INTERNAL EVIDENCE THAT NEW TESTAMENT HIDDEN

PREFACE
 
If we could be sure that the four New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were censored or largely censored during the first few decades of their appearance we reduce the already weak evidence for the claims the Church makes for the sinister Jesus Christ considerably. And we can be sure. There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who would have been able to refute the gospels had access to them and there is plenty of evidence that the gospels were kept out of their clutches. Most Christian argumentation in favour of Jesus Christ being a real person and a good man and a miracle worker comes from the idea that the gospels were public and well known and weren’t debunked by people who thought otherwise. They say for example that if the claims about Jesus in St John’s gospel were false this would have been shouted from the rooftops and his gospel would have been forgotten. Even today most miracle claims are not taken seriously enough to be debunked and nobody has the time to study them all. So had the gospels been produced and published much earlier they could still contain a lot of lies. The lies would be easier the longer publication was delayed. Why didn't the writers shorten their material and leave out most of the miracle tales? They didn't because they were restricting what went public and no worries about telling outright lies.

ANONYMITY PROVES HIDDEN

The Gospels never say who wrote them.

The suggestion of some that this was so that attention would not be focused on the authors but on the subject is sheer lunacy. Not knowing who the authors were is not going to stop people being obsessed with knowing about the kind of person who had done the writing and who that person may have been. The accuracy of the subject depends on examining the author. The Christian argument that the authors did not give their names out of humility is rubbish. The silliness shows how embarrassed they are about this thing.

Tradition ascribes the gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John a very long time after their composition but there is no evidence that it was going on anything other than guesswork, hearsay or flimsy evidence.

The traditions concerning authorship emerged too late after the gospels seem to have been written.

When the gospels are anonymous it shows that the authors were afraid of being identified. Say, if the apostle Matthew wrote Matthew the book would have been better off.

Why were the authors afraid?

They didn’t want to be found out as liars. Their books must have contained slander. Christians would say, “An even better explanation is that they knew enemies of the Church would want to interview them and nip their publications in the bud. There was the risk that disciples of the authors would be hounded to reveal the whereabouts of the books and what steps had been employed to preserve them and publish them. Then they would try to destroy the books. Or perhaps they would execute the authors for writing the books”. All this is speculation for there is no evidence that anybody could die for writing the gospels. Paul went about writing and nobody wanted to kill him for it.  
 
Also, these men preached in public and were able to protect themselves for so long and go about in freedom. Their preaching was worse and riskier than simply publishing gospels. They were afraid of being found out to be telling little else but lies. The gospellers then had no reason to be anonymous. Unless their gospels were outrageous lies.

The gospels had to have been hidden when the authors were too scared to give their names or to pretend to be somebody else though there were plenty of places to hide.

The Church decided that the gospels belonged in the New Testament for it said they passed the criterion for having started among the apostles. Catholics say that Protestants are wrong to believe in the Bible because of the Bible instead of believing in it because the Church says so. But it is better to believe in it by examining internal evidence for yourself instead of just taking the Church’s word for it and especially when it took centuries for the Church to canonise the books.

PHYSICAL PROOF OF CONCEALMENT

It is most probable that anybody who would have been conscious that the New Testament gospels lied if they had seen them never laid eyes on them. Anybody that did wouldn’t have had enough impact on public thinking to even bother trying to expose them. Logically, the early Church was wholly free to invent whatever it liked about Jesus.

The New Testament broke the law of Rome when it proclaimed that no false Gods, such as the Gods of Rome, were to be tolerated and non-Christian religions had to be phased out. For that reason the writings had to be hidden because they would have been destroyed and it would have been illegal to have them. Rome did not tolerate bigoted intolerant religions.

The gospels were predominately for foreign Jews and Romans neither of which groups understood Palestinian Judaism enough or cared enough to be interested in a thorough investigation on Jesus.

In New Testament times, papyrus was used to write on. It was brittle and fragile so only very few would have been allowed to handle it. The result would have been that New Testament writings would have been very obscure. Reading stuff out is not the same.

Jews were forbidden to touch anything idolatrous so many of them would not have touched a Christian book for the mere Christian notion that Jesus was a prophet was an intolerable blasphemy to them. Their revulsion would have been too great.

The New Testament states that the Jews were happy to employ force to break up the Christian movement. If so then they would have been expected to head straight for the jugular, the Christian writings, to get rid of them prompting the Christians to hide the most important of them and say nothing about them. Also, Jews rigidly confiscated and burned books on magic in obedience to the Law which wanted even idols smashed and Jesus was considered to be a black magician so relatives of the Christians would have burned the books to avoid bad luck. “It was a Jewish custom to bury heretical scripture, not to preserve them, but because they might contain the name of God and therefore could not be destroyed” (page 581, New Age Bible Versions). If the name of God was cut out they could then be consigned to the flames. If Christianity was a craze the Jews would have preferred to burn the writings. The writings could only be reproduced by hand and were hard to get so every copy was priceless and had to be kept double safe.
 
The antichrists were unlikely to have seen the New Testament gospels.
 
The Church had no official set of scriptures at the time meaning that any critic that did see them would have felt little impulse to spend hours and breath attacking them in those poverty stricken busy times.

There is not a molecule of evidence that anybody who knew Jesus or had met him was acquainted with the gospels. It is easy to see how anybody decades later might have read them asked some old person about their veracity who replied in the negative might do no more research and turn around and believe them. Would-be Christians were urged to feel God inspiring them to believe the so-called true religion. That was the voice that came first, the critics would have been written off as belonging to a satanic world or as having sour grapes.

The quotes from Jesus that managed to get enshrined in the gospel were circulating as tradition long before they were written down. There is no hint that the historical claims made about Jesus in the gospels were going around as well.

CONCLUSION

It is clear that even in those days, somebody writing in the name of another was considered to be fraud.  We are told that anonymous writings like Hebrews were fine.  Were they?  How do you know that such writings did not have a name?  What if Church authorities were alarmed at the authorship and removed it?  Why deliberately bring out anon documents?

There is no evidence at all that the Gospels were published or fully published within one hundred years after Jesus’ demise. The first publications were about the teachings of the Lord. Regarding that period it is no wonder that Robin Lane Fox described it as extremely difficult to figure out when the gospels were first quoted (page 124, The Unauthorized Version). There is no evidence that they were published for a long time after the end of the first century. Even if they were published they were not widely known or made important and even the highest people in the Church did not know of them. The words of Jesus were published before the acts of Jesus. Anybody could make up the words but the acts would be more difficult if the person did not exist or if a lot of lies were told. But if you make up the teachings first and get people to want to believe in the existence of the man who allegedly taught them it is easier to add in the alleged deeds later. The words differ from the gospels enough to indicate that the gospels were still evolving or were secret. These facts utterly destroy the credibility of Christianity.

WRITINGS CONSULTED

Bible Dictionary and Concordance, New American Bible, 1970  
Early Christian Writings, Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin, London, 1987  
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995  
Evil and the God of Love, John Hick, Fontana/Fount, Glasgow, 1979  
Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, Karl Von Hase, Vols 1& 2, The Religious Tract Society, London, 1906  
He Walked Among Us, Josh McDowell and Bill Wilson, Alpha, Cumbria, 2000  
Jesus – One Hundred Years Before Christ, Professor Alvar Ellegard, Century, London, 1999  
Jesus and the Four Gospels, John Drane, Lion, Herts, 1984  
Jesus the Evidence, Ian Wilson, Pan, London, 1985  
JR Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Baker Book House, 1988 (from 1891 Edition published by Macmillan and Co. London)  
New Age Bible Versions, GA Riplinger, Bible & Literature Missionary Foundation, Tennessee, 1993
On the True Doctrine, Celsus, Translated by R Joseph Hoffmann, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987  
The Apostolic Fathers, B Lightfoot and JR Harmer, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Baker Book House, 1988, from 1891 Edition published by Macmillan and Co. London  
The Bible Fact or Fantasy, John Drane, Lion, Oxford, 1989  
The Canon of Scripture, FF Bruce, Chapter House, Glasgow, 1988
The Early Church, Henry Chadwick Pelican, London, 1987  
The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief, Volume 1, Gordon Stein, Editor, Prometheus Books, New York, 1985  
The First Christian, Karen Armstrong, Pan Books, London, 1983
The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, Penguin, London, 1990
The History of Christianity, Lions, Herts, 1982  
The History of the Church, Eusebius, Penguin, London, 1989  
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1982  
The Jesus Event, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York, 1980
The Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Thorsons, London, 1999
The Jesus Papyrus, Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona, Phoenix, London, 1997  
The Lion Concise Book of Christian Thought, Tony Lane, Lion Publishing, Herts, 1984
The Nag Hammadi Library, Edited by J A Robinson, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1990
The Newly Recovered Gospel of St Peter, J Rendle Harris, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1893
The Original Jesus, Tom Wright, Lion, Oxford, 1996
The Reconstruction of Belief, Charles Gore DD, John Murray, London, 1930  
The Secret Gospel, Morton Smith, Aquarian, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985  
The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark by Shawn Eyer Alexandria: The Journal for the Western Cosmological Traditions, Volume 3, 1995  
The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992

THE WWW
 
WERE THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS UNABLE TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN AUTHENTIC AND UNAUTHENTIC BOOKS? GLENN MILLER
www.christian-thinktank.com/dumdad2.html

THE GOSPEL OF MARCION AND THE GOSPEL OF LUKE COMPARED, CHARLES B WAITE
 www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/3827/wait2.htm

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE SECRET GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK, SHAWN EYER
www.globaltown.com/shawn/secmark.html

The “Historical” Jesus by Acharya S
www.truthbeknown.com/historicaljc.htm