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Category: Karlheinz Deschner

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Ancient Rome Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Nero Tacitus

Christianity’s Criminal History, 94

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (1 of 7)

The Christians first falsified, from the 2nd century, the emperor’s edicts of tolerance: for example that of Antoninus Pius (about 180), or a Marcus Aurelius writing to the Senate a letter in which the emperor testifies about the salvation of the Roman troops from thirst thanks to the Christians.

They also falsified an epistle of the Tiberian proconsul to Trajan with the supposed imperial order to end the bloody persecution.

An edict of Nerva was falsified which revokes the harsh measures of Domitian against the apostle John. Indeed, Domitian himself, informs the historian of the Church Eusebius—relying on the Eastern Christian (((Hegesippus)))[1], the author of the five books of Hypomnemata (Memories)—, after having imprisoned ‘the relatives of the Lord’ as the successors of David, he released them and ordered to ‘cease the persecution of the Church’.

If the Christians began falsifying documents so that the emperor exonerated them, when the persecutions were a thing of the past, they began to persecute the adherents of classical culture. They ended up falsifying documents to accuse the Hellene sovereigns; they falsified, in series, a large number of anti-Christian edicts and letters of the sovereigns and consuls (especially by the end of the 3rd century): supposed records of non-historical martyrdoms, and also an infinity of martyrdoms. The Christians who appear as witnesses to these false biographies are countless.

Already the first of the presumed persecutions under Nero—which, for two millennia, made this emperor a monster without equal for Christians—was not a persecution against Christians but a process for arson. Even historians Tacitus and Suetonius, hostile to Nero, judged the process as just and reasonable. ‘Christianity was not discussed’, writes the evangelical theologian Carl Schneider. Also, the history of Christianity of the Catholic theologian Michel Clévenot establishes ‘that neither Nero, nor the police nor the Romans must have known that they were Christians; they were still moving too far in the dark and their number was still too small for their executions to have been a matter of public interest’.

But since the logic of Catholic theologians is rarely brilliant, Clévenot finishes his chapter on the fire of Rome in July of the year 64, not without having first recorded the ‘surprisingly’ good memory about Emperor Nero among the Romans. Among the Christians, he is still considered a bloodthirsty madman. And according to Clévenot this would be ‘perhaps (!) the best demonstration that Christians were really the victims of the horrible massacre of July 64’.

It is significant that religious motives did not play any role in the process, or at most a very accessory one. Significantly, Nero confined himself to the Christians of Rome. Although the acts were later falsified to locate martyrs elsewhere in Italy and in Gaul, according to the Catholic theologian Ehrhard: ‘All these acts of martyrdom have no historical value’.

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[1] Editor’s note: The triple parentheses are mine. Hegesippus, a chronicler of the early Church, was a Jewish convert. One wonders how many of the Christians that Deschner has been mentioning also had Jewish ancestry.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 93

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
As the historical-critical exegesis of the Bible teaches us, Jesus—the apocalyptic man who, totally within the tradition of the Jewish prophets, waits for the immediate end: the irruption of the ‘God’s imperial rule’, and thereby makes a complete mistake (one of the most solid results of exegetical investigation)—certainly did not want to found any Church or institute priests, bishops, patriarchs and popes.

As late as the middle of the 2nd century, the Roman Christian community had about thirty thousand members and 155 clerics. None knew anything about the appointment of Peter, nor about his stay and martyrdom in Rome.

 
The list of fabricated Roman bishops

The oldest list of Roman bishops was provided by the father of the Church, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, in his work Adversus Haereses, roughly between the years 180 and 185. The original Greek text is not preserved; only a complete Latin copy of the 3rd century or 4th, if not the 5th. Literature about it is hardly noticeable, the text is ‘spoiled’ in a manifest way. What remains a mystery is the origin of the list. Ireneus wrote down a little more than the names.

And nowhere is there talk of a primacy of Peter! By the end of the 2nd century Peter was not yet counted in Rome among the bishops. And in the 4th century it is affirmed that he was pope for twenty-five years! Bishop Eusebius, a historian of little confidence, even guilty of falsification of documents, transmitted in his time the succession of Roman bishops.

Eusebius ‘perfected’ also the list of Alexandrian bishops, very similar to that of the Romans. The same with the Antioquian list, associating an Olympiad with each one of the bishops Cornelius, Eros and Theophilus. In the list of bishops of Jerusalem he also worked with artificial computations, not having ‘practically any written news’ of the years in which they were in office. Later, Bishop Epiphanius made an exact dating comparing it with that of the emperors.

Around the year 354, the Catalogus Liberianus (Liberian Catalogue), a relation of popes that goes from Peter to Liberius, indicating dates in days and months, was continued and ‘completed’, as indicated by the Catholic Gelmi, who immediately added: ‘All these data have no historical value’.

The Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes), the official book of the popes, the oldest list of the Roman bishops, contains ‘a great abundance of falsified or legendary material’, which the author ‘completes by new findings’ (Caspar). In short, it carries so many fabrications that until the 6th century it has hardly any historical value, not naming Peter, but a certain Linus, as the first bishop of the city. Thereafter Linus is in second place and Peter in the first.

In the end a ‘position of Peter’ is constructed (Karrer) and becomes ‘papacy’. ‘Like a seed’, writes the Jesuit Hans Grotz in a poetic way, ‘Peter fell on the Roman earth’. And then many others fell, as is still happening today. Little by little all the ‘successors’ of Peter could be counted, as has been said, with the year in which they acceded to the papacy and the date of their death, apparently in an uninterrupted succession. (Editor’s Note: Deschner’s books have no illustrations but see the image that I chose for this post: part of a poster of the purported bishops of Rome from St. Peter to Pope Francis under the heading ‘I Sommi Pontefici Romani’. The poster is so large that, already unfolded, I had to hang it on a wall to photograph it.)

However, over time the list of Roman bishops was modified, perfected, completed in such a way that, in a table compiled by five Byzantine chroniclers, of the first twenty-eight bishops of Rome only in four places do the figures agree in all columns. Indeed, the final editor of the text, perhaps Pope Gregory I, seems to have expanded the list of names to include twelve saints, in parallel with the twelve apostles. In any case, the list of Roman bishops of the first two centuries is as unreliable as that of the list of the Alexandrians or Antiochenes, and ‘in the first decades it is pure arbitrariness’ (Heussi).

Note of the Ed.: Fabricated list of popes. Starting at the left,
St. Peter. Note the noblest faces the artist used for these
non-existent popes to make the faithful believe that the first
popes were not only saints, but also holy men of the white race.

The invention of a series of traditional names and tables, partly constructed, artificially filling the gaps, existed long before the appearance of Christianity and its lists of bishops falsified from the beginning. It is comparable to the Old Testament genealogies, which through a succession of names without empty gaps, guaranteed participation in the divine promises; especially the list of high priests after the exile, as a list of rulers of Israel.

Furthermore, the ancient pastors of Rome were not considered in any way ‘popes’. For a long time they had ‘no other title than that of the other bishops’ (Bihimeyer, Catholic). Whereas in the East, patriarchs, bishops and abbots were long known as ‘popes’ (pappas, papa, father), this designation appears in Rome for the first time on a tombstone from the time of Liberius (papacy 352-366).

At the end of the 5th century, the notion acquired a naturalisation certificate in the West, where the Roman bishops used the word ‘pope’ to call themselves, along with other bishops, although they did not do so regularly until the end of the 8th century. And until the second millennium the word ‘pope’ does not become an exclusive privilege for the bishops of Rome.

The first to refer to Mt, 16, 18, is, of course, the despotic Stephen I (papacy 354-357). With his hierarchical-monarchical conception of the Church, rather than episcopal and collegial, it is to a certain extent the first pope.

Not even Augustine, so fond of Rome but sometimes oscillating delicately among the pope and his African brothers, defends papal primacy. That is why Vatican I, of 1870, even reproached his ‘erroneous opinions’ (pravae sententiae) to the famous father of the Church. Sumus christiani, non petriani, ‘We are Christians, not Petrians’, Augustine had affirmed.

Similarly, like the bishops and fathers of the Church, the ancient councils did not recognise the primacy of law of Rome.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 92

Fourth century glass mosaic of St. Peter,
located at the Catacombs of Saint Thecla.

 

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb

According to an ancient tradition, the tomb of the ‘prince of the apostles’ is on the Appian Way, and according to another version, under the church of St. Peter. It seems that in the middle of the 2nd century this tomb was already sought.

Around the year 200 the Roman presbyter Gaius believed he knew where Peter’s tomb was, ‘in the Vatican’, and Paul’s tomb, ‘on the way to Ostia’. And since Constantine it has been venerated—and visited—the presumed tomb of Peter in St. Peter’s church.

However, its historical authenticity has not been proven; simply, in the Constantinian era there was a belief that they had found Peter’s tomb. But this belief did not prove anything more in those times than today. What was found under the church of St. Peter (in whose vicinity was the Phrygianum, the sanctuary of the goddess Cybele) was a large number of pagan tombs: in the last excavations no less than twenty-two mausoleums and two open crypts.

Between 1940 and 1949 the archaeologist Enrico Josi, the architect Bruno Apolloni-Ghetti, the Jesuit Antonio Ferrua and another Jesuit, Engelbert Kirschbaum, excavated under the dome of St. Peter. The management was given to the prelate Kaas, who was then director of the centre.

The results of various critical researchers—Adriano Prandi, Armin von Gerkan, Theodor Klauser, A. M. Schneider, and others—ended up extracting from the Jesuits the confession that the (Catholic) report of the excavations was not ‘free of errors’. There were ‘defects in the description’. They spoke of ‘greater or lesser contradictions’ and mention that errare humanum est (to err is human) ‘which, unfortunately, continues to be fulfilled’. But the decisive thing is that they want to ‘believe’. In no way has criticism ‘caused them to falter’. Finally, Engelbert Kirschbaum records the following:

Has Peter’s tomb been found? We reply: the tropaion of the middle of the 2nd century has been found. However, the corresponding tomb of the apostle has not been ‘found’ in the same sense, but it has been demonstrated: that is, by means of a whole series of clues, its existence has been deduced, although there are no longer ‘material parts’ of this original tomb.

Ergo, the grave has been there, but it’s gone! ‘Fantasy would like to imagine how the corpse of the first pope rested on earth’, Kirschbaum writes, and assumes that Peter’s bones were removed from its tomb in the year 258—naturally, without the slightest demonstration.

When Venerando Correnti, a well-known anthropologist, studied the legs of the vecchio robusto (old robust), the presumed bones of Peter, he identified them as the remains of three individuals, among them with ‘almost total certainty’ (quasi ciertamente) those of an elderly woman of about seventy years old. However, on June 26, 1968, Pope Paul VI announced in his address on the occasion of a general audience: ‘The relics of St. Peter have been identified in a way that we can consider as convincing’.

In fact, any identification among the pile of buried remains was, both at the beginning and after two thousand years, impossible even if Peter was there. Erich Caspar has rightly pointed out, with a good dose of prudence, ‘that the existing doubts will never be eliminated’.

Within this same context, Johannes Haller has recalled, also rightly, the scepticism regarding the authenticity of the Schiller and Bach skulls, although the distance in time is much smaller and the conditions much better. Likewise, Armin von Gerkan writes that, even if Peter’s tomb were discovered with inscriptions that would attest to it—which is not the case—that would prove nothing ‘since that inhumation would come from the Constantinian era, and it is very possible it was a fiction’.

Norbert Brox, who in 1983 knows ‘with all certainty’ that Peter has been in Rome, confesses that the role that Peter played in the community of that city is unknown. ‘It is ruled out that he was its bishop’. The author of the First Epistle of Peter (the ‘apostle of Jesus Christ’ in ‘Babylon’, that is, Rome) did not present himself as bishop but, according to the Protestant theologian Felix Christ, ‘as a preacher and above all as an ‘elder’. Also for the Catholic Blank, Peter was not, ‘in all probability the first bishop of Rome’, and naturally not the founder of the Roman community.

Even for Rudolf Pesch, so faithful to the opposite line, there was no ‘such beginnings’, no episcopate in Rome. Neither Peter nor Paul—‘neither of the two apostles has had a direct’ successor ‘in a Roman bishopric’. However, at the end of his study, this Catholic declares that the papal primacy is ‘the Catholic primacy of Peter united to the succession of the apostles in the office of bishop, at the service of the faith of the Church, One and Holy’. This is the factum theologicum.

In plan English, hiding a fact to obtain what would not otherwise be achieved.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 91

Below, an abridged translation from the second volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
There is no evidence of Peter’s stay and death in Rome

Nor was he ever the bishop of Rome. It is an absurd idea, but it is the basis of a whole doctrine that the popes and their theologians literally put on the roof. There is no definitive proof, even that he was ever in Rome.

The Christian community of Rome was founded neither by Peter nor by Paul or the ‘blessed founding apostles’ (in the 6th century, Archbishop Dorotheus of Thessalonica attributed a double bishopric to them), but by unknown Judeo-Christians. Already then, between these and the Jews there were so serious disturbances that Emperor Claudius, in the middle of the 1st century, ordered the expulsion of Jews and Christians, among whom no differences were made: Judaeos, impulsore Chresto, assidue tumultuantes [Claudius] Roma expulit (‘Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome’—Suetonius).

Peter’s stay in Rome has never been demonstrated, although today, in the era of ecumenism and the approximation of Christian churches, even many Protestant scholars assume it. But assumptions are no demonstration. Even when according to legends full of fantasy, Peter suffered martyrdom in Rome and was crucified as his Lord and Saviour, although, out of a desire for humility, with his head down…

In reality, there is not a single solid proof about that. Not even Paul, who would be the one who founded the Roman community with Peter, and who writes his last epistles from Rome (although he never cites his adversary, Peter, in them) knows anything about it. Nor is there any data about it in the history of the apostles, the synoptic Gospels. Likewise, Clement’s important first Epistle, from the end of the 1st century, knows nothing of the history of ‘You are Peter’ or of another appointment by Jesus, nor of any decisive role of this apostle. Clement limits himself to reporting with imprecise words about his martyrdom. In short, throughout the 1st century there is silence in this regard, as well as in the 2nd century.

The oldest ‘witness’ of Peter’s stay in Rome, Dionysius of Corinth, is suspect. First, because his testimony comes from the year 170 approximately. Secondly, because this bishop is very far from Rome. And thirdly, because he affirms that Peter and Paul not only found together the Church of Rome but also that of Corinth: an aspect that contradicts Paul’s own testimony. Does a guarantor of this type deserve more confidence about the Roman tradition?

But those who doubt this, or even deny it, ‘only raise an infamous monument to their ignorance and fanaticism’ (Gröner, Catholic). But is not precisely the other way around? Is not fanaticism more frequent among the faithful than among the sceptics? And also ignorance? Don’t religions, Catholicism and the papacy live on it? Don’t their dogmas overflow in the irrational and supernatural, in logical absurdities? Do they fear nothing more than authentic criticism? Haven’t they instituted a strict censorship, the index, the ecclesiastical authorisation to be able to print, the anti-modernist oath and the bonfire?

Catholics need Peter’s visit, they need the corresponding activity of this man in Rome, who will head as ‘founder apostle’ the list of Roman bishops, the chain of his ‘successors’. In this theory the ‘apostolic’ tradition and the primacy of the pope are largely based.

They affirm therefore, especially in popular writings, that the presence of Peter in Rome ‘has been demonstrated by historical research beyond all doubt’ (F.J. Koch); ‘it is a result of the investigation confirmed in a general way’ (Kösters, Jesuit); it is ‘totally incontestable’ (Franzen); it is attested in ‘all the ancient Christian world’ (Schuck); there is ‘no’ news of antiquity ‘as sure as this’ (Kuhn), which does not make any more certain the image that Peter has ‘set up his episcopal chair, his seat, in Rome’ (Specht / Bauer).

In 1982, for the Catholic Pesch ‘there is no longer any doubt’ that Peter died martyred in Rome under Nero. (However, the martyred bishop Ignatius does not say anything about it in the 2nd century.) Pesch considers it unquestionable. But neither he nor anyone else provides any proof. For him it is only ‘an attractive idea to assume that Peter left for Rome’.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 90

Editor’s Note: The following section comes from the second volume of Deschner’s work (pic left). In the previous instances I had been using the third one but the order I have chosen for this site tries to follow, more or less, the order of what I hope will be the first volume in English of this abridged version of Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

The envy that I feel for most Westerners is absolute. I was born in the Middle Ages in the sense that, unlike the vast majority of Christians, I got religion inculcated through the hardest psychic blows. A Christian today does not have the remotest idea of what Catholic education was like in other times. Living in Spain, for example, a woman told me that she knew ‘older people’ who feared the idea of eternal damnation: something that younger generations of Christians have been completely spared.

The number of times I heard my Catholic father quote a specific verse from the gospels, ‘Peter: you are a rock, and on this rock I will build my Church!’ (emphasis in my father’s voice) was such, and it made such a dent in my young mentality, that I cannot help feeling great liberation when a non-Christian scholar, like Deschner, debunks those apocryphal verses.

Christianity not only irreparably damaged my life. It is likely that it has irreparably damaged the white race, on which this religion was imposed. Only the outcome of history will show if the white man will get rid of his ethnosuicidal tendencies: a psychic malware programmed, in large part, by the religion that destroyed my life.

Also raised as a Catholic, Deschner wrote:

 

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Neither Jesus instituted the papacy nor Peter was bishop of Rome

The Catholic Church bases the foundation of the papacy, and of itself, in the Matthew passage: ‘You are Peter, and on this rock [petrus] I will build my Church’ (Mt 16:18).

In huge golden mosaic letters these words appear, the most discussed of the Bible, in the dome of St. Peter built by Michelangelo. But they are missing in three of the four Gospels, especially in Mark, the oldest of the evangelists. In fact, Jesus never uttered them. This is today ‘the certain outcome of biblical exegesis’ (Brox).

In spite of this, the Catholic Church continues to maintain its ‘divine foundation’. It has no choice: the Church has affirmed it for two thousand years. However, not a few of its theologians capitulate now. Many of them, following with delay the steps of quite conservative Protestants, have developed a language that ‘scientifically’ makes them preserve half the face and allows them not to lose everything before their superiors. They paraphrase the lack of authenticity of the ‘foundational words of the Church’ in the following way: Matthew does not refer to it historically but he composes it theologically. Or they claim the ‘rock’ is a commandment uttered after the ‘resurrection’. The Catholics with fewer detours explain the ‘promise of Peter’ as a later interpolation, simply as an invention of the evangelists.

However, perhaps Peter had a kind of primacy, a certain leading role. But perhaps only temporarily and in certain areas, not, of course, after the ‘council of the apostles’. Paul, who opposes Peter ‘in his face’ in Antioch, insults him by calling him a hypocrite and, in an open manner, questions his demands. Elsewhere in the ‘Holy Scriptures’ there are also ‘anti-Petrine’ tendencies. And that Peter retained his primacy, if he had one, even if it was only an invention of the ‘Petrist party’, does not appear anywhere in the New Testament. Nothing is said.

However, even in the case—which must be excluded for many reasons—that the ‘primacy words’ came from Jesus, the Church could not explain how they were transmitted from Peter to the ‘popes’, since they not only apply to the apostle but also to his ‘successors in office’. Neither the Bible nor any other historical source indicates that Peter appointed his successor.

More than one Catholic ‘sees himself in trouble when trying to explain from a historical and critical point of view the strength of the biblical foundations for the papacy’ (Stockmeier). The most courageous theologians admit that ‘there is nothing’ of a succession of Peter (De Vries), which ‘in the New Testament cannot be seen anywhere’ (Schnackenburg). In effect, the theologian Josef Blank asks himself how primitive Christianity understood this sentence. Did it mean Rome or the primacy of the Roman bishop as successor to the Apostle Peter? ‘The answer is, plain and simple: No!’

Apologetics is based on indications from Jesus to Peter: that he should catch men, that he takes the keys to the kingdom of heaven; that all that he unites or desires on earth will be united or disunited in heaven and finally: ‘Strengthen your brothers’, ‘Feed my flock’. However, many other Gospel or New Testament parallels show that the five dispositions of Jesus were not linked in principle to Peter. And above all, of a successor, even of a superior of the Roman community as director of a global Church, it is not spoken at all in any early Christian text.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 89

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
Interpolations in the New Testament
Christians were very fond of interpolations. They have constantly modified, reduced and expanded the New Testament writings and, for that, they had the most diverse motives. They used interpolations, for example, to reinforce the historicity of Jesus or to promote and strengthen certain ideas of faith. Not everyone was able to modify a complete work, but he could easily distort the text of an opponent by introducing or deleting something for his own profit. Falsifications were also done to impose unpopular opinions that the author was not in a position to impose but that, under the name of someone famous, there was a chance to achieve it.
Important authors also fell into this practice. Tatian reviewed Paul’s epistles for aesthetic reasons and Marcion did so for content reasons. Dionysius of Corinth in the 3rd century and Jerome in 4th century complain about the numerous interpolations in the Gospels. But St. Jerome, patron of Catholic faculties and who made ‘the most shameful fabrications and deceptions’ (C. Schneider), accepted the commission of the murderous Pope Damascius to revise the Latin Bibles, of which there was not even two that coincided in somewhat long passages. Scholars have modified the text in some 3,500 places to legitimize the Gospels. And in the 16th century the Council of Trent declared as authentic this Vulgate destined for general diffusion, although the Church had rejected it for several centuries.
Well, in this case it was, so to speak, an intervention of the ‘official’ type. But usually it was produced clandestinely. And one of the most famous interpollations of the New Testament is linked to the dogma of the Trinity that, apart from later additions, the Bible does not proclaim, and for very good reasons.
The classical world knew hundreds of trinities since the 4th century BC. There was a divine Trinity at the top of the world, all the Hellenistic religions had their Trinitarian divinity, there were the dogmas of Trinity of Apis, of Serapis, of Dionysus, there was the Capitoline trinity: Jupiter, Juno and Minerva; there was a thrice-greatest Hermes, the god of the universe three times unique, who was ‘only and three times one’, etc.
But in the first centuries there was no Christian trinity because well into the 3rd century Jesus himself was not even considered as God, and ‘there was hardly anyone’ who thought of the personality of the Holy Spirit, as discreetly ironizes the theologian Harnack. (Except, let’s be fair, the Valentinian Theodotus: a ‘heretic’! He was the first Christian who, by the end of the 2nd century, called the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit a Trinity, something that the Christian tradition still did not dream of.) According to the theologian Weinel, ‘there was rather a revolted mass of ideas about the celestial figures’.
Everything that in Christianity was not pagan comes from the Jews. Another trinity characterised the ‘Holy Scriptures’ in the Revelations of John: God the Father, the seven spirits and Jesus Christ. Soon St. Justin finds a tetralogy: God the Father, the Son, the army of angels and the Holy Spirit. As has been said, ‘a revolted mass’. But little by little, the ancient doctrine—which until the 4th century was widespread even in ecclesiastical circles—, the Christology of the angels, fell into disrepute and was considered heretical. In its place a true dogma was imposed, in addition to all the Christian Churches: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
At last they had the right people all together, but unfortunately not yet in the Bible. Therefore it was fabricated. Fabrication was necessary because in the New Testament there were—and they are—‘false’ opinions, even of Jesus. For example, in the Logion of Matthew 10, 5: ‘Do not go to the nations of the pagans and do not set your foot in the cities of the Samaritans either. Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’. From what fate the Greco-Romans would have been spared, and also the Jews, if the Christians had followed these words of Jesus! But for a long time they had done the opposite. In evident contradiction with Matthew 10, 5, the ‘risen’ says right there ‘Go and teach all peoples and baptise them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit…’
This passage, the mandate of the mission of Christ, is considered true precisely because the Christians soon went on the mission to the pagans: the opposite of the first mandate of Jesus, preach only to the Jews. And to justify this in practice, at the end of the Gospel the mandate to do mission in the wider world is interpolated. And, incidentally, this contained the biblical foundation, the locus classicus, for the Trinity. However, considering that the preaching of Jesus himself lacks the slightest sign of a Trinitarian conception and that none of the apostles was commissioned to baptise, how Jesus, who exhorts to go ‘only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ expressly forbids ‘the path toward the pagan peoples’. How could this Jesus ask to do the mission for the world?
The latter mandate, which is increasingly questioned by rationalism, is considered by critical theologians to be a forgery. The ecclesiastical circles introduced it to justify a posteriori both the practice of the mission among the ‘pagans’ and the custom of baptism, and to have an important biblical testimony for the dogma of the Trinity.
Precisely for that reason in the first epistle of John there was another falsification, minimal in appearance but of special bad reputation, the Johannine Comma.
What was modified was the passage (First Epistle of John 5:7-8): ‘There are three who bear witness: the Spirit, the Water and the Blood, and the three are one’, leaving it as ‘There are three who testify in heaven, the Father and the Word and the Holy Spirit, and the three are one’. The addition is missing in almost all Greek manuscripts and almost all of the old translations.
Before the 4th century, none of the Greek Fathers of the Church used it, nor did they cite it, as a careful verification has pointed out in the writings of Tertullian, Cyprian, Jerome, and Augustine. The fabrication comes from North Africa or Spain, where it appears for the first time about 380. The first to question it was R. Simon in 1689. Today, the exegetes reject it almost with total unanimity. However, on January 13, 1897, a decree of the Roman Office proclaims its authenticity.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 88

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
All the ‘general epistles’ of the New Testament, seven in all, are fakes
Among the so-called general epistles are the first and second of Peter; the first, second and third of John, that of James and that of Judas. Still in the 4th century, at the time of the Father of the Church Eusebius, although they were read in most of the churches, only two were unanimously considered authentic: the first of John and the first of Peter.
It is not until the end of the 4th century that all the general epistles are considered canonical in the West. The situation is now different and all of them are designated as ‘anonymous or pseudo-epigraphic writings’, no matter how much the ancient Church introduced them with the name of several authors (Balz).
 
Peter
Under the name of Peter, a Christian falsified two epistles. This is certainly true for the later writings of the New Testament such as the Second Epistle of Peter, something that even Catholic scholars no longer doubt.
This letter, which, suspiciously, is almost a literal copy in many passages of that of Judas, enjoyed little confidence in the old Church. Throughout the 2nd century it is not quoted. The first to affirm its indisputability was Origen, but still in the 4th century Bishop Eusebius, the historian of the Church, states that it is not authentic, and Didymus the Blind, a famous Alexandrian scholar whose disciples included Rufinus and St. Jerome, says it is faked.
‘Simon Peter, servant and apostle of Jesus Christ’, thus begins the forger to legitimise himself as a witness, has ‘seen himself’ the magnificence of Jesus and also heard the call of God ‘from heaven’ in his christening. He not only warns the faithful that God finds them ‘without spot or worthy of punishment’, but attacks the ‘false prophets’, the ‘false teachers’ and advises to capture and kill them ‘as irrational animals’.
The Second Epistle of Peter, which is intended to be taken as the testament of the apostle, was written long after his death, perhaps three generations later; and was attributed to St. Peter in order to counteract the doubts about the Parousia. The letter is full of controversy against the ‘heretics’, especially the blasphemers ‘who go through life freely and say: where is your promised return? Since the parents died, everything remains as it was at the beginning of creation’. The daring forger, who claims the same apostolic authority as Paul, simulates from the beginning to the end of the epistle the fiction of a Petrine origin. He supports it with his own testimonies seen and heard, and appeals to ‘the deep feelings of his beloved ones’. He also claims for himself the First Epistle of Peter, even though the great differences between both letters exclude the possibility that they come from the same author.
But it is notorious that the First Epistle of Peter is also falsified notwithstanding the fact that, for Luther, it is ‘one of the noblest books of the New Testament and the authentic Gospel’. It is precisely the evident kinship with the Pauline epistles, confirmed by modern exegesis (for what Luther was so enthusiastic) that makes Peter’s authorship unlikely.
Moreover, the place where it is written is apparently Rome, because by the end the author expressly greets ‘from Babylon’: a frequent secret name in the apocalyptic literature for the capital of the Empire, where Peter should have been when he suffered martyrdom in 64 AD. However, the name of Babylon to designate Rome appears in all likelihood because of the impression caused by the destruction of Jerusalem, and this happened in AD 70, that is, several years after the death of Peter. It is also extremely strange that the famous canonical index of the Roman Church, the Muratorian Canon (around 200), does not mention this epistle of Peter: a letter of its presumed founder. We will not review other criteria, also formal, that make less and less likely a Petrine origin of this document.
About the First Epistle of Peter, whose word ‘Peter’ carries the tagline of ‘an apostle of Jesus Christ’, recently Norbert Brox has stated in Faische Verfasserangaben (book author information) that, by its content, character and historical circumstances, it shows ‘no connection with the figure of the historical Peter; nothing in this epistle makes this name credible’. Today it is considered ‘completely a pseudepigraphic’ (Marxsen), ‘without any doubt a pseudonym writing’ (Kümmel). In short, another falsification of the New Testament, conceived between the years 90 and 95, in which the deceiver indiscreetly invokes Christ, and demands to be ‘holy in all your life’s journey’, ‘to reject all evil and falsehood’, not to say ‘lies’ and ‘always demand pure spiritual milk’.
 
John
According to the ecclesiastical doctrine, three biblical letters come from the apostle John. However, in none of them the one who writes cites his name.
The First Epistle of John started to be quoted as early as the middle of the 2nd century; and in those times it was already the subject of criticism. The Muratorian Canon reviews, around the year 200, only two epistles of John, the first and one of the so-called small epistles. It is not until the beginning of the 3rd century when Clement of Alexandria notarises the three epistles. However, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries they were not considered canonical everywhere. This only happened well into the 4th century. ‘They are not recognised unanimously’, Bishop Eusebius writes, ‘they are ascribed to the evangelist or to another John’.
The First Epistle of John is so similar in its style, vocabulary and ideology to the Gospel of John that most Bible researchers attribute both writings to the same author, as tradition has always done. But since the latter does not come from the apostle John, neither can the First Epistle of John be his. And since the second epistle is, so to speak, an abbreviated edition (thirteen verses) of the first one, which is almost unanimously attributed to the same author, nor can it have been penned by the apostle John. And that he even wrote a third one is something that the ancient Church already questioned.

 
Note of the Ed.: This handsome 1526 painting by Albrecht Dürer, The Apostles in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich shows Peter and John. It cannot be more deceptive from the historical point of view. Not only the Semites of the 1st century looked like Untermenschen as we have already seen, but the Apostle John did not even write the gospel attributed to him.
Even conservative bibliologists admit today that the author of the three epistles of John is not the apostle, as the Church has been teaching for two millennia; but that he was one of his disciples and that the ‘Johannine tradition’ had transmitted it. About the main epistle, the first, which from the beginning was not the subject of discussions, Horst Balz says: ‘Just as the apostle John, son of Zebedee and brother of James, cannot be considered author of the homonymous Gospel, so much less he may be behind the First Epistle of John’.
 
Other apostles
The alleged epistle of James was also falsified. Like most of the ‘general epistles’ it only imitates the epistolary form. This text, which is especially difficult to fix temporarily, contains proportionately few Christian features. It borrows numerous elements from the Cynic and Stoic philosophies and even more from the wisdom of the Jewish Old Testament, for which many authors consider it a slightly retouched Jewish writing.
Although the epistle claims to have been written by James, brother of the Lord, many important reasons exclude this possibility. For example, he only quotes the name of Jesus Christ, his divine brother, twice. He does not miss a syllable while writing about the laws of Jewish ritual and ceremonial, but, unlike most authors of biblical letters, he uses the formalities of Greek epistolary. He writes in good Greek, something unusual for a New Testament author. It is a surprising text with rich vocabulary and many literary forms such as paronomasia, homoioteleuron, etc. This and many other features show that this epistle, which constantly preaches those who apostrophise as ‘dear brothers’, the ‘faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord in Glory’, is a ‘more elaborate version of literary falsification’ (Brox) than the First Epistle of Peter.
It is curious that the epistle of James, later canonised in the West, is absent in the Muratorian Canon, Tertullian and Origen. Bishop Eusebius reports on the little recognition it enjoyed and the questioning of its canonicity. Luther also dismissed it. He even comes to threaten to ‘throw the rubbish into the fire’ and ‘expel it from the Bible’.
Finally, the brief Epistle of Judas, the last of the epistles of the New Testament which in the first verse claims to have been written by ‘Judas, slave of Jesus Christ, the brother of James’, is also included in the numerous falsifications of the ‘Sacred Scriptures’. This epistle also betrays ‘clearly later epochs’ (Marxsen).
It is a matter of fact ‘that in the early times falsifications were made under the name of the apostles’ (Speyer); that authenticity is claimed about them, that the ‘apostles’ give their names and that the texts were written in the first person. It is also a fact about ‘all the writings of the New Testament’, as the theologian Marxsen emphasizes, that ‘we can only provide the exact names of two authors: Paul and John (the author of the Book of Revelation)’. And, finally, it is also a fact, and one of the most worthy of attention, that more than half of all New Testament books are unauthentic, that is, they have been falsified or appear under a false name.
In the next section we will show pars pro toto (part of the whole) that, in addition, in the ‘Book of books’ there is a whole series of counterfeits in the form of interpolations.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 87

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
In the New Testament there are six counterfeited ‘epistles of Paul’
None of the Gospels was written by any of the ‘first apostles’. Neither the Gospel of Matthew comes from the apostle Matthew nor that of John from the apostle John, nor is the Revelation of John of Patmos due to the apostle. But if in the Old Testament there were men who did not stick at nothing (instead, they spoke as if God were speaking), why should there not be others, in the New Testament, capable of putting everything imaginable on the lips of Jesus and his disciples who, together with the Old Testament and Jesus, were the third authority for Christians?
In this way, several writings of the New Testament pass as works of the apostles. Although in some of them the intention to cheat may be doubted, in others it is evident and in others, plainly obvious. Nevertheless, and against all evidence, their authenticity is expressly attested. The main idea is to describe as ‘apostolic’ everything that has already been accepted and to make it binding as a norm.
Several epistles were thus falsified in the New Testament under the name of the oldest Christian author: Paul, who openly confesses he is only for proclaiming Christ ‘with or without second intentions’.
 
The Pastoral Epistles
Totally false in the Corpus Paulinum are the two epistles ‘To Timothy’ and ‘To Titus’, the so-called Pastoral Epistles. They were known in Christianity from the middle of the 2nd century and ended up in the New Testament among the other epistles without any qualms… until the beginning of the 19th century. In 1804-1805, J.E.C. Schmidt questioned the authenticity of the First Epistle to Timothy; in 1807 Schleiermacher rejected it completely, and in 1812 the scholar of Göttingen, Eichhorn, verified the falsity of the three epistles.
Since then, this idea has been imposed among Protestant researchers and lately more and more among Catholic exegetes, although there are still a few known authors who continue to defend their authenticity, or at least a partial authenticity (i.e., the ‘hypothesis of fragments’).
In the three epistles, which were probably written in Asia Minor at the beginning of the 2nd century, the forger calls himself, from the beginning, ‘Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ’. He writes in the first person and boasts of having been named

preacher and apostle—I am telling the truth, I am not lying—: master of the pagans in faith and truth.

He lashes out harshly against the ‘heretics’, of whom more than one ‘surrenders to Satan’. He whips ‘the stories of old irreligious women’, ‘the hypocrisy of the liars’, ‘the useless and charming charlatans, in particular the Jews to whom it would be necessary to close their mouth’. But he also silences women: ‘I do not allow a woman to indoctrinate, nor to raise her above a man, but to remain silent’. And the slaves must submit and ‘respect their lords’.
These three falsifications, which are significantly lacking in the oldest collections of Paul’s epistles, were already considered apocryphal by Marcion when referring to Paul. It is very likely that they were written precisely to rebut Marcion through Paul, as happened in the 2nd and 3rd centuries with other ecclesiastical falsifications. And it speaks for itself the fact that these false ‘epistles of Paul’, much later than Paul and therefore from the theological and canonical point of view much more evolved, soon enjoyed great popularity in Catholicism; that the most important writers of the Church quoted them with predilection and used them against the true Pauline epistles; and that precisely these falsifications made the almost heretic Paul a man of the Catholic Church. With them, countless times the popes have condemned their ‘heretics’ and fought to have their dogmas recognised.
Against the authenticity of these pastoral epistles there are historical reasons, but even more theological and linguistic reasons that have not only increased over time but become more precise. ‘For evangelical researchers’ writes Wolfgang Speyer, one of the foremost connoisseurs of the falsifications of antiquity, ‘the pseudoepigraphy of the Epistle to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus is considered proven’.
The theologian Von Campenhausen speaks of a ‘falsification of extraordinary moral height’ and attributes them to St. Polycarp, the ‘ancient prince of Asia’ (Eusebius). The Catholic theologian Brox, also an expert in this field so little appreciated by researchers, writes about ‘the literary manipulation that is perfect’ although ‘it is recognisable as fiction’, a ‘methodically executed deception, a presumption of conscious authority done in an artistically, refined way’, and of course ‘the crowning work’ of forgery within the New Testament.
More conservative scholars, in view of the discrepancy with the authentic Pauline epistles, resort to the ‘secretary’s hypothesis’: according to which the author would have been Paul’s secretary who had to accompany him for a long time. ‘It is true that tradition knows nothing of such a man’ says the Bibel-Lexikon (Bible Dictionary). In the ‘hypothesis of the fragments’ the assumption appears that among the false texts of Paul there are also authentic pieces. Even for Schelkle the Pastoral Epistles ‘not only seem to be different from Paul’s epistles but subsequent to them’.
 
The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians
As is often supposed, it is very probable that the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians was ‘conceived premeditatedly as a falsification’ (Lindemann) attributing it to Paul. The authenticity of Two Thessalonians was put into question for the first time in 1801 by J.E.C. Schmidt, imposing definitively the thesis of falsehood, especially thanks to W. Wrede in 1903. In the early 1930s, researchers like A. Jülicher and E. Fascher were of the opinion that, by establishing a non-Pauline authorship of the epistle, ‘we have not lost much’.
Not us, but this has implications to the faithful of the Bible. What would they think if, for two millennia, falsification has existed in their ‘Holy Scriptures’? The counterfeiter, who above all tries to dispel the doubts about the Parousia (that the Lord’s return does not occur) testifies at the end of the epistle its authenticity by emphasizing the signature of Paul’s own hand:

I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand, which is the distinguishing mark in all my letters.

In order to avoid the doubts about authenticity in his case, the forger does not hesitate to warn his readers about the falsifications with these words: ‘Do not let anyone confuse you, in any way…’ He is fully aware of his deception. With a falsified epistle of Paul the author wants to disavow an authentic one. This is why there are ‘very few’ who today defend the authenticity of Two Thessalonians (W. Marxsen).
 
Colossians, Ephesians and The Epistle to the Hebrews
Most researchers consider the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians as ‘deutero-Pauline’, and also as ‘non-Pauline’. And very probably the Epistle to the Ephesians was also ‘consciously’ falsified, closely related to the previous one: an epistle which, from the beginning, was considered authored by Paul. It is significant that reminiscences of all the important Pauline epistles are found here, especially the one destined for the Colossians, from which almost its complete formulations are derived. The style is very rhetorical and, actually, more than an epistle it is a kind of ‘meditation on the great Christian themes’, a ‘discourse on mysteries or wisdom’ (Schlier). And in no other epistle of Paul is the word ‘Church’ used so exclusively in the Catholic sense.
The Epistle to the Hebrews, written perhaps in the 1st century by an unknown author, was originally transmitted anonymously and no old writing related it to Paul. It does not even contain the author’s name, but in the end it shows ‘intentionally the final formula of a Pauline epistle’ (Lietzmann). In spite of the fact that until the middle of the 4th century it was not considered apostolic, Pauline or canonical, it appeared nonetheless in the New Testament as a letter from ‘Paul’, and as such was taken until Luther. The reformer put it in doubt, finding in it straw and wood, ‘an epistle formed by numerous pieces’. At present, even on the Catholic side, the epistle to the Hebrews is rarely attributed to ‘Paul’.
However, since the 2nd century it was accepted by the tradition. It appears in the liturgical and official books of the Catholic Church as ‘Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Hebrews’. It also appears in the Latin translation of the New Testament, but not in the Greek text. We do not even know who wrote it, and all the names that have been quoted or can be cited about the author are only speculations.
Although critical theology considers authentic other epistles of Paul, the fact is that the books of the New Testament contain various forgeries. No less than six epistles attributed to Paul by his own name are actually deutero-Pauline, that is, not authored by Paul; but they appear anyway as such in the Bible. If the Epistle to the Hebrews is added, it would be seven.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 86


Saint John the Evangelist, a painting by the Italian Baroque painter Domenichino. The problem with the splendid Christian art is that the painters have Nordicized the Semites of the 1st century. Had photography existed in the 1st century of our era, the Aryans would never have projected their beautiful physiques on the ugly rabble of Palestine.

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Neither the Gospel of Matthew, nor the Gospel of John, nor John’s Book of Revelation come from the apostles to whom the Church attributes them
Due to the great importance of the ‘apostolic tradition’, the Catholic Church published all the Gospels as books of the apostles or their disciples, which justified their prestige. But there is no proof that Mark and Luke, whose names appear in the New Testament, are disciples of the apostles; that Mark is identical to the companion of Peter, or that Luke was Paul’s companion. The four Gospels were transmitted anonymously.
The first ecclesiastical testimony in favour of ‘Mark’, the oldest of the evangelists, comes from Bishop Papias of Hierapolis, in the middle of the 2nd century. But today there are many researchers who criticise the testimony of Papias; call him ‘historically worthless’ (Marxsen), and even admit that Mark ‘has never heard and accompanied the Lord’.
The apostle Matthew, a disciple of Jesus, is not the author of the Gospel of Saint Matthew which appeared between the 70s and 90s, as is generally assumed. We ignore how he got the reputation of being an evangelist. It is evident that the first testimony comes from the historian of the Church, Eusebius, who in turn accepted the claim of Bishop Papias: about whom he writes that ‘intellectually, he should have been quite limited’. The title ‘Gospel of Matthew’ comes from a later period: we find it for the first time with Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. Both died at the beginning of the 3rd century. If the apostle Matthew, contemporary of Jesus and witness of his works, had written the Gospel that is attributed to him, would he have had to borrow so heavily from Mark? Was he so forgetful? Did he have so little inspiration?
All critical biblical research considers that there is no reason why the name of the apostle Matthew should appear on the Gospel, since it was not written in Hebrew, as the tradition of the ancient Church affirms, but in Greek. No one is known to have seen the Aramaic original, nor is anyone known to have translated it into Greek; nor in the manuscripts or citations is the slightest remnant of an original Aramaic text preserved. Wolfgang Speyer rightly includes the Gospel of Matthew among ‘fakes under the mask of religious revelations’. K. Stendhal ventures that it is not even the work of a single person but of a ‘school’. According to an almost unanimous opinion of all the non-Catholic researchers of the Bible, that gospel is not based on eyewitnesses.
The most recent Catholic theologians often painfully turn on these facts. ‘In case our Greek version of the Gospel of Matthew had been preceded by an original version in Aramaic…’ writes K. H. Sohelkle. Of course, ‘in case’, says Hebbel with irony, is the most Germanic of the expressions’.
‘An original Aramaic Matthew must have been written several decades before the Greek Matthew’. Not even they themselves believe this. Lichtenberg was not the first to know but was the first to say it accurately: ‘It is clear that the Christian religion is supported more by those people who earn their bread with it than by those who are convinced of its truth’.
It is interesting that the first three Gospels were not published as apostolic, the same as the Acts of the Apostles, whose author we also ignore. The only thing we know is that he who wrote these Acts of the Apostles simply puts on the lips of his ‘heroes’ the most appropriate phrases: something common in old historiography. But these inventions not only constitute a third part of the Acts of the Apostles but are also their most important theological content and, what is particularly remarkable, the writing of this author represents more than a quarter of the entire New Testament. It is generally supposed that the author of the Gospel of Luke is identical to the travelling companion and ‘beloved physician’ of the apostle Paul. But neither the Gospel of Luke nor the Acts of the Apostles are very Pauline. Researchers do not believe today that either of these two works was written by a disciple of Paul.
The Acts of the Apostles and the three Gospels were not signed with the true name or even with pseudonyms: they were anonymous works like many other proto-Christian works, such as the Epistle to the Hebrews of the New Testament. No author of the canonical Gospels cites his name, not once does he mention a guarantor, as the later Christian treatises so often do. It was the Church the first to attribute all these anonymous writings to certain apostles and their disciples. However, such attributions are ‘hoaxes’, they are a ‘literary deception’ (Heinrici). Arnold Meyer notes that ‘with certainty only the letters of the apostle Paul are authentic, who was not an immediate disciple of Jesus’. But it is well known that not all those epistles that appear under his name come from Paul.
 
John
Since the end of the 2nd century, from Irenaeus, although at first not without controversy, the Church attributes without reason the fourth Gospel to the apostle John: something that all critical researchers have questioned for more than two hundred years. There are many weighty reasons for raising questions.
Although the author of this fourth Gospel, who curiously does not mention any author, affirms having leaned on the chest of Jesus and being a reliable witness, he assures and repeats emphatically that his ‘testimony is true’, that ‘he has seen’ and that he ‘knows’ he is telling the truth so that we ‘may believe’. But this Gospel did not appear until about the year 100, while the Apostle John had been killed long ago, towards the year 44 or, probably, in 62.
The Father of the Church, Irenaeus, who was the first to affirm the authorship of the apostle John, has intentionally confused him with a priest, John of Ephesus. And the author of the second and third epistles of John, which are also attributed to the apostle John, calls himself at the beginning, ‘the presbyter’ (a similar confusion also occurred between the apostle Philip and the ‘deacon’ Philip). Even Pope Damasus I, in his canonical index (382), does not attribute two of John’s epistles to the apostle John, but to ‘another John, the presbyter’. Also, even the Father of the Church Jerome denied that these second and third epistles belonged to the apostle. The arguments against the authorship of the apostle John as ‘the Evangelist’ are so numerous and convincing that even Catholic theologians are starting to manifest, little by little, their doubts.
The same could be said about the Book of Revelation of John, whose author is repeatedly called John both at the beginning and at the end of the book, who also appears as a servant of God and brother of Christians, but not as an apostle. The book was written, according to the doctrine of the ancient Church, by the son of Zebedee, the apostle John, since an ‘apostolic’ tradition was needed to guarantee the canonical prestige of the book. But it did not last long given that the Book of Revelation, which appeared in the last place of the New Testament, was rejected by the end of the 2nd century by the critics of the Bible who otherwise did not deny any dogma.
Pope Dionysius of Alexandria (died 264-265), a disciple of Origen and nicknamed ‘the Great’, categorically denied that John was the author of the Apocalypse. Pope Dionysius points out that primitive Christians have already ‘denied and completely rejected’ the ‘Revelation of John’.

They challenged each and every one of the chapters and declared that the work lacked meaning and uniqueness and that the title was false. They affirmed, in particular, that it did not come from John and that they were not revelations since they were surrounded by a multitude of incomprehensible things. The author of this work was not one of the apostles, no saint and no member of the Church, but Cerinthus, who wanted to give a credible name for his forgery and also for the sect of his own name.

The theologian and Protestant bishop Eduard Lohse comments: ‘Dionysius of Alexandria has very accurately observed that the Revelation of John and the Fourth Gospel are so far apart in form and content that they cannot be attributed to the same author’. The question remains whether the author of the Book of Revelation wanted to suggest, by his name John, to be considered a disciple and apostle of Jesus. He does not say that explicitly: it was done by the Church to confer apostolic authority and canonical prestige on his text. And so falsifications started: the falsifications of the Church.

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Christianity’s Criminal History, 85

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
Why were falsifications done?
Well, there are many reasons. An important one was the increase in authority, although often it was only a concomitant circumstance. Attempts were made to achieve respect and the spreading of a text by passing it off as that of a renowned author or altering its age, that is, dating it to earlier times so that it formed part of the evangelical past.
This is how both the ‘orthodox’ and the ‘heretics’ proceeded. The counterfeiter confused his readers about the author, the place and the copy. For as the Christian communities grew and time passed, new problems, situations and interests naturally arose, to which the old literary tradition—the so-called classical period, the early apostolic times—could not respond. But since their approval was needed or at least reflect the legitimate continuity with the origins, several writings and ‘revelations’ were produced: false works that were dated to earlier times.
Catholics falsified to be able to resolve ‘apostolically’, in the sense of Jesus and his apostles (that is, with authority), the new problems that arose from the ecclesiastical discipline, the Church’s law, the liturgy, morality and theology. The ‘orthodox’ also falsified in order to fight, with falsifications of their own, the falsifications of the ‘heretics’: often widely read such as those of the Gnostics, the Manichaeans, the Priscillianists, etc., as is the case of the Kerygmata Petrou, the Acts of Paul, and the Epistula Apostolorum.
The forgers warn against ‘heretical’ falsifications as in the third Epistle to the Corinthians. They insult and curse the forgers by practicing exactly the same method, often in a more refined and less manifest way. And the ‘heretics’ falsified above all to impose and to defend their divergent beliefs before the dogma of the Church.
Finally, it was also falsified to guarantee the ‘authenticity’ of another text by means of a forgery; and also to harm personal enemies, to discredit the rivals. Although more rarely, it was done to defend friends, as shown in the claimed letters of Boniface. But only very rarely has the name of a counterfeiter come to us, such as that of the Catholic John Malalas, a rhetorician about whom we know nothing else.
What methods did counterfeiters use?
The simplest and most frequent method of falsification was the use of a false but illustrious name of an author of the past. This happened in the pagan world in a similar way as in the Jewish world, but in the Christian era it was systematic. Towards the end of Antiquity and later, an authority from the past generally was more notable, especially when the forger felt he did not have a ‘name’.
Resorting to a known contemporary was too risky as he could discover the falsification at any time by making a statement, reducing its effects. Although a work with the name of the falsified author does not have to be a forgery in itself, the falsifier is usually also the author of the work. A great amount of ‘apocryphal’ books, even New Testament texts that emerged with the purpose of deceiving, are conscious falsifications of a literary genre during antiquity: shoddy pieces of work that pretend to come from the pen of a totally different author whose ancient personality is considered venerable and holy.
In particular, the forgers of many of the lives of saints use the first person and turn to eyewitnesses to strengthen their lies. And no less effective were, above all, the counterfeiters of the Christian books of revelation, promising the readers and propagators the blue of the sky and at the same time threatening their detractors. The conmen presented sworn witnesses as guarantors of their lies, and to reinforce confidence they even said some truths on the sidelines.
After all, in Christianity, by the will of God everything is allowed. In antiquity most of the counterfeits were made to support the faith. In the Middle Ages, it is falsified in particular to secure or expand possessions and power. Already in the 9th century, papal documents were falsified throughout the West, naturally by ecclesiastics. The fact is that the percentage of pseudepigraphs is very high in proto-Christianity. The practice of unscrupulous falsification has always existed, even in the beginnings of Christianity. ‘Unfortunately,’ confesses the theologian Von Campenhausen, ‘truthfulness in this sense is not one of the cardinal virtues of the ancient Church.’

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