For two thousand years, for anyone to dare breathe a word against this Bible-inventing party, meant hell here and hereafter. Mark Antony invited Rome to weep over the prostrate form of assassinated Cæsar. 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 passages 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 superstition! It makes my heart rise and knock with vehemence against my ribs until I feel as if they would break. Not only were individual passages 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 manuscripts, 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 passage 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 passage 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 passage, which they certainly would have done, had such a passage existed. What better evidence could they desire in their controversy with the Jews than to point to this wonderful confession of their principal 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 passage creep into the works of the Jewish historian? The man who discovered this passage 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 passage. After quoting the interpolated passage, 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 passage, while a bishop of the Anglican Church,—Warburton—calls it "a stupid forgery."
But the early Christians made even the pagan gods 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 passion, 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 Constitution, 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 passage which was forged into Constantine's mouth by the Spanish priest Isidore:
"We ascribe to the See of St. Peter all dignity, all glory, all imperial power.... Besides, we give to Sylvester (bishop of Rome) and his successor, our palace of the Lateran which is beyond question the most beautiful place on earth. We give him our crown, our mitre, our diadem, and all our imperial vestments; we remit to him the imperial dignity. We give as a pure gift, to the holy pontiff, the city of Rome and all the Western cities of Italy, as well as the Western cities of other countries. In order to give place to him, we yield our dominion over all these provinces by removing the seat of our empire to Byzantium, considering it not right that a terrestrial emperor should preserve the least power where God had established the head of religion."