The forgery of the Torah (the so called ‘Law of Moses')
Genesis and the literary style known as Chiasmus
The term ‘Torah' (which means ‘the Law of God') refers to the first five books found in the Bible. The book of Genesis consists of a composite of various sources which have been spun together using an editorial technique known as ‘chiasmus'. This technique consists of a repeating elements, in a form such as ABCDBA, where the placement of the inner and outer elements echo a repeating theme and act as a bracket around an inner element. Much of the meaning of such a document is therefore hidden in the structure. What this tells us is that Genesis was never intended to be interpreted as an historical document, but rather it consists of collections of carefully arranged parables. It is not history, but rather a type of literary work written in a certain style (for history does not unfold in such a way as to conveniently fit into the literary style of a chiasmus).The Gospel of Mark in the New Testament is also not a history or a biography, but rather consists of a collection of fictional parables, and following the example of the book of Genesis the author arranged these parables in the form of Chiasmus, so that much of the meaning of the Gospel of Mark is hidden in the structure of the document and becomes lost when the document is read as a literal history. As an example of this sort of thing we find two parables of the breaking of bread, which are fictional parables used as brackets wrapping around the central theme of the chiasmus, which is an attack on the Torah, in particular the food laws and the clean and unclean laws. In the two parables of breaking bread we are told that thousands of people needed to be fed, but the disciples only had two loaves of bread and one or two fish. In a great miracle the bread and the fish are broken into pieces for five or six thousand people, and we are told that the disciples were so incredibly stupid that it did not occur to them that you could not feed thousands with a loaf and a fish. This is repeated twice, and in both cases the disciples have to gather up all the great numbers of left over fragments of bread and fish in many baskets, and still they prove to be to stupid to understand that it was not possible to have that many baskets of left overs when they started out with one loaf and a fish. This is hyperbole, a form of far fetched exaggeration. The theme here is not the great historical event of the breaking of bread, but rather it is the extreme stupidity of the disciples when it came to believing religious doctrines, and this functions as a commentary on the belief in the infallibility of the Bible. This is made clear in a brief recapitulation of the theme of the chiasmus which takes place on a boat, where the disciples are told to ‘beware the yeast of the scribes and the Pharisees' They then worry because they have no bread, and are scolded for taking the imagery literally, at which time they finally understand that they are to beware of the teachings of the scribes and pharisees.
In this way it can be seen that the Gospel of Mark employs fictional parables, which describe events which did not actually happen to address real historical controversies. The controversies were real, but the parables employed in the gospel of Mark are fictional. The same principle applies to the book of Genesis, which addresses real historical controversies, but does so using the fictional device of the Chiasmus. For this reason neither the Gospel of Mark nor the book of Genesis should be read as history, but instead should be properly interpreted as literary works, since the true meaning of the documents are not found in ‘historical details' but rather is hidden in the structure of the documents. The point here is that Genesis was no written by Moses so as to describe the true history of the world. This is an ignorant myth.
The Liberation Theology of Exodus
The book of Exodus consists of different sources which have been spun together into a composite work. The story of Moses rescuing the slaves from Pharaoh is not a retelling of history but rather is an amusing, satirical parable. The theme of the parable could be described as ‘Liberation Theology'. Even though the liberation narrative is a hyperbolic parable, full of fantastic imagery (such as magical contests between Moses and the Egyptian priests, the turning of sticks into live snakes, and so on), although the story is not historical, it may be possible that there is an historical antecedent to the legends concerning ‘Moses' and the liberation of slaves from Egypt. The Old Kingdom of Egypt suffered a mysterious collapse of central authority, and the downfall of the court of Pharaoh, that lasted for about one hundred years beginning sometime around 2100 B.C.E. Surviving historical records from Egypt describe this as a time of chaos and calamity in Egypt, a time of plagues, famine, and the complete collapse of the entire country. There were no Pharaohs again in Egypt for about one hundred years, the time of the rise of the Middle Kingdom from the ashes of the collapse of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. It is possible that following this collapse of the government of Egypt, and the unexplained downfall of the Pharaoh, a Moses type figure led a population of slaves out of the ruins of Egypt, and that this historical memory then become the inspiration for the Liberation parables found in Exodus.The forgery known as ‘The Law of God'
The second half of the book of Exodus consists of later forgeries by the priests of the Jerusalem temple. According to the story, Moses led the people to freedom from Pharaoh only to hand them over to the enslavement by priests. The priestly rituals and the priestly authority described in documents such as the latter half of Exodus and the book of Leviticus were condemned by later Jewish prophets as a forgery concocted by the priests to justify their growing authority through the device of inventing a fictional trip up to a mountain top by Moses, who then brought down priestly religion, which it was suggested came therefore directly from God. The book of Numbers is another forgery wherein the people, after being rescued by God, are shown in a state of rebellion against the priestly religious system, and as punishment are bitten by snakes, consumed by fires sent by God, and destroyed in the tens of thousands by plagues and so on, events which never actually happened, since the theme of the book is blind obedience to priests, which tells us that the author of the documents were once the priests.The central theme of this priestly religion consisted of various rituals, in particular the greatest ‘sacrament' of the sacrifice of animals. This religious system was condemned by the Jewish prophets as a hypocritical charade intended to divert the people into sterile activities and the hollowness of religion and its dogmas, and so subvert the pursuit of true justice in the land. The priests, as described by the prophets, were in bed with the government and with a rising oligarchy in the land, and were using the sterility of their hollow rituals and doctrines as a device to keep the population dulled and stupid, pleasing God with religion and its hollow practices, while turning a blind eye to the gross injustices taking place in the land, the oppressions of the poor, and the greed that was running rampant at the time.
The clearest denunciation of the forgery of the so called ‘Law of Moses' is found in the book of Jeremiah, who was a dissident priest who turned against the religious system of the day as a protest against the forgeries being committed by his fellow priests. It can be seen here that by becoming a whistle blower Jeremiah was doing a service to his fellow country men in that in those days most people were illiterate, and it was typical only for priests to learn to read and write, and so the common people of the time would have had no other way to know that their so called ‘Holy Writings' were actually being progressively forged by their priests. Jeremiah was also radicalized by the brutal oppression of the poor, who were apparently being pursued by what we would today call ‘death squads'. Just as we have seen ‘orthodox religion' crushing ‘liberation theology' and turning a blind eye to the activities of death squads who pursue and murder the poor in our time, so the same practice of sterile religion combined with brutal injustice characterized the hollow religious system of Jeremiah's time, and the purpose of that system of religion was to create a population superstitious and dulled of mind by religion. Jeremiah wrote of those times, saying,
We look for peace, but find no good, for a time of healing, but there is terror instead...Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: "Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?" ("Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?") "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people! O that I had in the desert a traveler's lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them!...They bend their tongues like bows; they have grown strong in the land for falsehood, and not for truth; for they proceed from evil to evil...They all deceive their neighbors, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongues to speak lies; they commit iniquity and are too weary to repent. Oppression upon oppression, deceit upon deceit! (Jeremiah 8:15)
According to Jeremiah the central practice of priestly religion, the supposed great sacrament of the animal sacrifice, was in fact a forgery cooked up by his fellow priests. He wrote,
Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh yourselves. For in the day that I brought your ancestors out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices...But they did not listen, they paid no heed, but went ahead with their own plans with the most stubbornly wicked and evil hearts...Speak to them but they will refuse to listen to you. Call to them but they will refuse to answer... truth has perished from their lips and it is no longer heard in the land. (Jeremiah 7:21)
The Torah also includes sadistic punishments for violating the laws of priestly religion, including the notoriously famous practice of burning at the stake. Concerning these laws, found in such documents as Leviticus, Jeremiah continued his polemical attack on the forgeries of his fellow priests, by condemning these burning laws, for like the central animal sacrifice ritual, these laws were ‘not the commandment of God'.
They have set their abominations in the house that is called by my name, defiling it. They built the high places of Topheth which is in the valley of ben Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire. That was no command of God. (Jeremiah 7:30)
Jeremiah continues his polemic with a direct attack on the practice of forgery in the Torah, followed by a condemnation of the laws of imperialist colonialism found in the same Torah, and supposedly sent down from God by means of Moses. Warfare and imperialist conquest, genocide and the seizing of lands is one of the great repeating themes of the Torah.
"When the lord your god has led you into the land you are entering to make your own, nations will fall before you. You must lay them under solemn ban and show them no pity." "The lord your god has given you this land as your own. All your fighting men must take up arms and march." Deut. 3:18 "Annihilate the nations you are dispossessing and make your home in their country." Deut. 12:29 "Put the inhabitants to the slaughter without giving any quarter and burn their town down." Deut. 13:15 "Drive out all the natives before you. You shall take possession of the land and settle it, for I, the Lord, have given it to you as your property. Divide it up among your clans." Num. 33:52 when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must completely destroy them; you shall make no peace treaties with them, and show no mercy to them. Deut. 2:1 "Put the men to the sword, but the women and all the spoil you may take as booty. This is how you are to deal with far away lands. But in the lands that nearby you must not spare a living soul." Deut. 20:10
Given how great is the number of genocidal imperialist scriptures in that so called ‘law of God' the few examples above hardly constitute a complete list of these abominations, since this is perhaps the greatest theme of those forgeries. Jeremiah's response to damn the Torah, and then in the spirit of judging them as they judged others, and doing unto them as they did unto others, he curses them and proposes giving their wives to others and having others steal their fields, for they are not a holy people, but were actually a band of filthy murdering thieves and their priests and their religion was a fraudulent abomination.
When people fall, do they not get up again? If they go astray, do they not turn back? Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? They have held fast to deceit, they have refused to return. I have given heed and listened, but they do not speak honestly; no one repents of wickedness, saying, "What have I done!" All of them turn to their own course, like a war horse plunging headlong into battle...Now my people do not know the requirements of God. How can you say, 'We are wise, for we have the Torah, when, actually, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie? Their leaders are dismayed, for they have been trapped and snared, but they rejected the truth, so what kind of wisdom did they have? Therefore I will give their wives to other men and their fields to new owners, for everyone from the least to the greatest is after dishonest gain. Priests and prophets are all frauds...They acted shamefully and they have committed abominations, yet they feel no shame and they don't even know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall with a great crash on the day of my reckoning and they shall all be overthrown. (Jeremiah 8:4)
The manipulation of the public and the creation of the Torah
One of the problems the priests faced after forging the Laws of Moses was that up to that time no one in the public was familiar with the documents, and to suddenly attempt to force such forgeries on the public would have been a public relations disaster for both the religious and political establishments of the time. Therefore what we can easily recognize as a public relations campaign was launched by an early cabal of spin doctors to peddle the newly forged documents. That this campaign of deception was successful is demonstrated by the fact that to this very day those forgeries remain in the Bible and among far to many religious people continue to be regarded as ‘the Law of God' which supposedly was brought down from the very heights of heaven by Moses in person.The story of how these new forgeries were foisted on the public can be uncovered because it is recorded in the ‘Book of Kings'. According to the spin doctored tale to be sold to the public, what happened was that the Torah, the law of Moses, was accidentally ‘discovered' in the temple in Jerusalem where it had supposedly had been lying dormant and neglected for many, many years. The ‘discovery' of the Torah was made by the High Priest, Hilkiah, who then allegedly reported the discovery to the political authorities, through Shaphan the secretary to the King at the time, Josiah..
The high priest Hilkiah said to Shaphan the secretary, "I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD." When Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, he read it. (2 Kings 22:8)
The secretary then took the Torah to the King.
Shaphan the secretary informed the king, "The priest Hilkiah has given me a book." Shaphan then read it aloud to the king. (2 Kings 22:10 )
The religious right of the time then launched a public campaign intended to instill superstitious terror into the population, in the form of such fire and brimstone speeches threatening damnation for disobedience to the contents of that book, which is the characteristic style of right wing authoritarian religion. The spokesperson for the religious right was a female prophet named Huldah, who went about the country preaching fire and brimstone and threatening the country with damnation should the newly discovered ‘law of Moses' not be adopted faithfully by the entire country.
Thus says the LORD, I will indeed bring disaster on this place and on its inhabitants—all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read. Because they have abandoned me and have made offerings to other gods, so that they have provoked me to anger with all the work of their hands, therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched. (2 Kings 22:16 )
With the ground having been prepared through the agitation of the public by the religious right, the political establishment then moved into action. The forged Torah was officially canonized and made into the sacred religious document of the entire country from that time forward. This was then celebrated as the ‘religious reform movement of the King Josiah', when, what actually happened, is that a forgery was canonized through a carefully planned spin doctored public relations campaign.
The king went up to the house of the LORD, and with him went all the people of Judah, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the LORD. The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the LORD, to follow the LORD, keeping his commandments, his decrees, and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. All the people joined in the covenant. (2 Kings 23:2)
The Jewish portion of the Bible (the so called ‘Old Testament') is a very interesting collection of documents, when it is read properly (by properly, I mean critically, not ‘literally', which is impossible given the great controversies and the resulting contradictions found in its pages). The books of Kings give us the spin doctored point of view of the political establishment of the time. (Chronicles consists of a rewritten spin doctored version of the book of Kings, this time representing the view of the priestly religious establishment of the time. This explains why we would find the book of Kings written over again, with those telling minor alterations that reveal the interests and the interpretation of the priests).
It is typical of that ancient Jewish religion to not be dogmatic, which makes it very ironic that their books were then adopted by such a dogmatic religion as Christianity. Because of this different mind set found in ancient Judaism, you find both the official spin doctored version of events, and you also find the voice of the dissidents found in the writings of the Jewish prophets, as they condemn the official religion of the time as a heresy and fraud. This pattern is typical of ancient Judaism, and I find it to be admirable. Even the sacred Torah, which supposedly came right down from God, was not sacred enough to those people to be spared the most biting attacks, and it is almost impossible to imagine the same open mindedness to be found in such a dogmatic thing as Christianity, which viciously persecuted dissent as heresy. This is not to say that Jewish priests did not pursue heretics, since they were the ones who invented burning at the stake and stoning people to death, but the difference here is that the Jewish priests and the political establishment with which they were connected did not have the final word. So we find the Torah under attack as a forgery and the priests themselves we find facing a charge of damnable heresy, which is refreshing change of pace, and one of the admirable characteristics of ancient Jewish religion. We find the mindless doggerel of the book of Proverbs (bad things only happen to bad people, and rich people are good and blessed while poor people are bad and cursed) comes under attack in the book of Job (which consists of quotations from proverbs which are lampooned and attacked). Most people are probably unaware of the difference that exists between Jewish and Christian religions, and this is unfortunate, for ancient Jewish religion does not deserve to be tarred with the same brush as Christianity, simply because the book is ignorantly misused by dogmatic Christian literalists.
Forgery in the New Testament
The line of continuity between Jesus and the Jewish Prophets
A critical reading of the Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of Matthew, reveals that Jesus is best understood as being in continuity with the earlier schools of Jewish prophets, even though the theology of Christian religion would try to deceive by insisting that he was in a line of continuity with the priestly religion of ancient Israel.A critical reading of the Gospel of Mark is required if we wish to discern the truth, because the author of the document was only a half baked follower of Jesus, and so therefore he distorts the record (the root cause of the problem being that he was a follower of the religious right hawk known as ‘John the Baptist', and therefore he was struggling to make sense of a controversial figure like Jesus, and this struggle results in distortions).
As an example of this we can consider the Chiasmus attacking the food laws and the clean and unclean laws found in the Torah (most notably in Leviticus and Deuteronomy). Nothing a person eats or touches can make them ‘unclean'. These laws, the author tells us, were ‘human traditions' which were ‘added onto the law of God'. The author then refers back to the attacks of the Jewish prophets on the Torah, saying, ‘You nullify the prophets for the sake of your human traditions, and you do many other things just like that.' Among the ‘many other things' they did, were the constant sacrifice of animals, which was supposed to be their greatest ‘sacrament', and which they could only do if they ‘nullified the prophets', since the prophets had condemned that practice as fraudulent and the source documents for the practice as priestly forgeries.
This doctrine of prophets such as Jeremiah is alluded to again later in the document, in the form of a chiasmus attacking the animal sacrifice. This is the famous event of the ‘cleansing of the temple'. The outer brackets of the chiasmus consist of the cursing of a fig tree for producing no fruit. First the fig tree is cursed. Then Jesus goes into the temple and attacks the money changers with a whip, and attacks those who are selling caged animals to be purchased for the religious sacrifice. The fig tree is then shown having withered and died after being cursed. In the center of the chiasmus the image of money is set beside the image of caged animals ready to be purchased and sacrificed, while the temple system itself is condemned as ‘ a house of thieves', which then suggests that the whole religious system revolved around making money by peddling animals to the gullible public. The cursed fig tree represents the temple religious system itself, which is cursed, first by the prophets, and then by the whip carrying Jesus, causing it to wither and die.
What is being suggested here is that Jesus was continuing the preaching of the former Jewish prophets, by attacking the validity of the Bible and its religious laws. The problem with the Gospel of Mark is that a distortion is introduced in that Mark suggests that their was a valid law of Moses which was then ruined by adding on human traditions. This distortion then causes Mark to misunderstand other actions of Jesus, such as his perpetual breaking of the Sabbath. For example, we are told the Jesus took his disciples out harvesting on the Sabbath, which is a death penalty offense under that religious system. This pattern of repeatedly breaking the Sabbath continues, and each time, Mark makes excuses for Jesus, suggesting that the Sabbath law was valid, and came down from God, and that Jesus had a perfectly good excuse for breaking the Sabbath. The reason for this tortured spin doctoring and excuse making is that Mark does not understand that the reason that Jesus went harvesting on the Sabbath was because he was directly attacking the doctrine that taught that Moses went up the mountain and brought down priestly religion.
When you attack the Sabbath the meaning of your action is to say that the story of Moses going up the mountain was a fraud, and that the Ten Commandments did not come from heaven (indeed they resemble the laws of Hammurabi and are typical of the laws of the State at the time they were produced...there is nothing exceptional about the Ten Commandments). The religious people understood that an attack was being made upon the entire collection of forged documents (for if Moses did not go up the mountain, their entire ‘law of God' was a forgery, which is what Jeremiah suggests in his polemic). Because the religious people understood the meaning of this action they found it necessary to quote the Ten Commandments to Jesus when he broke the Sabbath (‘six days there are to do your work, but not on the Sabbath'). It is because Mark refuses to accept that Moses did not go up the mountain that he makes excuses for Jesus and tries to spin doctor the Sabbath breaking, and therefore we must read the Gospel of Mark critically if we want the truth, for it does not come directly from that half baked author, who came under the influence of John the Baptist, which was the root cause of the problems in that document.
Forgery in the Gospel of Mark
Part of the problem with the Gospel of Mark is that the author cannot accept a whole sale rejection of the Torah, and being partly a follower of a radical like Jesus, and partly a follower of a religious right hawk like that John the Baptist he constantly distorts the record. This is not the same as ‘forgery' but the end result is the spreading of ignorant heresy by the author of the Gospel of Mark, a subject I have wrote about previously and won't go into in detail here.The Gospel of Mark was also subject to later forgery by the church authorities. Such redaction by a later author can be recognized in two ways. The first is that the archeological evidence shows us that the Gospel of Mark originally ended abruptly with the crucifixion. The 16thchapter of the Gospel of Mark is a later forgery which was appended onto the document.
The second way that we can recognize that the ending of the Gospel of Mark is a later forgery is the contradictions in doctrine introduced by the forged passage, which reflects not the point of view of the original author but rather the requirements of later church theologians. In the Gospel of Mark the Jesus figure was not a god. He was in fact ‘a sinner'. Now the reason why Jesus was a ‘sinner' was because the author of Mark's Gospel was a half baked follower of that religious right hawk known as John the Baptist, who, being a member of the religious right believed that everyone was a sinner, and on the way to hell fire, and therefore he preached hell fire and brimstone. (The message of John the Baptist was that you must repent, and be baptized to wash off your sin, or you will burn in hell. This sort of brimstone preaching is typical of the right wing authoritarian.) Therefore, being a sinner, Jesus went down to be baptized by John the Baptist before he could begin his mission, which is the way in which the author of Mark's Gospel intends to merge Jesus with John the Baptist (the suggestion being that John was ‘Elijah' and therefore in this way it could be explained how the conservative theology of someone like John could then be blended together with the radical theology of someone like Jesus).
The Gospel of Mark was written before all the other gospels, which are based upon the theological premise first established by Mark (merging Jesus with John the Baptist). However in Mark's Gospel there is found the heresy that Jesus was not a divine god, but rather a sinner. Jesus states, ‘Do not call me good, for there is no one who is good except God.' This is the famous heresy of Mark's Gospel, which contradicts later Christian theology, which holds that Jesus was the perfect human, without sin, and also a god, and thus part of the so called ‘Holy Trinity'. This heresy, wherein Jesus claims to be a sinner, and thus also claims not to be a god, is the root source of all the ‘heresy' that the church fathers battled against for centuries. One example would be Adoptionism, which held that Jesus was a sinner who then became ‘adopted' as the son of God after the crucifixion. This was an attempt to somehow blend the heresy of Mark's Gospel with later inventions of Christian theology. While theologians were always quick to damn a so called ‘heresy' when they heard one, they were strangely silent on damning the author of Mark's Gospel as a heretic, since that would mean that they had canonized a heretic, and they didn't want to admit that they had canonized a heretic, for to even acknowledge that heresy was found in Mark's gospel would then suggest that the doctrine of the ‘Holy Trinity' was a later forgery, and thus the theologians were the real heretics for having invented mythology.
A transparent attempt was made by later forgers to solve this problem, by concocting a forged ending to Mark's gospel. Here we find the doctrine of the Trinity pasted onto Mark's Gospel, wherein Jesus is made to mouth later church doctrine, advising the disciples to go out an ‘baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'
This clumsy attempt at harmonization is easily recognized as a later forgery, being exposed both by the evidence of archeology, and by the contradictions the forgery introduces in the manuscript, wherein the doctrine of the trinity, and invention of later Christian theologians, continues to exist in sharp contrast to the low Christology which is typical of the Gospel of Mark, in particular the explicit denial of the trinity doctrine and the denial of the divinity of Jesus found earlier in the manuscript.
Forgery and Heresy in the Gospel of Luke
The Gospel of Luke and the related ‘Book of Acts' incorporate such extensive forging of the historical record and multiple heresies, and I will focus on only a few of the most notorious examples here. The sad truth of the matter is that as far as history is concerned, the whole document was written for the express purpose of forging history, which means that a full discussion of the agenda of the author would be quite lengthy, since it involves almost the entire manuscript, which is replete with history forged and distorted for ideological purposes and heresies introduced for reasons of particular ideology.The most damnable heresy propagated by the author of Luke and Acts is to suggest that Jesus was a conservative, Torah observant Jew, who practiced the Law of Moses and encouraged others to do so. He was not in the line of continuity with the Jewish prophets, but rather he carried on the traditions of the Jewish priests, which would then mean that Jesus was hostile to the message of the prophets, and would have joined with the priests in damning the prophets. The book of Luke and Acts are the product of later developments in a growing trend towards priestly religion, and it is the fact that Luke is peddling the development of a religious hierarchy that the author turns to such damnable heresy.
The first evidence that we have of this heresy can be found by comparing the Gospel of Luke with the Gospel of Mark. (A downloable HTML comparison of the Synoptic Gospels in parallel columns is available here -> synoptic.zip) The attack on the food laws is strangely absent in Luke's account. Any criticism of the law of Moses is purged and disappears. You will notice a large gap, the white space where the author of Luke has taken the knife and sliced away any criticism of the law of Moses.
It is here that we encounter questions about historical accuracy. Is it acceptable to base a ‘theology' upon historical inaccuracies? Is some fictional delusion considered acceptable to theologians? Apparently so, for even when something is historically inaccurate it can still be incorporated into a system of theology, since it would appear that the criteria of theology is not truth but rather utility. If it was true that Jesus preached the message of the Jewish prophets, which is what we can discern through a critical reading of the Gospel of Mark, then it becomes clear that the agenda of the author of Luke and Acts was to deliberately distort history by causing us to believe that Jesus did not preach the message of the Jewish prophets, but rather he preached the message of the Jewish priest. If this was true, then it means that no one should listen to Jesus, because Jesus was brainless enough to preach the message of a Jewish priest, thus getting everyone involved in sterile ritual, not to mention a big pile of murderous genocide and theft. However if it is true, as the earliest gospel suggests, that Jesus did preach the message of the Jewish prophets, and thus rejected the religion as a forgery, then what we can discern here is that the author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts was the moron, while it was Jesus was who the intelligent one. So therefore, we are left with a stark choice. Either Luke was a moron or Jesus was a moron. If it is true that Jesus was a first class moron, then that means that both Jesus and Luke were harmful morons who did nothing to benefit humanity, and instead saddled everyone with the rotten superstitions and the harmfully poisonous violence of religion, and therefore we can forget about ‘the historical Jesus' at the same time we forget about the ‘historical Luke', since they were both first class jackasses. However if Mark's account is more historically accurate, then we need only consider Luke to be the first class jackass, and it turns out that Jesus was a sensible and decent human being, who did, after all, attack that revolting priestly forgery as one would expect to be done by a decent human being. It would then be Luke who was indecent, and not Jesus.
Now it is bad enough in that the heretic who produced the Gospel of Luke felt brave enough to take a bar of soap to the mouth of Jesus, and wash away all criticism of priestly religion. Having done this dreadful deed, the author then plunges head long into what I regard as the most damnable heresy, by leading the church down into the ditch by persistently working to convince the reader that the ‘Law of God' was of divine origin and brought down by Moses. Even the genocidal laws are washed clean and polished by this particular author, for whom, it would seem, nothing priestly is to filthy to be crumpled into a ball and tossed into a garbage can.
. Among the many gifts left to the world by that heretic is the religious right, for whom Luke paved a road, and the fundamentalism and all the backwardness of Christian theology that have followed in the ages past, since it was the unique contribution of that heretic to prepare the church to be polluted by this particular forger of Gospels.
The author's priestly agenda first emerges in the opening chapters of his document. When Jesus was born, his mother Mary, in obedience to the sacred ‘Law of Moses', went to be ‘purified' of the filthy act of pregnancy, and to make the required animal sacrifice for that purpose, the killing of a couple of pigeons.
When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord"), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons." (Luke 2:22)
Now right away we can notice another one of those famous ‘Bible contradictions' emerging here. In the Gospel of Mark we find that Jesus invaded the temple with a whip and attacked the sellers of those pigeons and doves. Luke, who wants to peddle the animal sacrifice as coming down from God, deals with the problem with a touch of editing.
Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, "It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer'; but you have made it a den of robbers." (Luke 19:45 )
In Luke's version the sacred pigeon is not mentioned, and while this might seem like a tiny bit of editing, it was done for a specific reason. They were selling ‘things', for Luke is in the business of peddling those pigeons and doves, and therefore that is going to require a touch of editing so as not to seem that perhaps their might be something wrong with the priestly animal sacrifice.
It is worth considering here just what sort of laws Luke is peddling as ‘the Law of God'. According to those forgeries, a woman's vagina was ‘unclean'.
"When a man and a woman have sex, they will be unclean until evening." Lev. 15:18
Women became unclean during childbirth, even more unclean when they gave birth to a girl, and this required them to be locked up in seclusion for a long time, followed by the sacred sacrifice of a couple of birds as sensible precaution of any lingering uncleanness, for giving birth was a sin and thus requirement ‘atonement'..
"When a woman gives birth to a boy she shall be unclean for seven days, but if she gives birth to a girl she shall be unclean for fourteen days, with the same uncleanness as with her menstruating period. She shall spend 33 more days becoming purified of her blood, for a boy, and for a girl 66 days. She shall not enter the sanctuary or touch anything sacred. After she has been purified she must offer a turtledove as a sin offering." Lev. 12:1
Women was saddled with the expense of buying those pigeons every single month, and they were also jailed in isolation every month for the sin of ‘menstruation' on the direct orders of God, lest their menstruation be the cause of death and suffering, as dictated in the most sacred ‘Law of God' which was brought down the mountainside by Moses.
"When a woman menstruates she will be unclean for seven days. Anyone who touches any furniture she sits on will be unclean. If a man dares to have sex with her he will also be unclean for seven days. She must wait seven days after she is freed from her affliction and offer two turtle doves to the priest as atonement before the lord for her unclean flow. Warn the people of their uncleanness lest it be the cause of their death." Lev. 15:28
I thought it would be interesting to take a short tour through the type of superstitious mumbo jumbo Luke finds it necessary to pull up out of history's garbage can right at the very opening of his so called ‘Gospel'. It is worth noting here that the attack on the pigeon sellers in the Gospel of Mark (notably absent from that pigeon peddling document known as Luke) was also an act of liberation, in that women were saddled with the expense of going to the temple to buy those pigeons every single month, since the priests had come up with a money making scheme to market those pigeons for the ‘sin of menstruation', which I am sure brought in lots of regular revenue.
The Gospel of Luke and Acts is a very cynical piece of work, in that there is no concern here for historical accuracy, nor is their any concern here as to whether or not Jesus actually taught women priestly religion, but rather the concern of the author of this document is with writing a gospel that will come into agreement with the developing Christian theology of the church fathers. (This tells us just how late is the date of the writing of this particular forged heresy. It was probably produced in the second century, as we can already see how the document lines up with the emerging church doctrines, including the doctrine concerning Peter as the first Pope, which is one of the great themes of Acts.)
It was characteristic of the developing theology of those church fathers, who were right wing hawks, to destroy every last trace of liberation theology from the developing theology of the church, and replace it instead with priestly religion and hierarchy. For this purpose it was necessary to sever any connection between Jesus and the Jewish prophets, and instead to construct a cord which would connect Jesus to the priestly religion. This involved a nullification of the prophets, and the rehabilitation of the priestly forgery known as the Torah.
According to the new priestly interpretation of the Christian message, as it was developed by the religious right during the early history of the church, Jesus died as a substitute for the animal sacrifices of the temple. It turns out that people were just sacrificing animals and pigeons for such sins as menstruation or child birth until such a time as a divine god could come and bleed to death for their sins ‘once and for all.' Until that time they had to make do with pigeons and livestock. We can contrast this interpretation, based upon ‘the Law of Moses', with the interpretation of liberation theology, based upon the Jewish prophets, which tells us that Jesus died on a cross to bring those people liberation from religion and thus to set them free from the forgeries of priests, and so then it was for this reason that he attacked the Bible, the pigeon sellers, and went out harvesting on the Sabbath, and all the other things that he did which enraged the religious people and finally got him killed. Luke didn't care much for that idea, which is why he found it necessary to continue on with that fine priestly tradition, by picking up a pen and committing the most notorious piece of Christian forgery, the Gospel of Luke.
This would require considerable hypocrisy on the part of the author, for not only would he have to shove a rag in the mouth of Jesus, to prevent him from criticizing the Torah, he would also have to pretend to be supporting the prophets, even though he was actually a hypocrite who was nullifying the prophets for the sake of an emerging Christian theology. To do this he claims that the law of Moses and the prophets together ‘predicted Jesus', which became the orthodox position, even though it is quite apparent that the prophets hated the law of Moses and considered it a fraud.
Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. (Luke 24:27 )
Then Jesus said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses , the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." (Luke 24:44)
What you read here is a description of the ‘orthodox' theology. According to this theology, which is the doctrine of the justification of torture and the normalization of the practice of crucifixion, ‘Jesus died for my sin. He took my place on the cross and the punishment I deserved he took upon himself.' Torture is normal. We should all be tortured to death, and we will be, unless we ‘accept Jesus.' Therefore Caesar was doing the work of God when he tortured people to death, because they deserved it. Thus the Roman Empire was guiltless and hierarchy and all the violence it requires is preserved and sanctified by religion. If it is true that Jesus actually carried on the tradition of the prophets and attacked the so called ‘Law of Moses' then it is true that Luke is damnable liar and heretic of the worst sort. In that case the closest thing we have to an accurate gospel is the Gospel of Mark, although due to the confusion in the mind of that author, even Mark's Gospel must be read critically and dissected to get at the full truth about Jesus. Even so it remains superior to the work of that blasphemous liar known as Luke.
Luke continues his agenda of white washing and restoring the ‘Law of Moses', so that it can be used to create the torture doctrine which lies at the heart of the theology of the church, in his book of Acts. He does this by addressing the controversy that existed concerning the legitimacy of the law of Moses head on. Now the fact that a controversy did exist is interesting, since it suggests that there must have been a reason why the church was mired in controversy concerning the Law of Moses. That controversy must have begun somewhere, and Luke's method is to acknowledge that a controversy exists and then to deny that the controversy is valid in that Jesus fully supported the Torah, and thus nullified the prophets on this matter, and supported the priest hood instead.
First Luke acknowledges the controversy.
"This man never stops saying things against this holy place and the law; for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses handed on to us." (Acts 6:13)
Next Luke denies the controversy and teaches that Jesus fully supports the Torah.
Moses is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living oracles to give to us. (Acts 7:38)
Luke then proceeds to justify the doctrine of genocide found in the Torah, nullifying the prophet Jeremiah who condemned such doctrines as ‘abominations'. If we agree that those doctrines were ‘abominations' then it seems right to me to condemn the heresy of Luke as an abomination as well, and the author can be condemned as abomination in the midst of the church for having written such things.
"Our ancestors had the tent of testimony in the wilderness, as God directed when he spoke to Moses, ordering him to make it according to the pattern he had seen. Our ancestors in turn brought it in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our ancestors." (Acts 7:44)
Luke also condemns anyone who does not keep the sacred law which came down from heaven. This would mean that Luke condemns Jesus, who also did not keep the law, and he condemns Jeremiah and the other Jewish prophets as well, who did not keep the law, but rather attacked the Torah.
"You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it." (Acts 7:53)
The writings of Paul are complex. The reasons for this is that writings span a period of time and during that time the author's view point changed on such controversial issues as the status of women, and thus the result is an ideological dog's breakfast. At one time Paul was like a fundamentalist, preaching from the authority of the Bible and the sacred law of Moses. At another time he warned that anyone who followed the law of Moses was cut off from Jesus. He also warned people that if they followed the Law of Moses and became circumcised they were ‘outside the Grace of God.'
Luke deals with this controversy through the creation of another one of his forgeries. He washes Paul's mouth out with a bar of soap. First he acknowledges the controversy surrounding the position taken by Paul. He then urges Paul to prove that he never said any such thing.
They have been told about you that you (Paul) teach all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs... Join these men, go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself observe and guard the law of Moses. (Acts 21:21)
Luke then forges a story about how Paul sacrificed animals to prove that in no way did he ever say that people should stop following the law of Moses or that they should not be circumcised. It turns out that the letters of Paul were just forgeries, is what Luke is suggesting here, and that in truth Paul nullified the prophets for the sake of Moses, just like Jesus did.
Then Paul took the men, and the next day, having purified himself, he entered the temple with them, making public the completion of the days of purification when the sacrifice would be made for each of them. (Acts 21:26)
It is interesting to note here that if Luke is ‘infallible' then it must be the case that the Bible contains errors, and therefore cannot be infallible. For either the letters of Paul represent Paul's position on the law of Moses (he was against it) in which case Luke is just a liar and a heretic, or if one chooses to support the law of Moses, then it turns out that Luke is infallible, but the Jewish prophets, the gospel of Mark, and some of the later writings of Paul are all heresy and should be ripped out of the Bible. This would then leave only the absolute worst parts of the Bible intact, along with the Gospel of Luke and Acts, which is appropriate, since this is the absolutely worst Gospel. A full recounting of all the historical deviance and heresy to be found in Luke and Acts would be lengthy, but I think just based upon this brief look into that perjured mess is enough to justify damning both Luke and Acts as worthless historical forgeries replete with the most damnable heresies, and therefore documents that can be safely ripped out of every bible and burned in the fire, since apparently that is what you are supposed to do with a heresy, or so the church did when they were burning books, although strangely enough they somehow forgot to burn that gospel of Luke and Acts in their fires, and somehow those heresies were canonized instead.
Forgery and Heresy in the Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel of Matthew, as it exists today, is not the original work the author first produced. The manuscript has been subject to the pen of a later forger. Such forgery can always be identified by the weird contradictions in ideology the later forgeries introduce into the manuscript, since the reason for the forgery is that some forger did not like the ideology of the book, and thus decided to do a little forging to confuse the issue. All this forging makes the document of Matthew complex, and it becomes difficult to discern what was and was not the original intent of the author.The Gospel of Matthew presents us with Jesus, the fundamentalist, who preaches the infallible inerrancy of the Bible.
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law (of Moses) or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law (of Moses) until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17)
This brings Matthew into sharp contradiction with Mark, where Jesus teaches people not to obey the law of Moses. The Gospel of Matthew consists of spin doctored version of Mark's Gospel. Beginning at chapter six, Matthew begins copying Mark's gospel, and such a close literary correspondence is not a coincidence. However, Mark's Gospel is not copied verbatim, but rather is copied and then edited slightly here and there. Matthew's agenda can be discerned by the many small alterations he makes to Mark's account. Whenever Mark presents Jesus as less than a superman, Matthew doctors the account to make Jesus ‘supernatural.' Matthew also destroys every attack on the Torah. So for example, the attack on the food laws in Mark's Gospel is destroyed by Matthew, who makes the controversy one about whether or not you should wash your hands before you eat and the proper way of washing cups and bowls. Neither of these are found in the infallible Torah, which makes them ‘human traditions.' Matthew also white washes the attack on the temple, by having Jesus first use his whip in the temple, and then take a seat and begin teaching from the Law of Moses in the now ‘purified temple.' What all this doctoring of Mark's Gospel reveals is that Matthew had the agenda of a ‘supernatural fundamentalist.'
There are some sharp contradictions to be found in Matthew's gospel, which reveal the work of a later forger. Throughout Matthew's Gospel, Jesus is called ‘The son of David.' However towards the end of the manuscript is found the denial of David. Jesus, Matthew tells us, not related to David. This brings Matthew into sharp contradiction with the rest of the New Testament documents. For example Paul insists that Jesus was ‘the son of David, according to the flesh.'
The denial of David is closely related to the forgery found at the very beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. The story of the virgin birth is a forgery which was not found in the original document, but rather added later, probably in the second century. I wrote a piece some years ago analyzing the Origins of the Virgin Birth Story. Based upon a literary analysis of the manuscript I concluded that the story was a forgery which was added to the manuscript at a later time. This literary analysis is confirmed by the findings of archeology. We know from the discoveries of ancient manuscripts that copies of the Gospel of Matthew continued to circulate in the second century which do not include the Virgin Birth forgery, which was added to manuscript many decades after the original was produced by a forger.
The image above is of a manuscript of Matthew from the second century, and which is a ‘critical edition' in that it incorporates all the variant versions of the manuscript relating to the text in question. Here there is no virgin birth story, but rather there is a genealogy in variant forms wherein Joseph is the father of Jesus, and not God or a holy ghost. Variant A became the traditional text which now concludes the genealogy in our ‘authorized' copies of Matthew. At point B the text diverges to list the variants in the different manuscripts. C denotes the Syriac variant from the second century, wherein Joseph is explicitly referenced as the father of the Jesus figure. The Greek variant (D) is an abbreviated version of the Syriac text, and states "And Joseph begat Jesus, the one called Christ." Both the Syriac and Greek variants have no ‘virgin birth myth', which is an indication that the virgin birth mythology had not become a part of the authorized lexicon of the Matthew gospel during the second century, but that copies of the manuscript without the virgin birth story were still extant and circulating at that time.
Above is an image of the Syriac variant, which is the source of the abbreviated Greek reading above. The Syriac manuscript includes no virgin birth mythology, since once again it was Joseph who ‘begat Jesus', and the genealogy, in part, reads in translation, ": "Eliud begat Eleazar, Eleazar begat Matthan, Matthan begat Jacob, Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph, to whom was betrothed a young woman, Mary, begat Jesus who is called Messiah."
It could be argued that what we have here are ‘heretical' variants, wherein some heretic ‘removed' the virgin birth story. The only other explanation is that the virgin birth story was not original to the manuscript, but was added later, and what we have here are extant versions of the manuscript which were still circulating in the second century without the virgin birth story, which had not at that time become part of the canonical and thus accepted rendition of Matthew (itself a product of cutting pieces from all the variants to come up with a standard version, not in itself a simple task, given the hundreds of thousands of variant readings for all New Testament manuscripts in existence, the scale of this problem being very familiar to translators but less well known to the average Bible reader who has been taught to believe that there is something called a ‘canonical text' which supposedly existed from the beginning and has somehow been preserved and thus copied verbatim into their Bibles. The actual process resembles a cut and paste job and thus the end product is the result of innumerable human value judgments, with what we would call a canon becoming a formal creation only in the fourth century).
It is sometimes said that one opinion is as good as another, or again, everyone is entitled to their opinion. This is a very reactionary position, since it would seem to me that it would make more sense to say that all opinions are equally worthless until proven otherwise, and that no one is entitled to an opinion unless they can make a valid case for holding such an opinion, and in all other cases opinions are questionable things which are best regarded as worthless.
If we are to come to some conclusion as to whether or not ‘the virgin birth story was removed' thus accounting for the early manuscript evidence of no virgin birth story in Matthew, or whether it was added later, which would also explain its absence in early sources, we must also come up with an explanation that will take into account the inconsistencies found in the rest of Matthew's gospel which are found to be linked to the Virgin Birth story.
The denial of David is one example, and here we have a glaring contradiction in Matthew's gospel which must be explained (either he was or he wasn't) and this is significant for the virgin birth story is the polemical denial of David, and so is linked to the explanation of this other contradiction.
Similarly, the denial of David, and thus the Virgin Birth story which is the denial of David encapsulated in myth masquerading as history, is linked to the doctrine of infallibility of the Torah found in the Sermon on the Mount, which once again is contradictory, not only in its proclamation of infallibility of Torah and prophets who condemned the Torah as a fake, but also in that it directly precedes a series of nullifications of the Torah in the Sermon on the Mount.
It is worth considering that the opinion that holds that virgin birth story was ‘removed' is also of the same mind to accept as perfectly valid the deliberate twisting of out of context of lines of prophecy and forgery of both prophecy and history. For the supposed ‘prophecy' of the virgin birth, does not mention a virgin (this is a mistranslation) and in context the story is about the Assyrians, and has nothing to do with a prophecy about Jesus (the time of the Assyrians was over seven centuries previous to the time of Jesus, and the events the author is referring to were to take place in just a few years, not after hundreds of years, having to do with the fall of the Assyrian empire, which would happen before the baby who was Isaiah's child and was named Immanuel had been completely weaned).
There was no massacre of the infants by Herod, and the prophecy concerning a Nazarene is an invention and does not exist. Therefore the same opinion that holds that the virgin birth story is somehow valid and original, is the same opinion that holds that twisting single lines of prophecy ripped out of context, or falsifying history or prophecy are valid practices, and given this track record, it seems likely that such an opinion must itself be worthless since the same who hold to such an opinion also have no problem holding to forgery and falsification.
Disrespect for objective facts permeates that document known as Matthew, as all that clear editing indicates, which then means that only bad opinion would hold that such a manuscript would be a reputable source for a story as fantastical (not to mention mythological) as the Virgin Birth myth.. The fact that they tolerate the first demonstrates that they would also tolerate the latter.
