Forgery in Christianity: A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

----Highly recommended.

The committed faithful, especially those who take the Christian story literally, will probably want to bypass this book. It's long, it's dense, and it rejects the story out of hand.

However, for those who can value the hard and intelligent research and the look into early Christian writings, the book is a great reward. To begin with, Wheless argues what (nearly) all Christians would also argue--that every non-canonical writing associated with both Judaism and early Christianity is a forgery--if it's non-canonical, it simply didn't form part of the canon. Many, many writers produced texts and attributed them to well-known figures in or outside of the Bible. What will rankle the faithful is the argument that the gospels themselves are also "forgeries," though that is now acknowledged by much mainstream Christian Bible scholarship. That is, no one knows who the actual authors of the gospels were; the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are simply traditionally accepted attributions. Wheless is definitely interesting and rewarding in his discussion of the Antenicene Fathers--the early Christian writers--and their arguments on behalf of Christianity. They were pagans converted to Christianity themselves, and Wheless quotes excerpts that I've never seen in other, more recent discussions of their ideas. For example, in his discussion of Irenaeus, he quotes this early Christian father of Church dogma to the effect that pagans ought to accept what seems absurd in Christianity--the resurrection, the virgin birth--because such circumstances abound in the pagan world. Wheless argues that someone like Irenaeus, early Christian apologist though he is, believes those stories, believes in the powers of pagan magic, as fundamental to his argument to other pagans. He and other early writers simply credit the pagan examples of hard-to-believe stories about divinities and semi-divinities (resurrection, virgin birth) to demons, while Jesus is the true semi-divinity, born of a virgin, resurrected by the true God. Even more interestingly, much of the support for his arguments, Wheless draws from the Catholic Encyclopedia itself, which often, though sometimes hesitantly, acknowledges the undependability of the documents that form the foundation of Christian doctrine. I haven't been able to find a copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia yet to check these quotes, but Wheless is good about citations, as he is about the citations of the Antenicene Fathers. Irenaeus is even quoted as arguing that the idea of Jesus being crucified at an early age is tantamount to blasphemy, since it nullifies the possibility that the savior of all mankind should have had such a short life in which to carry out his mission. Indeed, Irenaeus refers to hearsay that Jesus lived into the late years of the first century (85-90 AD). Now this certainly will be an alien idea to any traditional believer. Wheless's citations go to show that when it comes to selective quotation, Christian apologetics applies the same techniques to the early church fathers that it does to the gospels.

The value of this book, I believe, is to further substantiate the fact that early Christianity was entirely diverse in its beliefs (even moreso than contemporary Christianity, where--to the regret of many--differing beliefs abound, ranging from the entirely literal acceptance of the Biblical texts to their interpretation as symbolic and metaphorical, not to mention polemical). Wheless's strident tone and prejudices aside, this is a valuable book for its genuine and factual insights into early Christianity and the nature of its earliest texts. One final note: Wheless argues that the earliest dates for the gospels as we know them must be mid-second century, since none of the early writers (Papias, Irenaeus) seems to know them as other than scattered notes, recorded from hearsay and memory before that time. Current mainstream scholarship dates the gospels from around 70 CE (Mark) to somewhere in the 90s (John), with Luke and Matthew probably in the eighties. I have not seen any scholarship accounting for the stages by which the lower dating has been reached, but that would be interesting. The lowest dating possibility I have seen would be shortly after Jesus' death, making the gospels "eyewitness" accounts much more believable. But this is a very conservative dating, apparently depending on the willingness to accept the prophetic passages as true prophecy rather than as accounts of or references to events that have already transpired (e.g., the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE) or events that are impacting the later congregations of believers for whom the gospels were written.

Like the keen legal eagle that he is, Wheless indicts the early Church fathers as "pious" forgers of the various biblical texts, as well as the numerous "apocrypha" that have been tossed out of the canon because they are embarassingly obvious forgeries. All this, as endlessly admitted by the Catholic Encyclopedia itself!

It is fashionable among Protestant apologists to utterly dismiss the astonishing admissions of the Catholic Encyclopedia that virtually every non-canonical Christian text is bogus, including those trumpeted by apologists as "evidence" of the existence of Jesus. These biased dismissals occur simply because these admissions come from the Catholic Church, which Protestants, of course, view as the "adversary" that "corrupted pure Christianity." However, the fact remains that Protestantism is a very late development in Christianity, and that up until Luther Catholicism WAS Christianity. Hence, the Catholic Encyclopedia is indeed an authoritative source to be gleaned and cited, particularly where it indicts the origins of its own religion. In reality, it was CATHOLICS who wrote these various biblical texts that Wheless so astutely exposes as forgeries.

Wheless's various works, such as this one and "Is It God's Word?", are devastating to the foundation of Christianity and its parent Judaism. With a fine scientific mind not fraught with superstition and puerile belief, he is able to see clearly what I call "The Christ Conspiracy."

His conclusion, like that of all thinking persons who demand extraordinary proof for extraordinary claims, and who are not so easily duped and hypnotized by fantastic stories, is that Jesus Christ is a fictional character, a revelation that has liberated many from an oppressive anti-human philosophy.

Kudos to the late Wheless and all others for having the courage to state the obvious, i.e., that the Emperor is naked, at the risk of facing the unpleasant vitriol from the unlearned and fanatical masses.

Acharya S, Archaeologist, Historian, Mythologist, Linguist; Author, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold"