As the Old Testament was originally written without vowels, the Lord only knows what it meant. The best the copyists could do was to make a good guess at the meaning, or supply whatever vowels suited their purposes.—See Ency. Brit. 3-64.

Moses was a magician, a thief and a murderer according to the Bible, a fakir who foisted upon the Hebrews a magnificent system of priestly plunder. In pursuance of Moses pretence that the world was created in six days, and that their god El or Bel or Baal rested on the seventh, he commanded the people to refrain from labor on that day and go to church, so that he would have frequent opportunities to pick their pockets. The story of Moses’ birth and secretion in an ark of bulrushes was taken from the Babylonians, where it was applied to King Sargon, according to tablets excavated at Babylon.

The great, learned and profound Irenaeus says that there must be four gospels because there are four winds of heaven. This is a fair sample of the logic of theologians. The fact is, there are four gospels because those four jumped from the floor onto the table at the council of Nice. There was at that time so much doubt as to what alleged sacred writings were inspired by God, that the delegates put them all together under the communion table one night at the close of the session, and agreed that those that got up on top of the table during the night should be considered as inspired, and those that were too weak to get up on the table should be stamped as the work of the Devil.

“Many of the bishops in these councils were ruffians and were followed by crowds of vicious supporters, who stood ready on the slightest excuse to maim and kill their opponents.”—Keeler’s Hist. of the Bible. Tichenor says that “they decided all holy questions by a vote or a knock-down fight. It is doubtful if any of them drew a sober breath during the entire proceedings.” Millman says that “they fought in the streets and much blood was shed.”—Millman’s Hist. Christianity. “What these drunken, fighting, ignorant, pagan priests declared to be received from God, that is what is taught as Divine to-day. To this day they cram their abominable lies of devils and damnation into the brains of little children. The miserable, crazy creeds of Christendom were concocted by these brawling pagan priests, and their poison still pollutes the souls of men. Fire all the gods of all the creeds into the melting pot, and out comes the brazen face of Mammon.”—Tichenor.

Another reason why there are four gospels, according to Irenaeus, was because the Cherubim had four faces. But he thus calls attention to the fact that Christianity was spawned in the sties of paganism, as the Jews took the four beasts of the Cherubim, the bull, the lion, the eagle and the man, from the idolatrous Babylonians. And the four Evangelists adopted the four beasts as their totems and placed their beastly images on the four gospels. The Maya Indians and the Mexicans worshipped the same four idols of the four quarters of the heavens.—Ency. Brit. 12-823. The priests of the Ojibways wear the horns of the bull and sacrifice to the dragon or great serpent (Mary) that wears on its head the crescent moon. They also worship the eagle and the Tree of Life. The Ojibway picture writing shows that the Indian Adam and Eve had the same disgraceful scandal in the garden of Eden. See “Indians,” Ency. Americana.

It is claimed that Apollonius of Tyana (alleged to be the original of Paul and Christ) came through a medium and said: “Nine epistles were made a present to me by Pharaotes, a Satrap of Taxila, between Babylon and India. These epistles contained all that is embraced in the present epistles claimed to have been written by Paul. Further, I retired to the Isle of Patmos in 69 and 70 A. D. and wrote in a trance state an almost identical story with that attributed to St. John. The Christian Gospels were all preached by me at Jerusalem, Ephesus, Philippi, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Babylon, and in all those countries I healed the sick, cured the blind and raised the dead. The original of the four gospels I obtained at Singapore. They treated of the four stages of the life of Buddha.”—Antiquity Unveiled, 21.

Moses and God were mad at the Midianites because the Jews had entered into the tents of the Midianite ladies and worshipped Baal Poer, from which ensued a plague among the Congregation of the Lord. Num. 31-18. And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded, and slew all the males and took all the women and children captive. Moses was wroth because they had saved all the women and children, and ordered all the males among the children to be killed and all the females to be turned over to the soldiers for outrage. And he ordered all the women murdered except the virgins, of whom 16,000 went to the soldiers and 16,000 to the people, but the soldiers and the people were compelled to pay of these into the storehouse of the Lord 3200 in tithes. “And the priests laid with the virgins at the door of the Tabernacle.” Such a monstrosity of iniquity, such a fiend incarnate from the shades of Hell is the senior member of the firm of Moses and the Lamb.

The history of Moses is copied from the history of Bacchus, who was called Mises by the Egyptians. Like Moses, Bacchus was born in Egypt, he sojourned on Mt. Sinai, he passed through the Red Sea on dry land, he was a lawgiver and wrote the laws on two tables, he was found in a box that floated on the water, he smote a rock and wine gushed forth, and Bacchus was worshipped and these deeds of his sung in Egypt, Phenicia, Syria, Arabia and Greece before Abraham’s day.—Doubts of Infidels, 31.

The account of creation as given in the Bible has been found on tablets in the ruins of Nineveh, written in a language that was dead and buried before the Jews ever existed. In this Persian cosmogony the name of the first man was Adomah, and of the woman Hevah.

The Greeks said miracles for fools. Paul boasts of lying for the glory of God and catching converts with guile. Chrysostom said: “Great is the force of deceit.” St. Hermas, an Apostolic Father, said that he always lived in dissimulation and affirmed a lie for truth to all men.— Doubts of Infidels, 78.

You will see that the Bible is dedicated to King James, and that he is canonized in the dedication, probably because he kept fifty mistresses and was in the habit of becoming beastly intoxicated without provocation.

The only real revelations received by the priests and prophets of any religion were spirit messages, and the Lord only knows whether these were from God or the Devil, from good or bad spirits. In fact it is claimed by some spiritualists that all the good spirits are in Heaven with God and can’t get out. In other words, they are in limbo, while those that were not so good are at liberty to visit the loved spots and fond friends of earth and indulge on the astral in their favorite pastimes, whether it be a prayer meeting or a poker game. This is purgatory, the next story above Hell, which is the earth.

Gibbon said that Eusebius was a consummate liar. The Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews were his work, taken from the lives of Christna and Apollonius and the records of the Essenes and some of the Jewish and Phenician legends.

A Coptic version of the life of Apollonius in the possession of the monks of Seville, Spain, about 1458, was placed in the hands of Juan Hermonez for translation. In the margin was a Latin translation, in which the name of Apollonius had been changed to John among many other falsifications. The Latin translation was almost identical with the Gospel of St. John. When Hermonez called the attention of the Superior to these changes, he was seized and thrown into a dungeon, in which he was allowed to starve and rot.

The Bible has been too much neglected, due, no doubt, to the general impression that, being religious, it must be dry. Far from it. For instance: Elohim, the gods, made the light and days and nights four days before they made the sun. They made a firmament, probably of metal, to divide the ocean above from the ocean below, and had windows in it, so that they could open them and drown the inhabitants of the earth whenever they got drunk and needed a little diversion. And they stuck the sun, moon and stars in the metal firmament, which revolved around the earth.

When the serpent was not working, he was coiled around the Tree of Life telling Eve in snake language what luscious fruit the tree bore. For this interference with the plans of the gods, they made the serpent crawl on his belly. He had been crawling on his back.

Moses and his first assistant fakir, Aaron, destroyed all the horses and cattle in Egypt by a murrain, and then, as Pharaoh still had a stiff neck, they destroyed them all again by hail. Then, as Pharaoh still had trouble with his neck, they killed all the first-born of Egypt, both men and cattle. Then the Israelites fled, and Pharaoh hitched up his horses, that had been killed three times, to his six hundred chariots and pursued the chosen of God, who had pinched all the jewelry of the Egyptians. The Bible is full of these delightful stories from beginning to end. If you have conscientious scruples against reading the Bible, you will find them attractively set forth in Le Brun’s Doubts of Infidels.