Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [18]
It has never been only nonbelieving detractors who have made such allegations of falsification and deceit by the biblical writers. Indeed, those individuals who concocted some of the hundreds of "alternative" gospels and epistles being circulated during the first several centuries even admitted that they forged the texts. Of these numerous manuscripts, the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges, as quoted by Wheless:
Enterprising spirits responded to this natural craving by pretended gospels full of romantic fables, and fantastic and striking details; their fabrications were eagerly read and accepted as true by common folk who were devoid of any critical faculty and who were predisposed to believe what so luxuriously fed their pious curiosity. Both Catholics and Gnostics were concerned in writing these fictions. The former had no motive other than that of a PIOUS FRAUD.13
Forgery during the first centuries of the Church's existence was thus admittedly rampant, so common in fact that this phrase, "pious fraud," was coined to describe it. Furthermore, while admitting that the Catholics were engaged in fraud, the Catholic Encyclopedia is also implying that the Gnostics were truthful in regard to the fictitious and allegorical nature of their texts. Regarding this Catholic habit of fraud, Mangasarian states in The Truth about Jesus:
The church historian, Mosheim, writes that, "The Christian Fathers deemed it a pious act to employ deception and fraud." .. . Again, he says: "The greatest and most pious teachers were nearly all of them infected with this leprosy." Will not some believer tell us why forgery and fraud were necessary to prove the historicity of Jesus. . . . Another historian, Milman, writes that, "Pious fraud was admitted and avowed by the early missionaries of Jesus." "It was an age of literary frauds," writes Bishop Ellicott, speaking of the times immediately following the alleged crucifixion of Jesus. Dr. Giles declares that, "There can be no doubt that great numbers of books were written with no other purpose than to deceive." And it is the opinion of Dr. Robertson Smith that, "There was an enormous floating mass of spurious literature created to suit party views."14
So fundamental to "the faith" was fraud that Wheless remarked:
The clerical confessions of lies and frauds in the ponderous volumes of the Catholic Encyclopedia alone suffice . . . to wreck the Church and to destroy utterly the Christian religion.... The Church exists mostly for wealth and self-aggrandizement; to quit paying money to the priests would kill the whole scheme in a couple of years. This is the sovereign remedy.15
According to Christian father and Church historian Eusebius (260?-340?), Bishop of Corinth Dionysius lashed out against forgers who had mutilated not only his letters but the gospels themselves:
When my fellow-Christians invited me to write letters to them I did so. These the devil's apostles have filled with tares, taking away some things and adding others.... Small wonder then if some have dared to tamper even with the word of the Lord Himself, when they have conspired to mutilate my own humble efforts. 16
These statements by Dionysius imply that the letters and gospels were mutilated by his "fellow-Christians" themselves, as the letters were presumably in their possession, unless they were hijacked along the way by some other "devil's apostles," and as the "the word of the Lord" certainly was in the possession of Christians and no others.
In addition, a number of the fathers, such as Eusebius himself, were determined by their own peers to be unbelievable liars who regularly wrote their own fictions of what "the Lord" said and did during "his" alleged sojourn upon the earth. In one of his works, Eusebius provides a handy chapter entitled: "How it may be Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as Medicine, and