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Along with this comes the problem of the "inspiration" or lack of it as associated with the The New Testament writings. The New Testament and the inspired Apostles are silent on the subject and left the matter to serious doubts and disputations for many centuries: "There are no indications in the New Testament of a definite new Canon bequeathed by the Apostles to the Church, or of a strong self-witness to Divine inspiration," admits the Catholic Encyclopedia (Vol. iii, 274); that is, there is nothing in the 27 booklets which would lead to the suspicion of their "inspiration" or truth. There was then no Church for them to bequeath to, nor was the Canon settled, as we shall see.
You better be seated for this one. The Catholic Encyclopedia continues: "It was not until about the middle of the second century that these books (the books comprising our New Testament) were really written and that under the rubric of Scripture the New Testament writings were assimilated to the Old. . . . (lb. p. 275.)
Answer for yourself: Did you notice that the Catholic encyclopedia just admitted that the bulk of the New Testament writings were written not by the apostles and intimate followers of a supposed historical Jesus but were later written long after their deaths in in the "middle of the second century"? WOW! Of course this means "Gentile" authorship and this goes a long way to explain all the inaccuracies, misquotation of Hebrew Scriptures, purposeful mistranslation of the Hebrew Scriptures and Messianic Prophecy concerning Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures as we find finally recorded in the New Testament. These Gentile writers were simply not conversant upon Biblical Judaism because they were not Jews, and as study of the second century reveals, filled with antisemitism that clearly comes out in many of the New Testament second century texts.
As if that is not enough, get a load of this. Further, the dubious and disputed status of the sacred writings through centuries, and the ultimate settlement of the controversies by a numerical majority of the Council of Trent, in 1546 (after the Reformation had forced the issue), is thus admitted:
"The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is, from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council. . . . And this want of an organized distribution, secondarily to the absence of an early fixation of the Canon, left room for variation and doubts which lasted far into the centuries." (Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. iii, 274.) I just fell in love with the Catholic Encyclopedia in Seminary for it tells it like it is. I was constantly amazed how the earliest history of the Church and its deceptions were recorded over and over again in the Catholic Encyclopedia. In the Catholic Encyclopedia I found a frank history of the church and the perversion of Judaism over and over again. In it constantly is a truth that is long forgotten by the over-rehearsement of a church tradition that is anything but accurate and truthful. The self-incrimination of the Catholic Encyclopedia as to the untrustworthiness of these supposed inspired and infallible "literal" and "historical" religious documents given the whole of mankind is startling to say the least.
The modus operandi of the Holy Council in ultimately "canonizing" Jerome's old Vulgate Version, and its motive for doing so, are thus exposed by the keen pen of the author of The Rise and Fall:
"When the Council of Trent resolved to pronounce sentence on the Canon of Scripture, the opinion which prevailed, after some debate, was to declare the Latin Vulgate authentic and almost infallible; and this sentence, which was guarded by formidable anathemas, secured all the books of the Old and New Testament which composed that ancient version. . . . When the merit of that version was discussed, the majority of the theologians urged, with confidence and success, that it was absolutely necessary to receive the Vulgate as authentic and inspired, unless they wished to abandon the victory to the Lutherans, and the honors of the Church to the Grammarians." (Gibbon, A Vindication, v, 2; Istoria del Consiglio Tridentino, L. ii, p. 147.)
A number of these books were bitterly disputed and their authenticity and inspiration denied by the leading Reformers, Luther, Grotius, Calvin, etc., and excluded from their official lists, until finally the Reformed Church followed the example of the Church hopeless of reform and swallowed the canon whole, as we have it today, minus, of course, the Tobit, Judith, and like inspired buffooneries of the True Bible.
Such books and the vicissitudes of their authenticity are thus described: "Like the Old Testament, the New has its deutero-canonical [i.e. doubted] books and portions of books, their canonicity having formerly been a subject of some controversy in the Church. These are, for entire books: the Epistle to the Hebrews, that of James, the Second and Third of John, Jude, and Apocalypse; giving seven in all as the number of the N. T. contested books". The formerly disputed passages are three:
Since the Council of Trent it is not permitted for a Catholic to question the inspiration of these passages. (Catholic Encyclopedia, iii, 274.) Besides the forgery of the above and other books as a whole, we shall see many other instances of "interpolated" or forged passages in the Christian books.
So, when we read things like the following we have to take them with a large grain of salt given the testimony of the later Church Fathers as to how this New Testament actually came about. Information like the above makes such passages like those below laughable.
"The Gospel has come down to us," says Bishop Irenaeus (about 185 A.D.), "which the apostles did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith. . . . For, after our Lord rose from the dead [the apostles] departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things sent from God to us, who indeed do equally and individually possess the Gospel of God." (Iren., Adv. Haer, Bk. III, ch. i; ANF. i, 414.)
All of the New Testament must be suspect and open to intense scrutiny if we ever hope to find and separate Divine Truth within if from man-made religious dogmas, many of which are diametrically opposed to religious beliefs held for thousands and thousands of years by both the ancient Spiritual Wisdom Religions as well as Biblical Judaism. Understand much of what comes out in the New Testament could and never would have been believed by a Jewish Messiah or a typical righteous Zaddik like the Jesus of the New Testament. Given this then I used to ask myself over and over why I should continue to believe what I was proving to myself is a replacement religion based upon the distortion of both Biblical Judaism as well as "the Christ" given us by Rome in the middle centuries.
You need to set down for this because this will take your breath away. There are really two New Testaments. The First New Testament was written and given the world by Marcion who is a Christian Gnostic and one of the leaders of the earliest Gnostic Christians. You might say it is a collection of the Gnostic Paul's writings that focused on the evolution of the incarnated and indwelling Krst/Christ within every child of God. Marcion gave the world this First New Testament. Rome, not wishing to follow the ancient Wisdom Religions and the ancient understanding of "the Krst/Christ" gave the world their retort to Marcion's First New Testament. I call it the Second New Testament and it is the one we have today. This Second New Testament, the reworking of Marcion's First New Testament, was given to us by Bishop Irenaeus. Amazingly, both Bishop Irenaeus and Bishop Papias have both professed that the Jesus of the New Testament lived to old age (even at late as 98-117 A.D.), flatly denying thus as "heresy" the Gospel stories as to his crucifixion at about thirty years of age (Wheless, Forgery In Christianity, p. 173). The implication of this is staggering to Christian dogma and the salvation message attached to the crucifixion of Jesus as the Christ. But there it lies in dust in books never read today. It is these mean, Irenaeus, Papias, and others who, in spite of their beliefs about this Jesus, would sanction and give the world that taught otherwise. In any event, the Apostles, according to the record of such men like Irenaeus, scattered to the ends of the earth, preaching, orally, before they wrote anything at all. It is all so simple until you begin to study this book seriously then the can of worms flies open and hits the fan the the nice and neat Bible stories explode before your eyes as something less than trustworthy. The bottom line after ten years of such study is that one who seeks God is much better served by beginning his search for God through Biblical Judaism than the Christian religion with their corrupted religious documents which by the light of serious study can be shown to be "Swiss cheese theology" and full of holes throughout.
Traditional Christianity and many of our Bibles attest that the New Testament was not written all at once, but the books that compose it appeared one after another in the space of fifty years, i.e., in the second half of the first century. That sounds so nice and neat and reassuring that we have the earliest truth about God and His "Krst/Christ" but when we see that those responsible for this New Testament, in their private papers, held opposite views regarding this New Testament and its true origins, then it appears the whole agenda of preparing this New Testament was to deceive the illiterate masses and subjugate them to a Roman salvation message linked with their redefinition of "the Christ" which was only available to mankind through the doors of the Roman Church. Oh, how convenient to control the world through ignorance and fear of damnation. Surely less legions and wars would be needed to conquer the minds of people and subjugate them to the whims of the Roman State.
So we grow up believing as we are told. We are told to believe, as Irenaeus maintains, that the Gospels have come down to us (referring to Irenaeus in 185 A.D.) which the apostles did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures. But other Church Fathers testify otherwise. That this last clause of Irenaeus is untrue will be fully and readily demonstrated throughout the websites of Bet Emet Ministries. This statement, too, contradicts Bishops Papias and Irenaeus, who are, positively, the only two of the many second century Church Fathers who up to their times at all mention or reference any written Gospels or their supposed authors, as we have seen and shall more particularly notice. Amazingly, the earliest quote from any Gospel which is supposedly written "early" according to Irenaeus cannot be found in existence until after 185 A.D. Rather than early, it appears that they were written "late" at best and surely not by the supposed Apostles of a messianic movement in Judaism. I would often wonder as my studies advanced daily these many years ago what other things I had been taught to believe in my Christian tradition that were untrustworthy and not truthful. God knew, it was up to me to discern the truth from error in my relationship with God.
And Catholic Encyclopedia says, as is true, of the earliest existing manuscripts of any New Testament books: "We have New Testament MSS. written not much more than 300 years after the composition of the books"; and it admits (though with much diminution of truth, as we shall see: "And in them we find numerous differences, though but few of them are important." (Catholic Encyclopedia xiv, 526.) I would find that these "important" difference resided mainly regarding Messianic Prophecy which could be shown to be purposeful mistranslations, purposeful misquotations, verses taken out of context and pure invention of Hebrew Scriptures out of thin air in order to make it appear as if the New Testament Jesus was the "fulfiller" of Messianic Prophecy and the Jewish Messiah. Judaism has for two thousand years pointed out these Scriptural irregularities in the New Testament and staunchly denied that the New Testament Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. I would find out in my studies that it is "all about the texts" and "who has the best and most reliable texts". As a retired ordained Pastor it saddens me to say that as a Christian that I don't have these "best" and "most reliable" texts and Scriptures in my Bible. In fact, when these texts of Judaism and Christianity are compared, line upon line, precept upon precept, the Christian Bible is a forgery when compared to the Hebrew Scriptures. That means many dogmas and beliefs attached to the central character of the New Testament, Jesus, are less than truthful; in fact they are outright deceptions
In this Catholic Encyclopedia at another place, and speaking much more nearly the truth, contradicts itself, saying: "The existence of numerous and, at times, considerable differences between the four canonical Gospels is a fact which has long been noticed and which all scholars readily admit. . . . Those evangelical records (SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke) whose mutual resemblances are obvious and striking, and . . . the narrative (that of St. John) whose relation with the other three is that of dissimilarity rather than that of likeness." (Catholic Encyclopedia vi, 658.)
After ten years of daily textual study the so-called "canonical" books of the New Testament are a mess of contradictions and confusions of texts when compared to the Hebrew Scriptures from which they are taken, to the present estimate of 150,000 and more "variant readings," as is well known and admitted by honest scholars.
Thus Catholic Encyclopedia:
"It is easy to understand how numerous would be the readings of a text transcribed as often as the Bible, and, as only one reading can represent the original, it follows that all the others are necessarily faulty.
Answer for yourself: But where do we find the most accurate Scriptures that we can trust? Do we look to Biblical Judaism or to Christianity? Do we look to the Hebrew Tanakh or the Roman Bible? Without a doubt, having done these studies and proved to myself beyond any doubt which are truthful, one should look to the Hebrew Tanakh for all Messianic Prophecy as well as Divine Dogmas and not to Rome and its later sister, Protestantism, which is infected with the same corrupt texts in the same Bible.
The English critic John Mill estimated the variants of the New Testament at 30,000, and since the discovery of so many MSS. unknown to Mill, this number has greatly increased." (Catholic Encyclopedia iv, 498.)
Answer for yourself: Who, then, is "inspired" to distinguish true from false readings, and thus to know what God's Christ really said, or what some copyist's error or priest's forgery make them say or do, falsely? Well one thing is for certain it surely is not the average Christian who has never studied these issues or read any scholarly books upon the subject. But fortunately not all the followers of this Jesus and the New Testament Christ are ignorant of such problems with the New Testament.
Of the chaos and juggling of sacred texts in the Great Dioceses of Africa, the Catholic Encyclopedia again says: "There never existed in early Christian Africa an official Latin text known to all the Churches, or used by the faithful to the exclusion of all others. The African bishops willingly allowed corrections to be made in a copy of the Sacred Scriptures, or even a reference, when necessary, to the Greek text. With some exceptions, it was the Septuagint text that prevailed, for the Old Testament until the fourth century. In the case of the New, the MSS. were of the Western type. On this basis there arose a variety of translations and interpretations. . . . Apart from the discrepancies to be found in two quotations from the same text in the works of two different authors, and sometimes of the same author, we now know that of several books of Scripture there were versions wholly independent of each other." (Catholic Encyclopedia i, 193.)
Bishop Victor of Tunnunum, who died about 569 A. D. and whose work, says Catholic Encyclopedia, "is of great historical value," says that in the fifth century, "In the consulship of Messala, at the command of the Emperor Anastasius, the Holy Gospels, as written Idiotis Evangelistis, are corrected and amended." (Victor of T., Chronica, p. 89-90; cited by Dr. Mills, Prolegom. to R. V., p. 98.)
Answer for yourself: What does all of this mean to me...the average Christian?
This would indicate some very substantial tinkering with Holy Writ; which process was a continuing one, for, says Catholic Encyclopedia, "Under Sixtus V (1585-90) and Clement VIII (1592-1605) the Latin Vulgate after years of revision attained its present shape." (Catholic Encyclopedia, xii, 769.) And the Vulgate, which was fiercely denounced as fearfully corrupt, was only given sanction of divinity by the Council of Trent in 1546, under the Curse of God against any who questioned it. Though this amendatory tinkering of their two Holinesses was after the Council of Trent had put the final Seal of the Holy Ghost on the Vulgate in 1546!
Let us not forget that as Protestants we have come from such people and their religious persuasions, and that being fact, are faced with the stark realization that we have inherited their religious documents and their falsifications as well.
Answer for yourself: What is the truth about the New Testament that has come down to us today from the Catholic Church...is it truly the Word of God or has it replaced the Word of God and I not know it? Has not only the texts been forged when compared to the Hebrew Scriptures, but has the ancient Divine Spiritual Wisdom been so mischaracterized that "the Krst/Christ" has been distorted almost beyond belief? Are these documents, corrupted as they are, given today a false and improper hermeneutic and manner of interpretation? Are these documents to be understood "literally" or "historically" or are they to be understood "allegorically", "metaphorically", and "metaphysically" instead as did the ancients who held sacred the same "Krst/Christ" story under different names for thousands and thousands of years before the rise of Rome and its radical reinterpretation of almost everything?
It is to these issues we turn in this series on What Has Your Pastor Failed To Teach You About The New Testament?
