NEW TESTAMENT EVIDENCE

FOR ITS BEING HIDDEN

  

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PREFACE

EARLY PUBLICATION IMPROBABLE

ANONYMITY PROVES HIDDEN

PHYSICAL PROOF OF CONCEALMENT

THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK

PETER EPISTLES SAY THERE ARE NO GOSPELS

OTHER EPISTLES THAT DENY GOSPELS

 

PREFACE

 

If we could be sure that the four New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were censored or largely censored during the first few decades of their appearance we reduce the already weak evidence for the claims the Church makes for the sinister Jesus Christ considerably.  And we can be sure.  There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who would have been able to refute the gospels had access to them and there is plenty of evidence that the gospels were kept out of their clutches.   Most Christian argumentation in favour of Jesus Christ being a real person and a good man and a miracle worker comes from the idea that the gospels were public and well known and weren’t debunked by people who thought otherwise.  They say for example that if the claims about Jesus in St John’s gospel were false this would have been shouted from the rooftops and his gospel would have been forgotten.  

 

c)        Why not issue a shortened version without the miraculous bits that are lies?”

 

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EARLY PUBLICATION IMPROBABLE

 

 

To discount the notion that the gospels are evidence for Christ and his divine sonship and/or his existence we need to knock down the “proofs” that the gospels were available to the generation that knew Jesus and the times he lived in.  And it isn’t hard.  But anyway, if we cannot prove that the gospels were open to public awareness then we cannot prove that they should be taken seriously.  The gospels were written for believers and prospective believers and not critics.  They say that.  This reduces the validity and quality of their testimony considerably.  They would have more right to be believed if they addressed and invited the observations of critics.  Books that cannot do that have no business asking us to believe in resurrections and miracles which need a high standard of evidence.  That God failed to make them better evidence indicates that they are not his word at all.

 

a) “If the gospels needed to be kept hidden from the people who knew Jesus in case they would expose them then they wouldn’t have been written.”

 

It was intended to publicise and popularise them when the proofs against their tales ceased to exist and could no longer be verified.  And anyway there is always an audience for believing your lies especially a long time after the events.

 

b) “There would be outlandish and crazy tales in the gospels if they were made up and hidden from those who could expose them.  There are not so they were not hidden.”

 

The stories are crazy though they could be a lot worse.

 

The fig tree story is ridiculous.  Jesus allegedly made it wither because it had no fruit on it.  The miracle was needless for Jesus did not need to let the apostles see his power if he had done other miracles or to do this to symbolise what happens when people do not bear fruit.

 

It is absurd to think that the gospel Jesus would have been so free to go about his daily business when everybody wanted him dead.  He was claiming to be Christ and acting it and drawing huge crowds according to the gospels anyway.  If they are telling the truth, then the Roman government would not have tolerated him for ten seconds.

 

d)                  “You say that a lot of Jesus’ miracles were not miracles but that miracle interpretations are unjustly read into the text by credulous Christians.  (See my book, Non-Miraculous Witnesses.)  If that is right then why would anybody hide the gospels?  They were ordinary enough so they didn’t need to be hidden.”

 

That only means they may have had other reasons for hiding the gospels. 

 

Perhaps Jesus never existed.  Perhaps he did no spiritual or ministerial work at all and was only accepted as Christ and Saviour because he seemed to have risen from the dead.  Apparitions could have been happening and later it was decided they were of a man called Jesus who in fact never lived. 

 

If either of these was the case, then anything said about Jesus would be a problem so there would be no reason to keep back the miracle stories for it is all troublesome.

 

The miracles would not have been the only reason the gospels had to be kept private.  The Jews hated Jesus for his teaching more than his works.  He insulted them incessantly and claimed to be the Messiah and despite the ruthlessness of Pilate he put the people of Jerusalem’s lives at risk by looking for praise from them and for them as his supporters as if he was the King of the Jews when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.  When the gospel version of that teaching was mostly ignored for decades after the apostles died then the gospels were hidden all that time.

 

d)  “Why would the gospellers have had the gospels concealed from the public eye when in an age where one had to depend on the testimony of people and writings to prove something and not on material or forensic evidence?  They couldn’t afford to hide the stories for people would be looking for evidence.”

 

Anybody could have gotten away with religious type lies and plenty did in those days.  The writings could have been rejected as forgeries and lies and still ended up looking credible – that was how the silly pagan religions got started.  And testimony gets corrupted by bad memory and confusion and prejudice over the years so people wouldn’t have known who to believe.

 

What about the fact that they might have hidden their books to be on the safe side?  They might have found the case against their nonsense over-whelming and felt that it was best to be careful. 

 

They wrote their gospels long before they intended them to be published to give them more authority and credibility for some people would be able to stand up and say they were written long before publication if any controversy started about the veracity of the works.

 

Perhaps the reason they were hidden so long was because the right time for their launch was long in coming or delayed due to unforeseen political conditions and turmoil.  During the Bar Kochba revolution of the first half of the second century, Bar Kochba determined to eradicate the plague of Christianity from Palestine by persecution and murder and by burning books.  He had his Jewish spies to root out Christianity.  New gospels would have had to have been written after all that if they were published so any critic who could have left a refutation behind in writing would have been unlikely to manage it.  Or perhaps they were just kept secret for safety.

 

e)  “There are contradictions and errors or seeming contradictions and seeming errors in the gospels so if they had really been hidden these would have been removed”.

 

The smaller the readership the more likely it is that errors will be safe because then it is all the less likely that they will be noticed.  This argument proves the opposite of what it is alleged to prove. 

 

Perhaps, nobody cared until it was too late.  There is no evidence that the errors were even noticed before then.  The gospels were not said to have been utterly infallible in the early days.  Perhaps the sneaks set out as soon as they were discovered to give out their ridiculous and far-fetched and fraudulent solutions of the contradictions which were enough to make the prejudiced pretend to themselves that the conflicting writings were a perfect unity.  But while it is true that some of the contradictions can be solved, the early Christians would not all have been intelligent or knowledgeable enough to see that they could be and would have perceived them as contradictions.  Unless the gospels were restricted to a handful of people we cannot explain how these contradictions were allowed to stay in.  It shows that the gospels were not initially treated as scripture or as good as scripture having come from the apostles.  The non-apostolic origin of the gospels has been supported by much evidence today and can be considered conclusively proven.

 

The gospels contain so many contradictions and seeming ones that if they had been studied by the Church these would have been erased by their authors or by their disciples.  The gospels were hidden instead of studied and they were released when it was too late to make many corrections.  One could think that since the body of Christian dogma is full of absurdities and contradictions so it would not be surprising if Christians reverenced stupid books as the infallible word of God.

 

f)  “The enemies of Christianity knew that there had to be books about it.  They would have found these books and revealed their contents publicly and tried to refute them.  They did not, so the gospels must have been well-known and irrefutable.”

 

The enemies could twist things and when the books were not even mentioned in the early days by the enemies it proves they were either non-existent or hidden or perhaps they were just unimportant – which they could only be if they were considered more worthy of being laughed at than debunked.  Why look for books that nobody reads like the four gospels and Acts?  There were books all right but they were not much of a threat because the readership was very restricted so the books were hidden.  And the enemies knew that if the books were too well known they would still be reproduced even if they were wiped off the face of the earth and Christianity could have them again.  This might have made them feel it was best to ignore the books.  But the view that they did not see any reason to worry about the books for they were such silly books is the most plausible one.

 

To argue that the enemies wanted to destroy the books and didn’t because there were too many of them is ridiculous considering the much burning that went on in those days.  It is easier to think they were not destroyed because the enemies couldn’t get them.  They were hidden.

 

g)  “If the Gospels were kept from general readership to be put out into the open when their lies became irrefutable then how did those responsible for them know that they would become scripture someday for that must have been their purpose in hiding them for why hide books that may not be accepted as scripture?  It is ridiculous to say they planned for the Church to make scripture of their writings for they had no control over that.  So what happened was they were openly preached and their validity led to them being canonised.”

 

They didn’t know but they knew that Christians might be likely to want them for scripture someday but that whatever happened they would be treasured as precious and valuable records of the life of Christ – that is, if not considered infallible and inspired.  They would have thought their record was better than anybody else’s.

 

h)  “The gospels were published early for their enemies could not destroy them.  If the gospels had been hidden they would have been fewer and easier to wipe them off the face of the earth.  When one goes to the trouble of pulling a Christian out of his house to kill him one could easily search for books and burn them.  No religion can thrive without literature.  The gospels were published so widely that the enemies saw no point in destroying the books.  That is why we have our gospels today.”

 

The gospels could have survived because they were hidden just as easily as because they were published.  Success depends not on the quantity of books but on publicity.

 

i)  “Had the Christians withheld the gospels from the eyes of the world then we would be reading Jewish and pagan complaints.  Don’t say they didn’t know they existed for they would have apprehended that the Christians had to have had books to keep Christian traditions from being lost.”

 

This is a weak argument in the light of the fact that we can prove from the next oldest writings after the New Testament that the gospels were kept beyond the grasp of even the leaders of the Church.

 

If the Church let the four gospels be circulated it must have wanted them to be burned for that is what the Jews and Gentiles would have done. 

 

Anybody can see that there must have been books.  We know, and Luke 1 informs us, that there were many Christian books and gospels.  Nevertheless, we have no writings against these books from pagans and the Jews.  Even worse, they are not mentioned by outsiders at all.  Only Christians mentioned the four gospels we have.  If there were no such writings then that might explain the silence of the debunkers.  Or perhaps nobody was that interested in debunking them.  Maybe this was because there was no danger in the Christian books for they were not widely distributed and interest in them was negligible.  Maybe though Luke 1 was right about there being a load of books and gospels about Jesus nobody but a chosen few had access to them.

 

If these other gospels were well-distributed why do we have barely any copies today?  We know of the Church’s book burning escapades.  When it did such a good job of getting rid of them how much better would it have done the job of getting rid of any damning evidence about Jesus or the early Church.

 

Jewish and Pagan works running down the writings of the Christians must have existed but when we read that so many Christian works have been lost it is no problem to say the former were lost too.

 

Would the Jews and Gentiles really have thought seriously that there were hidden books?  At that time, the Church had no official list of sacred New Testament books so they would have supposed that hidden books were not worth worrying about.

 

It is known that the early Church expected Jesus back say about a few decades after the alleged resurrection appearances so they were unlikely to have started writing gospels until late in the first century and in the early second by when they knew their expectation was a waste of energy.

 

k)  “Why didn’t the Christians say they had hidden gospels?”

 

Would Christians want future generations to know that the gospels were previously treated like something to be deeply ashamed of?  The heretics who were into allegedly hidden tradition would have produced fake gospels forcing the Church to release the real ones eventually to counteract them.  These heretics are complained about even in the New Testament itself indicating that the Church may have written the gospels late for they were certainly hidden too.

 

Moreover, the real explanation might be that since we have so little data from the second century about Christianity that it is possible the Christians did say they had hidden gospels and we have lost the evidence that they did.

 

l) Christians say that there was no reason for the early Church to keep the gospels close to the chests of a select few: “There is a difference between people being persecuted for their faith and their writings being suppressed.  Times it is preferred to kill than to try and destroy the truth.  The gospels could have been published freely because it was the sword that was used not the bonfire”.

 

This contradicts the New Testament in lots of places and persecution is one of the favourite New Testament themes (eg Acts 8).  It is a strange kind of persecution that lets the persecuted have a chance to propagate their faith with literature and preaching for the Christians had sufficient freedom to do that under the nose of the legal system that persecuted them all the time according to Acts.  The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians or the martyrs’ religion.  I suspect that the early Christians may have been involved in violence at what they believed was Jesus’ behest and the brutal ones were the persecuted ones.

 

m) Christians argue, “Christianity arose among the Jews and became basically a Gentile religion and the Jews did not care what the Gentiles believed.  No Jew was likely to try and refute or suppress the gospels with their account of the resurrection for the sake of preventing poor Gentiles from being deluded for Judaism was not interested in converting them but only in keeping and evangelising those who belonged to their own race.  So the gospels would have been common among Gentiles.”

 

When a religion spreads so fast like Christianity allegedly did the books will be the first thing that the persecutors will go for and Rome did not like Christians any more than Jews did.  The Gentile Christians were keen to convert Jews for they were easier to convert for they had half of the religion of Jesus anyway.

 

St Paul said that the Church was the New Israel.  The Gentile Christians claimed to be Jews.  They said that only Jews can be saved so they are spiritually Jews and Jesus has kept the law of Moses for them to satisfy God’s claims against them.  The Jews would not have liked people doing that for it made their religion mean nothing and took credibility and unity from it.  They would not have tolerated it.

 

n)  “There were probably so many different and conflicting books for there were such a lot of heretics in the infant Church that the debunker and book burner could not get around to them all and would have dropped the project before it began owing to such discouragement.  So the gospels could have safely been published earlier.”

 

This is nonsense.  The Catholic Church once burned heretical books along with heretical scriptures and even burned fairly accurate Bibles because heretics produced them.  Christian books are Christian books and that is that.

 

There is no reason to think that the gospels were known to any outsiders never mind professional debunkers which gives us no reason to think they are probably true and inspired by the Lord.

 

 

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ANONYMITY PROVES HIDDEN

 

 

The Gospels never say who wrote them.

 

The suggestion of some that this was so that attention would not be focused on the authors but on the subject is sheer lunacy.  Not knowing who the authors were is not going to stop people being obsessed with knowing about the kind of person who had done the writing and who that person may have been.  The accuracy of the subject depends on examining the author.  The Christian argument that the authors did not give their names out of humility is rubbish.  The silliness shows how embarrassed they are about this thing.

 

Tradition ascribes the gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John a very long time after their composition but there is no evidence that it was going on anything other than guesswork, hearsay or flimsy evidence.

 

The traditions concerning authorship emerged too late after the gospels seem to have been written.

 

When the gospels are anonymous it shows that the authors were afraid of being identified.  Say, if the apostle Matthew wrote Matthew the book would have been better off.

 

Why were the authors afraid?

 

They didn’t want to be found out as liars.  Their books must have contained slander.  Christians would say, “An even better explanation is that they knew enemies of the Church would want to interview them and nip their publications in the bud.  There was the risk that disciples of the authors would be hounded to reveal the whereabouts of the books and what steps had been employed to preserve them and publish them.  Then they would try to destroy the books.  Or perhaps they would execute the authors for writing the books”.  All this is speculation for there is no evidence that anybody could die for writing the gospels.  Paul went about writing and nobody wanted to kill him for it.   

 

Also, these men preached in public and were able to protect themselves for so long and go about in freedom.  Their preaching was worse and riskier than simply publishing gospels.  They were afraid of being found out to be telling little else but lies.  The gospellers then had no reason to be anonymous.  Unless their gospels were outrageous lies.

 

The gospels had to have been hidden when the authors were too scared to give their names or to pretend to be somebody else though there were plenty of places to hide.

 

The Church decided that the gospels belonged in the New Testament for it said they passed the criterion for having started among the apostles.  Catholics say that Protestants are wrong to believe in the Bible because of the Bible instead of believing in it because the Church says so.  But it is better to believe in it by examining internal evidence for yourself instead of just taking the Church’s word for it and especially when it took centuries for the Church to canonise the books.

 

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PHYSICAL PROOF OF CONCEALMENT

 

It is most probable that anybody who would have been conscious that the New Testament gospels lied if they had seen them never laid eyes on them.  Anybody that did wouldn’t have had enough impact on public thinking to even bother trying to expose them.  Logically, the early Church was wholly free to invent whatever it liked about Jesus.

 

The New Testament broke the law of Rome when it proclaimed that no false Gods, such as the Gods of Rome, were to be tolerated and non-Christian religions had to be phased out.  For that reason the writings had to be hidden because they would have been destroyed and it would have been illegal to have them.  Rome did not tolerate bigoted intolerant religions.

 

The gospels were predominately for foreign Jews and Romans neither of which groups understood Palestinian Judaism enough or cared enough to be interested in a thorough investigation on Jesus.

 

In New Testament times, papyrus was used to write on.  It was brittle and fragile so only very few would have been allowed to handle it.  The result would have been that New Testament writings would have been very obscure.  Reading stuff out is not the same.

 

Jews were forbidden to touch anything idolatrous so many of them would not have touched a Christian book for the mere Christian notion that Jesus was a prophet was an intolerable blasphemy to them.  Their revulsion would have been too great.

 

The New Testament states that the Jews were happy to employ force to break up the Christian movement.  If so then they would have been expected to head straight for the jugular, the Christian writings, to get rid of them prompting the Christians to hide the most important of them and say nothing about them.  Also, Jews rigidly confiscated and burned books on magic in obedience to the Law which wanted even idols smashed and Jesus was considered to be a black magician so relatives of the Christians would have burned the books to avoid bad luck.  “It was a Jewish custom to bury heretical scripture, not to preserve them, but because they might contain the name of God and therefore could not be destroyed” (page 581, New Age Bible Versions).  If the name of God was cut out they could then be consigned to the flames.  If Christianity was a craze the Jews would have preferred to burn the writings.  The writings could only be reproduced by hand and were hard to get so every copy was priceless and had to be kept double safe. 

 

The antichrists were unlikely to have seen the New Testament gospels. 

 

The Church had no official set of scriptures at the time meaning that any critic that did see them would have felt little impulse to spend hours and breath attacking them in those poverty stricken busy times. 

 

There is not a molecule of evidence that anybody who knew Jesus or had met him was acquainted with the gospels.  It is easy to see how anybody decades later might have read them asked some old person about their veracity who replied in the negative might do no more research and turn around and believe them.  Would-be Christians were urged to feel God inspiring them to believe the so-called true religion.  That was the voice that came first, the critics would have been written off as belonging to a satanic world or as having sour grapes.

 

The quotes from Jesus that managed to get enshrined in the gospel were circulating as tradition long before they were written down.  There is no hint that the historical claims made about Jesus in the gospels were going around as well.

 

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THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK

 

There is evidence that the Gospel of Mark that we now have was part of a much larger work.  Large parts of it were left out in the revisions that left us with our present version.  The missing parts were kept secret and only very high level Christians were allowed to see them.  These parts were still hidden for well over a century after the gospel was written.

 

Professor Morton Smith found a transcription of a letter written by St Clement of Alexandria.  Smith uncovered it in the monastery of Mar Saba and it was written into the endpaper of a copy of the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch dating from the 1600’s.  Mar Saba is near Jerusalem. 

 

Clement in the letter stated that Mark wrote his gospel.  Later in Alexandria, Mark wrote a more spiritual gospel.  A sect called the Carpocratians got hold of it and were altering it.

 

The letter contained the text of a gospel story that is missing from the version of Mark we have today.  The letter declared that the portion in question along with other portions must be kept away from the public.  Concerning this letter which the Professor believed to be genuine “some experts think it could have been the work of Clement” (page 111, The Bible, Fact or Fantasy?).  Smith wrote a book called The Secret Gospel in defence of its authenticity. 

 

The story says that Jesus went to Bethany and a woman whose brother had died asked Jesus for mercy.  The apostles rebuked her and Jesus being angry went with her into the garden where the brother's tomb was.  A shout was heard from within the tomb and Jesus went and rolled the stone away and he raised the brother.  The brother saw Jesus and loved him and wanted to be with him and then Jesus went to his house for he was rich.  Six days later Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom during a night long ceremony in which the brother wore only a white robe over his nakedness.  Then Jesus was said to have gone back over the Jordan.   Another portion we are given says that the sister and Salome and Jesus' mother were snubbed by him. 

 

In Jesus, The Evidence, Ian Wilson implies that the secret gospel is probably authentic when he asks if the letter really came from Clement’s pen and states that the majority of today’s scholars concur that it is (page 27). 

 

More recently, a book called Decoding Mark  looks at how chaisms prove what parts of the gospel are Mark's work and which are the work of a possibly dishonest person and how the missing portion that is given to us in the Clement letter has chaisms that show it belongs to this gospel.   Chaisms are poetic word patterns and contrasts.  Luke used Mark to make his gospel and he left out a portion of it.  Mark's work sticks to a pattern and a different pattern shows up in this portion.  It wasn't in Luke's copy of Mark and the different pattern shows it was somebody else's work.  In Mark's real writing, the pattern is broken at one point but if you insert the Secret Gospel portion the pattern becomes continuous.   This book gives new evidence that the letter was not forged by Smith.

 

The way the contrasts and reverses of events are worked out in the chiasms would suggest to me to be too well done and that the stories were being made up.  Scholar Mary Ann Tolbert of the Pacific School of Religion thinks that the construction of Mark shows that Mark is fiction and adds that the content and story indicates that too (page 144, Decoding Mark). 

 

Page 72 shows how the prologue of Mark is the mirror image of the conclusion.  The pattern shows that the abrupt end of Mark at the point where the women being told that Jesus rose go and say nothing to anybody is how Mark meant the gospel to end.  His gospel refused to mention resurrection appearances meaning we should decide ourselves how we can hold Jesus rose from the dead.  He thought that visions were worthless in that respect.   Page 149 says the end was deliberate and was meant to urge you to start reading again from the beginning.  This to me would suggest the risen Jesus was not important and the normal and risen Jesus was.  Soon after the gospel starts Jesus gets the Holy Spirit.  If Jesus were God then, the Holy Spirit could not possibly be given to him for he would have the Spirit with him.  Near the end Jesus feels abandoned by God as if the Spirit left him.  This is further support for this position about the ending.

 

It is important that John Drane does not attempt to dispute the Clement letter’s authenticity in his book, The Bible, Fact or Fantasy?  Nor does he tackle it in his other book, Jesus and the Four Gospels.

 

Indeed if Smith forged the letter he would not have put in a testimony from Clement that Mark wrote the gospel under Peter's guidance which contradicted scholarly opinion.  The Church lied from the start about who wrote the gospels.  In fact nobody knows for sure who wrote the four gospels (page 18, Decoding Mark).  Decoding Mark shows the gospel is very hostile to the twelve apostles so it is hard to imagine Peter helping Mark with the gospel or Mark using his data.  Jesus in Mark asks the disciples if their hearts are hardened which shows he thought they could be totally depraved monsters.  Decoding Mark page 24 explains that this was extremely serious - in Jewish thinking and literature the expression hardened heart meant extreme disobedience, loss of salvation and made one dead spiritually.  Mark especially has it in for Peter (page 41).  No wonder we don't find any lies about Jesus saying, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church" or have Mark making a pope out of him.

 

Consider this, “The majority of the scholars consulted accepted the ascription to Clement” (page 301, The Canon of Scripture).  Consider also, critics have been forced to falsely claim that the photos of the letter that Smith has which are the only evidence of the letter’s existence are bad pictures and that parts of the text have been cropped.  The owners of the manuscript have verified its existence though one of them is the Church leader Archimandrite Meliton of Jerusalem.  He wouldn’t want to help defend the secret gospel for his faith told him it was evil heresy.  The way the secret gospel fits in with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices indicates authenticity.  Read The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark by Shawn Eyer (Alexandria: The Journal for the Western Cosmological Traditions, Volume 3 (1995), pp. 103-129).

 

The letter is incomplete which adds to it being likely to have been authentic.  It stopped in the middle of the page of the book it was copied into.

 

The letter complains that the heretics, the Carpocratians, were using hidden portions of Mark’s Gospel and putting in insertions to make it seem to advocate sexual vice.  For example, they put in, "Naked man with naked way."  The way the letter complains mostly about the heretics and devotes only a third to the hidden text argues for it being authentic.

 

The monks who had the book which contained the letter were unlikely to have fabricated such a letter.  No forger would have expected his forgery to get anywhere so it was not worth doing.  And the other monks who read it must have accepted it as authentic when they did not destroy the pages.

 

The letter resembles what Clement would have written.  It has lots of affinities with his style and choice of words. 

 

The hidden gospel text does not clearly downgrade Jesus or add anything to Christian belief that doesn't belong to it.  All it does it show that the Church gave us an edited version of the gospel and was hiding a lot of the data about Jesus.  A forger would be expected to invent some clear heresy to put in it so that controversy would rage and scandalise Christians.  Anybody who tried to add to the gospel could not like Christianity but the forger gave no real hint of that so there was no forger.  Some would say the mere existence of the letter was a heresy for it said the Church was using scriptures that couldn't be depended on for there were bits dropped out of them and that the scriptures were tampered with.  But it would only be a serious heresy for a Church that claimed to infallibly declare that scripture was complete like the Roman Catholic Church has done.  It is wiser to believe that the portion belongs in Mark's gospel than to believe we miraculously have the whole Bible that is inspired by God.

 

The eighteenth century handwriting shows that the letter would have been transcribed a number of times since it was written by Clement.  That is why nobody can point to this word or that sentence structure being unlike Clement to declare that it was not Clement’s work.  Changes and errors would have crept in.  But they are so minor and few that they do not cast doubt on authorship.  They would if they were serious and/or numerous.

 

The letter uses the Western Reading, of Mark 10:46, like Clement tended to do (page 305, The Canon of Scripture). 

 

It is claimed that the secret gospel text is fake for it shares some words and parallels with the other gospels which came after Mark.  It is as if memories of the texts of the other gospels were introduced.  But the transcriber is likely to have done that when the text was near enough to a text he had read before and was familiar with.  Perhaps Clement did that when he wrote out sections of the secret gospel.  Anyway some of the same gospel phrases could have been put in by Clement by chance.  For example, Jesus taking the young man’s hand in the Clementine gospel may not have been remembered from the time in Mark and the other gospels when Jesus took the hand of the daughter of Jairus.  People tend to use the same words when talking about somebody doing that.

 

The story of the man being found in the tomb by Jesus and learning the mystery of the kingdom reminds us of Lazarus who was raised from the dead in John’s gospel.  Smith uses this similarity to authenticate the gospel.  But it could just as easily be a different story for there is a huge difference in detail.  No it is more likely to be a different one because it is not said that the man was dead.  The story gives the lie to any suggestion of the man being dead for it says the man shouted from inside the tomb when Jesus arrived whereas in the Lazarus story Lazarus does not shout.  He rises when Jesus tells him.  Jesus didn’t tell him to arise on arrival.  He waited a while.  Of the man in the Mark gospel it is not said that that his sisters mourned for him, that he loved Jesus before then like was said of Lazarus and has different details from the Lazarus story in John.  Also, there is no resurrection at in the Mark story but a man being taught the mystery of the kingdom of God.  The man is the rich young man and not Lazarus and is not called Lazarus.  Yet Bruce says that the Clementine text must be forged when it has this story that is so similar to the story of the resurrection of Lazarus in John’s gospel.  If it is another form of the Lazarus story then it is older than John’s account for it has no miracles and is simpler.  We see that it does not even say that the young man in the tomb was dead.  Remember he must have been alive for he shouted before Jesus went in.  This was some kind of symbolic ritual – the man was buried alive for a ritual reason like some people believed in being buried in water for similar reasons. 

 

If the secret gospel account is the original Lazarus story, then consider this.  The fact that in John, Jesus wept for Lazarus implying that he did not know Lazarus could be brought back to life and then had the tomb opened implies that Lazarus must have shouted to him.  John then hints that Lazarus was not raised by Jesus but was buried alive.  This would be an important unintended clue that the secret gospel was real.

 

There is no real proof against the letter being real.  It is real for the evidence says it is.  The fact that Morton Smith has merely imagined the Lazarus connection and tried to twist the secret gospel into backing up his idea that early Christianity was a mystery occult religion and full of libertinism proves that he did not forge it.  Yet many critics like to say he did for they have no other candidate for this alleged forging.  Whoever wrote into the back of the book of the letters of Ignatius wrote it for himself and not for posterity for it was kept hidden so it was genuine. 

 

It proves that the gospels were hidden so well – that even many harmless bits were hidden – that portions of them were lost forever.  When the Church hid the story of Jesus being in the tomb with the young man it must have concealed the other ones with greater determination. 

 

The Secret Gospel of Mark was kept only at Alexandria.  This shows that the pope then was not considered to be the head of the Church.  Top Christians alone were allowed to read the gospel and the exclusion of the bishop of Rome shows that the papacy was a later invention of the Church. The Secret Gospel shows that the Catholic idea that Jesus and Mary were very close and she was sinless is challenged by the refusal of Jesus to accept visits from her.  Clement instructed in the letter that since the Secret Gospel has been leaked, those who inquire about these links and who ask if Mark wrote the gospel must be lied to.  It is known that the early Church did resort to lying to promote the faith.  Clement today is a saint of the Romish Church and the Orthodox Church.  They honour fake saints and yet many of them believe canonisation is infallible.

 

 

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PETER EPISTLES SAY THERE ARE NO GOSPELS

 

 

Paul’s epistles show that the gospel stories did not exist in any form when Paul lived.  But the later ones also show an absence of the gospel legends in the primordial soup of the Church of their times.

 

The New American Bible dates the First Epistle of Peter at between 64 and 67 AD and sees no reason to deny Petrine authorship (Biblical Dictionary and Concordance, page 176). 

 

Some date the Epistle at 90 AD long after Peter’s death because the epistle advises obedience to Rome and patience in suffering which is taken to imply that it was written when Rome was barbarically persecuting Christians.  This was seemingly intended to satisfy Rome that Christians should be left alone.  The letter says we must be calm for the end is close (4:7).  Persecutions were expected universally among Christians so the letter would only say that if they were already happening and were very bad making it look like the end was on the doorstep.  1 Peter 4:17 says the Church is suffering terribly and calls it a trial by fire.   The 90 AD date seems better.  Peter could have been alive then to write it.  The story of his martyrdom in Rome in 64 AD is unconvincing for it is based on gossip and legend and besides if Peter was in hiding it was easy to pretend that some Christian executed in Rome was really Peter.  There is more reason to take 90AD as the correct date than any other.

 

Irenaeus was the first to say it was Peter’s work and this was after at least a century had passed (NAB, Introduction to The First Epistle of Peter).  The letter was not written by Peter.  The author – Silvanus? - might have believed that God was inspiring him to write what the dead or absent Peter would write so it is incorrect to think that the letter could not be ascribed to Peter for the people would know that Peter was dead.  Perhaps nobody knew what became of Peter and thought he was reclusive and still alive.

 

The First Epistle of Peter instructs us to love enemies and to suffer like Jesus did for doing right and with patience.  Every Christian knows that if Jesus did that it does not mean we should do the same for he had divine protection and only had to give God the word and he would deliver him.  If we and Jesus suffer for doing right then it must be forced on us.  It would be ridiculous to command those who voluntarily suffer to be patient.  The Gospel Jesus could have avoided death, perhaps only for a time for he had to die sometime, for he had miracle powers to save himself and he said that God could rescue him with an army of angels.  Peter is denying that Jesus had these powers or protection or that anybody could have saved him from his passion and death.  The gospels report that Jesus had to be apprehended under cover of darkness in case the people would save him.  Peter is denying this too.  Peter’s Jesus is a human being and not God or a super-powered Son of God.  So in 90 AD we have proof that even the authorities in the Church knew nothing of the gospels.

 

If Jesus suffered to save and our suffering does not do what it did then Peter is wrong to suggest that we must do what Jesus did.  What Jesus’ suffering implies for us is that we should be ascetics and brutal to ourselves but Peter is not saying that.  He was hard up for something to illustrate his point.  Therefore the Christians could find no quotes from Jesus to prove that we must endure suffering patiently because there were none.  There were no gospels.

 

The epistle says that Roman governors must be obeyed for God uses them to punish and reward people (1 Peter 2:13,14).  It is thought that this denies that one of them, Pilate, killed Jesus.  It seems Peter would be taking it for granted that we know to obey them only when they are right.  But then why does he tell us to uphold the Roman governor’s decisions about meting out vengeance on people when most of their punishments were unduly harsh and they had little concern for justice?  I agree with G A Wells that this command proves that the early Church did not believe that Pilate unjustly sent Jesus to the cross.  Christians say that Pilate was forced by the Jews or Roman law or both but this is dubious for Pilate had the power to postpone a decision and could have decreed a discreet execution of a man who was not Jesus in Jesus’ place to save Jesus.  The John gospel has Pilate killing Jesus because he is afraid of the Jews and then informing Jesus that he could release him if he would only clear himself before him so somebody wasn’t able to make up his mind about Pilate.  The incoherence suggests that the Pilate episode may never have happened for it should not have been hard to report accurately about it if it had. 

 

Wells observed that Peter gives some ethical teachings that match the teaching of Christ but he never quotes Christ and all his quotes are plucked from the Old Testament (page 365, The Enc of Unbelief).  He knew nothing about the gospels or their Jesus. 

 

The second Epistle of Peter may seem to have extracted the story of the transfiguration from the Gospel.  The Epistle says that the people were not taught lies about Jesus having come in power for the author and others saw his glory on the mountain.  This denies the gospel version that Jesus came stripped of much power and got tired and hungry and angry and did not know that Judas was stealing from the purse.  Some say that God showing some glory through Jesus temporarily would not prove that he came in power.  It would for it would mean he may not have showed the power but he still came in it.  Jesus coming in power refers to his coming as man so the vision then must refer to Jesus after his resurrection when he ceased to be an ordinary man.  2 Peter is really describing a vision of the risen Jesus and not the gospel account of Jesus being transfigured on the Mount long before his crucifixion and death.  And what the gospels say God said about Jesus at the baptism in the Jordan is said to have been said in this event.  The gospels report that God said something different at the transfiguration.  So it was not the transfiguration.  There is no evidence that 2 Peter knows the gospels.  Even if it does know the transfiguration story, it is far from saying that Jesus really existed outside of visions and was known by the people.  Only three persons saw the transfiguration.  And it might have been a leak from the hidden gospels.  And why does the author not appeal to the resurrection as evidence for Jesus’ glory?  Either the author was a forger or Jesus’ resurrection was not glorious. 

 

2 Peter says that it is better not to know the law of God than to know it and turn your back on it.  This is mad for if you know you can always use that knowledge again.  This betrays a cynicism contrary to the attitude of Jesus in the gospels who concentrated on teaching backsliders.  It denies the gospels were known.  It denies the Jesus of the gospels existence.

 

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OTHER EPISTLES THAT DENY GOSPELS

 

The First Epistle of John is believed to have been written after the Gospel of John and in the 90s of the first century.  It denies that there are any gospels.

 

It endeavours to counteract the influence of people who said that Jesus was not a material being but an apparition.  All it does to achieve that is just saying that some unspecified “we” touched Jesus and that anybody who says he had no body is an antichrist.  It would have been better to say, “Go to the Gospel of John which I John wrote”, assuming tradition is right that John wrote all the New Testament works that carry his name.  The epistle says that those who have God’s light don’t need teachers for they hear God in their hearts (2:27).  It is divine inspiration inside you and not inspired gospels that teach. 

 

The letter condemns the whole world as evil and demands that Christians keep themselves separate from it for the whole world is in the grip of the evil one Satan (5:19).  Jehovah’s Witnesses and some others take that to be a condemnation of Christians who honour flags and presidents and who work in politics.  Other Christians say that he is simply meaning godlessness or worldliness by world and is not forbidding Christians to be politicians and work in politics.  That is a lie for John like the rest forbade involvement in the world for Jesus’ final coming had to be treated as if it was going to happen in a few minutes.  This coming was to overthrow all earthly kingdoms and comprised Jesus taking over the earth as king and Christians were urged to accept that this overthrow could happen any second.  John does forbid political activity for you can’t live that way and prepare for the future by political involvement for the future is what such involvement is about. 

 

The Christians can’t give you any evidence that world means what they say it means.  If John meant it in a restricted way like they hope he meant, he would have said so in his letter so world means world.  A Church that thought like that would not let the world have its gospels but would keep them to herself to protect them at least until it was sure of itself – and it didn’t get sure of itself until the time of Constantine and soon got cocky enough to turn Jesus into God. 

 

A Church that was not allowed to bring Christianity into politics to help people could not possibly care much for books for having books imply that you need them for future generations so it would have cared even less about publishing.  It might have had the books but did not depend on them or preach them.   It was only when the Church became invincible that it grew less secretive.

 

By the way, I have argued in other books that Jesus did not do away with the killing laws of the Old Testament that God gave which wanted homosexuals and idolaters dead.  What I have said here about Christians focusing on the message and not on politics does not undermine that. Some would say they felt they couldn’t put the law into practice for there was no time.  Others would say there was no time for making the civil law except these laws so they might have kept them whenever they could on their own.  The law says it is love to kill these people and Christians never argued that you may not bother loving for there was no time.  Either way they were not invalidating the law.  It is still true to say that the faith revealed by Jesus was a brutal and murderous one.

 

The Epistle of Jude was not written by Jude the apostle because he speaks of what the apostles said as if he were not one of them (17).  And it is in the past tense as if they are all off the scene.  The letter quotes an edition of the First Book of Enoch betraying a date of 100 AD (NAB, Introduction to the Epistle of Jude).  The author quotes a story about Michael the Archangel not judging the Devil but simply telling him that he hoped the Lord would punish him.  The moral is that we must not judge.  This story is terrible for the angel did judge the Devil when he told him he should be punished.  Jude was obviously stuck for evidence and had to use a legend that is not in the Bible to do it.  If he had the Gospel of Matthew he could have quoted what Jesus said about judging.  And he would have.  And he quotes a dud scripture to prove that Jesus will come back to judge the world.  The gospels would have been a better choice so he did not have them.  Even if the Epistle was written in 80 AD when libertine heretical Christianity threatened the faith it still shows that the gospels were highly privileged information then, a lifetime after the alleged events.  Jude didn’t even have access to the words of the Lord and he was a high-level Christian for his letter seems to have been meant for the whole Church. 

 

The Epistle of James gives no hint of the existence of the Gospels.  The stress it lays on Old Testament material suggests that it did not know of them.  James 5:12 seems to quote what Jesus said about oaths in Matthew.  But James does not attribute it to Jesus and perhaps Matthew used what James wrote and put it in his gospel or it could be a common tradition.  If James knew the gospels he would have used the verses from Jesus which seem to say that you have to obey God to be saved instead of quoting Abraham and Rahab whose cases give no proof of what he says.  The author uses his own authority instead of Jesus’ (NAB, Introduction to the Epistle of James).  You only use your pathetic authority when it is all you have and when you cannot use the infallible prophet Jesus’. 

 

If James really was related to Jesus then he proves the gospels are lying about Jesus and that high-level leaders of the Church who would have known about the gospels had they existed did not.  The letter is often dated to before 62 AD when James was murdered.  This would tell us that there were no gospels then or even any traditions that could become gospels.  Then, even Jesus’ relations knew that the stories in the gospels were false for they did not hear of them. 

 

Most scholars hold that this dating of James to be thrown out.  They date the letter to the end of the first century.  If they are right then it means there was no evidence even then that the gospels had been revealed to anybody.

 

The Epistles as good as say there were no Gospels published even in secret and show that a biography was manufactured for Jesus later for he did not exist. 

 

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CONCLUSION

 

There is no evidence at all that the Gospels were published or fully published within one hundred years after Jesus’ demise.  The first publications were about the teachings of the Lord.  Regarding that period it is no wonder that Robin Lane Fox described it as extremely difficult to figure out when the gospels were first quoted (page 124, The Unauthorized Version).  There is no evidence that they were published for a long time after the end of the first century.  Even if they were published they were not widely known or made important and even the highest people in the Church did not know of them.  The words of Jesus were published before the acts of Jesus.  Anybody could make up the words but the acts would be more difficult if the person did not exist or if a lot of lies were told.  But if you make up the teachings first and get people to want to believe in the existence of the man who allegedly taught them it is easier to add in the alleged deeds later.  The words differ from the gospels enough to indicate that the gospels were still evolving or were secret.  These facts utterly destroy the credibility of Christianity.

 

WRITINGS CONSULTED

 

Bible Dictionary and Concordance, New American Bible, 1970  

Conspiracies and the Cross, Timothy Paul Jones, Front Line, A Strang Company, Florida, 2008

Decoding Mark, John Dart, Trinity, Continuum Books, Pennsylvania, 2003

Early Christian Writings, Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin, London, 1987  

Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995  

Evil and the God of Love, John Hick, Fontana/Fount, Glasgow, 1979  

Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, Karl Von Hase, Vols 1& 2, The Religious Tract Society, London, 1906  

He Walked Among Us, Josh McDowell and Bill Wilson, Alpha, Cumbria, 2000  

Jesus – One Hundred Years Before Christ, Professor Alvar Ellegard, Century, London, 1999  

Jesus and the Four Gospels, John Drane, Lion, Herts, 1984   

Jesus the Evidence, Ian Wilson, Pan, London, 1985  

JR Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Baker Book House, 1988 (from 1891 Edition published by Macmillan and Co. London)  

New Age Bible Versions, GA Riplinger, Bible & Literature Missionary Foundation, Tennessee, 1993

On the True Doctrine, Celsus, Translated by R Joseph Hoffmann, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987  

The Apostolic Fathers, B Lightfoot and JR Harmer, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Baker Book House, 1988, from 1891 Edition published by Macmillan and Co. London  

The Bible Fact or Fantasy, John Drane, Lion, Oxford, 1989   

The Canon of Scripture, FF Bruce, Chapter House, Glasgow, 1988

The Early Church, Henry Chadwick Pelican, London, 1987  

The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief, Volume 1, Gordon Stein, Editor, Prometheus Books, New York, 1985  

The First Christian, Karen Armstrong, Pan Books, London, 1983

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, Penguin, London, 1990

The History of Christianity, Lions, Herts, 1982  

The History of the Church, Eusebius, Penguin, London, 1989   

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1982  

The Jesus Event, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York, 1980

The Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Thorsons, London, 1999

The Jesus Papyrus, Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, Phoenix, London, 1997   

The Lion Concise Book of Christian Thought, Tony Lane, Lion Publishing, Herts, 1984 

The Nag Hammadi Library, Edited by J A Robinson, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1990

The Newly Recovered Gospel of St Peter, J Rendle Harris, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1893 

The Original Jesus, Tom Wright, Lion, Oxford, 1996

The Reconstruction of Belief, Charles Gore DD, John Murray, London, 1930  

The Secret Gospel, Morton Smith, Aquarian, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985  

The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark by Shawn Eyer Alexandria: The Journal for the Western Cosmological Traditions, Volume 3, 1995  

The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992

 

THE WWW

 

WERE THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS UNABLE TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN AUTHENTIC AND UNAUTHENTIC BOOKS? GLENN MILLER

www.christian-thinktank.com/dumdad2.html

 

THE GOSPEL OF MARCION AND THE GOSPEL OF LUKE COMPARED, CHARLES B WAITE

 www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/3827/wait2.htm

 

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE SECRET GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK, SHAWN EYER

www.globaltown.com/shawn/secmark.html

 

The “Historical” Jesus by Acharya S

www.truthbeknown.com/historicaljc.htm

 

 

 

 

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