Alternative Religion/ Library

THE GOSPEL TITLES

These Four are themselves forgeries and apocryphal “in. the sinister sense of bearing names to which they have no right,” as well as by their contents being false, with many forged “interpolations” or spurious additions. Even if the Four Gospels were themselves genuine, as we shall see they are not, yet admittedly their present titles are not original and given to them by the writers. The present clerical position, seeking to save the works, is that, like the Acts of the Apostles, “the name was subsequently attached to the book, just as the headings of the several Gospels were affixed to them.” (CE. i, 117.) More particularly speaking of the Gospel titles, the same authority says: “The first four historical books of the New Testament are supplied with titles (Gospel According to [Gr. kata] Matthew, According to Mark, etc.) which, however ancient, do not go back to ¹⁵² the respective authors of those sacred writings. ... That, however, they do not go back to the first century of the Christian era, or at least that they are not original, is a position generally held at the present day. ... It thus appears that the titles of the Gospels are not traceable to the Evangelists themselves.” (CE. vi, 655, 656.) The very fact that the late second century Gospel-titles are of Gospels “according to” this or that alleged apostle, rather than “The Gospel of Mark” etc., is itself confession and plenary proof that “Mark,” et als., were not—and were not intended to be represented as—the real authors of those “according to” Gospels. The form of the titles to the Epistles—also later tagged to them,—as “The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans,” etc. makes this clear and convincing, that no Apostles wrote the “according to” Gospel-biographies of the Christ.

It is obvious, too, from an attentive reading of the Four Gospels, that they are not arranged in our present collection in their order of composition; “Matthew” certainly is not first in order, and is only put first because it begins with the “Book of the Generation of Jesus Christ.” The Gospel “according to Mark” is now well established as the earliest of the first three, the “Synoptics,” and “John” is clearly the latest. There has been much dispute on this point: “The ancient lists, versions, and ecclesiastical writings are far from being at one with regard to the order of these (4) sacred records of Christ's words and deeds. In early Christian literature the canonical Gospels are given in no less than eight orders, besides the one (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) with which we are familiar.” (CE. vi, 657.)

Let us pause a moment to catch the full force of these admissions by CE. and note their consequences fatal to the pretense of Apostolic authorship or origin of these Gospels. We shall shortly see amplest proofs that none of the Four existed until well into the last half of the second century after so-called Christ and Apostles; but here we have, by clearest inference, an admission that the Gospels were not written by Apostles or their contemporaries. These titles “do not go back to the respective authors of those sacred writings; ... do not go back to the first century; ... are not original; ... are not traceable to the Evangelists.” What an anomaly, in all literature! most especially in apostolic “sacred records of Christ's words and deeds”!

Here we have these wonderful and “only true” inspired writings of the companions of the Christ, eye-witnesses to his mighty career, written for the conversion and salvation of the world, floating around loose and anonymous for a century and a half, without the slightest indication of their divine source and sanction! All the flood of forged and spurious gospels, epistles, acts and revelations—“the apocryphal and pseudo-Biblical writings with which the East especially had been flooded” (CE. iii, 272), bore the names of the pretended writers, from the false Books of Adam and Enoch to the forged “Gospel of Jesus Christ” and the “Apocalypse of St. Peter.” But the authentic and true Gospels of the genuine Apostles of Christ, are nameless and dateless scraps of papyrus! Imagine the great Fathers and Bishops of the Churches, the inspired and all-wise “Popes” of the Church at Rome, rising in their pulpits before the gaping Faithful; taking up an anonymous roll of manuscript, and announcing: “Our lesson today is from, ¹⁵³ (ahem!) one of the wonderful Gospels of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; but, (ahem!) I don't really know which one. It is by either Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, or John, I'm sure; but the writer forgot to sign or insert his name. We will, however, worship God by reading it anonymously in faith. No, here is one with a name to it; we will now read from the inspired ‘Gospel of Barnabas,' or the sacred ‘Shepherd of Hermas.' Let us sing that grand and reassuring old Hymn, ‘How firm a foundation, ye Saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in His wonderful Word!' Let us pray for more faith; and remember to believe what I have told you. Ite, missa est—It's all over, beat it!”

Books, evidently, do not go the rounds of readers nor of inspired Churches for over a century without a title or name. The first mention of the names or titles, as of the “Gospels” to which they were “supplied” was, as we shall see, not until about 185 A.D., when the “Gospels according to” the Four first appear in ecclesiastical literature, and thereupon began their career in the current use of the Churches, and therefore, evidently, then first came into existence. The Four Gospels thus, self-evidently, did not—could not for more than a century exist anonymous, without the Apostolic titles certifying their origin and authenticity. To pretend otherwise is sheer deceit and false pretense. 

THE “CANONICITY” OF THE FOUR GOSPELS

The only possible pretext whereby generations of men should be persuaded or cozened or compelled to accept and believe the Gospels (as well as the other N.T. books), even under the genial threat “he that believeth not shall be damned,” is that these books were written by immediate companions and apostles of the Christ, faithful eye-witnesses to his work and word, commanded and inspired by Christ, God, or the Holy Ghost (which one is not explicit), to write and publish these wonderful biographies of the Christ. This is explicitly the teaching and dogma of the Church: no real Apostolic author, no true Gospel.

Through pious Christian fraud and forgery, there were fraudulently in vogue some couple of hundred “books current under an Apostle's name in the Early Church, such as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Apocalypse of St. Peter,” as CE. (iii, 274) admits of these fraudulent “sacred writings”—with Apostolic titles. Our Ecclesiastical authority then states the “certain indubitable marks” whereby true Apostolic authenticity, essential to validity and credence, must be known: “For the primitive Church, evangelical character was the test of Scriptural sacredness. But to guarantee this character it was necessary that a book should be known as composed by the official witnesses and organs of the Evangel; hence to certify the Apostolic authorship, or at least sanction, of a work purporting to contain the Gospel of Christ.” (CE. iii, 274.) All purported “Gospels” as to which Apostolic authorship or sanction could not be guaranteed and certified were, of course, spurious, as is natural and proper. Yet, for centuries, false and forged “Gospels,” etc., as the two just named, bore the Apostolic certificates of authenticity—now confessed to be false. ¹⁵⁴

THE “MARK” FABLE BELIES “CANONICITY”

The impossibility of the pretense that the precious Four Gospels circulated nondescript and anonymous in the Churches for a century and a half, is patently belied by the specific instance of the “Gospel according to Mark,” of which Gospel we have the precise “history” recorded three centuries after the alleged notorious event. Bishop Eusebius is our witness, in his celebrated Church History. He relates that Peter preached orally in Rome, Mark being his “disciple” and companion. The people wanted a written record of Peter's preachments, and (probably because Peter couldn't write), they importuned Mark to write down “that history which is called the Gospel according to Mark.” Mark having done so, “the Apostle (Peter) having ascertained what was done by revelation of the Spirit, was delighted ... and that history obtained his authority for the purpose of being read in the Churches.” (HE. Bk. II, ch. 15.) Thus Peter was dead at the time, but his ghost got the news and somehow communicated its delight and approval for the document to be a “Gospel” for the Churches. But in a later section the Bishop gives another version: the people who heard Peter “requested Mark, who remembered well what he [Peter] had said, to reduce these things to writing. ... Which, when Peter understood, he directly neither hindered nor encouraged it.” (HE. Bk. VI, ch. 14.) Peter, thus, was alive, but wholly indifferent about his alleged Gospel.

The impossibilities of these contradictory fables need not detain us now. But both join in declaring that the “Gospel according to Mark” was publicly given to the Churches, at Rome, just before or after the death of Peter, 64-67 A.D. The moment, then, that this famous manuscript fell from the inspired pen—(but it was not inspired: Mark only “remembered well”),—the Great Seal of the Holy Ghost was upon it, and it bore before the world the notorious crown of Canonicity,—And this fact was of course known to all the Roman Church. And so, of course, of the other three; every papyrus containing these precious productions of Divine Inspiration must ipso facto be “canonized” and notoriously sacred and of Divine sanction from the very day they were written. Every Church, Father, Bishop, and Pope must certainly have known the fact, and have glorified in their precious possession.

But so it was—not. Pope Peter evidently did not and could not know it; he was “martyred in Rome” 64-67, the Church tells us; and the earliest date clerically claimed for “Mark” is some years after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The great Pope Clement I (died 97 A.D.?), first-to-fourth “successor” to Pope Peter, knew nothing of his great Predecessor's “Gospel according to Mark”; for, admits the CE.: “The New Testament he never quotes verbally. Sayings of Christ are now and then given, but not in the words of the Gospels. It cannot be proved, therefore, that he used any one of the Synoptic Gospels.” (CE. iv, 14.) Of course, he did not, could not; they were not then written. And no other Pope, Bishop or Father (except Papias and until Irenaeus), for nearly a century after “Pope Clement,” ever mentions or quotes a Gospel, or names Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. So for a century and a half—until the books bobbed up in the hands of Bishop St. Irenaeus and were tagged as “Gospels according to” this or that Apostle, there exists not a word of them in all the tiresome tomes of the Fathers. It is ¹⁵⁵ humanly and divinely impossible that the “Apostolic authorship” and hence “canonicity” or divine inspiration of these Sacred Four should have remained, for a century and a half, unknown and unsuspected by every Church, Father, Pope and Bishop of Christendom—if existent. Even had they been somewhat earlier in existence, never an inspired hint or human suspicion was there, that they were “Divine” or “Apostolic,” or any different from the scores of “apocryphal or pseudo-Biblical writings with which the East especially had been flooded,”—that they were indeed “Holy Scripture.” Hear this notable admission: “It was not until about the middle of the second century that under the rubric of Scripture the New Testament writings were assimilated to the Old”! (CE. iii, 275),—that is, became regarded as apostolic, sacred, inspired and canonical,—or “Scriptures.”

To argue and prove that the Four were regarded as “Apostolic” and hence “canonical” after the middle of the second century, argues and proves that until that late date they were not so regarded,—which we have seen is impossible if they had been written by Apostles a hundred years and more previously and authorized by them “for the purpose of being read in the Churches,” as the very ground and pillar of their foundation and faith.

Follow the proofs and argument of the Church to its own undoing: “From the testimony of St. Irenaeus (A.D. 185) alone there can be no reasonable doubt that the Canon of the Gospel was inalterably fixed in the Catholic Church by the last quarter of the second century ... to the exclusion of any pretended Evangels. [Sundry writings mentioned] presuppose the authority enjoyed by the Fourfold Gospel towards the middle of the second century. ... Even Rationalistic scholars like Harnack admit the canonicity of the quadriform Gospel between the years 140-175.” (CE. iii, 275.) Even CE. does not prove or claim that it was any earlier; so here the Church and the Rationalists are in accord on this fatal fact! Certainly Popes Peter and Clement I, not to review the silent others, would have “inalterably fixed” the Divine Canonicity of the Four a century before, if they had known about these precious productions of the Apostles;—if, in fact, they had existed, the known works of Holy Apostles and apostolic men! But until “towards the middle of the second century” there was no “canon” or notion of divinely inspired Apostolic Gospels—simply for the reason that until just about that period they were not in existence.

The sudden appearance at a certain late date, of a previously unknown document, which is then attributed to an earlier age and long since dead writers, is one of the surest earmarks of forgery. Thus CE. speaking of another monumental Church forgery—(the “False Decretals” of Isidore, hereafter noticed)—urges this very fact as one of the most cogent grounds of the detection of that forgery: “These documents appeared suddenly in the ninth century and are nowhere mentioned before that time. ... Then again there are endless anachronisms,”—just as in the Gospels and Epistles. (CE. vi, 773.) More ample and compelling proofs of this destroying fact will soon be made. ¹⁵⁶

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