word of G.o.d. He does so because he is speaking by the creed, to which he has sworn allegiance for the rest of his life. One hundred and fifty thousand various readings of the New Testament! And think of the centuries of bloodshed and controversy over these various readings!

Open, if you please, your New Testaments and read the seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the first epistle of John, then look for the same verse in the Revised Version, and you will not find it there. After being regarded as the word of G.o.d for two thousand years, it has been expurgated. Today, according to one Bible (the King James Version), this pa.s.sage is inspired; according to another Bible (the Revised Version), it is an imposture. Let me quote the text:

"For there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one."

What better proof of the Trinity do we need? On black and white, in the Bible, John, the Apostle, declares by the power of the Holy Ghost, that there are three in heaven, gives their names, and adds that these three are one.

Some lying scribe, some crabbed sectarian, some unconscionable copyist, bribed by his party, must have invented this text, which, for twenty centuries, has been worshiped as the word of G.o.d. Wicked sceptics, two thousand years ago, denounced the clumsy imposture, but they were silenced by the halter and the sword. It has taken the Christian Church nearly two thousand years to discover that the sceptics were right. It has taken the church two thousand years of evolution in honesty and intelligence to throw out this spurious text. It has taken the church, claiming to be under the guidance of the Spirit of G.o.d, twenty hundred years in which to acquire the courage and love of truth of the wicked sceptics who first called attention to this lie hiding behind an apostle's name. Reflect upon this! After using every means, even the most cruel, to force this Trinitarian text upon the world, the Revised Version blushes with shame to retain it any longer.

It would be unnecessary to multiply ill.u.s.trations, but let my readers also consult the words in the margin of the last chapter of the Gospel of Mark, in the Revised Bible. Eleven entire verses of this chapter after having been palmed off for two thousand years as the word of G.o.d; after being repeatedly quoted as representing G.o.d's mind on matters of faith; after causing untold misery, cruel wars, persecutions, diabolical tortures, and more than all these, such mental anguish in millions of sensitive minds as no repentance can atone for,--these verses, among which is the following: "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole Creation.... He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, _but he that believeth not shall be d.a.m.ned_,"--has been placed under an interrogation mark. Ah, for how much misery is the above d.a.m.natory clause responsible! How many lives this leprous falsehood has blasted! How this cruel imposture, like a malignant cancer, ate away the sound parts in human nature, for twenty long centuries!

Among these eleven verses are also Jesus' promise of miraculous power to his disciples, such as casting out devils, juggling with live serpents, drinking deadly poisons, laying hands on the sick,--which has filled our world with charlatans without number. But now comes the Revised Version, and quietly dismisses from the Word of G.o.d these eleven Verses, with these words in the margin: "The two oldest Greek ma.n.u.scripts, and some other authorities, omit from verse 9 to the end (verse 20). Some other authorities have a different ending to the Gospel." Read the above carefully and reflect. The old translators suppressed all this information, and gave us to believe that we were not only reading the word of G.o.d, but the only word of G.o.d in existence. The revisers say, "Some other authorities have a _different_ ending to the Gospel." Is not that edifying? How did they decide which "ending of the Gospel" to print as the Word of G.o.d? And why did the translators of the Bible wait two thousand years before they gave out this information? Is it to their increasing honesty that we owe this admission, or is it the increasing power of the non-churchgoing world which has compelled this admission from their lips? Yes, yes, pause and think of how an organization must have become gangrened with imposture to have successfully resisted every claim of truth and honor for two thousand years! This is a question of conscience as well as a question of knowledge. Why did the translators suppress the fact until a few years ago that, "Some other authorities have a different ending to the Gospel"?, and that "the _two oldest_ Greek ma.n.u.scripts and some other authorities omit from verse 9 to the end"? Time forbids me to give other ill.u.s.trations of the--I regret to say it--manipulations of the Word of G.o.d by its custodians. The heart bleeds with mingled pain and indignation at the temerity and effrontery of the pious crew, who, to advance their "ism" or to make converts, did not hesitate to pervert history.

For two thousand years, for anyone to dare breathe a word against this Bible-inventing party, meant h.e.l.l here and hereafter. Mark Antony invited Rome to weep over the prostrate form of a.s.sa.s.sinated Caesar. I wish I could provoke you to a burning blush of indignation over the prostrate majesty of Europe and America at the feet of these unconscionable inventors of inspired texts. Blessed be the day which humbled the pride of the ecclesiastic, and wrested from his hands the power to suppress the truth!

But aside from doctoring their own Gospels, the early Christians did not hesitate to submit the writings of the great pagans,--Seneca, Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonious, Marcus Aurelius and the Jewish historian, Josephus, to the same indignity, by slipping pa.s.sages into their works favorable to the Christian religion. Perhaps I am to be blamed for taking this matter so seriously, but how can I help it? I feel the wrong, the shame, and the crime of it, deep in my bones--when I picture to myself an Asiatic scribbler, a sectarian, a clown, a rogue, a cheat, tampering with the works of a dead master,--pushing and squeezing his imposture into the mouth of the mighty dead,--defiling the thought of the philosopher with the foulness of his superst.i.tion! It makes my heart rise and knock with vehemence against my ribs until I feel as if they would break. Not only were individual pa.s.sages invented and slipped into the Pagan writings, but a number of books were written and attributed to the greatest shining lights of the old Roman world. Dr. Gieseler, a prominent Christian historian of modern Germany, who has made, as most German students do, a painstaking study of the early centuries, says that, when the Christians were accused of inventing ma.n.u.scripts, they "quieted their consciences respecting the forgery with the idea of their good intentions." "It was an age of literary fraud," declares Bishop Ellicott.

There is shown at the library in Jena, a letter purported to have been written by Publius Lentulus, the supposed predecessor of Pontius Pilate.

The impostor who concocted this epistle and affixed the signature of a Roman governor to it, makes him tell the Roman Senate, "that there had appeared (in Judea) a man endowed with great powers, whose name is Jesus Christ." The earmarks of fraud are so plain that even the orthodox are ashamed of this clumsy manufacture. Another Gospel is attributed to Pontius Pilate. Nicodemus is made the author of still another. The Emperor Aurelius, is made to recommend the Christians to the Senate for their valor; Tiberius even gives his testimony in their favor; Jesus, himself, is made the author of a treatise in his own behalf; the Virgin Mary writes the story of her wonderful child; Adam, even, testifies to the truth of the Christian religion, though he is supposed to have lived nearly four thousand years before Jesus. There is no end to the list of inventions.

But one of the most daring forgeries is the following pa.s.sage in Josephus:

"About that time appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it be right to speak of him as a man, for he was a performer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew after him many of the Jews as well as of the Gentiles. _This same was the Christ._ And though Pilate, by the judgment of the chief rulers among us, delivered him up to be crucified ... he showed himself alive on the third day...."

That this famous pa.s.sage in Josephus is an interpolation, is now generally admitted. Breaking suddenly in the midst of a paragraph, the great Jewish historian pauses to announce that Jesus was the Christ, and that he really rose from the dead, etc., etc. This, if true, makes Josephus a Christian, which he was not. The early fathers, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, never referred to this famous pa.s.sage, which they certainly would have done, had such a pa.s.sage existed. What better evidence could they desire in their controversy with the Jews than to point to this wonderful confession of their princ.i.p.al author and historian, that the Jesus whom they crucified was the Christ, and that he rose from the dead! But in the Josephus with which they were acquainted there was no such text. Origen, the Christian Father, admits in his writings that Josephus was not a believer in Christ. How, then, did this pa.s.sage creep into the works of the Jewish historian? The man who discovered this pa.s.sage in Josephus was the same man who invented Constantine's vision, and the fable of the Seventy, who, he says, shut up in seventy separate cells, produced the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, a translation, which, he adds, was surely the work of the Holy Ghost, because when the Seventy separate translations were compared, they were found to be in every detail alike, without even the difference of a punctuation mark in them all. To further prove this story, Eusebius tells us that he himself saw the seventy cells which the translators had occupied four hundred years before. This is the kind of churchman who first discovered the Josephus pa.s.sage. After quoting the interpolated pa.s.sage, Eusebius wonders how any Jew can have the impudence not to believe that Jesus was the Christ.

In one of his essays, De Quincy says that only lunatics now believe in the genuineness of this pa.s.sage, while a bishop of the Anglican Church,--Warburton--calls it "a stupid forgery."

But the early Christians made even the pagan G.o.ds to testify for Jesus.

They composed verses in praise of the Christian religion and attributed them to the pagan Sibyls. The oracles of Rome were made to prophesy the coming of Christ,--his pa.s.sion, and resurrection, and to admit their inferiority to him. For many hundred years these Sibylline verses were quoted as genuine, until the advancement of education laughed the disgraceful fabrication out of existence.

Again, pious ecclesiastics in their zeal for their "ism," invented also an _Apostles' Creed_, which the apostles never saw, and an _Apostolic Const.i.tution_, containing directions how a Christian Church or State should be governed. They invented also the _Decretal Epistles_, by which Constantine transfers all his property to the Bishop of Rome,--his sword, his diadem, his throne,--and makes a prince of the pope, and an empire of his church. Here is the pa.s.sage which was forged into Constantine's mouth by the Spanish priest Isidore: