The first five books of the Bible are derived from a patchwork of discordant and often contradictory texts which were cut and pasted together by the hand of Ezra in the early to mid 400's BCE.  Ezra was not a Prophet, nor was he the high priest.  He really had no business being the final editor of Israel's sacred history.  In the book of Ezra, we learn that he was a descendent of Aaron and Zadok,[1] which associates him with the Priestly sect responsible for the Priestly text.  He was also a "scribe of the Law of Moses,"[2] which means he was experienced in hand-copying the various Bibles from which the Torah is derived – making him very familiar with them.  He was "prepared to seek the Law of Yahweh."[3]  What does the Bible mean when it says that Ezra was prepared to seek the Law of Yahweh?  Had the Law of Yahweh not yet been found?  That is to say, the Law, the Torah, had not yet been compiled from its various sources; therefore, he was "prepared to seek it."

     That the Law, the Torah, was not compiled before Ezra, is evident from the account in Nehemiah 8, wherein Ezra reads his version of the Law in front of all the people, and the people hang on his words as if it were some kind of marvelous new thing they were unfamiliar with.  We are told four times in a single passage that Ezra's reading of the Law gave them a new understanding of it.[4]  Moreover, we are told twice that "they found written in the Law" new things they had never heard of before – namely, that they should live in booths during a seven day feast, and that they should divorce their gentile wives.[5]

     It is on this second point, that Jews should divorce their gentile spouses, that we find the most glaring immorality and inconsistency of Ezra's forgery.  Ezra commanded:

 

You have sinned by marrying foreign women… divorce yourselves from the people of the land and from the foreign women.[6] 

 

The story goes on to describe how a very large number of Jews all divorced their wives at once.  This must have been a very traumatic event in Israel’s history, for Ezra and Nehemiah spill a great deal of ink describing it.  The effects to the Jewish nation must have been devastating.  In an age before gender equality and social safety nets, divorced women would have been reduced to servitude and prostitution.  Children whose fathers had disowned them would have no land to farm and thus no means to survive. 

     Possibly because of this, the Jewish nation sank into a cultural dark age immediately after Ezra's time.  Jewish literature and culture is virtually non-existent from 440 to 190 BCE.  The few scraps of literature from this period, such as Tobit, do not come from Palestine, but rather have their origin in Diaspora Judaism outside of Palestine.  We know virtually nothing about Jewish history during the late Persian and early Hellenic periods, except for a few paragraphs in Josephus – and even these are compromised by blatant chronological errors.  The dearth of knowledge is so bad, we actually know more about Israel in 1000 BCE than in 400 BCE!  There were no wars or plagues at this time that can explain this dark age.  We have only Ezra to blame – the man who ripped Jewish family life to shreds and gave us the final edition of the Old Testament Torah.

     Ezra’s mass divorce spree was inconsistent with the rest of the Bible.  The Biblical book of Ruth celebrates a romance between a Hebrew and a Moabite, and informs us even King David’s grandmother was a gentile.  Solomon married an Egyptian.  David married a Hittite.  Even the Prophet Moses himself married a Midianite.  Marriage between Hebrews and gentiles was honored, not ridiculed.

     Malachi was the last of the Prophets.  He was Ezra’s contemporary, perhaps old enough to be his father or grandfather.  Malachi stated that they should not divorce the "wife of their youth," because, "Yahweh, the God of Israel, says He hates divorce."[7]  The same concept was expressed by Saint Paul, who said, "If any brother has an unbelieving wife, and if she is happy enough to live with him, then don’t divorce her."[8]  Moreover, Jesus himself indicated that religious differences do not constitute a legitimate cause for divorce.[9]  Therefore, the Law makes it illegal to divorce because of religious differences.  We may conclude that Ezra’s policy of forcibly divorcing Jews from gentiles was inconsistent with the rest of the Bible.  Ezra had no legal precedent to legitimize the divorces.  Rather, it seems this ill-begotten doctrine was something of the Priestly sect's own invention.

     As soon as Ezra came, the Old Testament Prophets ceased.  Malachi was the last of them.  We should ask, if the God of Israel was happy with Israel's Torah, then why did he stop talking with them?  Ezra-Nehemiah is classified as Kethuvim, which means Writings.  This is the lowest and least important level of authority in the Jewish Bible.  Moreover, Ezra is represented by only one short fragment among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Nehemiah by none, in contrast to most Biblical books, which are represented by multiple and relatively complete copies.  Chronicles, which like Ezra-Nehemiah was written by affiliates of the Priestly sect, is likewise represented by only one short fragment of just a few verses, and it is not even consistent with the text we have today, which suggests they did not exert the same level of care in copying it as they did other books of the Bible.[10]  Accordingly, it is likely that these books were not even considered scripture among the Essenes.  Wellhausen writes, "Chronicles represents Israelite history in accordance with the Priestly Code."[11]  The literary works that came from Ezra's time – namely Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, and the final edition of the Torah – are not scripture.  These books wrongly weaseled their way into the Old Testament.

          Ezra’s task was to create one national religion out of a bunch of squabbling sects.  He did this by weaving together the various religious texts into the first five books of the Bible.  He intentionally cut and pasted these texts together in such a way that it would be difficult to decipher that they had once existed separately.  It has taken modern Bible scholars centuries to untangle the mess.  At the beginning of this mess stands Genesis 1. 

     When the Babylonian exile ended, some Jews went back to their homeland In Palestine.  These became Judean Jews, and they followed Ezra’s interpretations.  However, there were two other Jewish groups who did not live under Ezra’s jurisdiction.  They were free to continue ancient traditions which Ezra’s interpretations would not allow. 

     One group consisted of the Jews of the Diaspora, that is, those who lived abroad.  After Alexander the Great conquered the known world, the Hebrew Diaspora adopted many aspects of Greek thought and philosophy. 

     The other group consisted of a Hebrew-gentile mixture living in Samaria, which was the old northern kingdom of the Elohists.  The Samaritans continued Israelite traditions, which they claimed originated from very ancient times, and on the whole, they were friendlier toward Greek culture than were Ezra's Judean Jews to the south.

     Both groups preserved traditions that stood outside the culture of Ezra's second temple and its Priestly religion.  Over time, these traditions faded into apocryphal legends, and they mixed these traditions with Greek philosophy and myth, thus forming the foundation of what would later become known as Gnosticism.  Some very unorthodox interpretations resulted.  Among these was Apelles, who is said to have

 

Uttered slanders against the first five books of the Bible and against the prophets, alleging that the things which are written are of human origin and false.[12]

 

     Valentinus added that the prophets and the first five books of the Bible, and indeed the bulk of the Old Testament, was inspired by a stupid god who created the world – the demiurge.  And for this reason, Jesus declared in John 10:8, "All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers."[13]

     Another voice of antiquity, Justinus, taught that there exists a distinction between the God Elohim and another God called "The Good One."  This hearkens back to a time in Israel’s extreme antiquity, when a distinction existed between the Father-God El or Elyon, and his son the storm God, Baal or Yahweh.  Scholars understand this from textual criticism and from the archaeology excavations at Ugarit.  Justinus also taught that the prophets were sent by these Gods; however, the prophets were deceived by an evil angelic serpent named Naas.  Naas is a derivative of the Hebrew word nachash, meaning serpent.  The same word nachash occurs in Genesis 3, and refers to the serpent who deceived Adam and Eve.  According to Justinus, after the evil angel Naas had deceived the prophets, Jesus was selected to set the record straight.  Jesus was told, "All the prophets before you were led astray."  The prophets had been deceived because the serpent interfaced with the fallible human psychology of the prophets, thus causing them to misinterpret the Father's revelation.[14]

     In other words, Satan the Devil wrote a great deal of the Old Testament!  That’s the gist of it.  Irenaeus and Hippolytus put it quite bluntly, describing even more Gnostic opinions,

 

The followers of Saturninus… hold that some prophecies were uttered by the angels who made the cosmos, and some by Satan.[15]

 

Cerdon proposed that the god spoken of by Moses and the prophets was not the same as the Father of Jesus Christ.[16]

 

Irenaeus also recorded that when the Gnostics were confronted with passages from the New Testament which refuted their ideas that they dismissed the problem saying that "the Apostles intermingled the things of the Torah with the words of the Savior," because "the Apostles were still under the influence of Judean opinions," and that therefore on this point the New Testament falls short of the truth.[17]

          One has to wonder where the Gnostics got these opinions.  The history of the Samaritans and the Diaspora Jews must be considered here.  When Ezra finalized the Torah, certain factions among the Samaritans and Diaspora Jews must have had grave reservations.  Why should they accept this new redaction of the Bible?  What made it superior to the earlier traditions?  Unfortunately, Judaism worldwide entered a cultural dark age about this time, so we know very little about the arguments which must have transpired.  What we do know is that when the dark age ended about 200 BCE, there were deep divisions within Judaism – for they had already separated into Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Samaritans, and proto-Gnostics.  Over the centuries, these conflicts were remembered – first as history, then as legend, and finally as a faint memory that Ezra's Bible was not legitimate.  In the end, they attributed the textual corruption of the Old Testament to evil forces that allegedly deceived the prophets.  This is evidence that Ezra's Bible was distrusted, and that many ethnic Hebrews who honored traditions outside of Judean Judaism believed parts of the Old Testament had been falsified by Ezra and his Judean Jews.

Return to this section's landing page:  Genesis 1 is a forgery.

The creationist narrative in Genesis 1 is contradicted by many ancient Christian texts.  Instead of an Almighty Creator God, ancient Christian texts espouse that the universe is born from blind arrogance and stupidity.  The angels caused evolution to occur from species to species.  There are many gods, (or aliens?), and the Christian God is just one among them.  Satan the Devil writes scripture, and thus the Bible was polluted with Genesis 1.  Archaeology and modern scholarship demonstrate that Genesis is indeed corrupted.  Cavemen walk with Adam and Eve.  Esoteric prophecies reveal the coming of Christ, and also reveal the dark forces that govern the cosmos.  Such are the ancient Christian writings.

Science vindicates the truth of these ideas.  Evolution often happens too fast for Darwin’s theory.  Gaps in the fossil record indicate that some kind of unnatural force acts together with natural selection.  Astrobiology reveals that intelligent life probably evolved long before us.  The fossil record reveals strange clues that aliens abducted species and transported them across oceans, and that DNA from diverse lineages was combined to spawn hybrid species.  Evidently, aliens influence evolution, and they are the gods of the world’s religions. 

This is not fiction.  All these facts are thoroughly documented in the links above.

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