Origins of the New Testament
What is the New Testament? Is it the actual ‘Word of God’? According to Christian belief it is. If asked who wrote the New Testament, most Christians will reply, "The New Testament was written by the direct apostles of Jesus.” But is that the fact?

Research scholars have concluded that soon after the death of Jesus there arose a conflict of interests between the original twelve apostles of Jesus [the Judeo-Christians] led by James, the brother of Jesus, on one side and the Gentile-Christians led by Paul on the other. Paul is sometimes called the ‘Apostle’ but this often misleads people to think he was a direct disciple of Jesus, when in fact he was not.

Paul or Paul of Tarsus describes himself in his writings as an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin and a Pharisee. He was born in Tarsus of Cilicia and received a Jewish education. Paul at first persecuted the followers of Jesus but later converted to Judeo-Christianity while on the road to Damascus, wherein he claims to have had a vision of Jesus. For some years Paul traveled in Arabia and preached. Then at Jerusalem he met Saint Peter and James the Just. Later Paul preached extensively among the Gentiles in Greece.

Historically speaking the Judeo-Christians led by James at Jerusalem were a Jewish sect and the followers of Paul [Pauline Christians] were a Jewish heresy. Paul claimed to have met Jesus in a vision but he disagreed with the teachings of the original apostles and of James. Paul introduced his own version of Christianity by adding the conceptions of ‘original sin’ [later elaborated on by Augustine of Hippo] and the pagan ideas of the resurrection, salvation thru the blood of Jesus, salvation by faith not by works, the divinity of Jesus [Jesus as God], the doctrine of the Holy Spirit [later to be developed into the doctrine of the Trinity], etc!

A large number of very recent works based on contemporary discoveries have chronicled the events during this period of Christianity. It was a period of religious controversy leading to the second eventually supplanting the first, and Pauline Christianity triumphed over Judeo-Christianity. It was during this period of in-house fighting that the Gospels were written by anonymous Gentiles to further prove the doctrines of Paul. These Gospels were compiled only after the deaths of Paul and the original apostles.

With the passing of Jesus, the original apostles formed a Jewish sect that remained faithful to the form of worship practiced in the Jewish tradition. However, when the observances of converted Gentiles were added to the ranks a 'special system' was established. The Council of Jerusalem in 49 CE exempted the new converts from circumcision and some Jewish observances.

Many Judeo-Christians, however, complained about the concessions for the Gentiles and insisted that Gentiles fully conform to Jewish law or be rejected. Overall, Paul and the Judeo-Christians were in conflict over the question of pagans who had turned to Christianity. For Paul, the circumcision, Sabbath, and forms of worship practiced in the Jewish temples were henceforth old fashioned. Christianity in Paul’s thinking was to free itself from its political-cum-religious adherence to Judaism and open itself to the Gentiles.

For those Judeo-Christians who remained 'loyal Jews' Paul was a traitor. Judeo-Christian documents call him the 'enemy’ and accuse him of 'tactical double-dealings,' etc.

Until 70 CE Judeo-Christianity represented the majority of the Church and Paul’s following remained a group of isolated rebels. The head of the community in Jerusalem at that time was James, the brother of Jesus. With him were Peter and John. The family of Jesus had a very important place in the Judeo-Christian Church of Jerusalem at the time. James's successor was Simeon, son of Cleopas, a cousin of Jesus. James represented the Judeo-Christian church that deliberately clung to Judaism as opposed to Paul’s followers who renounced Judaism.

Paul is the most controversial figure in Christianity. He was considered to be a traitor to Jesus by the latter's family and by the apostles who had stayed in Jerusalem in the circle around James. Paul created Christianity at the expense of those whom Jesus had gathered around him to spread his teachings. He had not known Jesus during his lifetime but he proved the legitimacy of his mission by declaring that Jesus, raised from the dead had appeared to him on the road to Damascus.

It is quite reasonable to ask what Christianity might have been without Paul and one could no doubt construct all sorts of hypotheses on this subject. As far as the Gospels are concerned however, it is almost certain that if this atmosphere of struggle between communities had not existed, we would not have had the writings we possess today. They appeared at a time of fierce struggle between the two communities. These 'combat writings', emerged from the multitude of writings on Jesus. These occurred at the time when Paul's style of Christianity won through definitively, and created its own collection of official texts. These texts constituted the 'Canon' that condemned and excluded as unorthodox any other documents that were not suited to the line adopted by the Church.

The Judeo-Christians have now disappeared as a community with any influence. When they were cut off from the new church, that gradually freed itself from its Jewish attachments, they faded out very quickly in the West. In the East however it is possible to find traces of them in the third and fourth centuries CE, especially in Palestine, Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Mesopotamia. Also traces of Semitic culture still persist in the church of Ethiopia.

The truth of the matter is not hard to recover, if we examine the New Testament evidence with an eye to tell-tale inconsistencies and confusions.

An interesting quote from Hyam Maccoby (Talmudic Scholar) to relate here is as follows:

"As we have seen, the purposes of the book of Acts is to minimize the conflict between Paul and the leaders of the Jerusalem Church, James and Peter. Peter and Paul, in later Christian tradition, became twin Saints, brothers in faith, and the idea that they were historically bitter opponents standing for irreconcilable religious standpoints would have been repudiated with horror. The work of the author of Acts was well done; he rescued Christianity from the imputation of being the individual creation of Paul, and instead gave it a respectable pedigree, as a doctrine with the authority of the so-called Jerusalem Church, conceived as continuous in spirit with the Pauline Gentile Church of Rome.

“Yet, for all his efforts, the truth of the matter is not hard to recover, if we examine the New Testament evidence with an eye to tell-tale inconsistencies and confusions, rather than with the determination to gloss over and harmonize all difficulties in the interests of an orthodox interpretation.” [The Mythmaker, p. 139, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1986]

By the time of the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, ordered by the Roman Emperor Constantine, Christianity had developed wide differences of opinions within its ranks and many books and parchments in support of each. Constantine called for the council to unite Christianity under one canon with the promise of Christianity becoming a recognized religion in the Roman state.

None of the books of the New Testament were written by anyone who knew Jesus.

At the time of the Council of Nicea, which ‘holy books’ would be admitted to form a new holy scripture and which were to be destroyed was settled — from that the New Testament appeared. The council decided which books were to be admitted and which were not — the method was by vote.

Since the ministry of Paul the world has been misled to believe that the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, etc are actual eyewitness accounts representing the life and teachings of Jesus, when in fact they are not. Indeed, none of the books of the New Testament were written by anyone who knew Jesus.

From the outset, Christian clergy, through a systematic omission of facts, have created a religion based on deception and turned it into a prospering financial and political institution, the Church.

Our conclusion is that the New Testament cannot be taken as an accurate account of the life of Jesus. The New Testament is either hearsay at best [handed down with a bias to support Paul] or wholly interpolations at worst. In either case, the New Testament falls short of being acceptable to us as the “Word of God.”

Councils of Nicea and Laodicea, voted the books that now compose what is called the New Testament to be the Word of God.

Regarding disbelief in the ‘Bible,’ the famous American statesman Thomas Paine has left us the following choice words in a letter to a Christian friend who was trying to convert him to Christianity [May 12,1797].

"In your letter of the twentieth of March, you give me several quotations from the Bible, which you call the “Word of God,” to show me that my opinions on religion are wrong, and I could give you as many, from the same book to show that yours are not right; consequently, then, the Bible decides nothing, because it decides any way, and every way, one chooses to make it.

"But by what authority do you call the Bible the Word of God? For this is the first point to be settled. It is not your calling it so that makes it so, any more than the Mohammedans calling the Koran the Word of God makes the Koran to be so. The Popish Councils of Nicea and Laodicea, about 350 years after the time the person called Jesus Christ is said to have lived, voted the books that now compose what is called the New Testament to be the Word of God. This was done by yeas and nays, as we now vote a law.

"The Pharisees of the second temple, after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, did the same by the books that now compose the Old Testament, and this is all the authority there is, which to me is no authority at all. I am as capable of judging for myself as they were, and I think more so, because, as they made a living by their religion, they had a self-interest in the vote they gave.

"You may have an opinion that a man is inspired, but you cannot prove it, nor can you have any proof of it yourself, because you cannot see into his mind in order to know how he comes by his thoughts; and the same is the case with the word revelation. There can be no evidence of such a thing, for you can no more prove revelation than you can prove what another man dreams of, neither can he prove it himself.

"It is often said in the Bible that God spoke unto Moses, but how do you know that God spoke unto Moses? Because, you will say, the Bible says so. The Koran says, that God spoke unto Mohammad, do you believe that too? No.

"Why not? Because, you will say, you do not believe it; and so because you do, and because you don't is all the reason you can give for believing or disbelieving except that you will say that Mohammad was an impostor. And how do you know Moses was not an impostor?

The Bible represents God to be a changeable, passionate, vindictive being.

"For my own part, I believe that all are impostors who pretend to hold verbal communication with the Deity. It is the way by which the world has been imposed upon; but if you think otherwise you have the same right to your opinion that I have to mine, and must answer for it in the same manner. But all this does not settle the point, whether the Bible be the Word of God, or not. It is therefore necessary to go a step further. The case then is:

"You form your opinion of God from the account given of Him in the Bible; and I form my opinion of the Bible from the wisdom and goodness of God manifested in the structure of the universe, and in all works of creation. The result in these two cases will be, that you, by taking the Bible for your standard, will have a bad opinion of God; and I, by taking God for my standard, shall have a bad opinion of the Bible.

"The Bible represents God to be a changeable, passionate, vindictive being; making a world and then drowning it, afterwards repenting of what he had done, and promising not to do so again. Setting one nation to cut the throats of another, and stopping the course of the sun till the butchery should be done. But the works of God in the creation preach to us another doctrine. In that vast volume we see nothing to give us the idea of a changeable, passionate, vindictive God; everything we there behold impresses us with a contrary idea — that of unchangeableness and of eternal order, harmony, and goodness.

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder.

"The sun and the seasons return at their appointed time, and everything in the creation claims that God is unchangeable. Now, which am I to believe, a book that any impostor might make and call the Word of God, or the creation itself which none but an Almighty Power could make? For the Bible says one thing, and the creation says the contrary. The Bible represents God with all the passions of a mortal, and the creation proclaims him with all the attributes of a God.

"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man. That bloodthirsty man, called the prophet Samuel, makes God to say, (I Sam. xv. 3) `Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.'

It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.

"That Samuel or some other impostor might say this, is what, at this distance of time, can neither be proved nor disproved, but in my opinion it is blasphemy to say, or to believe, that God said it. All our ideas of the justice and goodness of God revolt at the impious cruelty of the Bible. It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.

"What makes this pretended order to destroy the Amalekites appear the worse, is the reason given for it. The Amalekites, four hundred years before, according to the account in Exodus xvii. (but which has the appearance of fable from the magical account it gives of Moses holding up his hands), had opposed the Israelites coming into their country, and this the Amalekites had a right to do, because the Israelites were the invaders, as the Spaniards were the invaders of Mexico. This opposition by the Amalekites, at that time, is given as a reason, that the men, women, infants and sucklings, sheep and oxen, camels and asses, that were born four hundred years afterward, should be put to death; and to complete the horror, Samuel hewed Agag, the chief of the Amalekites, in pieces, as you would hew a stick of wood. I will bestow a few observations on this case.

As I never will believe any book that ascribes cruelty and injustice to God, I therefore reject the Bible as unworthy of credit.

"In the first place, nobody knows who the author, or writer, of the book of Samuel was, and, therefore, the fact itself has no other proof than anonymous or hearsay evidence, which is no evidence at all. In the second place, this anonymous book says, that this slaughter was done by the express command of God: but all our ideas of the justice and goodness of God give the lie to the book, and as I never will believe any book that ascribes cruelty and injustice to God, I therefore reject the Bible as unworthy of credit.

"As I have now given you my reasons for believing that the Bible is not the Word of God, that it is a falsehood, I have a right to ask you your reasons for believing the contrary; but I know you can give me none, except that you were educated to believe the Bible; and as the Turks give the same reason for believing the Koran, it is evident that education makes all the difference, and that reason and truth have nothing to do in the case.

"You believe in the Bible from the accident of birth, and the Turks believe in the Koran from the same accident, and each calls the other infidel. But leaving the prejudice of education out of the case, the unprejudiced truth is, that all are infidels who believe falsely of God, whether they draw their creed from the Bible, or from the Koran, from the Old Testament, or from the New.

My disbelief of the Bible is founded on a pure and religious belief in God. — Thomas Paine

"When you have examined the Bible with the attention that I have done (for I do not think you know much about it), and permit yourself to have just ideas of God, you will most probably believe as I do. But I wish you to know that this answer to your letter is not written for the purpose of changing your opinion. It is written to satisfy you, and some other friends whom I esteem, that my disbelief of the Bible is founded on a pure and religious belief in God; for in my opinion the Bible is a gross libel against the justice and goodness of God, in almost every part of it." [Thomas Paine]

The Editors