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CHAPTER 7

THE CODE:

HOLOCAUST

NOT IN,
BUT ON

 HISTORY

"I will ascribe righteousness to my Maker" :

"Remember to Magnify His work"

References include the Westminster contribution in

The Truth About Da Vinci, the

Dictonary of the History of Ideas

Encyclopedia Britannica

Especially relevant is  the author's,
The Shadow of  Mighty Rock Appendix C.

The Encyclopedia of Christianity

CRUCIFYING HISTORY

How history suffers like one abandoned in Belsen! How the people ignore her sufferings, and applaud with their dollars, the defiant dereliction of duty, which would oust her from her place!

Yet by the grace of God, and in the name of the immutable, long predicted, wholly and passionately Bible fulfilling Messiah, Jesus Christ, we will not leave her in this baseness, nor abandon her in this assault!

What have we here ? Do we read of many millions of copies of a book which invents history and legislates what it does not know ? We do. Surely, you may retort,  you are on the topic of communism, which tells how industrialised nations are to be the first to fall, when Russia was and Germany was not ?

Not at all, that is all unscientific historicism, and useless verbal pyrotechniques^*1. The world has paid with something like 50 million tormented or dead, and with perhaps 1200 000 000 turned into soulless instruments of State - as far as may be - in China, with its official detestation of things spiritual, using things spiritual to assert in the domain of things spiritual, the annihilation of things spiritual, like some perverse child, naughty, face-flushed, refusing correction, telling his parents: YOU must obey ME! A spirited discourse to be sure, but unspiritual, irrational and the mere hurly-burly of the tongue. But no, this is not Communism of which we here speak. That was given its grave long ago.

What new assailant would seek to dim the dynamic of man, reduce the reality of rationality and divorce man from truth, if not with this set purpose, then with this mode of action ?

What then do you have ? Is it something new ? Not really. You find what might be called a Jewish version in Simon Magus, with a sordid substitute for monotheism, to which we will look later, a sort of nervous breakdown in his version of deity, which merely presupposes insuperable limits to its power, and who, may one ask, imposed those! It is thus a form of atheism, where the chief Being is impossible even to achieve existence! It is not merely contrary to the New Testament, but to the Old, and has no tested credentials, in addition to being irrational. The Code work (henceforth meaning the teaching of the book, The Da Vinci Code) dwells on the synthesis of elaborate philosophic meanders in undisciplined thought, like that of Simon Magus, but these pseudo-gospel effluvia came later.

This sort of secret-style, esoteric philosophic romancing in the field of religion, invasive of monotheism, becoming simply dualistic, good and bad guys amongst the gods,  is as old as gnosticism, which in its Gospel-creating assault on Christianity may be placed a little after Valentinus who died around 160 A.D., a late second century affair, flowering as the centuries whirled by, with exotic blooms, like the Venus trap.

It was criticised, this flowering into Gospel production, by  the early church fathers Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Tertullian.

The underlying philosophic arias sung of  an heroic, evidentially aloof, idealism of a sort, which sought to distance God from creation and make a demi-urge do an inferior job on it. Gnostics - the word centres on knowing - love to have mystic, special knowledge of sacred things, and hence are most inventive, actual history being at a discount. It is the system, the idea, as with Plato, that counts. Paul warns in Colossians of some of this esoteric, parasitic growth, which tends to look for something to hang on, and in this case tried to hang on Christianity as a bright and appealing field - in Colossians. It was then rudimentary, mere interlopers, but the idea of having their own Gospels, like plagiarised works for sale, grew much later, say one century later, to be adorned later still.

As to Valentinus, a fatherly figure for this particular application of such evanescent dreaming, he had a work, The Gospel of Truth. His message was a blending of Pauline theology and gnostic ideas, with their dualism of good and evil, and mysticism. Not dissimilar philosophic inputs and borrowings of Christianity for ulterior motives, by what was not well enough grounded in itself to thrive, occurred on the part of Philo, in the first century^*2A, his philosophic work also debasing the Christ, the Word of God to a created thing. Such preoccupations put musings of this type into a box, much like many more recent attempts to synthesise someone's ideas and Christianity, as in most of the sects.

Arius^*2 , much later, made an enormous attempt to do much the same, having a created Christ, despite the enormous Old Testament and New Testament evidence to the contrary, in no small depth, shown in SMR pp. 532-560, The True God has Go, Gives Grace and Glory Ch.  5; but these ultra-biblical romancers sought to move from the Bible to their ideas. This, you could do with Wordsworth or Shakespeare, a few hundreds years later, without accomplishing anything but using others as a base for your own ideas, amounting to a combination of plagiarism and incompatibility. If you are to stand, however, you need more than these two errors, the one circumventing logical adequacy, and the other ignoring logical impasse, to do it.

Valentinus' efforts led to what appears a school, similarly interested in prodding revelation and injecting philosophic modes, and the 1945 find in Nag Hammadi, a town in Upper Egypt, of 13 papyrus books, contained in a red earthenware jar, has added to the testimony of mystic philosophy, as it moves from its own resources into the field of religion, like viruses seeking to control the cells of the host body, and to make them turn out what the virus has, rather than its own kind.

In this set were the Gospel of Thomas - a collection of sayings and parables ascribed to Jesus rather too late to bear credibility^*3A, but as something hidden as so much of gnosticism, plus important here, writings ascribed to Philip, Mary Magdalene, Adam, Peter and Paul. The CODE has special affinity for the Gospel of Philip and of Mary.

The former is not even a Gospel at all, not even a spurious one, being a collection of gnostic sayings, with summary of Valentinus.

It is even without a claim to be written by an apostle. In fact, the wholesale use of gnostic myths, secrets and accretions, reminds one of the Koran's trend into Jewish legends and stories, and later Christian oddities, which are swept into the book, with neither evidential basis nor verificatory scope. This is precisely the category of the gnostics, free with facts, empty in basis, parasitic in claiming relationship to Christianity, wholly other in testimony, alien immigrants to what is not theirs. In this sense, Islam is as much a Christian cum Judaistic heresy as many of those other impositions and inputs which we are here considering for their lightness and lack. The rational, empirical, heuristic thrust of the Biblical word, with intense correlations and that cumulatively, with history and final test, and from that to the index to the coming Age from Christ and the apostles, intensively fulfilled, are as missing as the criteria of validity (cf. *8 below). 

The latter, the so-called Gospel of Mary, is dated by one authority as around 350 A.D. (Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures), around one quarter of a millennium after the New Testament Gospels were in broad usage.

There is always the distinction between historically tested information, public and grounded from the first at the relevant season and testing time, and growing in company with events, enduring in the midst of immediate opportunities for refutation, existing in strength with constant confirmation, and what ? There is the distinction between this and whatever anyone, centuries later, happens to say. If it is claimed God told him, whoever it be, then he has to show the evidence for this.

The evidence for the Biblical Claim is that there has been a sequence of propositions, predictions, claims and principles, all coherent, all historical, all in the crucible of vulnerable prophets and often vehement events, all susceptible to refutation at the time, or later from research or failure to be fulfilled. That, apart from the rational necessity exhibited in SMR, is one of the unique distinctives. Such an availability is a first consideration in verifying the truth of any such statement. The mind is given to man with which to TEST, and what is outside test, is outside consideration. TEST the spirits is not only good biblical advice; it is necessary spiritual and human caution. God even provided the Christ in person, at the stated time, for the stated task, in the stated manner, in front of the stated nation, with the stated results, and the stated Gospel then coming into fulfilment, as foretold for centuries. (Cf. SMR Chs. 8-9, Highway of Holiness Ch. 4).

It not only has no empirical equal, but no rational alternative, as seen in SMR (cf. *8 below for broader reference). However, it often seems attractive to people with ideas, to find a base for them; for unless they are ruthlessly rational, energetically empirically founded, they are mere musings. They seek something, like mistletoe finding a eucalypt, from which to draw its meat and meaning. Everything reasonable must be able to stand without using the legs of another.

Indeed, a child of 7 can muse and prattle; but we need to test, and that is one way in which we help the child.

The temptation is always there, in finance, marriage or religion, just to rush and then to divorce. There is not only the weakness of temptation, there is the presence of highly explicit evil, whether in human form, from romancers and surrealists, opportunists, prime time seekers, money makers and frauds, or with devilish intent. Never under-estimate the devil, for he is the expert bowler, ready for careless batsmen, and enormously successful with many^*3.

This invasion of the church, then, from gnostic elements had been brewing for some time in many traditions and secrets, phases and forms, a mystic delusion of philosophy, always looking for outlet and inlets into which to place the output.

Thus, by the day the Gospel of Thomas appears as perhaps a later second century writing, it is as far removed from the day of Thomas as from the doctrines of the New Testament. It takes time to dream up synthesis! Gnosticism, infected with Greek philosopher, Plato, downgraded the physical side of things, unlike the entire consistent biblical message, in which the apostles were founded, and the Christian Church; whereas the Bible downgrades the yielding to its lusts, its deformities and enormities, AS SIN, not as defects in its 'unspiritual' nature.

This lofty but creator-divorced form of idealism is seen in the Gospel of Thomas to have an additional negation of part of what humanity IS. Namely, it derogates women. According to Gospel of Thomas, "every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven"! ( see *3A).

The ludicrous variability of these romancings and musings, as in the 'Gospel of Truth', which does not bother to provide any coherent account of the deeds and words of Christ, but speculates and intimates as it will, is notable. It is not alone in this. Thus, in the  Gospel of Mary, which may be a third century text from Nag Hammadi, there is effort to make Mary SO significant that to her are allegedly imparted such 'secrets' as the gnostics love; for what is open, like certain germs, is likely to be killed by the light of day. In this gnostic creation, the romancing even moves to the opposite extreme, inventing another Jesus who is made to have a special affection, not this time for John who ran with Peter to the tomb, but for Mary.  

The Code tries to bring illicit sexuality into it, like an incipient Freud at work, but even in the gnostic text such as it is, however fanciful, this cannot be extracted from it. Vagrant as it is, it does not require such a view.

Actually, it was the disciple whom Jesus loved of whom Jesus spoke, when on the Cross He told Mary, "Behold your son!" (Matthew 19:26). It would be strange to refer to a woman as a son! 

It is even stranger what sexual preoccupation seems to infill THE CODE's approach, as if it cannot keep its fingers out of the field of delusion and illicit religion. In extreme contrast,  as seen in some false and biblically detested varieties of religious error, such as the those of Canaan, and the obscene ashtaroth images, it was war ON this type of thing that was fundamental, constant and basic to Israel's even being in the land. Avoidance of it was a covenantal basic! This name, moreover, refers to the various fertility religions of the Middle East.

Avoiding such abominable perversions of what man is was one of Israel's reasons for being and moving into the Promised Land. They were to be a show-case, an instruction centre, a sight in practice. It was to show forth the praise of God (Isaiah 43:21, Deuteronomy 4, 12:1-4, Genesis 15:16) that they were called. It was in the end an operation of mercy, to enable mankind to find the truth which in perversity of spirit it has abandoned, with endless fictitious gods, like the later equally fictitious gnostic gospels, proliferating.

An exemplar of truth, clarity and spiritual wholesomeness was needed; to such a role was Israel commissioned; and for this was it to enter the land. This whole operation was instruction, education as well as judgment. It is like a death penalty: if it is to be imparted in the name of morality, that is one thing; but if the one performing this does the same things, it becomes an intolerable stress situation. Truth is not to be contained by hypocrisy.

You see such false lords and libidinous religions condemned for example, directly or indirectly,  in Judges 2:13, 10:6, I Samuel 7:3, 12:10, I Kings 11;5, 1:33, 14:33, the anger of the Lord is associated with this drastic forfeiture of His direction. It is associated with this, that "they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him"! Samuel makes the removal of this feature a condition of the Lord's deliverance, in parallel to the negation earlier. Repentance includes the acknowledgment of having served such things, the gods of the lands! Solomon's error includes such things as these, in the field of ABOMINATIONS! These are the biblical facts.

To suggest that of the religion of Israel in the Promised Land, that its main opponent was its major constituent is not interpretation, as so much else in this romancing: it is contradiction and an endeavour to wed a cat to a concrete wall. It does not relate. It is CONTRARY to what is its field.

Nothing is surprising in the ways of inventiveness, with late-line gnostic inventions, mixed up history and interpretation by contradiction. The glory of God in the temple a feminine principle ? Yet in heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage. What next will enter THE CODE's misconceptions, and export of sexuality as if Freud with a beginner.

Even more amazing in its inconsistency is this, that this very 'Gospel' has not only posed a special repository formed in Mary for secret teachings, but continues a negativity to women with it, surely a most excruciating contortion. Whoever the Mary is - there are seven in the New Testament, she is made to exclaim this, amid praise to the christ,  whoever it may be, concerned:  "He has prepared us all by making us men."

Nothing could be further from New Testament teaching, biblical fidelity or perspective. But that, it is the whole point. These gnostic teachings are too late by far, to have anything to do with eyewitness accounts, factually tested presentations, and are by no means too late to insert inventions, musings, contemplations, new forms of gods and the like, into the biblical base. It is rather like some skin creams: you have a 'base' and into this, you insert your own special nostrum, to make 'my skin cream', saleable at such and such a price.

Moreover, in the Gospel of Thomas , we have ludicrously unbiblical and innovative secretions injected into the newly made 'other Jesus'. Consider this almost 'New Age' effort:

Gnostic-Jesus says, "When you come to know yourselves... you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty." (Thomas-3)

Again, we have this in Thomas 71,  where the Gnostic-Jesus says: "I will destroy this house and no one will be able to rebuild it."

This contradiction of John 2 is attestation of the Gnostic hatred of resurrection: they were far too concerned with spiritual oddities which they invented, to deal with the vile realities of creation seriously, like the bodies we use in order to discuss it! We have then a polemic against the biblical doctrine, and every sort of embelishment, distortion and addition is to be expected, along the lines of the earlier mysteries and devotions to secret knowledge, always invading text with ideas of their own.

Not only so, you have developments of Valentinus' gnosticism, in due course, where  there were movements towards philosophy mixed with 'Gospel', his own, refuted by Irenaeus. Thus later and earlier movements, including magical ones^*4A, secreted themselves into the minds of creative artists who in due and significantly later time, gained the conception of making gospels, since this was the basic order of the day, famed, life-changing and concerned with the greatest episode of amazing events ever witnessed on earth. It was a good leg for the leech.

Indeed, you get developments of pure untested imagination, words that are emitted like a dance in their exuberance, but not propelled by legs, but by tongue, such as these: one or two first principles (cf. News 57, 59 ) emanate 'aeons' which provide the pleroma or totality of spiritual beings. How do principles emanate anything: if they are God, they act as they see fit, not as creatures of the sea with spawn, have wisdom, are complete, are not subjected to a potential which develops, for who would IMPART and IMPOSE that, but the actual God!

However, ignoring reason, it continues: The cosmos comes into being at the thirtieth aeon. Wisdom fell into darkness, became pregnant and begat the demiurge. The SYSTEM for all this contained, impelled procedure was of course - were it so - created by God to whom they would need to return: were they however to do so, and to find Him,  they would need to examine the evidence as distinct from the dancing of their words.

The composition of abstract ideas and practical events, oddities and enormities, essences and principles, the adventitious and the unpropitious is in one series of mazes: without reason, without revelation, without verification and without logical consistency. Secret ideas were very much loved by the esoteric, and this romancing has been no small part of the history of folly (II Esdras refers to 70 hidden books, in addition to the canonical books!). Like seeds caught in some pocket of the earth, these secrets tried to insinuate themselves into sites they might exploit for their growth, no more relevant to the ground of their choice, than any other seed.

Always, in the end, Christ is downgraded, man is upgraded, secret knowledge is the lift, and spiritual realms undisturbed by any sort of disciplined thought about their actuality, in the broadest possible extreme of distance from the Old and the New Testament, explode into their various fancies and fantasies, like a tap left on inadvertently. Neither man nor history is much in importance, and history is as readily crucified in the fanciful and late gospels of the gnostics, as was Christ by Israel. Here you have new nails, and new wood: imagination is the wood, and recklessness is the nail. You put them together, and behold, hundreds of years after the event, you can seem to crucify Christ again. Crucify ? yes, mangle into forms and speeches as attested from the first, as is the sun at midnight.

THE COURAGE OF CASUISTRY

These gnostics were nothing if not brave, and to find what Adam, for example,  wrote after a few millenia does much credit to imagination, if not to research techniques. That is what is missing: evidence. Anyone can romance, and modern theologians have been doing it ad lib for a couple of centuries now in our own 'late' time, manufacturing the most amazingly irrelevant 'interpretations', involving contradiction and synthesis, to such a degree that one wonders why they try. You cannot re-write history; you cannot remake God; you cannot pass eye-witness accounts, rising to conquer in their own day on account of their invincible basis in the knowledge of eye and ear, and the confirmation of those who had seen and experienced.

The opposite is of course true. What had been seen and heard could not be countermanded by mad apostles, joy-riding in the gnostic manner, declaring this and that because of some principles which they liked, with a philosophic indifference to what actually happened, gripped in the maw of the voracious themes and ideas which controlled them, and propelled their thought! That is far from what actually happened in the crucible of events, when the apostles spoke words which, to the contrary, were overpoweringly obvious in their claims, factually based and incontrovertible.

Thus  in Jerusalem, days after the Lord had been resurrected, there was utterly no hope of making merely imaginative claims which anyone would know were completely bogus and unbalanced, concerning a crucified criminal; but there was no way even authority could put down an appeal to what was subversively being covered up by authorities, and was now publicly proclaimed by the apostles. Their guilt was motive enough for secrecy and persecution of the apostles; and they abundantly pursued this line. When in trouble, seize, arrest, imprison and cut down is certainly a method not unfavoured by this world; but it does nothing to arrest the truth, which continues the more obvious in the midst of such ruffian substitution for rationality.

The priests and prelates, the governor and rulers, these had no desire to be held guilty of murder of so great and popular a preacher, so vast a healer, so clear a fulfilment of the Messianic prophecies which filled the Old Testament and had spilled over into factual history in front of their very noses. They imprisoned the apostles and forbad them to speak of this (Acts 4:17-18, 5:28, 40,, 12:2-4); what else could a cover-up do.

The actual cover up then, is not something which could not surface until history was well packed away, and this is the nature of the gnostic 'gospels'. It could not mix with or match what was proclaimed with power from the first in the most public of manner, being itself merely distilled in much later brains, passionate in their philosophies, and now grown impervious to events. The actual record was that of the death of the Messiah, on prophetic time exactly (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), His resurrection and His continuing power as shown in the Book of Acts, which was its own renewal of the matter, since power speaks, just as philosophy lacks a laboratory. These things were from the first acknowledged by many, implemented in power as was the work of Calvary and the resurrection, attested by appeal to known facts, working where challenge could be meaningful, enduring because irrefutable, and experiencing tortures without flinching, because truth cannot bow.

What a presentation then is this of THE CODE, appealing after millenia to philosophies in 'gospels' written and publicised long after Christ, following flowery traditions of gnostic talk without deeds, without available ground for comparison with truth or fact, and in flat contradiction in kind and basis of the actual Gospels, which had so weathered all storms and established themselves in the wind-tunnels of test, so that they were accepted on all sides in the continuity of the church.

The contrast between philosophic gabbling and fact-based history, openly prevailing against all attack and assault is shown in SMR Appendix C, from which the following quotation is taken (slightly revised for our present purpose).

 

Irenaeus deals interestingly with Valentinus, active in his period of history. It is worth an excursion into Irenaeus' work, Against Heretics (XI. 8, pp. 428-429ff., Ante-Nicene Fathers), T0 OBSERVE THE ATMOSPHERE IN WHICH - SO FAST - THE NEW TESTAMENT COMPLETED THE TOTAL BIBLICAL CANON COMMENCED BY THE PROPHETS. The cohesion of this is shown so fascinatingly in II Peter 3:16, Galatians 1:17; with 2:1-10 relative to Paul and the other apostles: in Acts 2 with regard to Peter and the prophets; in Acts 13 with regard to Paul and the prophets, as in Romans 16:25; in Luke 24 with regard to Jesus Christ and the prophets, as in Matthew 5:17-19.

Indeed, it is qualitatively shown in Paul's writings relative to the Gospels; in the harmony in worship and witness between his writings and the gospel writing; as in the ardent accord with all scriptures which was manifest in numerous New Testament references such as those of Clement and Ignatius^*4. These references pre-suppose a corpus or cadre of apostles in concert, and precise prophetic preludes to the incarnate life of the sent Saviour, seen to be emanating from the power of the Spirit of God - from them, and before them (cf. Hebrews 2:3-4).

N.B. Stonehouse in the The Infallible Word, p. 124, states of Ignatius:

The apostles are accorded a place of unique authority and privilege as proclaimers of the gospel; their ordinances possess the same authority as the Lord (Phil.5:1,2; Magnesians 13:1; Trallians 12:2; Ephesians 11:2). Ignatius himself speaks with a high measure of authority to the churches to which he writes, but for all of his claims he is far from associating himself with the apostles.

On the one hand, Irenaeus, in his adroit and scholarly argumentation and his intimate knowledge of the preceding identities and authorities, merely confirms with expository intensity and abundant detail, what the writings of such as Polycarp, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Clement of Rome and the listings of the Muratorian Canon attest positively. Indeed, Irenaeus' reference to Matthew's Gospel as first (op. cit. 111,11,i) agrees well in turn, with the now notable Magdalen College, Oxford, Matthew papyrus, claimed by Dr C. Thiede, from handwriting style, to be from mid-first century (The Australian, 26/12/94).

On the other, the failure of authenticated documentation to attest any established apostolic work beyond the famous four gospels and constantly corroborated works; the conspicuous failure of the spurious to penetrate the sanctum of historic authorship, despite philosophic submissions of late reference seeking 'success', even making appeals to scripture while making efforts to twist or subvert it: this leaves the negative side as decisive as the positive testimony to the authentic.

Speaking of the so-called 'Gospel of Truth', a gnostic effort of the Valentinians, Irenaeus (born 120 A.D.)  writes revealingly of "their comparatively recent writing":

... it agrees in nothing with the Gospels of the Apostles, so that they have really no Gospel which is not full of blasphemy. For if what they have published is the Gospel of truth, and yet is totally unlike those which have been handed down to us from the apostles, any who please may learn, as is shown from the Scriptures themselves, THAT THAT WHICH HAS BEEN HANDED DOWN FROM THE APOSTLES CAN NO LONGER be reckoned the Gospel of truth. But that these Gospels alone are true and reliable, and admit neither an increase nor diminution of the aforesaid number, I have proved... (Capitals added.)

The categories of old and new, apostolic and non-apostolic are clear, distinct and contra-distinct; and the gnostic productions ? FOR CHRISTIANITY FOUNDED on Jesus Christ, with the testimonies in scriptures of the apostles and prophets and Paul expressly stated: These are simply irrelevant. They are also - to catch Irenaeus' thrust - recklessly boastful. What are they then, these innovators ? Irenaeus deems them: "Wretched men indeed ! who wish to be pseudo-prophets, forsooth, but who set aside the gift of prophecy..."

Says Irenaeus:

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are ... it is fitting that she ( the Church ) should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh ... He who was manifested to men, has given us the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit.

Without doubt, this has the very ring of the treatment of Paul, who dealing with adventitious intruders from without the scene and dealings wrought by those "preaching another Jesus whom we have not preached", those involved with "a different spirit which you have not received," or a "different gospel which you have not accepted", calls them: "false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ," (II Cor. 11:4,13).

Indeed, F.F. Bruce, writing in the New Bible Dictionary, p. 487 notes :

The Valentinian Gospel of Truth (c. A.D. 140-150)... among the Gnostic writings from Chenoboskion ... was not intended to supplement or supersede the canonical four, whose authority it presupposes; it is rather a series of meditations.

Such "meditations" have some of the resemblance, we find as we read Irenaeus, of a gilded frosting on an apple, an arsenic additive to an aspro, and all the ingenuousness of that delusive dreaming which knows no way to make its own thought able, but that of parasitic leeching on the works and words of another, whilst pursuing a philosophy neither harmonious, nor attested nor historically related to its butt.

 

What then is the new impetus to finding the musings and imaginings, the mystic revelations and the philosophic dramatisations of gnostics, knowledgeable through meditation, furnishing themselves with the ludicrous concept of good and evil powers, which always leaves their creation and their dissonance in need of invention, since they are mere delimited objects in a total system, designed to contain both. They are causeless excrescences, lacking limit-free operation because of ultimacy, and so requiring imagination to invent them, since nothing else could. Simon Magus, a first century philosopher who was earlier in the gnostic movement, even had a breach within the godhead leading to evil, a yet more momentous anomaly, since time being delimited, and God necessarily not, the ascription of an event in time to a change in the godhead is like having a new chapter in a book, written by some author, leading to a change in the author.

Obviously, any such being as one suffering breach birth of a new and opposed personality is limited in power, in resolution and in foresight, a creature and in no respect, linked to God. You can have as many nervous break-downs as you like, but God is not of this constrained and disfiguring type, equipped with such a character than it has inherent incompatibilities. Who would have contributed such a thing to Him, who of necessity is free ? Even ANY nature which embarrasses or harasses Him, would be an insertion, and necessarily from without. Hence the inserter would be God. You cannot have such gods, and reason. The gnostics however love them; and so hate the truth, the Biblical depiction (it has to be 'adjusted' always, from the first, and new models are made up one or more centuries later, with no more reliability or relevance).

What is the source of it , as in THE CODE: this lust for

	more snide comments on Christ,
	more character assassination,
	more unattested nonsenses about words supposedly meaning this or that, but having no evidential force whatsoever,
	more imaginations, with a Leonardo painting supposedly having this or that special figure, but without the slightest evidential compulsion, mere desperate thought coming so many centuries later to invest the painting with 'knowledge'!

What does this appear in such terms to be, but a series of sub-plots to suppress where the suppression was of what was entirely and catastrophically open for examination! It was so from the first, every time the Christian refused to worship the emperor, or valiant, disdained to confess what was violently required. Here was the Gospel of the day, of the event, of the time, furthered in impact by the apostles, who paid as they presented; and it was open at every port, declared in every time, irrefutable because of truth, while those 'guilty' of its testimony  were marked to be met, as with the Master Himself, by torture, by death, or both.

Why do people give even a slow smile at the wholly arbitrary and fanciful work, precisely in the tradition of the nuances and restless imaginings and ideas of the multi-coloured, long-moving traditions of gnostics and their surreptitiously hidden like, and not dismiss it as errant intrusion on history, from imagination, in violation of every canon of evidence, logic and
test ?

THE PREDICTED COMMERCE OF HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

The Bible is Predictively Knowledgeable

and its Knowledge is NOT SECRET but has been available for millenia

It is the prey and the predator. They co-operate splendidly. Actually, the best point about this nonsense operation, which might have made good pantomime for naughty children, is this: the  Bible SPECIFIED that there would be SUCH an intolerance for sound doctrine, that LISTENERS would have itchy ears, nothing but some new thing able to tittivate them; and FALSE TEACHERS would have various motivations for satisfying the itch. This was a thing to come, and in II Timothy 3, the general arrogant molestation of goodness and truth, formalistic religion without the power of God was foretold for the last times, in which we now live (Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8). This is a special for the LAST DAYS, said Paul.

Peter specialised on the false teachers, the market-place provision for the itch. It is BECAUSE of the itch, that there is a market - as in skin disease, when ointments are in good demand when the disease is in epidemic proportions. Thus in II Peter 2, we hear that in the last times, false teachers will ARISE from the Christian body, and will MAKE MERCHANDISE OF MANY. Now to make merchandise of you, means assuredly, to molest your souls, to bind you, to set you up and sell you, so that your usage brings profit. Two things appear to happen. Firstly, you are SOLD, inveigled, tricked, trapped, sent to be spent into sin, harassed into unholiness, driven into devilry.

Secondly, those who do it, these make money: Peter declares the generic motive in this movement then to come: it is this - that "by covetousness, they will exploit you with deceptive words" (II Peter 2:3). That is the scripturally defined motive in this configuration of events and times.

They gain, you lose. They become rich, you become spiritually impoverished. You hear of the same sort of thing in the field of physical medicine, where those who do not bother with accuracy and study and care, make money out of bogus remedies, which in fact may cause even death.

The only really nice thing, then, about this spiritual pandemic is this, that it fulfils what the Bible predicted as one of the signs of the last days, to a perfect degree. Where, said Christ, the carcase is, there the eagles gather.

Whether or not this or that particular exponent of shoddy, irrational talk about Christ, is in this motivational  category, the Lord knows; but where carelessness coming into the realm of the slipshod is mixed with millions, and where facts are brushed aside as by an imperious hand, thre is assuredly the sign of an equation too fitting to ignore. 

The PRESENCE in FORCE of just that category of religious statement, it is this is PREDICTED to be occur in the last part of this Age. It is occurring. Whatever the known motives of such, the known financial results are indisputable, and the demonstrable flush of errors would be all but incredible, were it not for the prophecy. It sits majestic, past all the murmuring of mankind. He says, and it happens.

Thus we have at once a complete characterisability of this type of thing. There is the slackness, the ready use of non-truth as a means; there is the invasion of the church with such sentiments, drawn largely from mystic thought, that of yesterday or today; there is the merchandise aspect as people carelessly allow themselves to become faddists for the culture of disillusion and contempt for truth; and there is the enormous profit on the part of the propounders of these old ideas, brought out in despicable indifference to the rigorous domain of investigable history.

With that, there is the stately certainty of the Bible declaring not only what will happen, as in the first coming of Christ, and WHY it would happen, and WHEN, and HOW it would happen and WHERE; but declaring what would be the end of the Age derivative from Jesus Christ, the Messiah. In this domain, we have what we are now seeing, just as in the climatic, the oceanic, the earth movements, the fear in the hearts of men, the pandemic of shedding blood, the fulfilment of the precise scope of Christ's warning about the way to the end (cf.  SMR Ch. 8).

As in the days of Noah, said Christ, so will it be (Matthew 24) - many doing this and that, until the time comes! Pre-occupied with pettiness, they are to unaware of profundities; looking for merely superficial gains, they lose the very world in which they sought to gain them!

So it is, and so are we warned. The huge popularity of these fantasies makes the impact as great as that of the climatic^*5 one. In fact, with the indefatigable reliability of the Bible, the written word of God,  both these things are foretold. Both of these, together with the war syndrome, the blood shedding syndrome (Revelation 6), the famines, earthquakes and horrible sights (Luke 21:11 -  not just 'awesome' is the Greek term, but 'inspiring fear', or terrifying): these  make up a good exhibition, fit for students as in medicine, to behold, as they see the end of the disease: in this case called sin and rebellion.

Far the worst component is failure to repent (cf. Luke 13:1-3), which means increasing turbulence, like a smoker in the last stages of lung cancer, refusing to forego the habit (Revelation 9:20-21). Not only so, they refuse the Gospel, and are turned away to fables (as predicted for this last phase of the Age in Timothy 4), follies such as now are well exemplified in Communism, evolutionism and other fantasies of false prophets (cf. *1 below and More Marvels Ch. 4, with Divine Agenda Ch. 6).

This biblical background, and contemporary foreground being shown in their correspondence, It is now time to look a little further, now, at some of the romantic oddities of the presentation in THE CODE.

Far from its being the case that Constantine invented or invested the deity of Christ, Paul is the most eloquent and assured, the most impactive and exacting of apostles in this field, and his works are from the first century, a couple of centuries before this imagined, pantomime-like work of a rebuilt and fantastic Constantine, appearing like a ghost, remade from the tomb, stripped of history, invested with the ideas of raging imagination. Indeed, THE CODE has much of the criteria which made gnosticism: stark invention, free play of ideas and compelling constraints to change things to the way one wants, without regard to evidence.

What then as to history itself ? So far from anyone then inventing the canon, let alone the Gospels, these had been known from the first century, Matthew and Mark treated significantly with much of Paul, as by Justin Martyr (who died around 165 AD), who refers to the memoirs of the apostles being read every Sunday at Church Worship. Earlier, Papias held forth in some detail about the coming into being of Matthew and Mark, with other works noted. Indeed, Irenaeus, born 120 A.D. had sharp words in criticism of gnostic style, 'secret' documents purporting to be gospels, but not publicly tested. Anyone can write a gospel once the originals are out; it takes merely a dead conscience and a lively imagination, with the prospect of finding a tree for your mistletoe to drag on, for life.

In fact, in Against Heresies, Irenaeus declares:

This easy assemblage of Old Testament, the Lord Jesus Christ, His words, His apostles, their designation to convey it, their inspired words, is as much a divine conflation, a unit, as is a  magnetic resonance imaging equipment. It is all for one purpose: God has something to do for and say to man, and makes sure that the equipment is provided, both in procedure, scripture, and in person, Christ. Just as the Son was SENT by the Father (John 3:16, Isaiah 48:16), so the Spirit was given from the Son (John 15:26, 14:26) so that the God-breathed scriptures should be given (II Timothy 3:16). In the early church, these things are so clear that they tend to be simply assumed, as you see in the above.

Indeed, by the time of Irenaeus, the fourness of the Gospels was as elemental as the compass quarters, and this with Ignatius shows the authority which they possessed and had possessed, treated as scripture in Church assembly. Notably, Ignatius in his Epistle to the Romans declares this:

"I do not, as Peter and Paul, issue commandments unto you. They were apostles; I am but a condemned man: they were free, while I am, even until now, a servant. But when I suffer, I shall be the freed-man of Jesus, and shall rise again emancipated in Him. And now, being a prisoner, I learn not to desire anything worldly or vain."

Tertullian likewise listed the Gospels over a century before Constantine, around 200 AD, and most other books of the canon, while the Muratorian Canon dated around 190 A.D. has a list of New Testament books, clearly indicating the four Gospels. Nothing else Gospel-wise is in consideration; but the assaults of polluters are rebutted by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, just as a mother might remove hair lice from her child's hair after school. It did not belong, but was an alien intrusion from an irrelevant source masquerading by philosophy as if to have something to say, when what HAD to be said, HAD been said by those who saw and heard. You cannot invent God: when He acts, you watch and see.

Three things stand out: it is the writings of the APOSTLES or their close associates which are considered as source, and from that comes in this 'see and hear' empirical setting, those which may come to be regarded as scriptures to be read in Church. Thirdly, these are not to be countermanded, but basic to belief. God did not send Christ in order to have biographical nullity; but sent the Holy Spirit to provide certainty of the portrait and the performance (John 14, 16, I Corinthians 2).

Applying these criteria, we find an error of nearly two centuries in timing in the lapse of THE CODE, which has arm-chair inventors, telling about the 'match' a few hundred years later. They are of course regarded by those who followed the incarnate Christ, as of no consequence at all, and find no spot in the listings of the early Church.

We do not expect split second timing, to be sure, but two centuries before the Emperor Constantine and his alleged manipulation ? is this not a trifle turgid ? school-boyish ? in the worse sense, of someone not watching at all, what is going on. Is this not perilously close to the merchandise proposition of Peter, that such skill should be used in such bucolic buffoonery, as this! And is that not a beautiful fulfilment of the prophecy of Peter, like daffodils in Spring, more accurate than landing on the moon' for that is within visible space: this is within invisible history millenia in advance!

The thing is starkly impossible, like dividing a number by zero. There is no meaning in it, just a ludicrous supposition, unresearched, unconfirmed, like a bank robbery. You cannot get results that way, that stand IN PUBLIC!

Indeed, you have the prophets, the apostles and their close associates, the Gospels in particular, the writings of Paul, all from mouths tested in time, public in utterance, declaring themselves sent by the one changeless God of creation, mutually approbative, testifying direct into historical situations in the Old or the New Testament, before an often rebellious Israel, in BC times or AD.
So they act,  before all the world, attesting their words, which are testable before any audience, thrust into the midst of the maws of those who prefer not to eat, like it or not, or to use the scriptural term, 'whether  they hear or  they forbear' (Ezekiel 2:4-8, 3:1-11). The thing is open, consistent, fact-based, whether of the Exodus' day, or the Incarnation time, wrought in observation, compelling in truth, sustained for all time in verification. The Canon is like a great cannon which fires the demarcated, explosive truth far, but with salutary not destructive power.

The flavour of these needs to be realised.

^“For they are impudent children and stiffhearted.
I send you to them; and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD.’

^“And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebellious house,) yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them.

^"And you, son of man, do not be afraid of them,
neither be afraid of their words,
though briars and thorns be with you, and you dwell among scorpions:
be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks,
though they are a rebellious house.

“And you will speak my words unto them, whether they will hear,
or whether they will forbear: for they are most rebellious.

^"But you, son of man, hear what I say to you; ‘Do not be rebellious like that rebellious house: open your mouth, and eat that I give you."

Again in Jeremiah 3, we find the same spirit.

"Moreover He said to me, 'Son of man, eat what you find; eat this scroll, and go,
speak to the house of Israel.' “So I opened my mouth, and He caused me to eat that scroll. And He said to me, 'Son of man, feed your belly, and fill your stomach with this scroll that I give you.'

"So I ate, and it was in my mouth like honey in sweetness.

"Then He said to me:

'Son of man, go to the house of Israel and speak with My words to them.
For you are not sent to a people of unfamiliar speech and of hard language,
but to the house of Israel, not to many people of unfamiliar speech and of hard language, whose words you cannot understand.

'Surely, had I sent you to them, they would have listened to you.
But the house of Israel will not listen to you,
because they will not listen to Me;
for all the house of Israel are impudent and hard-hearted.

'Behold, I have made your face strong against their faces,
and your forehead strong against their foreheads.  
Like adamant stone, harder than flint, I have made your forehead; do not be afraid of them, nor be dismayed at their looks, though they are a rebellious house.'

"Moreover He said to me:

'Son of man, receive into your heart all My words that I speak to you,
and hear with your ears. And go, get to the captives, to the children of your people and speak to them and tell them,  "Thus says the Lord God,"  whether they hear, or whether they refuse.' "

Here is the straightforward, direct, confrontational, non-discursive, proclamation of truth into the midst of the active situation to which it relates. It can include things near or distant in its survey (as did Ezekiel in particular, including the Messiah as in Ezekiel 37), but it publicly probes for the present. It is a matter of multiple test, near and far, the word from the living God who not only integrates it in spirit and substance with what went before, but exposes it with relish to what is to come (as in Deuteronomy, Joshua, Daniel in their gifts from God, of sustained, testable revelation).

Ezekiel for example foretold the case with Tyre with dramatic precision, a matter moving on to then distant time of Alexander the Great, who performed the last deeds of the Tyrian matter (as in 26:1-4), moving the stones of the city into the sea, just as he foretold in the immediate future, what would befall Jerusalem (Ezekiel 23).

With mingled pity, courage, clarity and force, they presented what was, what was to be, what should be, the word of the unchanging God, to the clamant world, whether Israel or more generally; and their words in the midst of the people of God, challengeable, perhaps leading to the death of those who spoke thus in the name of the Lord, were always fulfilled, always pure, always consistent, in name, in power, in precision: and behind was the delight in mercy (Micah 7:19ff.). This was also seen repeatedly in Jeremiah as offer after offer was made, only to be rejecte. A different outcome was seen also in days of Hezekiah, where the Lord being sought, deliverance was obtained by miraculous means (Isaiah 36-37). These things were continual confirmations, as from the days of Moses and the Exodus, often unpopular, stated under continual scrutiny, in the name of the unchanging God, whose fame and name were apparent.

After all, it was good that Israel should testify to the truth, for it was made for such a purpose, and if only it would do it, so it would be enabled to continue. But despite some massive revivals as with Josiah and earlier Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah,  it would not! It was not willing. This same rebellion infected the Jerusalem of Jesus’ day, a fact He made clear most forcibly (Matthew 23:35-39): on them would come the blood of many years, as they slew the Son who came after so many prophets had already been rejected, mistreated or worse (Mark 12).

Yet “wherever the carcass is, there the eagles will be gathered!” (Matthew 24:24-28). Thus, the same false prophet syndrome, fecklessly imaginative, not able to be tested, merely contrary, rejecting the purity of the one God, the continuity of His doctrine, the fundamentals of His power, the Messianic centre and the solemn means of deliverance, while altering, debasing, mixing, muddling, compromising, seeking place for spiritual or physical lust as was done even in the days of Moses (Numbers 11, Exodus 32, Numbers 25): this proceeded. Just as it was  in the Old Testament days, so it fluttered its flurries, in the New.

It sought to find place, to snare the people, to use their basis by subtle or gross differences, to prescribe moral folly, or imply it or to seduce in any way, its proponents seductive but obviously alien in their words. It came like a tornado, destructive. Yet there was no alteration. The testimony of tested truth in the changeless name of the self-revealing God Almighty continued, clear, contradistinct, authoritative, known, assailed as were its spokesmen, the prophets, the apostles, but never in the end invaded. God’s word stood like a rock, contradistinct, settled.

The case was clear in the New Testament, in close parallel, and all the venoms of hell could not get false gospels listed in the Church lists, nor the false god Gnostic materials, to be lodged in place. It failed, and the lust continues now, as it was then. It strikes on the rock, but is unable to move it.

No Gospel but the four, nothing of Paul but his epistles; the public fruits of public truth are forwarded till the final details of the last members of the canon are settled in the day of Athanasius; but the criteria are clear, and just as there were OF COURSE many false prophets in the Old Testament days (so often noted, as in Jeremiah 23), proposing direct contradiction of the word of God (as in Jeremiah 20, I Kings 22:6ff., and notably at Mt Carmel in I Kings 17, where a mass contest was explicit, won by one, in the Lord of all truth, continuity of truth and of testimony): so was the case in New Testament times.

Their doctrine was untested, false, unverified, dissident from the ways and person, the purity and truth, the testable truth of the Almighty attested by prophet and apostle alike. Their contests were vain, and though much evil came on people infected by them (like King Ahaz), who would not believe, and did not have the faith to follow the word of God, but preferred natural things, gods, expressive of natural feelings, that line even coming to include perverted persons, and their ritual booths (II Kings 23:7): yet their lairs were discernible with simplicity and their ways subject to destruction, as by the vigilant King Josiah.

The prophets opposed these Canaanitish, these Phoenician, these Middle Eastern ramparts of ruin, these battering rams of belligerence towards the tested, attested and invested truth of God, presented before all, and with results which COULD have failed to happen, but DID happen. Not in vain was the death penalty for those playing with the name of God (Deuteronomy 13,18). The test is always there (Deuteronomy 18:20): DOES IT HAPPEN ? and is it the same God, or does it have the habiliments of another! These tests there are several, and not merely joint! They are independent, a double criterion.

Thus when Irenaeus in his second century work, Against Heretics, inveighs at great length against every distortion of the New Testament scriptures in particular, which themselves have come by direct attestation of eyewitnesses and apostolic sanction, and expands and dilates on the essential centrality and deity of Christ as depicted by them, and the doctrines of godliness as in continuity in all the Bible, and ravages through the invasions of dissidents who seek to corrupt from these things by idle words, it is nothing new. It is merely the work which had been manifest in the Church from the first, now re-appearing as the New Testament Church  stood with the law and prophetic writings of the Old Testament, with monumental and detailed fulfilment in Christ given them from the first, and the observations of their eyes, of their ears, and the testimonies of the apostles against hostile Jew and Gentile alike!

There was nothing else, any more than in Old Testament days, but the authoritative, consistent, historically tested word. Now there was rushing into the Church, the vast compact of gospel and epistles of Paul surging like billowing waves in its heart of the Church, visible, viable from Christ’s own day. Into this select company, no aliens were admitted, but as in the Muratonian canon, rejected, while the list of books was being completed. Irenaeus, indeed, has all the vigour and vitality of the Old Testament prophets, reminiscent even of Moses, as he reviews both books and doctrines in the latter part of the second century, himself born about 120 A.D.. How intensively and extensively he expunged what was contrary, expounding in detail the coherence, the content and the harmony of all. This he gives not only in names of books, but  in exposition of the content in substance.

Just as Christ, as He spoke with the apostles,  had told them that He would lead them into all truth,  and bring His words to their remembrance (John 14,16), so did the canon become clear in all major matters from the earliest date, and altogether in the day of Athanasius, then down to the smallest detail. Of that, too, we may note that the bishops who dissented in the vast concourse of Nicaea, from the strict and most stringent attestation of the deity of Christ, when Arius had sought to act as did so many in the Old Testament, against the long established testimony of apostle and scripture: they were not large in number. They were TWO out of hundreds!

But what of this deity matter, the confused concept of having the Christian Church make a god,  when they died rather than allow Rome to make its emperors gods, in this, that they would not bow! Is there no end to illusion! The conceptions of making gods and being made by God are infinitely apart. It is unwise to confuse them, like making zero infinity and vice versa, by oversight.

THE CODE wants to have a new fornicating christ, one made into deity by a politician, one conducting secret knowledge for salvation via some Mary. This puppet of contemporary pretence is to follow the current descent to the abyss, in morals, while being elevated to a goddy sort of thing, of some kind or other ? Not at all, this new fangled, mangled 'christ' is to become the infinite God of creation by some kind of ... imagination.

Surely the gnostics are not dead, and imagination blows the trumpet for the pantomime of impossible things, to excite the children. People dying in droves rather than allow that the Emperor is to be worshipped, while making a fornicator into supreme and infinite deity! … For a scenario based not in this, but in that century, it takes as well as oil to water. It is impossible in conception, a contradiction in terms at the basis of the whole affair. What HAD to be God to be recognised, does not have to be MADE into the minimum for its mission! WHEN recognised, as by Peter at Caesarea Philippi, He is then equipped with a follower. The rules are simple, straight and strict, the morals are categorical, death penalties were still applicable. The apostles were named and numbered. The authority was granted (John 14, 16), and it was unequivocal. With one voice the apostles attest the deity, the Old Testament specifications, the prophetic requirements and their fulfilment.

The only opposition is as always, from false prophets, known by having other gods, and not receiving the Messiah as defined in the prophetic identikit, by God (as in Micah 5:1-4, Psalm 45, Isaiah 43-45, where the Saviour and Creator ALONE is God, and none other is there or will there ever be, pre-formed or post-formed). THIS is the Saviour, the Messiah, to whom every knee must be bowed as to God (Isaiah 45, Philippians 2). Here is MY LORD AND MY GOD! from the lips of the actual Thomas (John 20), who thus spoke to Him. Here is the I AM, of Exodus translated into flesh.

These constraints, uniform in the Old Testament, in the Gospels, in the words of Christ, in the canon compiled, in the epistles of Paul, were as contradistinct form the works of changing gods, changing morals, changing criteria as a bull from a mouse. It is obvious that the Gnostic messes would be excluded with the same vigour and fire as were the words of false prophets in the Old Testament. The testimony of history is precisely this. That is what happened. It always happens. God is God who makes it happen; and though many are the trials of the people of God, and were those of the prophets of old and the apostles, many dying, yet the testimony was as shining as metal from ore. Trying to remix was as noxious as vain.

Those whose desire, like that of Arius, much later, is to de-recognise the basis of the Christian church may certainly 'have a go'; but the foundation was too strong for such belated mockery, and the overwhelming majority could not be moved at Nicaea, to any such infinite revisionism.

The Bible knows nothing of such things as making gods, except as idolatry, nor of fornicating, except as a prelude to a deserved death;  nor does history, and even the gnostic books of THE CODE are merely interpreted in terms of a fornicating 'christ' , by a cast of thought. It is by no means stated, nor does it follow even from the gnostic references.

There is nothing stated, nor demonstrable. As to the secrecy, the One who declared “I AM ... THE TRUTH”, and asked them why they sought to kill Him, "a man who has told you the truth" (John 14:6, 8:40)  is scarcely a candidate for the surreptitious, any more than the subversive. Indeed, His naked exposure in crucifixion would seem to be the precise opposite in kind, in intention, in nature and in degree to the whole concept of secrecy. MAN is exposed in sin, and CHRIST was exposed to bear it!

Further, Christ declared in association with His presentation of the Gospel to Nicodemus, seen in John 3, one vast in significance but simple in expression, these words (3:19-22):

"And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

"For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God."

This is the way of Christianity in total contrast with the gnostic hiddenness, snivelling in the darkness, hiding its blur, slur and stigma, shadowy and unsubstantial, a thing of calumny and secret shame.

That indeed moves to the very ground of condemnation among mankind, that they prefer darkness to the light which with universal application and celestial power and grace, has come to this world of shame. It has come to give another and a better name, that of the Messiah, the Lord of glory, who through the Cross of shame, provides a better name, a better way, escape from worse than oblivion, in peace and pardon, in the pathway of truth.

To His disciples, He declared that He would lead them into all truth (John 14:26, 16:13ff.). Playing with these words, by contradiction, is the exact opposite of building a case. No doubt, if you use bin Laden as a voice, you could make a different Messiah again, one equipped with the shedding of the blood of thousands rather than shedding his own, with force for religion's sake, rather than peace as a product of faith. You could try this; but not with history on your side. That is not what the prophets predicted for the Messiah, who would justify many, for He would bear their iniquities; nor would the time be right - for it was to lead to the death of the Messiah in AD 30; nor would the appeal be right, for slaughterous salvation is a contradiction in terms. It is a composite picture which God has provided, and it is because everything fits, rationally, empirically, prophetically, arithmetically, substantially, in dynamic and in miracle, in word and in deed, that it must be believed.

To ignore it, in favour of imaginations unbased in reason or history, it is as preposterous now as it would have been then. Naturally, the Church ignored this play-acting.

It is the sudden spurt of imagination, as dismal in evidential standing, as fog.

The deity of Christ is not the work of imagination, nor was the death of so many of His followers, but the conviction from evidence, in the crucible of experience, in the context of the scriptural predictions, in the wind-tunnel of test. You could pour on as many metaphors as you wish, and scarcely do justice to the contrast, between the lurid lures of gnosticism, on the one hand, and being unable to deny what they had seen and heard, on the other, and so standing firm before hostile priests! whose power to kill had just been exhibited at Calvary (Acts 4:20).

Let us investigate the deity of the Messiah a little further, for historical perspective and realism.

LAMPOONING HISTORY MAY BE ROMANTIC, BUT IT IS COSTLY

Firstly, the New Testament scriptures which are most eloquent, impelling and declarative on the deity of Jesus Christ, those of Paul, are attested as shown in SMR Appendix C, from the first century and multiply in many cases; and the endeavour by this or that heretic to change their testimony, to degrade Christ as they did physically at Calvary, now in the mind, was simply scurrilous and imperious. It was never accepted because it was just an individual work or some gesture coming over a century later, which did not have the verifiability of being from the apostles or their close associates, simply contradicting this or that their testimony and writings. There was no concerted, consolidated, correlated body which could bring up an evidential testimony to confirm anything contrary to those whose power and whose testimony alike showed no crack for exploitation. Therefore there was no significant place, no place in lists, no acceptance for these alien 'gospels', this late place staters of spiritual philosophies, with or without words that fitted their theories.

Further, there WAS no Roman Catholic Church, no pope. The bishop of Rome for centuries, was merely slowly gaining a degree of ascendancy in some matters, but even Gregory I, pope on the Romanist clannish concept, denounced such activities as shown in detail in SMR Ch. 10 (pp. 1036^*6). Such distortions were far from extant, with the use of papal armies and power, an obvious derogation of the word of Christ (John 18:36), and adoption of worldly methods. In fact, it was a very different world then with naked power used against the Christians, open hearted and vulnerable, slain and sundered, but standing firm because of the truth, neither recognising emperors not any other, but Him who alone had done the works and spokent the words which made it in all honesty, impossible to deny Him.

It was not for nothing that Christ referred to them as shutting their eyes lest they should see; but this is a human option, not always consciously performed, but done amazingly well by many ... until sometimes suffering, and always grace, enables them to leave their culture camps and face reality at last.

There was no scope for repression or suppression except OF Christians BY the powers that then were. The power of God, invisible but active, however, at length, after centuries, brought the Empire to book, first in Constantine and then in its invasion. Meanwhile, it is  useless to try to make the victims into powers to enact and determine by their will, the things to be allowed or found.

The evidence however could not be destroyed, not even by the cover up on the death of Christ, not even by the slaughter of thousands, the tortures and demeaning violation of many.

There were only two bodies: that of the apostles and the scriptures, Old and New in perfect accord, for the vast and increasing body of apostolic Christendom. Against this, when the first century from Christ is past, you begin to get some perhaps 11 or 12 written efforts to shanghai the work into some ill-attested field, in terms of writings of alleged authority as 'gospels',  outbursts against the victims of political oppressions, the Church itself. It did not however yield either to physical violence or to metaphysical innovation. It stood firm on Christ, and His contemporary, God-given and promised, testimonies. What had been predicted for a thousand years, was protected by the power of God.

The CODE concept of Christ, then,  as a fornicator, therefore one worthy of instant death by the biblical law then applicable, did not appear as an alternative to His crucifixion; moral complaint was not found, which might have spared them the trouble of murder.

Further, to suggest that any such godless folly as this, by the book,  would be missed, that

	anything so utterly outrageous in Jewish code and law,
	would not be found by those lynxes and wolves
	who could not bear His authority, His miracles or His message,
	when their vehemence knew no end (Luke 11), and their hatred no intermission,
	as foretold in Isaiah 49:7 and Psalms 2, 15, 22, 41, 55, 108, for example, and foreshadowed in Isaiah 24:

this would be to imagine a world quite different from this one.

With the operations of Judas giving intimate access to the group, with the milling thousands who made use of Christ, and those who rejected Him,

	there was no knowledge for even a false accusation to this effect ?
	there was no easy way out, such as the Chinese have, in seeking to sink the reputation of Christians before imprisoning them ?

Did they have to go to the limit of crucifixion for Christs's claiming to be the Messiah
when the claim was most easily,
on this imaginary CODE model, to be shown to be a moral plague, a ludicrous anomaly,
a crass impudence in the face of moral standards not in question!

To suggest that He was married, on the other hand, is an enormous imposture, adding to what is given in all early records, turned into nonsense in view of His intensely open and probed life. It is available only to those for whom history is a basis for romance, not reason.

With people pressing into His private life on all sides, so that even rest was an achievement as in the feeding of the 5000, no one could see ? With disciples and enemies, traitor and sick all about, He concealed what is by nature public, a marriage ?

The thought is ludicrous, the idea is a sensation of blackguarding, and the concept is like suggesting that the Germans possessed weapons which could have destroyed England with ease, but instead attacked Russia and suffered Berlin to be taken. In fact, they were hopeful through atomic work and buzz bombs, and they used these to the uttermost, even in the most elementary form, and had some limited success: but they tried, oh yes, they tried.

When your regime is to be subject to numerous works for its extinction, so that it may continue only by greater power and glory, truth and not fiction, is it to be suggested that not only did Christ escape, but so too did the persecuted, harried, harassed, victimised, hated and assaulted Christian Church, in impostures unclean, circumstances secret, liveries of deceit ? Do pigs fly ? Is the impact of unanswerable truth to be met by the assumption of insufferable lust ? Is a new christ to be invented every time morals change, whether as assassin with the liberationists, clown with the comedians, humanist with the self-measuring pedants!

This is mere anachronism. There was no power to deceive, no place to hide when the face was that of Christ. Very different for centuries, was the plight of the Christian church from that imposing billionaire to come, Romanism, yes and that to the uttermost part. Not for it was the option of the clandestine, for its testimony was at all times remarkable for boldness, openness, fearlessness and insistence on the practical facts of Christ crucified, not Christ lucif-ied in lies, as in THE CODE.  Their place lay in being not proud, but humble, not pompous but evidentially open, not imposing but exposing Christ from the testimony of truth and the knowledge of the people, even in Jerusalem within days of His resurrection.

The CODE is a puzzle indeed, but merely makes compositions of error.

Are the vehement and intimidatory enemies to be denied any access to such a flirtation, double life and dishonour, such an hypocrisy and double-mindedness on the part of the most single-minded person ever known ?

Moreover, is the testimony of years and multiplied thousands over the early centuries,  to defer to some small and inconspicuous testimony, among a number of others, which without evidential ground or popular consent, is to be simply written. Well might such slander be secret, and not show its face, be found in jars, in philosophies, too shameful a slander to be open.

Small wonder that it did not, and the canon of the New Testament gave no place to these secret slanders and peculiar mystiques.

There was to be no yielding, then, in the face of what had prevailed increasingly without being overturned, during long years of persecution, to this trifling with truth. They would yield neither truth nor Gospel to incisions, even when in the most abased condition, under the authorities of government and temple, and is a series of various, vicious and unconfirmed assaults. No innovative and unhistorical ideas were to be given credence, no 'gospel' of this kind was to be listed, no, not though the face of the whole mass of Christendom, without pope, without power and riches, such as came to Romanism, was slapped repeatedly and the body of the saints was set the midst of interminable persecution!

The idea is ludicrous, on all sides,  by any rules of evidence. They neither deified the One accepted for being Deity, nor did He show a testimony of insidious sin, but of a righteousness so intense, that none could fault it, though their motives, their methods and their meddling were almost unlimited, and their power was vast. Christ was ON SHOW, and when He would take rest, readily was He interrupted as more and more sought healing and help. It was in a way like those early Chinese missionaries whom many would seek to watch, even in their domestic affairs, when they lived in open places, in order to satisfy their curiosity.

Nothing however could make Christ fall; and false gospels taking a hundred, or two or three hundred to find paper, were instant failures, would-be despots over history, contrived to turn the victory of Christ on the field,  into some verbal failure, appealing to invisible faults that showed not at all, after exhaustive tests. The two stood together: infallible life, infallible power and infallible morals, and ineradicable fulfilment of every scripture which they could throw at Him, whether it meant the use of miraculous power as in Isaiah 29, 35, or inveterate power to overthrow every verbal assault.

Nothing but death would do, for the exclusion of Christ from the place of Prince of Peace. His murder meant that the priceless having been slowly strangled, with blood oozing the while, there would and could be no peace for Israel till its time came. So it was to be, and so it has been; nor is there any peace for this world, while it follows the work of Caiaphas, with its endeavours to kill again who He was, and slaughter what He did, in insolent aversions, and unmemorable imaginations.

Further, the trinity is clear from the Old Testament (cf. SMR Ch. 7, Section 4), and the deity of the Messiah is consistently insistently and persistently pressed in it, so that Peter's acclamation in Matthew 16, as recorded, was a necessary belief for any acceptance of the Messiah. Paul's words expressive of the deity of Christ are as categorical as could be imagined; and these are they which circulated and within several decades of Christ's death, were approved by the apostles, Peter deeming Paul's epistles to be scripture (II Peter 3). Where is this concept that someone centuries later invented the deity which was imposed from a millenium before Christ came, and that at the date, as well as with the authentication, required (cf. SMR pp. 532-560).

To conceive that certain wholly unobjective and purely imaginary Leonardo pictures have some inscrutable message which only imagination can even conceive, which in some way was to enshrine the unevidenced filth that a few writers threw at Christ, as has been common over the Ages,  the production of ill-attested romancings: this is a scandal to rationality, an impudence to verification and a journey into loose adventures of the prurient mind.

Purity and deity were the entire scope of the Gospels, which swept to place as scripture in the early church within decades of His death, now directly attested, now in this or that case, now as a body or corpus of writings, now as inexorably obvious truth, as unalterable as the directions of North, East, South and West, in the eyes of one of the leading scholars of the time, Irenaeus. Reckless, renegade re-writings of history, in philosophic clowning, were candidates only for contempt, their code unscientific, their message unbased, their philosophies irrational.

It is the same with the CODE’s pretence that there are Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest Christian records, that do not "match up with the gospels of the Bible” (p. 245). In fact, as trial attorney Craig L Parshall points out (Israel My Glory, Jan. – Feb. 2006), there is blatant falsification in this claim. Whatever the motive for such false assertions in THE CODE, this is the result.

In fact, there appear to be no Christian scrolls in the Dead Sea collection, and the relationship of the Essenes has been considered in SMR pp. 1163C-1164.

The spirit of antichrist has many forms, like that of those who imagine the Romans did not know how to kill, or to attest those whom they killed in crucifixion; or that blood and 'water' separation of the elements of our life- giving fluid (John 19:34) is a suitable base for sustaining life (it being the discharge of ruin!); or who imagine Christ was not killed, or did not rise bodily from the dead, as if a tormented relic showed the power of life eternal; or from a callow, crippled condition, a crucified butt produced the formula for immortality and the function for faith.

Chapter 6 supra has dealt with such contrived follies of desperation, flits into the fancy of existential irrationality; but God's word deals with those who withhold faith, and so test... the Almighty, as if judgment were not just around the corner.

Indeed, will a romanticising theologian allege that the this-worldly 'deceiver' in some ancient document of a sect of zealots (like the Essenes, anti-Establishment penitents who spoke of a teacher of righteousness, but did not perceive the Lamb of God suffering for sin in His divine passion of lovingkindness, in their doctrine) is in fact the sublimely altruistic Christ!

What is this but jousting with reality by sheer anti-evidential guesswork!... contrapuntal procedure by contradiction, while constructing on this basis an irrelevant 'political' potentate or party, who nevertheless said: My kingdom is not of this world... (John 18:36) and lived it; who did not fight or seek political power and said so, as also from the first in His withering rejection of the devil (Matthew 4:9-10); who instead carved a kingdom of truth on another basis altogether, deeply embedded in the scripture, one explicitly, emphatically and continually so (John 6:15,27-29, Matthew 16:20-21), declaring: "My kingdom is not from here!"

Will rational man listen to such irrational reconstruction of unevidenced anti-history, in endless vendetta with essential and available reality, at daggers drawn with the data ? as equally with the essential logic ? (Cf. Ch.'s 1, 3 and pp. 931-936, 989-1010 supra.) If fairies may then contrive, so that neither data nor logic, nor history nor Old Testament nor New Testament nor Church foundation nor church history, nor indeed anything pertinent empirically or rationally be involved: let them. We are talking of Christianity, not plagiarism.

Man now mixes his blood with his ink. Much of both... has flowed. He is unkind to himself, his race and his future. Only redemption remains, then judgment. (Cf. pp. 316Cff., 592,  631A-B supra; 1174D infra.)

In fact, the creation still has that wonderful bounty, originality, that poetic imagination that enlivens the spirit of man, justly inducing worship of its Creator; but it has been marred beyond recognition in many ways, such as these (cf. Ch. 2 S1-S14) :-

i) In the heart of man: without Christ, this is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9), not least in imagining its own purity or wildly seeking to reconstruct... God.

ii) In the environment, which is charred, broken or marred, its magnificence subdued... being subjected as Paul states in Romans 8:20-21, for the time, to things lower than its original disposition, to vain things, a fitting rebuke to the sin of its 'lord' (Psalm 8:4-6), yours truly, man: forming a chastening picture in terms of its... deformities, of man's own, a continual sermon on sin. Man is not the only one who can give sermons; and God can provide them in stone (archeology) or in life (biology) with the same consummate ease with which He first created life forms in their teeming complexity and fascinating compression of code and format (cf. Ch. 2; 631A-B supra).

iii) In the human form created for the eternal Son of God, as we read in Isaiah 52:14, an 'astounding' matter for many. Here the highly exalted servant of God, Christ as man, becomes a sin-bearer, and in that form He is marred beyond recognition (lit. "beyond the form of man") by the barbarous cruelty, the sophisticated hatred and the carnal convenience of man. He has presented us, like a barber, the 'back-view' of our own sin, in terms also of our own creation. If to that some object, this merely exposes yet again the same marring... within. Our evils as a race are not photogenic within or without. They are not good to look at; but look we do, and must.

Yet despite the marring, the marvel still remains: both of the love of God who sent His Son for deliverance from damage (not for damage control), and of the majesty of God who made not only man, but also his environment, in His time mirroring how He would, the vain faults of fallen man. It is not reason which can object.

Thus for the Christian, God instead becomes the ultimate environment (Colossians 1:27, 3:11-17), the Maker for the made; and indeed, as Christ is now resurrected, so in due time, at the end of this trial, when the pages of this history have finished their first turning:

The creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21).

It will be time then. Meanwhile, God has started with the children.

There is in the Essenes and their purificatory rites, self-made teacher of righteousness concept which is far from the Messianic role of Christ, merely one of the numerous sects which littered the landscape at this period, as noted in Unger’s Bible Dictionary; and endeavours to parallel, or even correlate them with the wholly divergent work of redemption through the blood of the slain, predicted and sin-bearing Saviour is mere intransigence against truth. They do not match. They move to remove the relationship to God Himself, or the work, or both.

You might as well try to match the work of the former USSR and the Carnegie Institute because they have one or two points in common. Such confusion is the enemy of science, the bane of understanding, and like the rest of these myths, a patent and blatant work of confusion of incomparables.

Thus this additional idea of THE CODE, is barbarous. In no sense is there ANYTHING to do with the Christian Church or the Redeemer, with Jesus Christ, with the account of His life or the scriptural centre of His significance. It is a Jewish sect intent of purification and their teacher, as far from Jesus Christ as the moon from the sun. It does NOT, emphatically not provide anything whatever to do with the Christian Church, has no relationship in doctrine or dogma to it, but is like a false road, leaving the core of the prophecies of the Lamb, for a philosophic preference. They did it their way; but no Christ was in their midst, nor was the Messiah in their midst, nor was the Cross in their minds.

As was noted earlier for this Site, the contrast between the Essenes’ teacher and Christ is vast. Thus one wrote earlier (slightly revised for this purpose) as follows.

A book of F.F. Bruce, a prodigiously famous scholar and Professor in this sort of area in the University of Manchester, is Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls. This gives an informative account of various references outside the Bible, in a B.C. sect, which was very fond of the term "teacher of righteousness." As Bruce shows on pp. 60, 71, 76ff., 92ff., 112ff., with reference to detailed items found in the cave, there appears to have been a highly regarded teacher who was very inappropriately forced into some contexts in Habakkuk, so that it was made to appear that HE would be the one to interpret and provide data. Others might possibly have borne the name as a title, but it seems that there was one, the founder presumably, who was most singularly revered. The distortions and insights combined provide, as Bruce exhibits, a strange fare indeed. It is far from Biblical truth, history and its termination, all three.

It was, Bruce indicates, a sect which seemed to have felt the end was near (e.g. p. 96) and that their teacher would instruct them concerning what was to be done. He also indicates that there is no slightest evidence of any special kind of death for this ‘teacher’, or that he was at all regarded as a, or the Messiah. Nor was the end anywhere near ‘near’!

In fact, as you can see by consulting The Shadow of a Mighty Rock pp. 886ff., even the First Coming of the Messiah was set for His death about 30 A.D., long after this sect arose! They did not look intently for the many Messianic requirements, but followed a form of their own.

As for the rule of the Teacher, in fact the Messiah, that was a matter of millenia distant as you see sketched in II Peter 3:9, an Age in which a whole series of political, moral, religious, spiritual, social and international events had first to transpire. Theirs was a void, with a swift step past the suffering of Christ, to reach at once very far to  the realm of the Second Coming and the End. This,  biblically in the prophets, had to await Christ's resurrection, the dissemination of the Gospel to the Gentiles, the restoration of Israel after its dispersion and the entire Gentile era! (cf. SMR Ch. 9, Appendix A, Joyful Jottings 22-25). 

This too was taught likewise by Christ (cf. Luke 19:42ff., 21:24), for Israel had to have its temple ground to the ground, and to be taken over by the Gentiles, and then to be restored, before there was anything of the Messiah to rule on this earth, in view. As noted, Peter showed the scope in II Peter 3:9. Here, in the context of the entirety of history, where phases can be seen as a thousand years, one page, there is an awareness that thousands of years are to pass, and God is by NO means forgetful of His coming. The time is His own.

It is groaning now, as the weight of the years presses. As mentioned in Bon Voyage Ch. 2,

Many ignorantly imagine that because the patience of God is colossal, His kindness is equivalent to making Him irrelevant to action. It is just like the smoker who thinks the advertisements can go to blazes, for he enjoys his little fires in his pipe. Yet to this moment, though some of the coming physical distortions of the order of the earth which will mirror to some slight extent, and then a growing one, the distortions of deity and His designs,  by man, and the twistings of truth and the marring of morality, are beginning to suggest themselves to both eye and reasoned prognosis from changing events: yet the patience of God is profound.

We are still being given a little more time in the grace and love of God (II Peter 3:9), as Peter foretold,  and what is to come waits yet a little. Remissions however are no ground for ingratitude or folly.

Time is vast, but not endless. The coming was not to rule first, but to suffer; but the suffering of folly, though almost inordinate, has an END.

As Jesus indicates in Luke 24:25-26, there was first the prediction of His sufferings, and to follow, then that of His glory. They were very far from being the same. These were two epochs, to suffer and produce the Gospel, fully paid up, and to return and to reign, till the earths should be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah11, Habakkuk 2:14).

The ‘teacher of righteousness’ concept of this sect, therefore,  a stark feature, on which they were so keen, is not really very interesting, in this: that we just the same sort of phenomena today. It was a slim and even at that, alien connecting link to a mighty corpus of concepts, deeds and provisions prophetically affirmed by the Almighty, and then redemptively done by Christ. It was slimmer than string tied to a bull.

Even now, people are still trying to force this or that into or out of the Bible, and seeming rather to make fools of themselves, like that modern sect which confidently ‘prophesied’ that Christ would return in 1934 or so. He neglected to do this, just as the modern sect apparently neglected to think much about Acts 1:6-8, where knowledge of such times and seasons is denied even to the apostles.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls do show, as Parshall points out and W.J. Martin, when Rankin Lecturer in Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages in the University of Liverpool  showed so exquisitely in his  “The Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah”, is the amazing fidelity of the transmitted Isaianic text relative to the earlier version in the Scrolls. There are found only insignificant variations, some omissions in one scroll rectified in another, and the substance is secure to a highly impressive degree (Parshall cites to this effect from Martin Abeg Jnr., Peter Flint and Eugene Ulrich eds. In  The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, 1999).

Thus items in the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus, which in fact includes the confirmation of biblical accuracy and the relics of some sect of Jewish zealots with lustratory rites as a preoccupation and a leader of zeal in a mission of their own: this in some nugatory manner is to become an early Christian document! It omits the Gospel, the Christ, the testimony of Jesus, the redemption, the Cross, the centre and the name both of Christ and of Christians, and is an early Christian document! Perhaps next we will find that caustic soda is really sulphuric acid, or that Bush was Nixon.

There is no depth to which pride and folly will not sink: there are those who from time to time, become similarly obsessed. They who MUST assume homosexuality between David and Jonathan, although nothing is more distant from the text, the tests which they underwent, or the courage, character and morality of their lives, their biblical law, their godly devotion to the Lord their strength and their trust. To be sure, David went ONCE into a wholly other venture, in adultery with a lustful eye for Bath-Sheba; but it was cut short in horror, almost smashing his life, leading to anguish almost  unspeakable as seen in Psalm 51.

The very concept of disobeying God, of rebelling against His word, was like someone slamming him against a wall. There was far from any intimation of a preliminary in horror, deserving of death, as the young saint wended his way amongst his enemies, in danger of death at any time, accessing and waiting on the Lord in every contingency, with child-like devotion and manly courage. Such compilations of those who cannot stand a prior passion for righteousness and must invest or infest truth with enmity,  are the mere imagination of what cannot stand evidence or God.

It is not in one point or element: it is a pathological passion. Some things arrest the attention, perhaps stir the guilt of the workers of evil, and they MUST change them, or die of shame, if not conscious, then uncomfortably near to being so.

Thus, there were those, in later times, the Arians who persistently tried to REMOVE the deity of Christ, like Arius. He was born about 250 A.D., centuries after Christ, and long before Constantine, and he strove to remodel his Maker. Such endeavours in their fourth century day, had an impact; but the scriptures of both the Old and New Testament would not permit such a renovation, and the Church removed this luxury of imagination.

There was nothing new in trying to make of Christ something which the evidence did not attest; for there was everything old in showing,  as Paul and many others together had done,  that what the Old Testament required, from the very first and in every detail, Christ fulfilled. A desire for change, and for demotion occurred. It was not uncommon among men, and it came like a bull raging and rampaging into the 4th century Church.

In fact, however, ALL happened as the Bible said, and as He said, and NONE could show at any time ANYTHING to the contrary. It was like a scientific theory which on all sides and in every circumstance was verified, stunning in concept, clear in mandate, authoritative in its consistency with all knowledge, without competitor, which could indeed be assaulted and attacked, but not with reason, not in ANY field where evidence confirmed, or reason allowed. Arius failed. The Council of Nicaea overwhelmingly rejected the demotion of the Lord.

The assailants like Arius could try, they could seek to create some new christ, alien to both the Old and the New Testament's unremitting, long held beliefs and data bank of centuries aged by that time. Yet they could not succeed, for the unremitting evidence of the ages was consistently and persistently against them, and they were as mavericks, leading to the sterile valleys and deserts.

NOTHING supported their ideas, neither reason, nor verification, neither report based on credible testimony, nor the contrary mass of tried evidence of events in Christ and the apostles, which none could evidentially deny, and which accumulated during the major persecutions of the non-Roman Church, where humble apostle and not proud pope led.

The idea that despite a total lack of any evidence, and despite the fact that the epistles of Paul and the Gospels are full of the deity of Christ, centuries before Constantine, the latter invented it : these are as ludicrous as the concept that Queen Victoria was a professional harlot who was the courtesan of the real ruler of England in that day, Prince Albert, whose death was merely contrived. Here THE CODE ought indeed to become the remorse code, and reverse its raucous and squalid confusions.

What then ? You can say ANYTHING; but it is evidence, and not shadowy romancings of da Vinci, empty of all evidence, not a Constantine who is invented contrary to all-recorded history, which is de rigueur if truth is your quest, or peace to be your end.  Moreover, the pseudo-'Gospels' which are used by the producer of this defamation of Christ are from the third to fifth century, earliest late second century, and are thus secondary in dating, long in coming to their attestations and branded with philosophical patterns and types neither rational nor anything less than glasses for seeing, which like a double polaroid action, obscure everything. They are as relevant as a gun going off, two hours after a murder.

Mauling the truth, irrespective of motive, whether the pursuit of philosophical, psychological or political passion,  is always a deadly farce.

HISTORICAL OBLIVION INDUCED MAY BE PLEASANT
BUT IT IS WORSE THAN OPIUM'S PRODUCT

Pondering the Perspective

If you are seeking the cause of a crime, starting to take evidence from some centuries later is scarcely likely to succeed; nor is so belated a work a deposition of what occurred, but of minds tardily at work, so being provided with plenty of time to produce ill-conceived expostulations. In fact, Irenaeus in particular makes it clear that the Gospel-seekers, outside the four, the followers of the mode, of the form or at least of the word, were exposed by him as false because secret.

By contrast, the testimony of open and available, public truth was from the first of one kind, it met, because it had to do so, every assault with reason and evidence, because it had these things in abundance, and so was famed for its candour, boldness and clarity. When, as occurred, as centuries past, it was later assailed by post-scripts invented in later history, there was a certain falsetto note. This could only be done on the basis of public evidence long-known, whereas the precise opposite being the case with these literary and philosophical assailants, these gnostics in this case, the assault forces were left as providers and propounders of simple imagination. Their secret presentations were of no greater value than any other slathering of ideas, call it what you will, that people come up with, from time to time, to satisfy their lusts, to implement their programs, or exercise a belated and baseless innovation.

In fact, efforts have poured forth from the day of Paul to now, to make a new Christ, better suited to current tastes than the actual One, just as the nation in His own day, had just the same idea, except that the priesthood could do for the time, with its echelons of power. It is a continual mode on this earth, to replace God either with fraud, with falsetto philosophies of mere imagination; and very often, to this is added the desire to replace His servants, by carting off their carcasses from the earth, assailing their reputations by slander, grabbing their children, and so doing a thorough job. Was the USSR any better than Rome ?

Yet the gnostics were no more successful than all the other assailants, whether literary or political, with word or sword, with torture chamber or Star Chamber.

Not least, their strength in founding the Gospel and overtaking this world came precisely because the objective, public, tried and tested proclamations and intimations concerning Jesus the Christ, the Messiah:

	are unique, attested by history,