When I was growing up in the 70’s, we sat in church listening to pastors tell us to open our Bibles to the Gospel of Matthew, or Mark, or John. Then these pastors would tell us, “Matthew tells us that …” And this is pretty much how things went on into the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s when I found myself sitting in various churches from Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Assemblies of God, and Adventist.
What I never realized sitting in Church, what I was never told sitting in Church, was that the authors of the Bible’s books are NOT who the Church claims them to be.
In a nutshell,
- the Apostle Matthew is not the author of the Gospel According to Matthew;
- the Apostle Mark is not the author of the Gospel According to Mark;
- the Apostle John is not the author of the Gospel According to John;
- the Apostle Peter is not the author of the Books of Peter;
- the Book of Hebrews has an utterly unknown author.
These are not just my opinion. Ask ANY honest professor or pastor with an M. Div. or Ph.D. from any Christian seminary on the planet and they will tell you, “Yes, that’s correct, NONE of these apostles actually wrote these books.” The operative word here is “honest” when referring to a pastor or scholar.
These are not “Liberal” or “modern” theologians who will tell the truth about these books’ illegitimate authorship; they are HONEST Conservative scholars and theologians throughout our Protestant Christian history who will tell you this.
Some evangelical or dishonest seminaries still teach (they “believe”) that the Apostle John really wrote the gospel book that bears his name, but they are in the minority of modern Christian thought, current science, and historical archeology and paleography. Just because you really, really want to believe the lie, does not suddenly make it truth.
Spinning the Lie to Make it Believable
Once you open this line of questioning with a pastor or someone educated in Christian leadership, you are going to get huge pushback from whomever you have just opened this can of worms with.
You’ll also likely get bullied with the “believe it or you’re going to hell” balderdash. Take note that bullying only works on uneducated laity. Just try this bullying bullshit with a real Christian scholar and they will laugh you out of the building as the idiot that you are making yourself into.
But Christian laity are waking up within the Information Age. We are slowly becoming aware that the books of the Bible are indeed forgeries. As such, the Church is scrambling to come up with new and innovative EXCUSES to dismiss the newly discovered lie as not really being a lie.
You’ll get EXCUSES like:
- The early Church Fathers believed … or early Christians believed …
The question to ask is WHICH early Christians? There were dozens of early Christian factions coming out of the first century. The Catholic Church was but one very small one based not in Jerusalem, but in Rome. Later on, so-called early Christians under Constantine believed what they were TOLD by the Catholic Church. Using the people in-charge of perpetrating the lie as the source of your legitimacy doesn’t work. Two lies do not the truth make. - The gospel books were written by “eyewitnesses” of the Apostles.
This is pure hog wash. If you don’t know who the original author is, you are not going to know who the so-called “eyewitnesses” are either. This isa fallacy argument that is just as much of a lie as the original lie. - It’s not really a lie. We’ve known this all along.
More BS. Pastors preach from these books saying that Matthew wrote whatever! Or John wrote whatever. We use these books as our authority on who Jesus was and what GOD is like! If they are forged, then the whole premise of their authority is a lie the church was hiding. The reason they were hiding it was because they knew you would not believe them if the book had been written by some guy named “Bob” in John’s name. Who the hell is “Bob”? - All of the Bible’s authors are unknown so it’s okay.
No. It’s not okay! Authority is based on verification of someone who actually walked with Jesus and was called by them! If we don’t really know who the real author is, then the book is utterly without merit in terms of its authority! This is the category the the Book of Hebrews falls into. - God Created / Assembled the Bible!
No, GOD did not! This is just another lie of the Church attempting to legitimize its own beliefs and decisions buried within its own man-made traditions. Nowhere in the scriptures does GOD ever demand that man assemble a Bible. - How dare you question “God’s Word”!
This is the biggest self-serving lie of them all. And it’s the Church’s primary bullying tactic. The Bible is not “God’s Word”. GOD did not assemble the Bible! The lying Church did and then the same liars demanded that you believe the words they put into the mouth of GOD. Nowhere within scripture does GOD ever say, “assemble a bible”. The Church invented their NT Bible c. 140 CE, the Church put into it whatever these Pagan leaders wanted, and then the Church demanded that it was GOD who led them to insert their pet paganism into their tome.
The bottom line is that credible Christian scholars know that the aforementioned books of the Bible are complete and utter FORGERIES.
In the scholastic world, scholars use a fancy term known as pseudepigrapha to describe these books as “written in the name of” someone famed. But at the end of the day, when you remove the excuses and hyperbole piled on by the Church trying to maintain its lie, these books are little more than complete FORGERIES.
LIES, forged books, are saddled in the middle of the “inerrant”, “infallible”, and “wholly inspired” Bible!
Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
GOD Does Not Need To Lie—But the Church Does
GOD did not perpetrate this lie—the Church did, that is, lying founders of the early Roman Catholic Church did. And you and I are still believing them!
“Well, Keith, we have to trust someone!? The people closest to the source are the best bet!”
- This is a fallacy argument as well. The point is, the founders of the Roman Catholic Church were not Jewish, they were PAGAN, that is “Gentile”. As such, they ensconced within their Bible ONLY those books that supported their pagan versionof their pagan Jesus and pagan gospel—namely the Gospel of Paul.
Pau’s Gospel and the Gospel of Jesus and the Twelve were not the same. Paul even admits to such in his own letters.
So what kind of “geniuses” were the early Church Fathers anyway? The Church, including the Protestant Church, is fond of quoting “early Christians” as the source of their fundamentalism and beliefs. So let’s look at the kind of “scholarship” we get from the people who assembled the Bible.
Irenaeus was a late 2nd century early Church leader whom a lot of Christians like to quote as their primary apologist in defense of the Bible’s books. Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, and was Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul within the Roman Empire (now Lyons, France). He was an early Christian apologist whose writings were formative in the early development of (Pagan, Roman Catholic) Christian theology. Irenaeus said of the 4 Gospels,
“It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are, since there are four directions of the world in which we are, and four principle winds … The four living creatures [of Rev. 4:9] symbolize the four Gospels … and there were four principle covenants made with humanity, through Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Christ.” —METZGER, Bruce, The Canon of the New Testament, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 154–155
“Since there are four directions of the world, and four principle winds, the four living creatures…” SERIOUSLY! This is what passes for early Christian apologetics (proof) in the ancient Roman Catholic world! This ridiculous statement, were it to be uttered in any church or seminary today, would get you laughed out of the building by any pastor or Christian scholar. But yet, people today just “buy it” because they are told to respect the early “Church Fathers” as some kind of inspired demigods, no matter what dimwitted things they’ve said.
All Scripture is Not God-Breathed.
You’ve heard this many, many times:
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness …” 2 Timothy 3:16
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard Christian pastors and then laypeople parrot this passage as their proof text of the whole Bible being “God-breathed”.
“See! The Bible proves itself!”
No, it doesn’t.
Here’s the problem: Context.
Paul wrote this letter to Timothy nearly a century before Marcion would even assemble his first Christian canon of “Scripture” in c. 140 CE. In other words, the Bible as a compendium didn’t even exist when Paul was talking about “Scripture” being “God-breathed”!
If anything, Paul was ONLY talking about the Jewish “Scriptures”. And in his day, these were a loose collection of books that comprised Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, books that would eventually become the Jewish Tanakh, or what Christians disparagingly and errantly refer to all the time as the “Old Contract”, “Old Covenant”, or “Old Testament”.
And as bad as Paul quotes Torah, he likely wasn’t reading the Hebrew version, but rather the Greek translation we know as the LXX.
Note that the whole idea of an Old versus New Testament was first coined by another early Roman Catholic rock star by the name of Melito of Sardis, in the 2nd century CE.
God wasn’t the one who divided the Bible between Old and New — the Catholic Church owns that LIE as well.
So, it was not God who divided the Bible between Old and New Contracts (Testaments). Men did that. Specifically, Pagan Roman Catholic men; and then their error was picked up by reforming Protestants some 1,400 years later.
And now you’re beginning to see why the Protestant Church has become little more than Roman Catholic Lite.
We’re using the Catholic Church’s Pagan Bible and believing in their version of Jesus because of what these Pagan Romans put into their Bible.
When Paul says “Scripture”, the Bible as we know it today did not exist yet as a canonized compendium. In fact, some of the Gospels, like the Gospel of John, and other books had not even been written yet when Paul penned these words to Timothy about all scripture being God-breathed!
As such, all Paul was referring to as “God-breathed” were the loose collection of books the Jews knew as Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. The so-called New Testament canon didn’t even exist yet.
Attempting to prove a 16th century belief about a 4th century book using a 1st century quote — isn’t going to fly.
Finally, let’s get real. We use Paul’s own words to somehow prove that his own letters are “scripture” as well.
Wait—what?
Yes. Paul’s letters are considered “scripture” by the Church. Paul may have been boastful and even arrogant and cocky, but he was NEVER referring to his own letters as “Scripture”. That is something, again, the Church has added as its own man-made tradition and then created a half-truth, a lie, to make it look like Paul was referring to “the whole Bible”.
The Lying Books of Peter
Since the Reformation, scholars have long known that the books of Peter were at best meddled with and at worst, outright forgeries designed with the sole purpose of supporting a charlatan apostle, namely Paul, who had no relationship whatsoever with the Super Apostles, and no relationship with the ONE Super Apostle whom he hated — namely Peter.
To somehow give itself authority among the plethora of other so-called Jewish Christian denominations growing in and around the Roman Empire after the first century, the Pagan (Gentile) Church in Rome needed to create a clear line of succession giving them the authority of the Super Apostles through Paul (the so-called “Apostle to the Gentiles”) and it would be the lying books of Peter that would accomplish this necessary task.
Not many of us realize this or even care after 2,000 years of entrenched Pagan Church tradition; but legally, if you will, without Peter’s endorsement, Paul’s Apostolic Credentials, so to speak, rest solely upon himself. He has NO link to Jesus, no witnesses, save his own. Paul has NO TIES to the Jerusalem Synagogue without the endorsement of Peter.
None.
In other words, Paul is his ONLY witness. Paul absolutely needs the endorsement of Peter; without it, he’s seen as the interloper that he truthfully is.
So, let’s first look at the book of 1 Peter. The reason many scholars contend that the book of 1 Peter is not the work of the famed Apostle is not only because of the deeply Pauline doctrines the book espouses, but also because the Greek of 1 Peter is not just good, but exceptional. It is, in fact, some of the best Greek in all the New Testament. Its sheer eloquence surpasses that of the well-educated prose of Paul and is simply not the work of a simple Galilean fisherman.
F.W. Beare observes:
“The epistle is quite obviously the work of a man of letters, skilled in all the devices of rhetoric, and able to draw on an extensive, and very learned, vocabulary. He is a stylist of no ordinary capacity, and he writes some of the best Greek in the whole New Testament, far smoother and more literary than that of the highly-trained Paul.” —BARCLAY, William, The Daily Bible Study Series, The Letters of James and Peter, Introduction to Peter (1), p. 142
Even causal readers of the book will point to the fact that of course Peter didn’t write it, the book itself states that Peter dictated it to someone named Silvanus. (1 Peter 5:12) This easily explains why the Greek can be so exceptional.
Okay, but just who is this Silvanus?
Silvanus is simply the proper name for Silas; the same Silas found traveling with Paul in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. (2 Corinthians; 1–2 Thessalonians)
Now the brake lights go on.
To any everyday Christian this appears to be no big deal. Paul and Silas and Peter were all buddies! Right?
Not. Even.
While we in the uneducated Christian world will just assume that it would have been no big deal for Peter to ask Silas to write his letter, such a notion stirs rebuttals of deep dissent within highly trained scholastic circles. Scholars know a lot more about the history of these men than you and I ever will hear from the pulpit.
This is yet another lie of the Church, that Peter and Paul were best buddies. Just so you and I know, Peter and Paul being on the same page preaching the same Gospel is a lie. Paul and the Apostles were not buddies. They were, in fact, bitter adversaries. I wrote an article about this as well, see below:
Does the Christian Church Really “Believe In” Jesus?
Considering the deep conflicts over the keeping of the Law between the Apostles and Paul’s group (which included Silas), the heavily contradictory Pauline theology being espoused by the books of 1 & 2 Peter, and the admission that Silas was not just the stenographer but the literary architect of the Greek of 1 Peter, well-educated scholars find it very difficult to see how this book is anything other than a complete work of outright fraud.
In other words, Peter did not write the letter NOR did he dictate its contents.
The Jerusalem Synagogue (Church) was large and well known in the latter part of the 1st century. Peter had at his disposal any number of very well-educated people in Jerusalem to whom he could tap to dictate his letters in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, or Latin. He did not need Paul’s sidekick Silas — and in fact would have likely regarded Silas utterly untrustworthy as part of Paul’s rogue group.
Other Bible scholars are of this same understanding:
One cannot save Petrine authorship by arguing that Peter employed a secretary. If one argues that this secretary was Silvanus, the traveling companion of Paul (eg. Selwyn 1958) or an anonymous amanuensis of the Roman church (Michaels 1988) the letter then becomes the product not of Peter, but of the secretary, since it is the latter’s language that the epistle exhibits (see Beare 1970). —EVE, Eric, The Oxford Bible Commentary, p. 1263
Other evidence contained within the book itself testifies against 1 Peter being a book that was actually written or even dictated by Peter.
W.G. Kümmel observes:
I Peter presupposes the Pauline theology. This is true not only in the general sense that the Jewish-Christian readers, the ‘people of God’ (2:10), are no longer concerned about the problem of the fulfillment of the Law, but also in the special sense that, as in Paul, the death of Jesus has atoned for the sins of Christians and has accomplished justification (1:18 f; 2:24). Christians are to suffer with Christ (4:13; 5:1), obedience to the civil authorities is demanded (2:14 f), and the Pauline formula en XRISTW is encountered (3:16; 5:10, 14).
The frequently advanced proposal that I Peter is literarily dependent on Romans (and Ephesians) is improbable because the linguistic contacts can be explained on the basis of a common catechetical tradition. But there can be no doubt that the author of I Peter stands in the line of succession of Pauline theology, and that is scarcely conceivable for Peter, who at the time of Gal 2:11 was able in only a very unsure way to follow the Pauline basic principle of freedom from the Law for Gentile Christians. —KÜMMEL, WG, Introduction to the New Testament, p. 424
The Book of 2 Peter exhibits even deeper problems. Even as late as the Reformation era c. 1540 CE, not even John Calvin believed that Peter wrote the book of 2 Peter! In the modern era, William Barclay notes within his Daily Bible Study Series that it is difficult to believe that 2 Peter was actually written by Peter the Apostle:
It is the well-nigh universal judgment of scholars, both ancient and modern, that Peter is not the author of Second Peter. Even John Calvin regarded it as impossible that Peter could have spoken of Paul as Second Peter speak of him (3:15–16), although he [Calvin] was willing to believe that someone else wrote the letter at Peter’s request. —BARCLAY, William, The Daily Bible Study Series, The Letters of James and Peter, p. 285
It is clear that these books have been in deep dispute since the Roman Catholic Church added them to their Bible. Even our own modern Christian scholars concur that the people whose names they bear did not actually write them.
However, mainstream Christianity continues to insist that these very doctrinally Pauline books are valid books written by the Apostle Peter. I wrote an entire series on Paul’s disputes with the Super Apostles, you can find that here:
Christianity’s Counterfeit Jesus, Part 1
How The Church Created Its Mythical Charlatan “Jesus”
Today’s evangelists and preachers continue to ignore the very deep historical disputes over such books as completely immaterial, while continuing to insist that such issues have been settled and are therefore no longer issues for our modern laity to review and study.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” to quote the famed classic movie.
Allow me to offer you an axiom: Whenever someone demands that something is “settled” and that you don’t even need to consider it, whether in science or scholarship or politics or whatever, it’s NOT settled. In fact, such a declaration only means that the can of worms needs to re-opened as wide as possible and its contents dumped out into the light of day for all to see.
The truth does not care if or how it is examined. Only the LIE demands that you cannot examine it fully in the light of day.
Conclusion
GOD would not insert lies into a Bible that was supposed to truthfully represent who they truthfully are. But the Bible is chalked full of lies, beginning with FORGED books that are not wholly accurate of who Jesus was and what he actually preached.
The Bible is a wholesale product of the Pagan Roman Catholic Church that assembled and edited its books.
Yes, I would agree that there are many truths and history within the Gospels that we can glean to see glimpses of who and what Jesus and the Apostles really taught.
But we need to heed the counsel of Jesus as recounted by Peter in the non-canonical Clementine Homilies—“Do not believe everything written within the scriptures.”
Then Peter: ‘As to the mixture of truth with falsehood, I remember that on one occasion he [Jesus], finding fault with the Sadducees, said, “Wherefore ye do err, not knowing the true things of the Scriptures; and on this account ye are ignorant of the power of God.” But if he cast up to them that they knew not the true things of the Scriptures, it is manifest that there are false things in them. And also, inasmuch as He said, “Be ye prudent money-changers,” it is because there are genuine and spurious words [written within the scriptures].
And whereas He said, “Wherefore do ye not perceive that which is reasonable in the Scriptures?” He makes the understanding of him stronger who voluntarily judges soundly. And his sending to the scribes and teachers of the existing Scriptures, as to those who knew the true things of the law that then was, is well known. And also that He said, “I am not come to destroy the law,” [Matthew 5:17–20] and yet that He appeared to be destroying it, is the part of one intimating that the things which He destroyed did not belong to the law.
And His saying, “The heaven and the earth shall pass away, but one jot or one tittle shall not pass from the law,” intimated that the things which pass away before the heaven and the earth do not belong to the law in reality. Since, then, while the heaven and the earth still stand, sacrifices have passed away, and kingdoms, and prophecies among those who are born of woman, and such like [kingdoms, prophecies and laws that were merely man-made], as not being ordinances of God.’
At the end of the day, the Church is able to lie to you, pass off half-truths as the Gospel, because you and I didn’t know any better 50 or 100 years ago. Information like this was hidden from us until the dawn of the Information Age.
Now that the stranglehold of information has been removed, the Church is waning, it is losing membership like crazy. Some people think this is because Jesus is coming soon. No, that is not the reason the Church is losing membership. It’s losing membership because the public are waking up; they are done with being lied to. They are done with the hypocrisy and they are done with the Church’s bullying of anyone who doesn’t just roll over and conform to it’s lying gospel and man-made traditions.
When the Church finally pulls its collective head from its blind faith in itself and its pagan beliefs, ONLY THEN will GOD return to the Christian Church. Until then, seek the Heart of GOD on your own and follow the true Gospel of Jesus— “Repent and Live!” (Ezekiel 18)
