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If you have been faithful to study the articles in order on this website then you are seeing for yourself the truth concerning the alterations made to the New Testament over hundreds of years whereby important religious concepts originally held by the ancients and the earliest Christains were later changed and altered by the Roman Church in order to impose their own "flavor" of Christianity upon the world.
Now let our examination go even futher into this deception.
Three hundred years after the time of Jesus), there were many different versions of the Gospel story and the teachings of Jesus (Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Guide To The Bible: The Old and New Testaments (New York: Avenue Books, 1981). Asimov goes on to tell the truth about the presumed authorship of these New Testament documents when he says that then, as now, no one was quite certain who wrote them, or when or where they were written. The teachings of the Christian Church varied from one area to another and each geographical area contested with others for "authority" for their own unique understanding and interpretation of "the Christ" and Jesus. As you would expect different sects of Christianity evolved around these different teachings and there arose a need to decide on a uniform, unified code on which to base future Christian doctrine.
Bruce Metzger also comments regarding the development of the canonization of the current New Testament. In one of his many books entitled The Canon Of The New Testament: Its Origin, Significance & Development he shares with the reader that the Bible used by the early Jewish Christians consisted of the Old Testament and some Jewish apocryphal literature. They did not use a New Testament as it had not been written yet and disregarded the Pauline epistles as not accurate to the truth concerning the gospel preached by Jesus. Along with this written authority of the Jewish Tanakh and Jewish apocryphal literature went the accepted traditions, chiefly oral, of sayings attributed to Jesus. This is the Bible used by such as those we read about in Acts 15 at the Jerusalem Council. On the other hand, authors who belonged to the 'Hellenistic Wing' of the Church refer more frequently to writings that later came to be included in the New Testament. Metzger is very truthful when he says they very rarely regarded such documents as the Pauline epistles as "Scripture". Metzger also give us insights into the fact that at this time there was as yet no conception of the duty of exact quotation from books that were not yet in the full sense canonical. Consequently, it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to ascertain which New Testament books were known to early Christian writers; our evidence does not become clear until the end of second century (Bruce M Metzger, The Canon Of The New Testament: Its Origin, Significance & Development (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997) .
In other words, there was no specific 'canon' of the New Testament known to the early Christians. The 'canon' that we possess today was a late development of the Roman Church as they collected, sifted, selected, discarded, altered, wrote, and even invented much of what we carry around today in our Bibles believing it is the "inerrant" Word of God in the New Testament. As shown earlier in this website and as I will continue to reveal what we have today as our New Testaments is the refutation of the earliest First New Testament collected by Marcion which consisted of the collection of the Pauline writings in his day and a collection of oral sayings and oral traditions regarding Jesus which were written down from memory by followers in various places. Furthermore, even those who adhere to the documents that form the 'canon' of the New Testament today need to understand that these writings did not in their day posses the authority among people as did the Jewish Bible. These First and Second New Testaments were not regarded on the same level as the true "Scriptures" of the Jewish people.
But that was to change. In the year 325 C.E., it was agreed that representatives from several different sects of Christianity would have a meeting and each would bring with them the writings upon which they were basing their teachings. Some compromise of the various versions of Christian teachings as found in different localities would have to be agreed upon for the Christian church to grow as a unit, as each separate sect in these days had varying beliefs and spread different versions of belief where they went. Disunity instead of unity was the rule of the day. Political expedience necessitated the people find a common ground and this ground was to be interpreted by Constantine as the area of religions. Karl Marx understood such brilliant thinking when he said "religion is the opiate of the masses." It would be through religion and the unification of the diverse people of the Roman Empire throught religion that Constantine hoped for the continual power of the Roman Empire to continue. The meeting called the Council of Nicea was held in Nicea, Turkey and the disputes among all those calling themselves Christians were intense. The disputes were not only about the points of Christian doctrine, but also about which of these many writings were authentic since many varying beliefs about "the Christ" let alone Jesus reflected differences in beliefs of the people who by now had many of these beliefs commited to writing and attributed apostolic authority to them. In one letter from Fauste to St. Augustine, Fauste says
It is thus that your predecessors have inserted in the scriptures of our Lord many things, which, although they carry His name agree not with His doctrines. This is not surprising, since that we have often proved that these things have not been written by Himself, nor by his apostles, but that for the greater part they are founded upon tales, upon vague reports and put together by I know not what, half-Jews, but with little agreement between them, and which they have nevertheless published under the names of the Apostles of our Lord, and have thus attributed to them their own errors and their lies (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (New York, Prometheus Press, 1984).
Bart Ehrman, as a host of other scholars, informs us that the canonization of the New Testament was influenced and supported by the Emperor Constantine of the Roman Empire. Ehrman informs us that the Roman empire was a pagan empire, however, it was the dominant "superpower" of the time. Anyone who could enlist its aid would have an unconquerable ally at their side and would themselves be undefeatable. As mentioned above on the Roman side, Emperor Constantine was greatly troubled by the swelling ranks of his Christian subjects and the great division among their ranks which did not bode well for the continued stability of his empire.
Ehrman goes on in his book to tell us that most of these fringe sects now began to fade into insignificance and the matter was now left between those who believed in the Unity of God and those who believed in a "Trinity." The Roman empire's support fluctuated between these two groups for a long time until the Trinitarian's finally gained the upper hand and all but wiped the Unitarians off the face of the earth.Ehrman, in his The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, informs us that over the next centuries they slowly selected and collected the "truly inspired" gospels into one volume which later became the "New Testament." They burned all other gospels; many of which found their origin with the earliest Jewish believers of Jesus. Many sweeping campaigns of "Inquisition" were launched by Rome against those who would not accept this religious compromise of evil where untruths were not taught about Jesus let alone "the Christ." Everyone found possessing any of these "false" Gospels was put to death and his Gospel burned. Orthodoxy was now unorthdoxy and to think or believe differently than what was prescribed now by Constantine and Rome meant sure death. The truth as well as true believers went "underground" and feigned Christianity in order to survive. The Knights Templar are a great example of Christians who held these earliest secret beliefs of the earliest Christians concerning Jesus that they could not share if they wished to live (Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, p. 7).
Ehrman further says that the classical understanding of the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy met a devastating challenge in 1934 with the publication of Walter Bauer's Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum, possibly the most significant book on early Christianity written in modern times. Bauer argued that the early Christian church in fact did not comprise a single orthodoxy from which emerged a variety of competing heretical minorities. Instead, early Christianity embodied a number of divergent forms, no one of which represented the clear and powerful majority of believers against all others. In some regions, what was later to be termed 'heresy' was in fact the original and only form of Christianity. In other regions, views later deemed heretical coexisted with views that would come to be embraced by the church as a whole, with most believers not drawing hard and fast lines in demarcation between the competing views. To this extent, 'orthodoxy,' in the sense of a unified group advocating an apostolic doctrine accepted by the majority of Christians everywhere, did not exist in the second and third centuries. Nor was 'heresy' secondarily derived from an original teaching through an infusion of Jewish ideas or pagan philosophy.
Beliefs that were, at later times, embraced as orthodoxy and condemned as heresy were in fact competing interpretations of Christianity, one of which eventually (but not initially) acquired domination because of singular historical and social forces. Only when one social group had exerted itself sufficiently over the rest of Christendom did a 'majority' opinion emerge; only then did the 'right belief' represent the view of the Christian church at large (Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, p. 7).
The text of the New Testament developed freely for quite some time depending upon the whims and fancies of Christians. As Kurt and Barbara Aland tells us their The Text Of The New Testament, p. 69, that until the beginning of the fourth century the text of the New Testament developed freely. It was the "living text" in the Greek literary tradition, unlike the text of the Hebrew Old Testament, which was subject to strict controls because (in the oriental tradition) the consonantal text was holy. And the New Testament text continued to be a "living text" as long as it remained a manuscript tradition, even when the Byzantine church molded it to the procrustean bed of the standard and officially prescribed text. Even for later scribes, for example, the parallel passages of the Gospels were so familiar that they would adapt the text of one Gospel to that of another. They also felt themselves free to make corrections in the text, improving it by their own standard of correctness, whether grammatically, stylistically, or more substantively. This was all the more true of the early period, when the text had not been attained canonical status, especially in the earliest period when Christians considered themselves to be filled with the Spirit. As a consequence the text of the early period was many-faceted, and each manuscript had its own peculiar character.
In face of all the evidences, we still cannot see the justification for the claim of Christianity that the New Testament is wholly the "inerrant" word of God. This short testimony above as presented just from these few scholars and not preachers tells the truth about the reliability and authority of the New Testament. I quickly began to see these same isues and problems surface in my exhaustive study of the New Testament. I was not only shocked but hurt by what I was uncovering in my years of study following graduation from Seminary. What I had been taught in Seminary could not hold up to the light of intense scrutiny and study where the evidences of such forgery of the New Testament could be seen by anyone if they had the time, desire, and resources before them that are all necessary if one wants to come to the truth about the New Testament.
We have in this website began to see the truth in these regards; namely what is passed off today in the Roman Second New Testament as a Divine Revelation expressing the earliest beliefs of Christainty and what the earliest followers of Jesus believed of him is anything but the truth of the matter. Instead we are seeing that what the earliest Christians believed about "the Christ" and Jesus as pictured in Rome's refutation of the First New Testament as handed down to us today in Rome's Second New Testament. The implications for such facts and knowledge seeing the light of day are tremendous and threaten the very foundation of Christianity itself as it is known today.
