Alternative Religion/ Library

THE “INSPIRED” HEBREW SCRIPTURES

The processes of the formation of the Hebrew Old Testament Scriptures are, however, interesting and intriguing, if sacred tradition is true. According to priestly lore, the man Moses, “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (another Christian assurance; Acts vii, 22), sat down in the Wilderness of Sinai and under divine inspiration wrote his Five Books of prehistorical history, codes of post-exilic divine Law, and chronicles of contemporary and future notable events, including four different names of his father-in-law—(Viz.: Jethro, Ex. iii, 1; Reuel, Ex. ii, 18; Jether, Ex. iv, 18, and Raguel, Num. x, 29, while a fifth name, Hobab, is awarded him in Judges iv, II), together with a graphic account of his own death and burial, and of the whole month afterwards spent by all Israel mourning his death. He also records the death of his brother Aaron at Mt. Hor (Num. xx, 28; xxxiii, 38), just six months before his own death; though, in amazing contradiction, he elsewhere records Aaron as having died at Mosera, just after leaving Sinai (Deut. x, 6), thirty-nine years previously—and thus nullifies the entire history of the wonderful career and deeds of Aaron as high priest during the whole 40 years of wandering in the Wilderness, of which the Books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers are largely filled; as also many other matters and things occurring for some centuries after his death, and known as “post-Mosaica” to the scholars.

Joshua, the successor of Moses, next wrote the history of his life and times, working in, too, a sketch of his own death and funeral obsequies (Josh. xxiv, 29-30), and quoting the celebrated miracle of the nun standing still, of which he says, “Is it not written in the Book of Jasher?”—which Book of Jasher was not itself written until several hundred years later, at least in or after the time of David; for it is recorded: “And he [David] bade them teach the children of Judah the use of the bow; behold, it is written in the Book of Jasher.” (2 Sam. i, 18.)

The Book of Judges was written by nobody knows whom, nor when, except that it was long “post-exilic.” It relates that, “Now the children of Judah had fought against Jerusalem, and had taken it” (Jud. i, 18); whereas it was not until David had reigned seven years and six months in Hebron, that “the King and his men went to Jerusalem” and failed to capture it, “nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, and called it the City of David.” (2 Sam. v, 5-9.) It is further recorded in Judges that the tribe of Dan made a silver idol of the Hebrew God and hired a grandson of Moses to serve it, and “he and his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan until the captivity of the land” (Jud. xviii, 30)—about a thousand years later.

The gifted Samuel. Prophet of the heathen High Places of Baal worship, gives his name and inspiration to two books of mythical history written piecemeal until the “return from captivity,” as above indicated, and early in his work he records the historic episode of the calling up of his own ghost from the dead by the famous Witch of En-dor. (I Sam. xviii, 1, 7-19.) ⁷²

The ex-bandit David, “man after God's own heart”—after murdering a man to get his adulterous wife, and engendering of her his all-wise son and hero, Solomon, wrote the 150 songs of the Hebrew Hymn Book, many of his psalms singing of the long posthumous Babylonian Captivity.

Solomon himself, who was son-in-law to nearly everybody in the heathen nations round about who had eligible daughters, wrote the wisdom of the ages into his Book of Proverbs, though not one of them is by Solomon, and in his lighter (headed or hearted) spells penned his erotic Canticles, which for realistic lubricity quite outdo Boccaccio, and would be really unmailable under the Postal laws if they weren't in the Holy Bible and clerically captioned “The Church's Love unto Christ.” These are indeed but one collection out of the great many pornographic stories of The Holy Ghost's Decameron, enshrined in God's Holy Word for delectation of the Puritans of Faith.

Other divinely inspired and anonymous writers, falsely entitling their effusions under the names of this or that Prophet or other wholly fictitious personage, as Job, Esther, Ruth, Daniel, gave forth yet other inspired histories, books of oracles or prophecies, apocalypses or high powered visions into Futurity, and a miscellany of sacred novels, love-stories and nondescript musings or ravings known collectively as the hagiographa or holy writings of the Jews. All these together, now thirty-nine in number, comprise the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. It being out of question to review each of these here, it may be stated with assurance that not one of them bears the name of its true author; that every one of them is a composite work of many hands “interpolating” the most anachronistic and contradictory matters into the original writings, and often reciting as accomplished facts things which occurred many centuries after the time of the supposed writer, as Psalms, isaiah, Daniel, and the so-called “historical” books. For scientific detailed demonstration of this the Encyclopedia Biblica digests the most competent authorities; my own Is It God's Word? makes the proofs from the sacred texts themselves. See the recent “Religions Book of the Month Club's” notable Unraveling the Book of Books, by Trattner. (1929.)

But as the Christian religion depends more vitally on Genesis and Moses than on all the other sacred writings and writers, we may appeal to the admissions of CE., thereto driven by force of modern criticism, for the destruction and abandonment of the Moses Myths.

“It is true that the Pentateuch, so long attributed to Moses, is now held by the vast majority of non-Catholic, and by an increasing number of Catholic, scholars to be a compilation of four independent sources put together in final shape soon after the Captivity.” (CE. i, 622.)

This scores strongly for Hebrew-Christian forgery and fraud in attributing this primitive system of Bible “science” and barbarous law to a god as a pretext for priestly domination of the superstitious people. That God-given forged law thus prescribes for priestcraft: “The man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest, ... even that man shall die.” (Deut. xvii, ⁷³ 12.) The whole Five Books of Moses are thus a confessed forgery in the names of Moses and of God; every one of the Thus saith the Lord a thousand times repeated, with speeches and laws put into the mouth of the God, are false and forged. Speaking of the “difficulty, in the present condition of Old Testament criticism, of recognizing more than a small portion of the Pentateuch as documentary evidence contemporary with Moses,”—who, if he ever lived, which may be confidently denied,—never wrote a line of it, CE. further confesses to the natural evolution—not the “divine revelation”—of the Hebrew mythology into a (no less mythological) monotheistic religion: “The Hegelian principle of evolution ... applied to religion, has powerfully helped to beget a tendency to regard the religion of Israel as evolved by processes not transcending nature, from a polytheistic worship of the elements to a spiritual and ethical monotheism.” (CE. i, 493.) But this finally and very late evolved monotheism is neither a tardy divine revelation to the Jews, nor a novel invention by them; it was a thousand years antedated by Amenhotep IV and Tut-ankh-amen in Egypt,—nor were even they the pioneers. We have seen the admission that the Zoroastrian Mithra religion was “a divinely revealed Monotheism” (CE., ii, 156). But the Hebrews were confessed and notorious idolaters and polytheists until after the Captivity; that fact is a thousand times alleged throughout the Scriptures as the sole reason for their troubles and captivity. As above suggested, and as thoroughly demonstrated by the texts in my other book, the Hebrew God Yahveh was but one of the many gods worshipped by the Hebrews; and Yahveh never claimed more than to be a “God above all gods,” to be preferred before them all;—as at Sinai he enacted: “Thou shalt have no other gods before [in preference to] me,”—thus admitting the other gods.

FORGERY BY CONTRADICTIONS

Contradictions throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, abound by the many thousands, and in virtually every book of both Testaments,—as every one knows who has read the Bible even casually. See some thousand and more of the most notorious and vital ones as cited in “deadly parallel” in my Is It God's Word? as one of the most conclusive proofs of uninspired human origin and of confusion worse confounded of tinkering, “interpolation” and forgery outright, by the pious priests of Israel and Judah, and the Ezra “school” of forgers of the “Law and the Prophets.”

OUR “PHONY” CHRISTIAN ERA

“It was a monk of the 6^th century, named Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Little), who fixed our present Christian era, laying down that Jesus Christ was born on the 25th of December, A.U.C. 753, and commencing the new era from the following year, 754. That date, as we shall see, cannot be correct and, instead of being an improvement on, is farther from the truth than the dates assigned by the early Fathers, St. Irenaeus and Tertullian, who fixed the date of the Nativity in the 41st year of Augustus, that is to say, 3 years B.C., or A.U.C, 751 ... All this points to the fact that Herod died in the year 4 B.C., and that our Savior must have been born before that date ... Our Savior was born some time before Herod's death, probably two years or more. So that, if Herod died ⁷⁴ in the year 4 B.C., we should be taken to 6 or 7 B.C. as the year of the Nativity” (CE. 735-6).

This, of course, discredits the date given by the inspiration of [71] Luke, and demonstrates that both he and Matthew merely alleged fictitious dates for what in all human probability was a purely fictitious event. The new Era of Christ was, however, very slow in gaining recognition; the first official secular document dating by it was a charter of Charlemagne, after 800 A.D., and it did not come into general use until about 1000 A.D. I may mention a fiery sermon I once heard, in which the expounder of truth vindicated the glory of God by declaiming that every Jew and Infidel confessed to Jesus Christ every time he dated a letter or mentioned the year of an event. Being simply a hearer of the Word, I could not rise to suggest, that by the same token we confess more to the Pagan gods than to the Christian,—for more than half the months and every day of the week are named for Pagan deities, and we name them much more often than we do the years of grace and salvation of Christ. After this bad start from Gospel error and contradiction, we now turn to further evidences of “Gospel truth” in contradictions and forgery.

Among the most signal of these incessant contradictions and scientific impossibilities of Divine Inspiration, are those relating to the capital matter,—for the credit of the Christian Religion, of the time and manner of Creation of earth and Man, based on Holy Writ and on the “chronology” worked out, with several hundred disparate results, from the inspired pedigrees of the ante-Diluvian Patriarchs. So fatally important is this to Christianity, that the ‘True Church—“which never deceived anyone” and “has never erred,”—speaking through CE., thus admits that Christianity stands or falls with—“the literal, historical sense of the first three chapters of Genesis in as far as they bear on the facts touching the foundations of the Christian religion, e.g., the creation of all things by God at the beginning of time, the especial creation of man, the formation of the first woman from the first man, the unity of the human race”! (Papal Biblical Commission, June 30, 1909; CE. vii, 313). Thus: No Adam and Eve, no Garden of Eden and Talking Snake, no “Fall” and Curse—therefore: No Savior Jesus Christ, no Plan of Salvation, no truth in the Christian Religion! The fatal point is elucidated with inexorable logic and dogmatic truth by the “Reformed” ex-Father Peter Martyr: “So important is it to comprehend the work of creation that we see the creed of the Church take this as its starting point. Were this Article taken away, there would be no original sin; the promise of Christ would become void, and all the vital force of our religion would be destroyed”! Father Luther inherited the same faith and bequeathed it to his dissident following: “Moses spoke properly and plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively; and therefore the world with all creatures was created in six days.” Calvin, in his “Commentary on Genesis,” argues that the Genesis account of Creation is literally true, and warns those who dare to believe otherwise, and thus “basely insult the Creator, to expect a Judge who will annihilate them.” Again he says: “We know on the authority of Moses, that longer ago than 6000 years the world did not exist.” So too, the Westminster Confession of Faith, in full Protestant force and effect today—specially lays it down as “necessary to ⁷⁵ salvation to believe that all things visible and invisible were created not only out of nothing but exactly in six days.” And the Churches have murdered countless thousands to impress this beautiful impossible truth.

Notwithstanding the crushing disproofs of those primitive forged “Fables of Moses,” by every fact of astronomy, geology, anthropology, biology, and kindred sciences, known to schoolboys today, Faith clings fatuously to its fetches: Arkansas (“Now laugh!”), Mississippi, Tennessee, three States of the Twentieth Century United States, have made it crime by Law to teach the sciences which discredit the Genesis Myths, upon which Christian Superstition utterly depends;, and like medieval laws are sought to be imposed in all our States. The True Church, like all the others, still founds its “Faith and Morals” upon these old Hebrew forgeries of Genesis and peddles them to its Faithful; but it knows better. Thus the whole True Faith is shipwrecked by these heretical confessions of CE., forced from it by the truths of heretical Modernism, in full face of the fierce inspired fulminations of the Syllabus of Errors: “In an article on Bible chronology it is hardly necessary in these days to discuss the date of the Creation. At least two hundred dates have been suggested, varying from 3483 to 6934 year B.C. all based on the supposition that the Bible enables us to settle the point. But it does nothing of the kind. ... The literal interpretation has now been entirely abandoned; and the world is admitted to be of immense antiquity”! (CE. iii, 731.) Again the “sacred science” of Genesis and of Christianity is further admitted to be false, and the fabulous “Septuagint” Bible on which Christianity was founded before the era of the second century forgeries of Gospels and Epistles, to be a holy fraud, in these further excerpts accrediting the true revelations of modern Science as against those of Moses:

“The church ... does not attach decisive influence to the chronology of the Vulgate, the official version of the Western Church, since in the Martyrology for Christmas day, the creation of Adam is put down in the year 5199 B.C., which is the reading of the Septuagint. It is, however, certain that we cannot confine the years of man's sojourn on earth to that usually set down. ... Various explanations have been given of chapter v (Genesis) to explain the short time it seems to allow between the Creation and the Flood. ... The total number of years in the Hebrew, Samaritan, and Septuagint differs, in the Hebrew it being 1656, in the Samaritan 1307, and in the Septuagint 2242. ... According to Science the length of this period was much greater than appears from the genealogical table. ... In any case, whether we follow the traditional or critical view, the numbers obtained from the genealogy of the Patriarchs in chapter xi must be greatly augmented, in order to allow time for such a development of civilization, language, and race type as had been reached by the time of Abraham.” (CE. iii, 731-3.)

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