Lying for God
02 Oct '12 07:49"Clearly the Christians have used ... myths ... in fabricating the story of Jesus' birth ... It is clear to me that the writings of the Christians are a lie and that your fables are not well-enough constructed to conceal this monstrous fiction.'
– Celsus (On The True Doctrine, c178 AD)
Celsus was one of the foremost thinkers of his age. His critique of the Christians was so damaging that Christians destroyed every copy of his work they could find."
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‘There is nothing so easy as by sheer volubility to deceive a common crowd or an uneducated congregation.’
– St. Jerome (Epistle to Nepotian, Lii, 8.)
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Would the partisans of Christ have set out deliberately to lie? Were they such barefaced charlatans that they concocted falsehoods and deceits merely to advance themselves and their designs? By their own admission, YES they were. They may well have been believers, in that they held to a certain faith. On this was built the fanaticism either to die, or to kill others, for that faith. But faith absolves the believer from any fidelity to objective truth.
God's Truth – Lies
Religious fantasy advances in small steps by which those who already ‘see a higher truth’ help the less gifted to achieve that sublime state by using various devices. In Jewish tradition, one such a device was ‘midrash’, the teasing out of new, contemporary meanings from antique, sacred texts. By such means, the scribes could resolve a current issue by interpreting what the scripture had ‘really meant’ all along. Was that a lie?
False accreditation was another much used method, common practice during antiquity. Most of the texts in both the Hebrew bible and the New Testament were forged in the names of their authors to give them ‘authority.’ This merely helped others recognise 'the higher truths' presented to them. Who could argue with Solomon, say, or Apostles of the Lord?
A Labyrinth of Deceit
One of the most inveterate forms of imaginative creation was the invention of sayings and whole speeches which, just as fiction-writers do today, they put entire into the mouths of the personages of whom they were writing. Thus, in the Gospel of John, chapters 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 are almost one continuous verbatim monologue – all three thousand six hundred words of it! – supposedly uttered by the godman, a truly remarkable instance of total recall by the fabled octogenarian author!
More at:
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/lying.htm
– Celsus (On The True Doctrine, c178 AD)
Celsus was one of the foremost thinkers of his age. His critique of the Christians was so damaging that Christians destroyed every copy of his work they could find."
******
‘There is nothing so easy as by sheer volubility to deceive a common crowd or an uneducated congregation.’
– St. Jerome (Epistle to Nepotian, Lii, 8.)
*******
Would the partisans of Christ have set out deliberately to lie? Were they such barefaced charlatans that they concocted falsehoods and deceits merely to advance themselves and their designs? By their own admission, YES they were. They may well have been believers, in that they held to a certain faith. On this was built the fanaticism either to die, or to kill others, for that faith. But faith absolves the believer from any fidelity to objective truth.
God's Truth – Lies
Religious fantasy advances in small steps by which those who already ‘see a higher truth’ help the less gifted to achieve that sublime state by using various devices. In Jewish tradition, one such a device was ‘midrash’, the teasing out of new, contemporary meanings from antique, sacred texts. By such means, the scribes could resolve a current issue by interpreting what the scripture had ‘really meant’ all along. Was that a lie?
False accreditation was another much used method, common practice during antiquity. Most of the texts in both the Hebrew bible and the New Testament were forged in the names of their authors to give them ‘authority.’ This merely helped others recognise 'the higher truths' presented to them. Who could argue with Solomon, say, or Apostles of the Lord?
A Labyrinth of Deceit
One of the most inveterate forms of imaginative creation was the invention of sayings and whole speeches which, just as fiction-writers do today, they put entire into the mouths of the personages of whom they were writing. Thus, in the Gospel of John, chapters 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 are almost one continuous verbatim monologue – all three thousand six hundred words of it! – supposedly uttered by the godman, a truly remarkable instance of total recall by the fabled octogenarian author!
More at:
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/lying.htm
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