On The Claims Of Christianity

. By Femi Akomolafe

Edited By Andy C.Y. Kwawukume

We promised to write on Christianity and that is exactly what we are doing, even if in fits and starts. The following is the first part in a long series of articles on what is called the Christian religion. You had read some already. The purpose is not to attack any particular religion or theological beliefs of any people or group of people. We endeavour only to shed light on this religion (Christianity) which is being used to sentence a lot of Africans into life long mental servitude.

As we write this, millions of what the Christians called a Holy Book, the Christian Bible, is on its way to Africa. They are being given away free of charge. Why? You may ask. Why would Euro Americans be wasting money and time giving things away FOC Free Of Charge? You and I live in this society, do you ever receive something for nothing?

The Bible is being used to turn our eyes to some phantoms and goblins of the sky while Euro Americans are LOOTING our resources. While they are telling us to wait for our paradise in some after-life, they are gorging themselves with the loot from our land. Jomo Kenyatta, I believe it was who said that "When the Europeans came, the Africans have the land, the Europeans have the Bible. 'Close your eyes and let's pray to our father in heaven,' the Europeans asked of the gullible Africans. When the Africans opened their eyes, they were having the Bible, and the Europeans were having the land." It took a protracted 'Mau Mau' war to force the Bible wielding, god fearing 'men of god' to divulge of their ill gotten wealth.

In the coming series we shall touch on a lot of things which Western scholars\leaders would rather not discuss. If some of the things we write about appear unimaginable or fantastic, blame it on the veil of secrecy and ignorance which serves the purpose of obscuring a lot of facts about the Bible and the history of those touched by it, including we Africans. Revealing these facts, of course, will be unpalatable to those who make their good living by pretending to stand between our fears and helplessness, and the wrath of the gods. Those of you under a false sense of smug security may be mightily perturbed by the facts we present. But exercise patience and cross-check for yourselves our claims.

The bible peddlers like to tell us that an attack on their book is an attack on the CREATOR. This is not so. They also like to say that an attack on the biblical god is an attack on the CREATOR of the universe. This is another baloney. The biblical god is Yahweh, also called Jehovah. Yahweh is a Jewish tribal god. Let me explain. First, we have to ask who are the Jews?

All the historical, anthropological and archaeological evidence we have today shows that Africans were the first people on earth to evolve a civilisation, human beings having their origins in Africa! The Jews belong to the so called SEMITIC race. For those who do not know, SEMITES are descended from Africa. In every Jewish vein, there flows some African blood the same goes for the Arabs. So, brothers and sisters, if we were the first people on earth by origin and to evolve a civilisation in which even Jews sought refuge in order to avoid famine and starvation, how do we explain the Jews giving us a god, the god of creation?

Those who read their Bible properly will understand that before the wandering seventy Hebrews went to settle in Egypt, they had no conception of monotheism! Monotheism, for our still ignorant brothers, was an African concept. It was Pharaoh Akhneton who conceptualized monotheism and wrote many of the books falsely credited to Solomon. We read in the Bible how the Jews were worshipping several gods. Even after they left Egypt, they still often relapsed to worshipping these different gods, whenever they are fed up with Yahweh. How many instances in the Bible did Yahweh had to warn them through Moses, the Judges and the Kings that, 'I am your God, who brought you out of Egypt'? Moses was brought up in the court of the Pharaohs, it was just jejune nonsense that he got his laws from Mount Sinai. It was another way of denying Africans the credit that rightly belongs to us! We shall be dealing more with Moses in subsequent issues.

Among the people of the world, Africans are the most spiritual; some say more correctly, superstitious. That explains why we remain eternal optimists. In the face of great adversity, we keep going strong because we believe that the morrow will be brighter. This is precisely what our oppressors throughout the ages know, and they are using it against us. Anyone who know anything about religion could only be amused by the sight of Euro Americans going to teach spirituality to Africans. The sight of the charlatans rushing to our land to teach “universal human compassion” should draw derision not anger. You and I live in Europe and America, where do you find men who love one another? Where do you find men whose hearts were/are filled with Christian charity? Where, in these hate filled societies, do you find people who love Africans? Sure! You know quite a few, you’d say in response.

First, there is an important distinction to be made between Christians and what we shall call 'Bible Peddlers,' or 'Bible Zombies.'

It may distress a lot of our Christian brothers, but the Bible has nothing to do with Jesus the Christ.

Jesus the Christ? Yes, Christ is a title and not the surname of Jesus of Nazareth. What Jesus taught has nothing to do with much contained in the Bible. Christianity as we know it today owes its inspiration and creation to Saul alias Paul, who claimed to have an epiphany on his way to Damascus. None of those credited with writing the Gospels were eye witnesses to what they were writing about. None of the fables and legends they were plagiarizing came directly from the mouth of Jesus the Christ. The writing of the New Testament (NT) as we know it today began well over a century after Jesus’ death!

The saddest part is that most Christians today do not know that those whom Jesus imparted his knowledge\teachings were overcame by Paul. And do our Christian brothers know that they are worshipping Paul's, and not Jesus' teachings? This fact has been well documented by Christian scholars of the Bible from ancient times to today. Heinz Zahrnt calls Paul “the corrupter of the Gospel of Jesus,” Johannes Lehman, the “The Jesus Report”, p.126. Werde describes him as the “second founder of Christianity”. As he put it, “… the discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of the Church became so great that any unity between them is scarcely recognisable,” Johannes Lehman, “The Jesus Report”, p.127.

Schonfield wrote, “The pauline heresy became the foundation of the Christian orthodoxy and the legitimate Church was disowned as heretical” (ibid, p.128). And of course the Unitarians of the Gospel of Barnabas were persecuted almost to extinction by the Trinitarians of Antioch and Ephesus that towed Paul’s falsification of the Gospel of Jesus in order to win more converts among non-Jews who were unwilling to follow Jewish traditions. One must recall that the early Christians were a sect in Judaism and shared the synagogue with the followers of Judaism. Jesus’ sacking of the money-changers from the synagogue was one celebrated occasion of the increasing schism between Jesus’ teaching and the established Judaism, a fact which led to his death being orchestrated by the priesthood, turning Jews into the hated “Jesus killers”.

If Paul had not, through the sheer force of his personality, wrested control from the true apostles of Jesus, we would have a very different Christianity today. Paul himself testified to his use of unorthodox methods to win converts, including deceit and extensively compromising Jesus’ teaching. This he did through claims of divine revelation from Jesus himself – “For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ”(Galatians 1:12; see also 1 Cor. 9:12,20,22; Gal. 3:13; Romans, 3:38). The triumph of the Antioch faction over the authentic early Christians based in Alexandria was decisive in this schism. None or many of the Gospels we find in the New Testament would have been included as they were all written by Paul partisans. The picture we have of Jesus the Christ would also be very different. The simple fact that the early Roman Catholic fathers compiled 73 booklets into their version of the bible while the Protestants, an offshoot of Roman Catholicism, compiled 68 is telling. Readers are directed to documents relating to the Conference of Nicea (Nicene) in 325 AD. What is interesting is the Gospel of Thomas found in the most ancient Coptic Church, with roots in the early Christian community of Alexandria, is not found in both two rival Christian denominations. Few African Christians south of the Sahara even knew about this Coptic Church, which is the Christian tradition found in Ethiopia too. African Muslims, however, tend to be more informed about these things. Islam, of course, also had its origins in Alexandria, from a virulent, anti-Jewish faction of early Christians. But that is another story altogether.

When asked a question, our Christian brothers are quick to say, 'According to the holy Bible, blah, blah, blah.' Let us debunk this nonsense about a Holy Bible. There are books in the world that could be declared sacred or holy, but the Christian Bible is hardly one of them. A simple dictionary definition of 'Holy' is, 'endowed or invested with extreme purity.' Does the Christian Bible meet this simple criteria?

The Bible could be dismissed as a book of 'excessive war mongering, licentious pornography, debauched prostitution, debased immorality, slavery of the highest degree and intolerance of the highest order’. You can then throw in fantastic legends and fabulous myths. You may also add extreme contradictions and infantile fables.

These are very serious charges and we did not make them because we want to impress you with some big grammar. Everything we write shall be adequately substantiated, eventually. Please therefore exercise patience with us.

There are many authorities we can cite to support what we are going to say on the Christians and their book, but since the Bible is its own worst enemy, we shall rely solely on quotations from therein. Sadly, whereas authorities like St. Augustine, (an African who contributed a lot to the building of the Christian faith), expressed doubt about the authenticity of some of the books of the bible, ('when I encounter in these books a statement which seems to contradict reality, I am in no doubt that either the Text is faulty or the translator has not been faithful to the original,' he wrote); and whereas honest Western Christian scholars expressed the same intellectual skepticism; and whereas even the Second Vatican Council (1962 1965) expressed contradictions in the Bible, our African brothers\sisters are clinging, dogmatically to the literalness of the Bible. Africans are prepared to go to war to attest to the authenticity of the Bible. How sad! This is 1994, guys\gals! (We are now in 2014!).

Like most things they touch, Euro Americans have turn religion into a set of abstractions and touting this as the glory of mankind. As anyone except the most ignorant and dogmatic Christian knows, there are other religions in the world dating back to antiquity. What the Euro Americans are teaching as Christianity are nothing but crude copies of ancient religions, which unto this day, they cannot fully understand.

In order to fully understand the Bible, one has to read more than the Bible. There is no single original thought in the Bible. The Christian bible added almost nothing to human knowledge, except to preserve some in watered down and distorted versions. All its stories are found in the Egyptian or the Chaldean ancient books. The psalms and songs of Solomon falsely credited to the wrong people. There is no important idea contained in the Christian Bible that is not found in the eschatology of the Egyptians.

It is important to make another distinction; this time between religion and theology. Religion: “worship of, or obedience to a supernatural power”; not necessarily a deity. Theology: 'the systematic study of Christian revelation concerning God's nature and purpose.' As can be clearly seen, the Christians are LYING when they say that theirs is the only religion, the only vehicle to God. Christianity is nothing but a theology, a crude vehicle to perpetuate White Supremacy. I think it is only African Christians who do not seem to see the use to which Christianity was put and is being put to physically and mentally enslave us. In fact, they (Africans) are among the greatest apologists for the abuses of Christianity, (past and present), as the religious and moral rationalising tool for the brutal enslavement and trade in Africans and all kinds of social evils and frauds presently perpetrated and sanctioned by nations and people proclaiming themselves as Christians. In this guise, they wear the armour of super-Christians who declare all others apart from themselves non-Christians, church-goers and pagans on a mission for Satan! Their own “Christo-paganism” (apologies to the Rev. Prof. Baeta, Emeritus) is hardly visible to them. While Western Bible scholars have the privilege and respect of exploring these things of the past, Africans who want to contribute a little to this debate are insulted by their fellow Africans as “fools who doubt the existence of God”, and the inerrancy of the Bible. To these people we say: we’d rather be fools than be idiots that believe in all kinds of outrageous myths and infantile fables such as the whale swallowed Jonah; a prophet was carried to heaven by a chariot of fire; Moses (or is it his god, Yahweh?) caused the death of all the first borns of the Egyptians and parted the Red Sea; Jesus walked on water like a Japanese Ninja; Ezekiel raised a whole city from the dead (Ezekiel 37:1-9); Elisha raised the dead, resurrected himself, healed a leper, fed a hundred people with twenty barley loaves and a few ears of corn, and healed a blind man (2 Kings 4.35, 13:21, 5:14, 4:44, & 6:11) and a myriad more

Any honest Euro American Christian scholar knows that the image of a Caucasian Mary with her baby Jesus is a pure invention. How does this strike our Christian brothers? Those of us still bowing to the image of a Caucasian maid and her son are bowing to a FALSE IMAGE. Mary and her son could never have been blue eyed blonde. They were Hebrew, and all the records we have of the Hebrews did not picture them as WHITE PEOPLE. This alone should shatter the myth that proponents of Christianity are anything but cultural chauvinists, hell bent on distorting reality, enslaving the non European, especially the African people of the world, and promoting racial nonsense under the canopy of spreading the word of God. If nothing else, these bible peddlers are guilty of blasphemy by attributing to God all their racialist nonsense.

Before 1505, when Pope Julius II commissioned the Italian painter to paint biblical personalities in white, Jesus and his mother Mary were always portrayed as BLACK! You still find them in the Black Madonnas in Poland, among other places. How do we explain this distortion?

'Jesus is the Son of God,' our Christian brothers are fond of affirming. Is this a new Christian invention? At least three thousand years before Jesus, the Egyptian Belief System has the idea of a Trinity. The biblical story of Jesus was lifted verbatim from the Egyptian legend of the Cult of Isis. In it were the story of the Virgin Isis and her son, Horus. What the compilers of the Bible did was merely to change Isis to Mary, and Horus to Jesus. Shocked? Don’t be. The myth of virgin births originated by the Egyptians of course, and found in other ancient civilisations, went into Greek religious mythology from which it entered Christianity through the myths surrounding the goddess Artemis or Diana, with her famous temple at Ephesus, known for its early Christian community, and Dionysus, the “only begotten son” of Jupiter (Zeus for the Greeks), the king of the Roman gods. The triumph of the Antioch faction prepared the way for the birth of the myth of the virgin birth of Jesus. Jesus, so was not the only one supposed to have been born by a virgin in history. More details can easily be found by any serious searcher after the truth.

There is thus more to it. All the myths about Jesus being born on 25 December by a virgin, Isis, disappearing at age 12, reappearing at age 30 and been crucified at age 33, and his arising on the third day and ascending to heaven to sit on the right hand of his father are exactly how the Egyptians told their legend of Horus. So which other societies had the myth of the virgin birth and/or on 25 December and celebrations to mark the event before it entered into Christianity? Many! A few are given below. The interested reader is referred to contact given references, or request for the special write-up on virgin birth myths prior to Jesus.

First, Osiris, god of the dead and the underworld in Egypt, the son of the “holy virgin”, was believed to have been born on 25th of December. Likewise, the Buddha is believed to have been born on this day when the “holy ghost” descended on his virgin mother Maya. The great saviour and god of the Persians, Mithras, is said to be born on the 25 December too. The Greeks celebrated 25 December as the birthday of Hercules, the son of the supreme god of the Greeks, Zeus, through the mortal woman Alcmene. Bacchus (Dionysus for the Greeks), the god of wine and revelry among the Romans was also born on this day, and suffered a fate similar to that of Jesus. Adonis, revered as the “dying-and-rising god” among the Greeks was also born on 25th December, died for mankind and was resurrected in spring. A yearly festival was held for him representing his death and resurrection, in midsummer. It is interesting to learn that the ceremonies of his birthday were recorded to have taken place in the same place which is claimed to be the birthplace of Jesus! The Romans, of course, also celebrated the birth day of the god of the sun, Natalis Solis Invicti (“Birthday of Sol the invincible”) on 25th December. As said earlier, the interested reader can contact T.W. Doane’s book, “Bible Myths and their parallels in other religions” and Dr. Muhammad Ansari’s “Islam and Christianity in the modern world”. These are by no means the only intriguing myths of virgin births and other myths in the bible and the definitive authorities on the subject.

The question to ask at this stage is whether Africans also have similar myths, with their proven contacts with Nubia and Egypt? The Yorubas are among the African ethnic\national group who said that they came from Egypt. Anyone who knows the story of the fabled Yoruba king, Sango, will recognize the close resemblance it bears to that of Jesus the Christ. Sango, according to the legend, was a powerful king of Oyo, the political capital of the Yorubas: He was rejected by his people and, as was the custom in those days, he had to commit suicide. On the third day, he was storied to have arisen and went up into heaven. This story, of course, comes from its ancient African origins.

It is not that these things are not known to modern scholars. There are literary thousands of books that attest to all these (historical) facts and myths. As a matter of fact, these things and myths are known to the most knowledgeable and learned of Christians. The great interpreter and philosopher of the Church, St Augustine (354-430 AD), to whom we owe the concept of Free Will, is quoted to have said “The same thing which is now called Christian Religion existed among the ancients. They have begun to call Christian the true religion which existed before”

“Our love for what is old, our reverence for what our father used, makes us keep still in the church, and on the very altar cloths, symbols which would excite the smile of an Oriental, and lead him to wonder why we send missionaries to his land, while cherishing his faith in ours,”James Bonwick.

St Augustine should know. He lived at the time when the Catholic Church, which he once led, was busy reconstructing the Gospel of Jesus to suit its quest for aggrandisement. These events, following the Council of Nicea (325 AD) which declared Jesus a God against Arianism, and the “conversion” of Emperor Constantine, and the subsequent events leading to the Council of Constantinople (381 AD) which defined the full humanity of the incarnate Christ against Apollonarianism; the Council of Ephesus (431) which defined the unity of the Christ person against Nestorianism, and the Council of Chalcedon (451) which defined the two natures of Christ , divine and human, against Eutyches. If you do not know these things, then simply count yourself among those less knowledgeable. These events are recorded by Edward Gibbon’s book, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, among many others, including the records of the Vatican. Human beings turned Jesus, a rabbi, a teacher and a human being into a God to be worshipped! How the Unitarian Gospel of Barnabas, teacher and protector of Paul, was suppressed for the benefit of existing ideas of the Trinity of god through persecution and killings of those who followed more closely the Gospel of Jesus has been told in many books.

Why are these things not being taught at our seminaries, in our universities and schools? Why are the liars, the forgers, the peddlers of distortions being allowed to get away with these lies they claim were words and deeds of God? Why is a plagiarised book full of stupid myths and patently false legends being bandied as the HOLY BIBLE, inspired by almighty God? Why are the governments in Africa allowing our culture to be contaminated by all these Lily White lies? Why are we still issuing visas to the cultural imperialists masquerading as men of God? Why are the false teachings of the Bible compulsory reading in our schools? We can spend the rest of our life posing burning questions, but let us move on to our examination of this Jesus thing. But before we do that a word of advice won’t be out of place. A couple of hours spent in the library with the Encyclopaedia Britannica will go A LONG WAY IN CONFIRMING most of what is stated here. We can then proceed to answer those questions and uncover the reasons for the total silence: the dominance of our minds and being by the unjust, Western, capitalist, global order in alliances with some selfish and ignorant people of our great continent, Africa.

The compilers of the Bible want us to believe that their work was inspired by God. Any work so inspired must, per definition, be FREE of errors, omissions or contradictions. Is this true of the Bible? It is only the irredeemably dogmatic Christian who can claim so; unfortunately they are mostly Africans these days.

It is blasphemous, to say the least, that a book that contains so numerous errors and contradictions as the Bible could be labelled 'Holy Bible,' and falsely claimed to have been inspired by a God. The most gullible of these Christian brothers would even go as far as telling us that the words were dictated word for word by God. This is simply outrageous! If only these fellas will read their book properly, they will know that it cannot be the handwork of a properly educated man, not to mention an almighty God! They really don't know the amount of damage they are doing to their creed by the stupid and patently false claim.

THE DUAL GENEALOGY OF JESUS

In trying to make Jesus the Christ fulfil their purpose of distortion, they claimed for him a false genealogy to the Hebrew king David. On this important score, one would have expected the writers to be extra careful. Were they? No, they weren't. Check out the genealogy in the Gospel according to St. Matthew and compare it with that of St. Luke. The mistakes are that which are common to all plagiarists and forgers.

According to our Christian brothers, we have to believe that Matthew was inspired to see 26 ancestors of Jesus from his father, Joseph, to king David. In the same Holy Book, Luke was equally inspired to see 41 ancestors also from Joseph to king David! As even a believer Maurice Bucaille puts it, these genealogical miracles present “problems of verisimilitude, and conformity with scientific data, and hence of authentic (sic)”, (The Bible, The Qu’ran and Science, p.89). As for us, instead of buying any attempt at explaining away this contradiction, one must be more inclined to agree with Bucaille’s observation that:

“The authors of the Sacerdotal text of Genesis, sixth century B.C., had already been inspired by imagination for their genealogies of the first men. It again inspired Matthew and Luke for the data they did not take from the Old Testament” p.89.

Aside from the problem of explaining a male genealogy to someone not conceived by a male known as Joseph, (remember? Jesus was born by a virgin!), the absurdity presented in the two conflicting genealogies presents Christians with one of the most embarrassing contradictions in the Bible. The opportunity for “feats of dialectic acrobatics” (Bucaille, p.100) has not been enthusiastically welcome by the gurus of Christendom, as the heavy flat falls on their faces or bottoms are not pretty sights to behold. No wonder, a “pious conspiracy of silence” surrounds this fiction.

GENEALOGY OF JESUS, AFTER DAVID AS PRESENTED BY Matthew (Matt. 1:6 16 ) Luke (Luke 3:25 31)

DAVID DAVID 1. Solomon Nathan 2. Rohoboam Mattatha 3. Abijah Menna 4. Asa Melca 5. Jehosopaphat Kliakim 6. Jehorom Jonam 7. Uzziah Joseph 8. Jotham Juda 9. Ahaz Simon 10. Hezekiah Levi 11. Manasseh Matthat 12. Amon Jorim 13. Josiah Eliezer 14. Jehoiachin Joshua 15. Shealtiel Er 16. Zerubbabel Elmadam 17. Abiud Cosam 18. Eliakim Addi 19. Azo Melchi 20. Zadok Neri 21. Achim Shealtiel 22. Eliud Zerubbabel 23. Eleazar Rheasa 24. Matthan Joanes 25. Jacob Juda 26. Joseph Joseph 27. JESUS Semein 28. Mattthias 29. Maath 30. Naggai 31. Esli 32. Nahum 33. Amos 34 Mattathias 35. Joseph 36. Jannai 37. Melchi 38. Levi 39. Matthat 40. Heli 41. Joseph 42. JESUS There you have it, fellow Africans. The bible peddlers are going around the world, disturbing our peace\sleep to tell these lies they claimed were inspired by God! This is just a small part of the mountain of lies and contradictions contained in the Christian 'Holy Book.' These things cannot be produced by people with unsurpassed brilliance and intellect, not to mention with divine guidance. Luke, of course, further extended his genealogy straight to God, putting twenty generations (instead of the 19 in the Genesis) between the first man and Abraham! (Luke 3, 23-28). What do you make of these things in the light of the knowledge available to us now?

We have to believe that it was inspired by God that Jesus was immaculately conceived, yet we have to believe that, according to God’s inspiration, he was a descendant of King David! Careful readers would have noted that Jesus’ ancestry ended up with both Solomon and Nathan. For Christ sake, these two men were brothers, from the same father. How could an inspired work claim that Jesus was the son of David through Solomon, and also claimed that he was through Nathan, Solomon's brother?! Does the word exist in any language you know to express this contradiction? This is by no means the only contradiction in the Bible, but we shall not do a count of such contradictions, as the Jehovah Witnesses did in 1958 and put them at a whopping 15000 plus! The interested reader is referred to Maurice Bucaille’s attempts to resolve some of these contradictions in both the Bible and Qur’an, “THE BIBLE, THE QUR’AN and Science: The Holy Scriptures examined in the Light of Modern Knowledge” (year and publisher not given), translated from the French by Alastair D. Pannell and the Author.

On this note, we beg to take a pause while the rest of you ponder over these matters raised. This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Of course, we shall not rest until the full extent of the hoax being perpetrated on us is fully exposed.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article, culled from “The African”, first distributed on the Internet in December 1994 and 1995, has been substantially edited with quotations, deletions and whole paragraphs and references added to it.

26th May, 2014 London