The Catholic Encyclopedia writes: "The existence of numerous and, at times, considerable differences between the four canonical Gospels is a fact which has long been noticed and which all scholars readily admit."

Perhaps one of the most pointed questions and answers I’ve read recently is from a magazine article defending the New Testament: "Does it make sense that God would give man His revelation and then stand by helplessly as it became garbled and corrupted? Such an idea is preposterous!"

I must totally agree with that statement! Of course, the real question is: what truly comprises the Word of God? The answer to that depends on one’s perspective. First of all, and perhaps chief in a Christian sense, is the argument of the infallibility of the New Testament, which, of necessity, takes us to the question of the NT canon. Canon is another word for the much-fought-over, officially accepted books of the Catholic, and hence, the Protestant Churches. Canonization also means that the books have been declared infallible by Roman Catholicism.

Now, for those who may not know the origin of our canonized Gospels, let me inform you that the New Testament books found in the present translations were the result of their acceptance by the Roman Catholic Church and its various councils. This is a fact pure and simple, and is easily proven by any biblical encyclopedia or dictionary. But, more to our purpose, what this really means is that the pious liars, cheats, murderers, sodomites, blood-lusting sexual perverts of every description, and outright Baal-worshippers, comprising Roman Catholicism, were the ones who decided once and for all what books of the New Testament were sacred, and what books were to be discarded.

The following quote from a correspondence course lesson offered by a seventh-day Sabbath-keeping Christian college makes the point: "Prior to the fourth century there was no [official] catalogue of the New Testament canonical books. However, even during the time of the apostles, quotations of some of these books were made by writers of the Christian faith." "Clement, Paul’s fellow laborer, referred to I Corinthians as ‘Paul’s epistle.’" "Tertullion (A.D. 160-220) regarded the four Gospels and most of the books of the New Testament to be genuine. Eusebius of Caesarea (Circa A.D. 260-240) declared in his Ecclesiastical History (A.D. 315) that it was universally admitted that the four Gospels, Acts, the Epistles of Paul, the first Epistles of John, Peter, and Revelation are genuine. The catalogue of origin (circa A.D. 185-254) is the same as that of Eusebius. Jerome’s residence in Palestine and great knowledge of the sites of bible history qualifies him to make statements as to the authenticity of the books of the New Testament Scriptures. He [the Catholic Church father Jerome!] assigned authorship of the books to the person whose name the book carried. He assigned the Acts of the Apostles to Luke, and the Epistles of the Hebrews to Paul, noting that there was some doubt as to authorship of this epistle which today is considered anonymous."

Let me here comment on the honesty, or rather the dishonesty of these early "church fathers," by singling out one in particular. The famous Bishop Eusebius, whom we have discussed in volume one as one of Christianity’s greatest liars, is admitted to have forged the Letters between Abgar and Jesus. He falsely declared that he had found the originals and gives a translation of them in his Ecclesiastical History. Such an episode was by no means unique, and it comments volumes on the integrity of the early church fathers!

What all of this boils down to is that when you hear theologians argue over the meaning of a specific Greek word (which, as I’ve already noted, may or may not change the meaning of an entire passage and thus doctrine itself), they do so only by authority of the Catholic Church: it is by that authority that the word, indeed the very book itself, was left in the accepted New Testament to begin with¾ whether it is found in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate or some Protestant version! And, the latter, much vaunted Protestant editions, as we have just seen, came about only in the 16th century when a Catholic-turned-Protestant scholar finally put together an acceptable New Testament from all the different Greek manuscripts floating around the Christian world.

But, getting back to our topic, history tells us that the first known "canon" of the Christian Church was put together by the "great heretic" Marcion in circa 150 C.E. Reinach notes: "Down to this time all quotations from ‘Scriptures’ in the works of the Apostolic Fathers, refer exclusively to the Old Testament."

Accordingly, it was Marcion who collected various books of what would one day be the New Testament. It is very significant that Marcion, being a notorious anti-Semite, deliberately excluded the "Old" Testament from his teachings. In fact, he is noted for purging the letters of Paul and Luke of "JEWISH TRAITS!" What is even more telling about Marcion was that, as a disciple of Simon Magus and Menander, his purpose was to compose a new religion to oppose and oppress the Jews whom he desperately hated! The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church writes: "The significance of Marcion lies in the fact that he compelled representatives of orthodox Christianity to deal seriously with the problems of evil, to think deeply about the biblical teaching concerning creation and redemption, to REEXAMINE THE PAULINE WRITINGS, AND TO DECIDE UPON THE QUESTION OF THE CANON."

About Marcion’s heresy, The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church goes on to tell us, "Marcion stressed the radical nature of Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism. In his theology there existed a total discontinuity between the OT and the NT, between Israel and the church, and even between the god [sic] of the OT and the Father of Jesus. Jesus came to reveal the true God, who was totally unknown up to the Incarnation. The god [sic] of the OT, the demiurge, an inferior being who created the material world and ruled over it, was not exactly an evil being, but he was not good in the same sense as the God and Father of Jesus, a God of love and grace."

From what I know of traditional Christianity, also called "orthodox" Christianity, there seems to be little difference between what Marcion taught and the attitude that finally permeated the NT and the Christian Church!

Let’s quote Robin Lane Fox here about Marcion’s tampering with the NT books. He writes: "In the 140s an important Christian, Marcion, troubled many of his fellow Christians by producing a ‘Gospel’ which abbreviated Luke’s so as to suit his theology . . . He edited ten letters of Paul, changing and omitting bits which he did not like and also omitted the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. This enterprise played havoc with the written text. . . . IF CHRISTIAN TEXTS WERE BEING CHANGED AND EDITED TO THIS DEGREE, EVEN A GAP OF A CENTURY BETWEEN THE ORIGINAL AND ITS FIRST SURVIVAL ON A PAPYRUS IS A LONG AND POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS TIME. WE SIMPLY DO NOT KNOW WHAT MAY HAVE HAPPENED TO THE AUTHOR’S WORDS AT IMPORTANT PLACES."

We follow the advancement of the "canon" by noting that the Thirty-ninth Paschall Letter of Athanasius listed all the books of the present New Testament. The Encyclopedia Britannica notes the following: "The triumph of the Athanasian Canon, indeed, went along with the triumph of Nicene Christianity. And while the movement received its impulse from Athanasius, the power by which it was carried through and established was largely that of his powerful ally, THE CHURCH OF ROME." The Oxford Companion to the Bible adds: "In the Western Church the canon of Athanasius was probably approved at the synod of Rome in 382 C.E. and definitely confirmed by a PAPAL DECLARATION OF THE YEAR 405. Under Augustine’s influence the North African Church followed suit at the Synods of Hippo Regius 393 and Carthage 397 . . ." (I would also like to recall here, from volume one, the history of the pagan Athanasius and ask again if it had any bearing on his part in the preservation of the Greek NT, so widely held to be the sacred book of the Christian Church?)

With the above facts, and the questions they raise, we can clearly see the origin of our accepted "canon" of the New Testament. And I must say that I, for one, have difficulty in trusting a church that has a two thousand year-old reputation as liars and cheats to carefully preserve any document¾ let alone the "Word of God." But, as a Christian who has essentially placed his faith in the teachings of men, I now find that I have unknowingly put my trust in the Roman Catholic Church. Furthermore, I need only refer to the 300 pages of research in Mystery Babylon the Great to prove that such trust is greatly misplaced. In fact, I might just as well be asked to believe that God would have entrusted the preservation of His Truth to Satan himself!

Knowing this to be the fact of the matter, some Protestant ministers deny altogether that the Catholics had anything to do with the preservation and canonization of the New Testament¾ which for them means the Stephanus/Erasmus Greek "original." Of course, there was a time I would have totally and adamantly supported this denial, based completely on an attitude that the NT was sacred and the disgust many Protestants and their offshoots feel toward Catholicism.

As an illustration of my previous attitude, I need only cite yet another article by my former church. In this instance, it goes so far as to claim that the Catholics were indeed forced to accept and preserve the NT canon against their will. Accordingly, the Catholic Church finally accepted the canon in the Council of Carthage "because the Greek Church had long since recognized it as genuine." Having, therefore, no way around this situation, my former church asserted that the Catholics were reluctantly forced to accept the "original" canon on behalf of the true Christian Church. And, just as reluctantly, we are assured, they went on to preserve it for about 1,500 years.

Now, the fact of the matter is that the Catholic Church, headquartered in Rome, was the supreme ruler of the known Christian world at the time of these councils. There were, to be sure, small, scattered and persecuted groups who refused to acknowledge Catholic authority, but these groups played no part in the final canonization of the New Testament and, like all of Christendom, they finally accepted the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the matter! Furthermore, as we’ve already noted, the so-called "Greek" Church was simply one and the same as the Western Church in Rome! So there is absolutely no argument here to support the above contentions!

The writer of one of the other articles I’ve been using in this chapter notes that it is evident that God had His hand in the preservation of the New Testament because some powerful Catholic Church fathers didn’t get their way when they promoted certain books for canonization. Yet he fails to mention that these same church fathers also promoted some of the very books that did get accepted, and that their powerful opposition to certain other books KEPT THESE OUT OF THE "OFFICIAL" CANON! One of these books was the Book of Enoch, which, as one Christian minister has noted to me on occasion, "almost made it into the canon." (We shall return to this book later because its contents do present many difficulties for the true-blue believer in the sacred canon.)

At any rate, among the dozens of Gospels circulating in the first three hundred years of this era, the Catholic Church lighted upon and canonized only four. But, regarding these canonized four, by comparing them with the surviving ancient rejected texts we can easily recognize that they were a corrupt woven mixture of the sayings of Jesus, some of his authentic deeds (or at least accounts as told by his Jewish followers) and certain Mithraic "fairy" tales drafted into service on his behalf at the behest of the "converted" Christian pagans. Actually, with just a quick glance at the many other surviving unofficial Gospels, it becomes evident that the four chosen were the "best of the lot!" Origen, the great Catholic father, may very well be confirming just this fact when he recalls that the four Gospel accounts were accepted by the authority of his church: "And not four Gospels, but very many, out of which these we have chosen and delivered to the churches, we may perceive."

By the way, here is a partial list of the different books that were considered by the Catholic Church Councils for the canon: A gospel written by Jesus’ own hand; letters and other correspondences written by Jesus; letters written by the virgin Mary; Pilate’s official report to the emperor of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, with Pilate’s confession of faith; the reply to this from Tiberius, and the trial of Pilate; official documents of the Roman Senate about Jesus; Gospels, epistles, acts, by every single one of the twelve apostles; and official documents of church law and government, written in Greek by the apostles. The number comes to about 50 or more documents!

As to the Gospels themselves, at one time there were 200 different ones circulating in the Christian Church! Here are some of the known (or at least the surviving) Gospels that have circulated in the Christian Church, which, keep in mind, were at different times accepted as the "infallible word" of God: The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Signs, Thomas, Greek Fragments of Thomas, Secret Book of James, Dialogue of the Savior, Gospel of Mary, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Infancy Gospel of James, Gospel of Peter, Secret Gospel of Mark, Egerton Gospel, Gospel Oxyrhynchus, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Nazoreans.

Now I ask that you continue this book with the following question in mind: Are we, as born-Christians, predisposed to believe and accept that the Roman Catholic Church fathers were used by Israel’s Creator to preserve a "sacred canon" which they themselves had put together? Furthermore, can we believe that they left the books in their possession untouched in their subsequent and tremendously corrupt seventeen-hundred year history? Do we really want to place our faith in the pious liars of Roman Catholicism and accept their books as sacred "canon" by which we are to live our lives and seek our salvation?

To shed light on that last question, perhaps it is best to use an illustration from the present history of the Catholic Church. To set the stage for this, it would be helpful to recall from volume one some of the evidence regarding the Catholic Church’s propensity to offer outright forgeries in order to prove their doctrines. In fact, even when the light of Protestantism broke through to expose the church’s extreme corruption, the forgeries continued, and, although significantly scaled down, such activities continued as a matter of course.

Back in 1930 the Associated Press released a story about the Vatican’s International Commission on the revision of the Bible. They reported that the commission was taking steps to "correct" Exodus 20:5. Both the actual text and "what the Vatican Commission thinks it should read," are quoted here:

THE ORIGINAL: "For I the Lord thy God am a Jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me."

THE CATHOLIC REVISION: "For I, the Lord thy God, am a God of loving-kindness and mercy, considering the errors of the fathers as mitigating circumstances in judging the children unto the third and fourth generation."

If the Catholic Church has the nerve to try a broad-daylight falsification such as this, what do you suppose they did when they had total custody of the New Testament in the three centuries upon which little historical light shone?

So far I have made numerous charges that the Catholic Church was guilty of tampering with New Testament scriptures: it is now time to call into account the piecemeal composition of the Gospels to justify that charge.

Although we have already touched on this, it is now generally agreed upon that there was no Gospel account such as we know it today in the first century C.E. Further, when such a book was produced, it is agreed by many of the most competent scholars that the Gospel of Mark was the gospel from which Matthew and Luke were essentially drafted. The Oxford Companion to the Bible writes: "The authors of the two later synoptic Gospels, Matthew, and Luke, used Mark as their primary source, plus a common source consisting mostly of sayings [of Jesus], unknown to Mark."

The Complete Gospels notes the following: "There are some powerful arguments to support this conclusion: 1. Agreement between Matthew and Luke begins where Mark begins and ends where Mark ends. 2. Matthew reproduces about 90% of Mark, Luke about 50%. They often reproduce Mark in the same order. When they disagree, either Matthew or Luke supports the sequence in Mark. 3. In segments the three have in common, verbal agreement averages about 50%." "These facts and the close examination of agreements and disagreements in minute detail have led scholars to conclude that Mark is the adopted basis of Matthew and Luke." "Mark is responsible for the chronological outline of the life of Jesus represented by the synoptics; Matthew and Luke do not have independent evidence for the order of events."

Prior to the Gospel of Mark, it is agreed by the experts (some of whom, mind you, have spent the entirety of their adult lives researching this subject) that the only Christian writings circulating in the first few centuries were the sayings of Jesus. Furthermore, as The Oxford Companion to the Bible notes, these sayings (not to be confused with the "Gospel" events of Jesus’ birth, life, and death) bear traces of having been written originally in Aramaic. This is quite logical, as the author notes, "since this was Jesus’ normal language." Of course, as we’ve already touched upon, this information has grave implications for the entire New Testament, and one can readily see why so many ministers denounce such scholarship as nonsense.

Many encyclopedias will point out that after a few generations the sayings of Jesus, which were devoid of any details of his life, were not sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of the increasing membership of the Christian Church. Important to this fact, as you may recall from volume one, is that these new converts were recruited from paganism, and history proves succinctly that they were responsible for the direct introduction of numerous pagan Mystery traditions into the church. Significantly, when these new "converts" began to filter their former beliefs into Christianity, it is agreed by the experts that it was at a time when oral traditions were being developed about the life of Jesus.

Now the problem with oral tradition is that unless it falls under some official guidelines, as in the case of the Irish who preserved their oral history by means of official bards, it is easily corrupted. Many are familiar with the simple experiment of telling one person a story, and asking them to repeat it to someone else. This is continued until fifteen or twenty people have heard the story. By the time the last person tells it, the story will invariably be far different from the original version! (Actually, I could easily demonstrate this by a certain individual who couldn’t tell a story straight five minutes after she had heard it!)

Now, consider the spreading of oral traditions about Jesus among Christians who were pagan converts. What do you suppose could have been added to the story by the time that they were being written down in a "Gospel?" This question may be especially pertinent if we take into account that men like Paul often "preached Jesus" to the pagans in their own religious terminology! Such a sermon would easily cause a new "convert" to view Jesus as nothing more than an extension of their old deity! This is not to say that some authentic deeds or words of Jesus or his followers didn’t contribute to Christianity. Actually, the Gospels are laced with accounts that could have only come from a true Jewish believer in Jesus’ Messiahship. Be this as it may, we are about to see that it doesn’t make up for the corruption’s of the present-day Catholic production called the New Testament.

In essence, the oldest known "Gospel" account of Jesus (the oldest surviving complete manuscript), is The Gospel According to Thomas, found in 1947 amongst the Gnostic Nag Hammadi manuscripts in Egypt. The entire manuscript was written in Coptic and dates to ca. 350 C.E., while some portions, in Greek, date to ca. 140 C.E. Actually, the entire ms. is but a translation of a second century original composed in Greek. Thus in certain respects, it is the oldest known complete ms. of the NT in existence. But, significantly, it is Gnostic and contains only the sayings of Jesus¾ all of which means it is systematically denounced and rejected by Christianity. The odd thing is that this Gospel, in regards to its content, corresponds very closely to the four "canonized" Gospels known today.

Why is The Gospel According to Thomas rejected by Christianity? Well, for one thing, if these sayings were all there was to the original "Gospel" account, then there is a very big problem with our modern four Gospels, because, as already pointed out, there is much more than the sayings in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! This question can be somewhat cleared up by simply examining the canonized Gospels so familiar to both Catholics and Protestants. However, for the purpose of this study, we will confine ourselves to the canonized NT Gospels, which are composed of the Synoptics, and the book of John, backed up by an occasional reference to the book of Acts.

Perhaps the first thing to notice about the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John is that outside the New Testament itself there is no way to corroborate most of their facts from secular history. As The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church says: ". . . the secular evidence can do little more than establish the bare fact that he [Jesus] lived and died."

Indeed, the famous Christian historian, Dr. John Laurence von Mosheim, admits that ". . . a variety of commentaries, filled with impositions and fables, on our Saviour’s life and sentiments, [were] composed soon after his ascent into heaven, by men who, without being bad, perhaps were superstitious, simple, and piously deceitful. To these were afterwards added other writings falsely ascribed to the most holy apostles by fraudulent individuals." In a footnote, Mosheim comments about the early spurious gospels: "These were all designed, either first to gratify the laudable curiosity of Christians, and subserve the cause of piety; or, secondly, to put to silence the enemies of Christianity, whether Jews or pagans, by demonstrating, from alleged facts and testimony, that Jesus was the Messiah, his doctrines divine, his apostles inspired, etc., or, lastly, to display the ingenuity of the writer, and to gratify the fancy by a harmless fiction." My question to Dr. Mosheim would be how, as a Christian, can we distinguish from the "piously deceitful" works of bare-faced liars, and the truth of the matter?

The Catholic Encyclopedia writes: "The genuine Gospels are silent about the long stretches of the life of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, and St. Joseph. This reserve of the Evangelists did not satisfy the pardonable curiosity of the many Christians eager for details . . . 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."

That the story of the birth and death of Jesus were later additions, supplied from tradition by the "converts" coming into the new Catholic Church by the millions, can be amply demonstrated. The glaring pagan facts of that history were sufficiently outlined in the first volume, and they clearly proved who was responsible for the adaptation of such Mithraic festivals as Easter and Christmas into Roman Catholicism.

I would like to offer here an interesting insight in the writing of volume one. While researching the early Christian traditions I often strove to separate fact from fiction even though the Christian material with which I was working at times made that almost impossible. In other words, it was frequently impossible to see where the story of the Gospel accounts ended and the pure Babylonian Mysteries began! This fact was one of the points I mentioned earlier as having caused me concern while writing MB. On the one hand I was quite willing to believe, for example, that the seasonal traditions of modern Christianity were adaptations of paganism. But on the other hand, the tenets of those pagan traditions, that were identical to the New Testament stories, were something that I was by no means prepared to even look at, let alone consider as having the same pagan origin!

At that time I strongly believed that the Gospel accounts were written by the apostles of Jesus¾ the very men who knew him and who were personally present at the events they described. How could I believe anything else? I was taught from early childhood not to ever question these infallible "truths of God." But my former faith aside, I can now see that historical and other scientific evidence simply does not support these Christian assertions. This brings us back to the Gospels and the question of authorship, which I previously raised in the case of Luke.

One of the strongest hints that the Gospels were not written by the men to whom the Catholic Church fathers assigned them, is that the books of "Matthew," "Mark," "Luke," and "John" were supposedly written by men who were Jews for Jewish Christians, or more properly, the Nazarenes. But notice: whoever the Gospel writers were, they continually refer to "the Jews" as someone distinctly different and alien to themselves. As a Jew, writing in Judea for the Jews, you would expect the authors to identify themselves with their own people. But notice the opposite instance in the New Testament: Matthew 28:15, "So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day." Mark 7:3, "For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders." Luke 7:3, "And when he heard of Jesus, he sent unto him the elders of the Jews, . . ." John 1:19, "And this is the records of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, who art thou?" John 2:6, "And there were set there six water pots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, . . ." John 6:4: "And the Passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh."

John’s Gospel alone has dozens of references to "the Jews" which means that the identity of its author isn’t hard to figure out. The Complete Gospels writes about the Gospel of John: "Nevertheless, this document is ardently anti-Jewish." "This gospel has given rise, still more than Matthew, to savage Christian anti-Semitism down the subsequent centuries."

We should consider these facts as serious implications when we can see in the writings of the early church fathers the exact same anti-Semitic attitude! For instance the evolution of the Gospels and their anti-Semitic message can be somewhat noticed in the longer version of Acts, which we’ve already mentioned. Robin Fox writes about this longer version: "The author, it seems, touched up certain passages to emphasize hostility of, and to, the Jews . . . Individuals are given a clearer identity: Timothy’s mother, a Jewess, turns out to have been a widow; the sons of Sceva who practice exorcism in Ephesus appear to be the sons of a pagan priest, not a puzzling high priest among the Jews." In other words, the "original" book of Acts was touched up to cast aspersions on the Jews!

We can further understand the alien authorship of the Gospels by not only citing the above accounts, but by these additional facts: in Luke 5:19 there is mention of a paralytic who was let down through the tiles of the roof to Jesus. Manfred Barthel writes, "Houses with tile roofs were common enough in Athens and Rome, but houses in Galilee were simple, one-room structures with a thatch of reeds and hemps laid over the rafters. Just as Mark uses the Roman system of reckoning time¾ ‘the fourth watch of the night’¾ Luke uses the Greek system of counting days of the week when he writes, ‘And Jesus came unto Capernaum on the second day.’ This doesn’t mean that he was on the road for two days, but that he arrived on a Monday, which is still called ‘the second day’ in modern Greek." In a note about Zacharias writing on a tablet in Luke 1:63, Barthel writes: "Whereas a wax tablet (which could be written on with a pointed stylus and erased by scraping off the top layer of wax) would have been a common enough household object in Greece, it would have been a rare and expensive luxury in Palestine."

If you would undertake the exercise to go back into the NT texts and consider the way in which the term Jew is applied, it will become evident that the nature of the narratives is anti-Semitic, which clearly tells us that the books were written by Gentiles and not the original Jewish apostles. Moreover, that these Gentiles were actually one and the same with the Greek and Roman church fathers becomes obvious and explains why the NT was written in such a "polished Greek vernacular." These facts will be borne out in numerous examples as this book progresses.

Some may ask "if there was Catholic tampering with the NT to make it conform to their theology of the pagan Mystery Religion, then what of the ‘Old’ Testament?" Thankfully, the Jews (which is to say Elohim) kept the "Old" Testament far from the clutches of the Christian Church! This did not, however, keep the "church fathers" from rejecting the true Scriptures of the Masoretes and turning to another translation which better suited their purposes.

Despite being noted by many Protestants as totally unreliable in many cases, the Septuagint (or LXX) has been the foundation text of the Roman Catholic Church’s Bible. Even more significant is that this was a version produced in Alexandria, Egypt by Jewish scholars who not only had pagan authority to make the translation, but who themselves had adopted a definite "Alexandrian" theology, which included a filtering of the ancient Egyptian version of the Babylonian Mysteries into the truth of God!

I need not get into a great discussion on the unreliability of the Septuagint, as many biblical encyclopedias will point out the various deficiencies in a critical review. I will, however, note here a few major points: the LXX rendition of the book of Job is about one-sixth shorter than the Mesoritic Text of the Hebrews. There are large variations between the LXX translation of Joshua, I Samuel, I Kings, Proverbs, Esther, Jeremiah and "OT" chronology and those translated by the Masoretes.

What is truly important to this study is that the LXX, written in Greek, was a translation totally without authority in its production, and one that is soundly rejected by traditional Jewish Rabbis. This fact is more to our purpose, because the LXX would never have been used by the religious Jews of first century Judea! And yet we have in the New Testament the apostles of Jesus quoting from this version! The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us the following: "The New Testament undoubtedly shows a preference for the Septuagint; out of about 350 texts from the Old Testament [cited in the New], 300 favor the Greek version rather than the Hebrew."

How could Jesus have preached to the crowds in Jerusalem and elsewhere using a text that was not only unacceptable, but was written in a foreign language? Would he have made on-the-spot translations from Greek into Aramaic? And why would his apostles have used such a text? This is especially important when we again consider that the first century Jews of Judea didn’t speak the Greek language of the LXX, and the common every-day working men who made up the apostles surely lacked the education to use and speak Greek.

To be blunt, what we have in the example of Jesus quoting from the LXX in the Gospels is the clear evidence of tampering with, and the piecing together of various stories and sayings in a later manuscript written by Greek-speaking, Septuagint-reading anti-Semitic Gentile men with a satanic agenda.

In other words, if the authors of the NT scriptures were not the original apostles of Jesus, and were indeed the early Greek-speaking church fathers, then the version of the "OT" that they would have known was simply the Greek Septuagint!

The most important question to this discussion is: "Just who were the founders of the early Christian Church?" We have answered this in chapter eight of MB: the founders of the church were the Samaritan Simon Magus and his disciples!

But we shall save Simon for a later chapter. What we need to understand here is that the Septuagint has indeed afforded many helpful Greek translations of Scripture to the ever-paganizing Catholic Christian Church and their ever-developing doctrine¾ not the least of which was the "virgin" birth of a Messiah.

Joseph Smith, the Mormon Church founder and the man I’ve used as an example in this study, declared that his Book of Mormon was infallible, and Mormons still hold to that belief today. Yet, since Smith’s initial writing of that book in 1830, the Mormon Church has had to make some 4,000 changes in grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, if not, in some cases, completely rewriting some passages.

Actually, what is almost comical, except when thinking of the Mormons who have had such blind faith that they have laid down their lives for their religion, is that when Smith was composing his "infallible" works and was obviously copying verbatim from the KJV Bible, his grammar and education reflected that of the KJV translators. Yet, when he strayed from that text and began to insert his own verses and "wisdom," the book reflects Smith’s own lack of education. One would think that this revelation would be quite a problem for the nine million people who accept The Book of Mormon as the infallible "Word of God!" But, to the contrary, few Mormons will pay any attention to the evidence that is available from the archives of their own church library. They will argue and staunchly defend their "Word of God," or should I say "gods," as the Mormons believe in a multitude of deities.

Infallibility! This is a fundamental principal of Christianity! Paul, for instance, tells us in II Timothy 2:16 that "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine . . ." (The Greek word theopneustos, selected here by Erasmus/Stephanus for the Christian New Testament, literally means "God-breathed.")

Throughout my life I’ve heard ministers thunder from the pulpit (and I have, in imitation, followed suit) that not one single word in the Bible was out of place¾ that it was all "God-breathed" and therefore infallible. Of course I then believed in the original "inspired" Greek and thought my statements could be substantiated by this "original" writing. But, as already noted, and to use an old saying, "there ain’t no such animal!"

This fact notwithstanding, wars have been fought over the meaning of just one particular word in the New Testament. Religious doctrines have been founded on such insignificant words as "it," "a," or "the," which simply means that throughout history men and woman have died for beliefs that literally have hinged on just a few words in the "infallible" NT Word of God. Once more I want to quote from The Complete Gospels: "The Greek texts behind our English translation is a reconstruction produced by patient and exacting comparison of thousands of differences in wording among the nu-

merous copies." (Give this some thought the next time you hear a sermon or debate over the "original" Greek!)

Perhaps the most obviously spurious words found in the New Testament, and words that large numbers of Christians know by heart, are to be found in I John 5:7: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." This is the famous Trinitarian verse, which we covered in some detail in volume one. What is of interest here is that this verse is still used and reproduced in a number of Bibles¾ including the New King James Version, even though it is now admitted by all biblical scholars¾ including the Catholic Church¾ to be a late insertion. Why?

Over the years I have talked to a number of people about I John 5:7. One was a Trinitarian Baptist minister who embraced the verse as genuine and refused to believe that God would have allowed such a mistake to be in "His" Word! Of course, he, like most Christians, didn’t even want to hear about such a problem. After all, how could he deny verses like John 5:7 when he had used them his whole adult life to support Babylonian theology?

I suppose such people can’t be totally to blame for their attitude because the knowledge that this verse was spurious has not, until recent times, been generally known, and it certainly has been used to do what the liar who inserted it intended: it has supported the Trinity of the Babylonian Mystery Religion, which is now such a part of Christianity. This means that Christianity has had a centuries-old cherished tradition with which it is loathe to part, and it also means that uncounted millions of Christians have lived and died believing in I John 5:7¾ including seventh-day Sabbath-keepers who do not consider themselves average Christians! To these millions the Trinity was provable from the Word of God and was, therefore, not to be questioned.

What this means is that millions have bowed before and prayed to a concept that was directly from pagan Babylon¾ including Seventh-day Sabbath-keeping Christians! It also means that if one is interested in the truth, then they should look at the entire New Testament with an open mind. Let us now proceed into the New Testament to prove or disprove its infallibility.