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Forgery in Christianity
Incendiary in its passion and irrefutable in its evidence, this classic of atheistic literature condemns Christianity as superstition and wishful thinking rooted in early paganism, "sourced" by anonymous fables, and promoted by self-serving men seeking "worldly riches and power." Raging against the blatant manipulations of the early Church and the antiscience agenda of the modern Church, American writer JOSEPH WHELESS (1868-1950) takes on everything from faked "relics" and the "holy mummery" of stigmatics and other dramatic mystics to the "priestly terrorism" of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Church's historical intolerance. This is an absolute must-read for anyone looking for ammunition to counter the argument that the longevity of Christianity is evidence of its legitimacy. ALSO AVAILABLE FROM COSIMO: Wheless's Is It God's Word?
440 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
About the author
Joseph Wheless
46 books3 followersJoseph Wheless (Montgomery County, Tennessee 1868-1950) was an American lawyer who wrote promoting the Jesus myth theory during the early years of the 20th Century.
He was son of Joseph Wheless Sr. (1830–1899), grandson of Aquilla Wheless. His mother Myra McCall, died when he was young, and his brothers and sisters were by his father's second wife. Wheless was raised Southern Methodist but later questioned the verity of the scriptures, studying their sources in detail. As a lawyer he defended American free-thinking and atheist organizations, was instructor in military jurisprudence at the University of Arkansas and held the rank of major in the department of the Judge Advocate General.
Also self-taught, Wheless was a successful lawyer and a very outspoken Jesus-was-a-myth writer. He studied for the bar while articled in his uncle's firm. Wheless served as counsel for several American free-thinking organizations and defended many cases involving issues of atheism. A specialist in South American law, he was also for some time an instructor in military jurisprudence at the University of Arkansas and a major in the Judge Advocate General's Department. For his writing on religious topics, he received the honorary DD from the University of Denver. According to Wheless not only had no one called Jesus ever lived, but Christianity and the Bible are based on deliberate fraud, Christianity's continued existence is a conspiracy using persecution and oppression to perpetuate its myths, to enslave people.
More: http://infidels.org/library/historica...
http://philosopedia.org/index.php?tit...
He was son of Joseph Wheless Sr. (1830–1899), grandson of Aquilla Wheless. His mother Myra McCall, died when he was young, and his brothers and sisters were by his father's second wife. Wheless was raised Southern Methodist but later questioned the verity of the scriptures, studying their sources in detail. As a lawyer he defended American free-thinking and atheist organizations, was instructor in military jurisprudence at the University of Arkansas and held the rank of major in the department of the Judge Advocate General.
Also self-taught, Wheless was a successful lawyer and a very outspoken Jesus-was-a-myth writer. He studied for the bar while articled in his uncle's firm. Wheless served as counsel for several American free-thinking organizations and defended many cases involving issues of atheism. A specialist in South American law, he was also for some time an instructor in military jurisprudence at the University of Arkansas and a major in the Judge Advocate General's Department. For his writing on religious topics, he received the honorary DD from the University of Denver. According to Wheless not only had no one called Jesus ever lived, but Christianity and the Bible are based on deliberate fraud, Christianity's continued existence is a conspiracy using persecution and oppression to perpetuate its myths, to enslave people.
More: http://infidels.org/library/historica...
http://philosopedia.org/index.php?tit...
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June 1, 2024
A SKEPTICAL AUTHOR QUOTES CHURCH AUTHORITIES TO SUPPORT HIS POINTS
Author Joseph Wheless (1868-1950) was an American lawyer who advocated the “Jesus myth” theory. He wrote in the Foreword of this 1930 book, “I here propose to treat of the inveterate forgeries, frauds, impostures, and mendacities of Priestcraft and its Theology… This book is a grave indictment, impossible to be made or to be credited unless supported at every point by incontrovertible facts. These I promise to produce and array in due and devastating order.” (Pg. 19-20)
He continues, “The proofs of my indictment are marvelously easy. They are easy to be found in … history and accredited ecclesiastic authorities, and in abounding incautious admissions made by the Recredited spokesmen of the Accused: upon these I shall freely and fully draw for complete proofs of my every specification. These damning things of the Church… are not well known to the pious and preoccupied layman. My task is simply to bring together the documentary proofs and expose them before the astonished eyes of the modern reader; that is the prime merit of my work.” (Pg. 23)
He explains, “Forgery, in the legal and moral sense, is the utterance or publication, with intent to deceive or defraud, or to gain some advantage, of a false document, put out by one person in the name of and as the genuine work of another, who did not execute it, or the subsequent alteration of a genuine document by one who did not execute the original… All are counterfeit or forged if not authentic and untampered.” (Pg. 24)
He states, “The proofs here to be arrayed for conviction are drawn from original sources, chiefly those inexhaustible mines of priestly perversions of fact and truth, the labored and ludicrous volumes of the ‘Fathers of the Church,’ and its most accredited modern American spokesman, the Catholic Encyclopedia. Hence it cannot just be complained that this presentation of the facts of Church history is unfair or untrue; all but every fact of secular and Church history herein recounted to the shame and guilt of Holy Church is taken verbatim from the Church’s own histories and historians.” (Pg. 36)
He outlines, “This paragraph is one of the most important in this book… It will disclose the substantial identity of Christianity with the most popular and wide-spread ‘Pagan’ religion of the times, Mithraism, or the Persian Zoroastrian religion, the closest and all but successful rival of Christianity in the Roman world, and which might have been successful, but that, soon after Constantine prostituted the Empire to the Church.” (Pg. 65) He continues, “The religion of Zoroaster, known as Mithraism, is confessed by [the Catholic Encyclopedia] to be a divinely revealed Monotheism… and having a divinely revealed Moral Code comparable to the Christian… it quotes a Jesuit as saying: ‘Mithraism is the highest religious result to which human reason unaided by Revelation, can attain.’ Revealed or invented, it is virtually identical with Christianity…” (Pg. 67)
He notes, “While speaking here immediately of the Jewish Apocrypha or pious forgeries, it is to be noted and borne in mind that it is the Holy Ghost-guided True Christian Church which alone has accepted and cherished these spurious productions of Jewish priestcraft… had adulterated and re-forged them to more definite deceptive purposes of Christian propaganda, and has outdone Jewry by adding innumerable like forgeries---‘a whole literature’ of fabrications---to its own spurious hagiography, or sacred writings.” (Pg. 105)
He says of the Old Testament books, “Solomon himself… wrote the wisdom of the ages into his Book of Proverbs, though not one of them is by Solomon, and in his lighter … spells penned his erotic Canticles, which … would be really unmailable under the Postal laws if they weren’t in the Holy Bible and clerically captioned ‘The Church’s Love unto Christ.’ These are indeed but one collection out of the great many pornographic stories of The Holy Ghost’s Decameron, enshrined in God’s Holy Word for delectation of the Puritans of Faith. Other divinely inspired and anonymous writers, falsely entitling their effusions under the names of this or that Prophet, or other wholly fictitious personage, as Job, Esther, Ruth, Daniel. Gave forth yet other inspired histories, books of oracles or prophecies, apocalypses or high powered visions into Futurity, and a miscellany of sacred novels, love-stories and nondescript musings or ravings known collectively as the … holy writings of the Jews.” (Pg. 134)
He points out, “Half a hundred of false and forged Apostolic ‘Gospels of Jesus Christ,’ together with more numerous other ‘Scripture’ forgeries, was the output, so far as known now, of the lying pens of the pious Christians of the first two centuries of the Christian ‘Age of Apocryphal Literature]… Individual Gospels were forged in the names of each of the Twelve Apostles, severally, and a joint fabrication under the name of ‘The Gospel of the Twelve,’ was put into the mouths of the twelve Apostles, using the first person to give the ear-marks of authenticity to their forged utterances… Several seem to have been fathered upon Matthew besides the one that wrongly heads the list of the ‘canonical Four,’ such as the Gospel of Matthias, Traditions of Matthias, also a supposed and probably non-existent writing in Hebrew hypothesized as the basic document of the Four…” (Pg. 177-178)
He says of the Great Commission [Mt 28:18-20; Mk 16:15-16], “This ‘command’ could only have been ‘interpolated’ into the forged ending of Matthew and Mark long after the original form of the tradition of Jesus had been first written, and when the ‘second coming’ in the ‘Kingdom of God’ and the immediate ‘end of the world’ had become impossible of further credit by lapse of long years of time and disappointed expectation. It could only have been written after the gospel of the ‘Kingdom’ for the Jews had failed, and the apostles had ‘turned to the Gentiles,’ which was not, even on the face of Scripture, until after the so-called ‘Council of Jerusalem,’ when the Jewish apostles, after bitter quarrel with the interloper Paul, had recognized Paul’s pretended ‘revelation’ of mission to the Gentiles and had parceled out the propaganda work, Paul to the uncircumcised Gentiles, all the others… to the ‘circumcision’ only.” (Pg. 335)
He asserts, “The ‘lying wonders’ of saints, martyrs and miracles are so intimately related, and so inextricably interwoven the one form of pious fraud with the others, that they must needs be bunched together in this summary treatment of but few out of countless thousands, millions perhaps, of them recorded for faith and edification in the innumerable ‘Acts’ and ‘Lives’ and wonder-works of the Holy Church of God. Those which are here mentioned are picked at random from a turning of the pages of the fifteen ponderous tomes of [The Catholic Encyclopedia], where they may be verified under the respective names of the Saints. With scarcely an exception they are soberly recounted as actual verities of the past the living realities of the present.” (Pg. 398)
He adds, “Without comment we let [The Catholic Encyclopedia] record for the faith of its readers, several of the very notable and most remunerative Relics treasured by Holy Church. That they are all impossible, all are bogus, all crude forgeries and fakes only possible of credit by the most credulous child-minds, needs no comment. The sordid debasement of the human mind to the degree of credulity here displayed, the crass dishonesty of the false pretenses which give credit to these things for purposes of extortion from silly dupes of religion, the vastness of the grand larceny thus perpetuated in the name of God---are beyond orderly comment.” (Pg. 425-426)
He comments, “The last sentence of the clerical admission… ‘the healing power of nature,’ bears destructively upon one of the most insistent of religious superstitions, the efficiency of prayers, and saints, and relics, and shrines, and pious mummeries, to which millions of the afflicted and deluded of God’s children resort for the relief of their torments and the cure of their diseases—which their loving Father God inflicts or prevents… the priests and parsons and charlatans of every stripe preach and encourage this ancient heathen superstition---and reap rich rewards through the imposture. The perfectly natural cause and explanation of numerous occasional instances of success at the game, which incites to further superstition and greater abuses, is curiously but truly confessed…” (Pg. 574)
He concludes, “It remains yet to complete the good work for civilization and humanity by destroying the last lingering works and delusions of decadent and decayed priestcraft…. A new and free Civilization rises from the ruins of the Ages of Faith… it hails the glorious possibilities of the scientific Age of Reason, which will redeem humanity from the blight of the centuries of Unreason. Men may now know and freely and unafraid make known the truth, and the Truth shall make mankind free.” (Pg. 582-583)
This work will primarily interest those studying the recent history and development of skeptical treatments of Christianity.
Author Joseph Wheless (1868-1950) was an American lawyer who advocated the “Jesus myth” theory. He wrote in the Foreword of this 1930 book, “I here propose to treat of the inveterate forgeries, frauds, impostures, and mendacities of Priestcraft and its Theology… This book is a grave indictment, impossible to be made or to be credited unless supported at every point by incontrovertible facts. These I promise to produce and array in due and devastating order.” (Pg. 19-20)
He continues, “The proofs of my indictment are marvelously easy. They are easy to be found in … history and accredited ecclesiastic authorities, and in abounding incautious admissions made by the Recredited spokesmen of the Accused: upon these I shall freely and fully draw for complete proofs of my every specification. These damning things of the Church… are not well known to the pious and preoccupied layman. My task is simply to bring together the documentary proofs and expose them before the astonished eyes of the modern reader; that is the prime merit of my work.” (Pg. 23)
He explains, “Forgery, in the legal and moral sense, is the utterance or publication, with intent to deceive or defraud, or to gain some advantage, of a false document, put out by one person in the name of and as the genuine work of another, who did not execute it, or the subsequent alteration of a genuine document by one who did not execute the original… All are counterfeit or forged if not authentic and untampered.” (Pg. 24)
He states, “The proofs here to be arrayed for conviction are drawn from original sources, chiefly those inexhaustible mines of priestly perversions of fact and truth, the labored and ludicrous volumes of the ‘Fathers of the Church,’ and its most accredited modern American spokesman, the Catholic Encyclopedia. Hence it cannot just be complained that this presentation of the facts of Church history is unfair or untrue; all but every fact of secular and Church history herein recounted to the shame and guilt of Holy Church is taken verbatim from the Church’s own histories and historians.” (Pg. 36)
He outlines, “This paragraph is one of the most important in this book… It will disclose the substantial identity of Christianity with the most popular and wide-spread ‘Pagan’ religion of the times, Mithraism, or the Persian Zoroastrian religion, the closest and all but successful rival of Christianity in the Roman world, and which might have been successful, but that, soon after Constantine prostituted the Empire to the Church.” (Pg. 65) He continues, “The religion of Zoroaster, known as Mithraism, is confessed by [the Catholic Encyclopedia] to be a divinely revealed Monotheism… and having a divinely revealed Moral Code comparable to the Christian… it quotes a Jesuit as saying: ‘Mithraism is the highest religious result to which human reason unaided by Revelation, can attain.’ Revealed or invented, it is virtually identical with Christianity…” (Pg. 67)
He notes, “While speaking here immediately of the Jewish Apocrypha or pious forgeries, it is to be noted and borne in mind that it is the Holy Ghost-guided True Christian Church which alone has accepted and cherished these spurious productions of Jewish priestcraft… had adulterated and re-forged them to more definite deceptive purposes of Christian propaganda, and has outdone Jewry by adding innumerable like forgeries---‘a whole literature’ of fabrications---to its own spurious hagiography, or sacred writings.” (Pg. 105)
He says of the Old Testament books, “Solomon himself… wrote the wisdom of the ages into his Book of Proverbs, though not one of them is by Solomon, and in his lighter … spells penned his erotic Canticles, which … would be really unmailable under the Postal laws if they weren’t in the Holy Bible and clerically captioned ‘The Church’s Love unto Christ.’ These are indeed but one collection out of the great many pornographic stories of The Holy Ghost’s Decameron, enshrined in God’s Holy Word for delectation of the Puritans of Faith. Other divinely inspired and anonymous writers, falsely entitling their effusions under the names of this or that Prophet, or other wholly fictitious personage, as Job, Esther, Ruth, Daniel. Gave forth yet other inspired histories, books of oracles or prophecies, apocalypses or high powered visions into Futurity, and a miscellany of sacred novels, love-stories and nondescript musings or ravings known collectively as the … holy writings of the Jews.” (Pg. 134)
He points out, “Half a hundred of false and forged Apostolic ‘Gospels of Jesus Christ,’ together with more numerous other ‘Scripture’ forgeries, was the output, so far as known now, of the lying pens of the pious Christians of the first two centuries of the Christian ‘Age of Apocryphal Literature]… Individual Gospels were forged in the names of each of the Twelve Apostles, severally, and a joint fabrication under the name of ‘The Gospel of the Twelve,’ was put into the mouths of the twelve Apostles, using the first person to give the ear-marks of authenticity to their forged utterances… Several seem to have been fathered upon Matthew besides the one that wrongly heads the list of the ‘canonical Four,’ such as the Gospel of Matthias, Traditions of Matthias, also a supposed and probably non-existent writing in Hebrew hypothesized as the basic document of the Four…” (Pg. 177-178)
He says of the Great Commission [Mt 28:18-20; Mk 16:15-16], “This ‘command’ could only have been ‘interpolated’ into the forged ending of Matthew and Mark long after the original form of the tradition of Jesus had been first written, and when the ‘second coming’ in the ‘Kingdom of God’ and the immediate ‘end of the world’ had become impossible of further credit by lapse of long years of time and disappointed expectation. It could only have been written after the gospel of the ‘Kingdom’ for the Jews had failed, and the apostles had ‘turned to the Gentiles,’ which was not, even on the face of Scripture, until after the so-called ‘Council of Jerusalem,’ when the Jewish apostles, after bitter quarrel with the interloper Paul, had recognized Paul’s pretended ‘revelation’ of mission to the Gentiles and had parceled out the propaganda work, Paul to the uncircumcised Gentiles, all the others… to the ‘circumcision’ only.” (Pg. 335)
He asserts, “The ‘lying wonders’ of saints, martyrs and miracles are so intimately related, and so inextricably interwoven the one form of pious fraud with the others, that they must needs be bunched together in this summary treatment of but few out of countless thousands, millions perhaps, of them recorded for faith and edification in the innumerable ‘Acts’ and ‘Lives’ and wonder-works of the Holy Church of God. Those which are here mentioned are picked at random from a turning of the pages of the fifteen ponderous tomes of [The Catholic Encyclopedia], where they may be verified under the respective names of the Saints. With scarcely an exception they are soberly recounted as actual verities of the past the living realities of the present.” (Pg. 398)
He adds, “Without comment we let [The Catholic Encyclopedia] record for the faith of its readers, several of the very notable and most remunerative Relics treasured by Holy Church. That they are all impossible, all are bogus, all crude forgeries and fakes only possible of credit by the most credulous child-minds, needs no comment. The sordid debasement of the human mind to the degree of credulity here displayed, the crass dishonesty of the false pretenses which give credit to these things for purposes of extortion from silly dupes of religion, the vastness of the grand larceny thus perpetuated in the name of God---are beyond orderly comment.” (Pg. 425-426)
He comments, “The last sentence of the clerical admission… ‘the healing power of nature,’ bears destructively upon one of the most insistent of religious superstitions, the efficiency of prayers, and saints, and relics, and shrines, and pious mummeries, to which millions of the afflicted and deluded of God’s children resort for the relief of their torments and the cure of their diseases—which their loving Father God inflicts or prevents… the priests and parsons and charlatans of every stripe preach and encourage this ancient heathen superstition---and reap rich rewards through the imposture. The perfectly natural cause and explanation of numerous occasional instances of success at the game, which incites to further superstition and greater abuses, is curiously but truly confessed…” (Pg. 574)
He concludes, “It remains yet to complete the good work for civilization and humanity by destroying the last lingering works and delusions of decadent and decayed priestcraft…. A new and free Civilization rises from the ruins of the Ages of Faith… it hails the glorious possibilities of the scientific Age of Reason, which will redeem humanity from the blight of the centuries of Unreason. Men may now know and freely and unafraid make known the truth, and the Truth shall make mankind free.” (Pg. 582-583)
This work will primarily interest those studying the recent history and development of skeptical treatments of Christianity.
March 1, 2014
i really want to love this, but its ambitious argument is not well substantiated by the inadequate citation protocol that author has adopted.
bracketing this issue, text advances the argument that numerous moments of scripture are a mix of plagiarisms from more ancient items, mixed with fabricated interpolations. one nifty thesis is that the four canonical gospels were selected specifically to placate one of the four big churches (Rome, Jerusalem, Ephesus, Antioch) because its preferred gospel fought against its local heretical rival.
bracketing this issue, text advances the argument that numerous moments of scripture are a mix of plagiarisms from more ancient items, mixed with fabricated interpolations. one nifty thesis is that the four canonical gospels were selected specifically to placate one of the four big churches (Rome, Jerusalem, Ephesus, Antioch) because its preferred gospel fought against its local heretical rival.
August 29, 2015
Even though much of what Wheless says is true, he sites some things without citation or credible reference. Much of the material is dated and of little use anymore. I have chosen to terminate my reading of this book so as not to cloud my information.
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