Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [22]
In The Myth of the Historical Jesus, Hayyim ben Yehoshua evinces that the orthodox dates of the Pauline epistles (c. 49-70) cannot be maintained, also introducing one of the most important individuals in the formation of Christianity, the Gnostic-Christian "heretic" Marcion of Pontus (c. 100-160), a well-educated "man of letters" who entered the brotherhood and basically took the reins of the fledgling Gnostic-Christian movement:
We now turn to the epistles supposedly written by Paul. The First Epistle of Paul to Timothy warns against the Marcionist work known as the Antithesis. Marcion was expelled from the Church of Rome in c. 144 C.E. and the First Epistle of Paul to Timothy was written shortly afterwards. Thus we again have a clear case of pseudepigraphy. The Second Epistle of Paul to Timothy and the Epistle of Paul to Titus were written by the same author and date to about the same period. These three epistles are known as the "pastoral epistles." The ten remaining "nonpastoral" epistles written in the name of Paul, were known to Marcion by c. 140 C.E. Some of them were not written in Paul's name alone but are in the form of letters written by Paul in collaboration with various friends such as Sosthenes, Timothy, and Silas.... The non-canonical First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (written c. 125 C.E.) uses the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians as a source and so we can narrow down the date for that epistle to c. 100-125 C.E. However, we are left with the conclusion that all the Pauline epistles are pseudepigraphic. (The semi-mythical Paul was supposed to have died during the persecutions instigated by Nero in c. 64 C.E.) Some of the Pauline epistles appear to be have been altered and edited numerous times before reaching their modern forms. . . . We may thus conclude that they provide no historical evidence of Jesus.
It is clear that the epistles do not demonstrate a historical Jesus and are not as early as they are pretended to be, written or edited by a number of hands over several decades during the second century, such that the "historical" Jesus apparently was not even known at that late point. As is also evidenced, these texts were further mutilated over the centuries.
The Gospels
Although they are held up by true believers to be the "inspired" works of the apostles, the canonical gospels were forged at the end of the 2nd century, all four of them probably between 170-180, a date that just happens to correspond with the establishment of the orthodoxy and supremacy of the Roman Church. Despite the claims of apostolic authorship, the gospels were not mere translations of manuscripts written in Hebrew or Aramaic by Jewish apostles, because they were originally written in Greek. As Waite relates:
It is noticeable that in every place in the gospels but one (and the total number is nearly a hundred) where Peter is mentioned, the Greek name "Petros" is given, which is supposed to be used by Jews as well as others. This would indicate that all the canonical gospels, Matthew included, are original Greek productions.9
Of these Greek texts and their pretended apostolic attribution, Wells states:
a Galilean fisherman could not have written what KQmmel calls such "cultivated Greek," with "many rhetorical devices," and with all the Old Testament quotations and allusions deriving from the Greek version of these scriptures, not from the Hebrew original. 10
Furthermore, as stated and as is also admitted by the writer of Luke when he says that there were many versions of "the narrative," there were numerous gospels in circulation prior to the composition of his gospel. In fact, of the dozens of gospels that existed during the first centuries of the Christian era, several once considered canonical or genuine were later rejected as "apocryphal" or spurious, and vice versa.
Out of these numerous gospels the canonical gospels were chosen by Church father and bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus (c. 120-c. 200), who claimed that the number four was based on the "four corners of the world." In reality,